Empty Arms: A Novel (31 page)

Hannah jabs the air like a boxer, her eyes searching. I step into view so she can see she’s not alone, but her face twists and a wail follows. I scoop her up and press her against my heart, before the others join in. “I know,” I whisper, bouncing her gently. After spending nine months nestled in their mothers’ wombs, listening to Mommy’s voice and feeling her heartbeat, a cold, lonely bassinet can be a traumatic change for newborns. Sometimes they need a warm body to remind them that they’re safe and not alone. Hell, we all need that from time to time.

I call Mom when I get home from work.

“Catharine? Is everything all right?”

“Everything’s fine. I just wanted to thank you again for a wonderful Thanksgiving. It was exactly what I needed.”

“Me too,” she says in a tender voice that I’ve never heard before.

I wait, wondering if this is it. Is this the moment she’s going to let down her guard and help me find Emily?

“We should do it again sometime. Soon.” With those words I know she’s not going to give me anything tonight, but I’m closer than ever before. I can feel it.

“What are you doing for Christmas?”

“I’ll be having chocolate chip pancakes with my daughter.”

The thought of reinstating our beloved tradition causes my eyes to fill with tears. The last time we made chocolate chip pancakes on Christmas morning, Daddy was still alive, Mom smiled a lot, and I was still their innocent little girl. It’s a commemoration of a bygone era and the mark of a new beginning. “I’ll be there.”

The unexpected renewal between me and Mom causes happiness to seep into my life and sweep away some of the darkness that’s collected over the past few months. I even stop in the hospital gift shop during my lunch break on Tuesday and buy a Christmas card for Paul. I sign it with love and send it to his apartment, hoping that one way or another we can heal too.

December is my favorite time in the hospital. It starts with a giant Christmas tree in the lobby, followed by blinking lights at the nurses’ station, and tinsel in the patients’ windows. All month, Christmas carols play softly on the radio, and I get to swaddle the babies in blankets adorned with snowflakes and top their heads with little Santa caps.

I’m in the middle of showing little Andrew Goodman the blinking lights when Delaney pokes her head into the nursery and startles me.

“Cate, there’s a call for you.”

“I wonder who that could be,” I say to the baby boy as I lay him back in his bassinet.

At the nurses’ station a receiver is lying on the counter. I pick it up. “This is Cate.”

“Catharine,” a deep voice croaks, “this is Father Thomas.”

The last time I saw Father Thomas was at Daddy’s funeral. It’s been years since I’ve been to church, and the mere sound of his voice evokes guilt. “Hi, Father Thomas. This is unexpected. Is everything all right?”

“It’s your mother, Catharine. She’s had a stroke.”

“What?” My brain goes numb and the hallway begins to spin.

“A group of us came to New York City to watch them light the Christmas tree. One minute she was fine, the next she was on the ground. She’s in the ICU at St. Luke’s Roosevelt. You must come now.”

The words jar me back to reality. I drop the phone and my body operates on autopilot. My legs carry me out of the hospital and into my car. I floor it south on the New York State Thruway, half listening to a story about this year’s Norway spruce, which had been reluctantly donated by the Sisters of Christian Charity from the Mallinckrodt Convent. They never wanted to part with their beloved sixty-three-year-old tree that stood next to the convent’s front entrance, and they denied Rockefeller Center’s requests every year. But when other trees on their property began to fall and the tree by the front entrance began to show signs of rot, they finally relented, sprinkling it with holy water and singing “Oh Christmas Tree” as the men cut it down and hauled it off. Hundreds of nuns and thousands of Christians had gathered in Rockefeller Center to celebrate the lighting of the majestic tree; among them, Mom.

I make it to the Lincoln Tunnel in less than five hours, a personal record. Making it through the tunnel, however, takes almost half as long because an oversized truck is stuck, causing traffic to back up for miles. As the crow flies, I’m only a few miles from St. Luke’s Roosevelt, where Mom is lying in a hospital bed, her chest rising and falling with the mechanical pump of a ventilator, but I might as well be on the other side of the world because traffic isn’t moving. Not even an inch. As I stare into the sea of glowing red taillights, I pray for her to hold on.

A blood clot is a lot like an oversized truck getting lodged in the Lincoln Tunnel; it stops people from getting to the places they’re needed most, like it stops oxygen from reaching the brain. “Time is brain,” the doctor tells me when I ask how she’s doing, and every second that truck is lodged in your vein a piece of your brain dies.

I run down the hallway but by the time I reach her, the truck has been lodged there long enough to kill every brain cell that operates the right side of her body, causing her mouth to droop and her eye to release a steady stream of tears. Also gone are the cells that inspired her lungs to breathe and controlled her vocal chords, silencing her forever. Her body is motionless in the bed. Her hand is outstretched on the blankets waiting for someone to ease her pain. I sit next to her and pull her limp hand into mine. “It’s me, Mom. It’s Catharine. I’m here.” I wait for her eyelids to flutter or her mouth to bend in recognition.

“Mom? Can you hear me? If you can hear me, squeeze my hand.”

Her hand, which once wiped away my tears, mended broken skin, and played the other half of Franz Schubert’s “Serenade,” looks so small in mine, so helpless. Of course, this hand is also the one that held my arms when they took Emily away, the one that forced my signature across the bottom of the adoption papers.

“Come on, Mom. Give me a sign. Show me there’s a reason to hold on.” I rest my forehead on the back of her hand and think about how happy she looked at Thanksgiving. Tears leak over our skin as I remember our plans for Christmas. As I look at her frail body, I remember the way things had been before I got pregnant. Though they’d never been easy between us, there was a time when I didn’t bring her shame, when she could hold her head high at church without wondering if people were whispering about her daughter. She and Daddy had been cohesive, unblaming. But then I had sex one time, and it dropped a boulder in our tranquil lake.

The doctor returns with Father Thomas by his side. They look to me with unspoken question. I look to Mom and wait for an eyelid to flicker or a whisper to rise from her throat. She’s my last link to the past, to Emily, to myself. How can stillness mean so much?

I hang my head and nod. Father Thomas says a prayer and sprinkles her with holy water. I think of the nuns who didn’t want to part with the beloved tree they grew up with; their guardian from the sun, their shelter from the storm, which finally gave in to its age.

The doctor turns off the ventilator, and Mom’s chest collapses as her lungs deflate, suffocating every last living cell that remains.

P
AUL COMES WHEN
I
CALL
, without question or drama. He wraps his arms around me and lets me grieve on his shoulder.

“I miss her,” I say and the depth of it surprises me.

His arms tighten around me. He holds my hand and listens when I talk, and he sits quietly, cradling me in his arms, when I don’t. When our stomachs begin to growl, he cooks me dinner. Spaghetti and meatballs. A first.

He twirls the pasta on his fork. “I miss you, you know,” he says, avoiding my eyes.

“I miss you too.” I put my hand on his to show him I mean it.

“Things aren’t the same without you, Cate. I’m not the same without you.”

His words thaw the piece of my heart that had turned to icy resentment. “I’m not the same without you either.”

“But?”

“But”—I split a meatball with the side of my fork—“it doesn’t change how I feel about finding Emily.”

Tenderness swells in his eyes. “Sleeping alone has given me a lot of time to think.”

I wait, scared of what might follow. After everything, I’m in no mood to bargain or choose one love over another.

“I realized that all this time I expected you to accept a baby that wasn’t yours, yet I wasn’t willing to accept a daughter that isn’t mine.” His tone is gentle and underscored with apology.

Tears fill my eyes, and his words pull at my heart.

“If I was in your shoes and I had a daughter somewhere out there, I’d want to find her.” He pauses and looks at me. “And I’d want you to support me.”

I close my eyes. Finally, he understands.

He pulls me into his chest and whispers into my hair. “I want to help you find her, Cate. That is, if you still want me.”

My cheek brushes against his shirt as I nod. “Of course I still want you.”

P
AUL SLEEPS WITH ME
that night, warming the other half of our bed. And when we make love, he looks at me, and for the first time in all the years we’ve known each other, he really sees me.

Mom left me everything: a small savings account, her Asscher-cut diamond engagement ring, their Lenox china, the snowy portrait from their February wedding, the ruby pendant Daddy gave her to mark my premature July birth, the pearl earrings she’d gotten for their thirtieth wedding anniversary, and her house with an attic full of junk.

“I thought you were exaggerating,” Paul says, surveying the chasm of clutter. “What is all this stuff?”

“A lot of it was Daddy’s. Stuff she couldn’t part with. But it’s a lot of junk too. Apparently, there’s a box of orphaned Tupperware in there somewhere.”

He shakes his head. “I’d believe it.”

“Where do we even begin?” I look to him for any solution that doesn’t involve us spending the rest of our lives sorting through this mess.

“We begin right here,” he says, reaching for the stack of phone books. He lifts one off the top and flips through the pages. “Here.” He rips out a yellow page and passes it to me.
Auctioneers
.

E
ARL
S
UNLAP’S EYES LIGHT UP
as he walks through Mom’s house and sees the spectacular amount of inventory in need of his services.