Mending the Moon (2 page)

That's his phone.

The music's coming from under one of the pizza boxes. Cursing, Jeremy shoves the box aside with his foot and scoops up the ringing phone. If it's somebody important, he'll answer it on his way to class.

Unknown Caller. Probably a telemarketer. Jeremy sighs as he turns off the light and leaves the room. He'll have to remember to put the phone on silent before he walks into class.

“Hello? Yes, this is Jeremy. Who's this?”

*   *   *

Five minutes to class. Earlier in her career, Veronique would have gotten there at 5:15, as soon as the previous class left. These days, she gives herself thirty seconds to walk down the hall to the classroom. The less time she has to spend teaching, the better. All she wants to do is retire.

She can't retire. The house isn't paid for, and she can't pay the mortgage on her retirement income, and she can't sell, not in this market. When she and Sarabeth bought the house, she was a newly tenured associate professor. She believed that one day she'd make full professor, a promotion that carried with it a ten percent raise and a corresponding bump in retirement income. She and Sarabeth had two salaries. They'd be able to retire, maybe even a little early, and enjoy some well-earned leisure.

But Sarabeth found another lover and walked out, and seven years into Veronique's tenure, the chair of the department told her gently that she wasn't promotable. Once, she would have been. Once, associate professors had been promoted to full simply for doing more of the things they'd done to get tenure. This was no longer true. Veronique, the chair said, choosing his words very carefully, was a valued member of the department, but didn't have enough of a national profile to be promoted.

In short, she wasn't famous enough.

To be fair, Veronique had expected something like this when she walked into his office, since even then she was bored with what she'd done to earn tenure. She'd written her doctoral dissertation on narratives of female flight in nineteenth-century protest literature, women running away from home to seek better lives. As an assistant professor, she'd published a string of scholarly articles on writers like Stowe, Gaskell, and Eliot. But around the time when Sarabeth ran away, literary criticism had started to seem like a useless exercise, intellectual masturbation. Veronique found herself much more interested in how people who didn't have the luxury of running away created homes where they were. She didn't think they used footnotes.

Even then, she knew her boredom with the profession was her problem, not the department's. Her feeling trapped in a job she'd come to hate was her problem, not the department's. The fact that she lacked the courage to run, or even walk, away from tenure was her problem, not the department's.

The conversation stung anyway, and it hurts more now than it did then. These days, Veronique doubts that anyone considers her a valued member of the department. They're waiting for her to retire. A young, hungry lecturer could teach her courses for a fraction of her salary, and would undoubtedly be more popular with students.

Four minutes to class: time to go. Her tote bag holds
Cranford,
the folder of graded reading responses she'll hand back today, a bottle of water, her keys—there've been thefts on campus, so she keeps her office locked—and a list of discussion points, although she knows she'll wind up doing most of the talking.

She reminds herself, as she always does before class, that there are good students in this section. Amy Castillon: smart young woman, hardworking and perceptive. And then there's that boy, the shy one in the corner—Charles?—whose in-class writing exercises are more polished than most of the finished essays she gets from the others.

And then, God help her, there's Jeremy, who seems unable to fasten the Velcro tabs on his sneakers without his mother's help. Why did he sign up for her section? He's not a good student. The only text he cares about is that blasted comic book, and he isn't especially articulate even on that subject. Dealing with him tactfully is a nightmare; avoiding Melinda's unspoken questions is even worse.

Three minutes to showtime. Veronique scans her office and sees nothing else she needs to bring. All right. She puts her tote bag over her arm, so she'll have a hand free to open her office door, and grabs the cane she uses when her arthritis acts up. It's been raining all day, last week's glorious Indian-summer weather replaced by biting autumn gloom. Saturday's Halloween. She hopes her students don't expect candy, which some colleagues hand out this time of year. Her knee hurts.

Limping into class, only ten seconds late, she takes a quick survey of the seats. A scattering of students, huddled into jackets and sweaters, sit slumped in their usual places. One child wears flip-flops; her toes look faintly blue around their sparkly pink nail polish. A Vegas native, and not the sharpest mind in the room. By the time she figures out how to dress for the weather up here, she'll be ready to graduate.

Only Amy's sitting up straight, and even she seems more subdued than usual. “Hi, Professor Bellamy.”

Veronique nods a greeting, too oppressed by the apathy in the room to speak. Eleven out of twenty students, and no Jeremy. He's always late, even without the excuse of bad weather. Veronique doesn't understand why rain or snow slows kids down, even the ones who don't have to drive to campus, but it's a consistent pattern.

She looks unhappily at the clock. Time to start. More students will drag themselves in, probably, but it's not fair to the ones who got here on time for her to stall. She clears her throat. “Please open your books to—”

She senses movement at the door and turns to see who it is. Jeremy, face haggard, phone clamped to his ear, rushes to her desk and thrusts the phone at her. He's shaking. “This has to be a joke. This can't—this can't be happening. You talk to him.”

“What? Talk to whom? Jeremy, this is—”

“Please,”
he says, and she realizes in horror that he's crying. The other students, more awake now, stir and stare—this is the most interesting thing that's happened all semester—as Jeremy presses the phone into her hand. “Please, talk to him.”

*   *   *

“You're on until nine?” the charge nurse asks. “We just called the family. They'll be here soon. I'll let them know a chaplain's here in case they want to talk to you.”

“Thank you,” says Rosemary Watkins. “I'll go make sure the consult room's unlocked.” The ER's family consult room has comfortable furniture in soothing colors, but very strange lighting. There's no wall switch, and to turn on the floor lamp, you have to step on a button that invariably gets shoved underneath a chair. On top of that, the bulb keeps burning out.

The room's intended as a place where families can absorb bad news in privacy and something resembling comfort; making them sit in the dark is a little too grimly fitting. And it's hard to keep the room stocked with tissues.

The consult room's outside the ER proper, in an adjoining hallway. Ordinarily, Rosemary would grab a tissue box from an empty room on her way out of the ER, but there aren't any empty rooms tonight. She can make out the voices of at least three howling children, two male drunks engaged in a shouting contest—a pair of security guards speeds past, power-walking toward that room—and a female patient yelling for someone to bring her pain meds
now
goddammit
now
I need a shot
now
where are you fuckers?

Her friends wonder why she volunteers in such a noisy, dirty, chaotic place. “I'm not saying you have OCD,” Melinda told her once, “but you do tend to have meltdowns if your outfits aren't perfectly coordinated.”

And Veronique, acerbic as always, added, “You can't walk into Melinda's house without trying to dust all her books and geodes, and you can't walk into mine without offering to sweep up stray bits of cat food in the kitchen, but you spend four hours a week in an ER?”

But that's why she does it. If she can bring even a little bit of order to this place, offer even a temporary oasis, maybe one or two patients will feel better. And, anyway, the upheaval here comforts her; her own life seems serene by contrast. Most of the time, she feels competent at the hospital.

She's not clergy, of course. The hospital trains laypeople to minister to patients, with the most difficult cases reserved for the staff chaplains. But she's been doing this for seven years now, and at least some of the ER staff routinely ask her to visit patients, or to talk to distraught relatives, or to bless their own hands.

Heading for the hallway, Rosemary dodges left around a portable X-ray machine and right around a gangly teenaged boy on crutches hobbling toward the restroom. The crowd of medical staff around the code room, closest to the ER entrance, has dispersed; there's nothing more to do there. Rosemary glances into the room, but sees only a drawn curtain. Beyond the curtain, she knows, is the body of a thirty-five-year-old woman, brain-dead from an aneurysm, being kept alive on a ventilator. When the family arrives, the doctor will ask what they want to do next and gently bring up the subject of organ donation. And then Rosemary will do whatever she can to help.

She skirts a family—mother and father, each carrying a screaming twin infant—being escorted into the ER by a registration clerk, and finally manages to escape into the hallway. Fifteen feet to her left, she sees the open door of the consult room, a dim glow spilling out into the corridor. She won't have to call security to have the room opened, then. Good. She walks down the hallway and glances inside. Not one but two boxes of tissues, one on each table. Thank God for small favors.

Rosemary stands there, debating her next move. It's seven o'clock. She's been here for two hours, on her feet the entire time. Ordinarily she'd take a break now, but she knows that if she sits down, if she allows herself to be alone, she'll think about her first visit of the evening. She spent forty minutes with an eighty-year-old woman with a broken hip, who clung to Rosemary's arm and keened, “There's no one here! I'll die alone. No one cares about me! I used to have people. They're all gone! No one's here.”

“I'm here, Lisa. You're not alone. My name's Rosemary, and I'm here with you.” But Lisa kept howling. She howled while Rosemary sang a lullaby. She howled while Rosemary, in desperation, recited the Our Father. Chaplains aren't supposed to pray with patients who haven't requested it, but many elderly dementia patients respond to the familiar words of the Lord's Prayer.

Lisa didn't. Rosemary couldn't even sit down: Lisa had one hand clamped around Rosemary's fingers and the other around her wrist, and between the bedrail and the angles of their respective arms, standing was the only option.

At last a surgical nurse in blue gown, cap, and booties came to take Lisa to surgery, and gently pried her fingers from Rosemary's arm. “Okay, Lisa, time to let go now, all right? I'm going to take you upstairs. We're going to fix your hip. You have to let go of this nice lady's arm, sweetheart.”

The whole time, Lisa continued her keening. “There's no one here! No one cares! No one loves me! Why won't anyone come help me? Why isn't anyone here?”

Rosemary should have taken a break after that visit, gotten a cup of coffee or escaped into the chapel for a while. Instead, she washed her hands at the sink in Lisa's room, trying to scrub the feel of those frantic fingers from her skin, and moved on to the next patient, and then the next, and the next. Those were brief, pleasant visits: a few prayers for healing, a few casual conversations about pets and gardening. None were what she needed. She kept looking for someone who knew she was there. And then the charge nurse waved her over and told her about the aneurysm.

She needs to eat; she's already slightly shaky, and dealing with the family will require energy and concentration. She has to be present to them. She can't do this one on autopilot. During a quieter shift, she could ask the charge nurse to page her in the cafeteria when the family showed up, but right now, things are too hectic. It's not a good time for a volunteer to try to ask anybody for anything.

Rosemary stands paralyzed in the corridor. She knows this is a ridiculous stalemate. She wouldn't have any trouble deciding what to do if she weren't so tired, and being so tired is a major red flag that she needs to take a break and refuel.

But if she takes a break, she'll think about Lisa again. No: she has to keep busy. So she stops for a long slurp at a water fountain and goes back into the ER, bracing herself against the barrage of noise and activity. She hears the static of the department's PA system clicking on, and then, improbably, her own name being announced from the nursing station.

“Rosemary, call on 57. Chaplain Rosemary, pick up line 57.”

She squints, thinking she's misheard—who could be calling her here, and why?—and then feels a sudden surge of panic. Walter. Something's happened to Walter.

This makes no sense, since no one at Walter's nursing home would call the ER to find her. They'd call her cell, which she keeps on silent at the hospital and checks regularly. But she's reaching for the nearest hall phone even as she works this out. “Hello, this is Rosemary. May I help you?”

*   *   *

Seven hundred and fifty miles away, Anna Clark settles down in front of the evening news with a glass of white wine and her knitting. It's raining, typical Seattle weather, but she doesn't mind. She likes being surrounded by water; it's one reason she and William bought the house on Mercer Island. Living on the island makes her feel calm, self-contained, protected by moats.

She is, of necessity, a highly social person. She organizes openings at her husband's art gallery: ordering food and flowers, schmoozing with artists and patrons. She's on the board of the private school where their son attended K–12, and she's in a knitting group run by one of the other Blake School board members. But she also finds too much social contact exhausting and treasures her time alone.