Strangers (19 page)

“You had to get up on a ladder for some of this,” he said.

“Just the stepladder.”

“But what if you’d fallen? You should’ve left this for me to do.”

Faye shook her head. “Honey, I swear to God I’m not the fragile type. Now, hush up. You ex-Marines carry macho too far sometimes.”

“Is that so?”

The outer door opened, and a trucker came in, asking about a room.

Ernie held his breath until the door closed.

The trucker was a lanky man in a cowboy hat, denim jacket, cowboy shirt, and jeans. Faye complimented him on the hat, which had an elaborately sculpted leather band brightened with chips of turquoise. In that easy way of hers, she made the stranger feel like an old friend as she shepherded him through the check-in process.

Leaving her to it, trying to forget his curious experience on the interstate, trying not to dwell on the night that had come, Ernie moved behind the counter, hung his coat on the brass rack in the corner by the file cabinets, and went to the oak desk, where mail was stacked on the blotter. Bills, of course. Advertisements. A charity solicitation. The first Christmas cards of the year. His military pension check.

Finally, there was a white envelope without a return address, which contained only a Polaroid color photograph that had been taken in front of the motel, beside the door to Room 9. It was of three people—man, woman, child. The man was in his late twenties, darkly tanned and good-looking. The woman was a couple of years younger, a pretty brunette. The little girl, five or six, was very cute. All three were smiling at the camera. Judging from their clothes—shorts and T-shirts—and the quality of sunlight in the picture, Ernie assumed that the snapshot had been taken in the middle of summer.

Puzzled, he turned the photo over, looking for a scribbled note of explanation. The back was blank. He checked the envelope again, but it was empty: no letter, no card, not even a business card to identify the sender. The postmark was Elko, December 7, last Saturday.

He looked again at the people in the picture, and although he did not remember them, he felt his skin prickle, just as it had done when he had been drawn to that place along the highway. His pulse accelerated. He quickly put the picture aside and looked away from it.

Faye was still chatting with the cowboy-trucker as she took a room key off the pegboard and passed it across the counter.

Ernie kept his eyes on her. She was a calming influence. She had been a lovely farmgirl when he’d met her, and had grown into a lovelier woman. Her blond hair might have begun to turn white, but it was hard to tell. Her blue eyes were clear and quick. Hers was an open, friendly Iowa face, slightly saucy but always wholesome, even beatific.

By the time the cowboy-trucker left, Ernie had stopped shaking. He took the Polaroid snapshot to Faye. “What do you make of this?”

“That’s our Room Nine,” she said. “They must’ve stayed with us.” She frowned at the young couple and little girl in the photograph. “Can’t say I remember them, though. Strangers to me.”

“So why would they send us a photo without a note?”

“Well, obviously, they thought we
would
remember them.”

“But the only reason they’d think that was if maybe they stayed for a few days and we got to know them. And I don’t know them at all. I think I’d remember the tyke,” Ernie said. He liked children, and they usually liked him. “She’s cute enough to be in movies.”

“I’d think you’d remember the
mother.
She’s gorgeous.”

“Postmarked Elko,” Ernie said. “Why would anybody who lives in Elko come out here to stay?”

“Maybe they don’t live in Elko. Maybe they were here last summer and always meant to send us a photo, and maybe they recently passed through and meant to stop and leave this off but didn’t have time. So they mailed it from Elko.”

“Without a note.”

“It is odd,” Faye agreed.

He took the picture from her. “Besides, this is a Polaroid. Developed a minute after it was taken. If they wanted us to have it, why didn’t they leave it with us when they stayed here?”

The door opened, and a curly-haired guy with a bushy mustache came into the office, shivering. “Got any rooms left?” he asked.

While Faye dealt with the guest, Ernie took the Polaroid back to the oak desk. He meant to gather up the mail and go upstairs, but he stood by the desk, studying the faces of the people in the snapshot.

It was Tuesday evening, December 10.

8

Chicago, Illinois

When Brendan Cronin went to work as an orderly at St. Joseph’s Hospital for Children, only Dr. Jim McMurtry knew that he was really a priest. Father Wycazik had obtained a guarantee of secrecy from the physician, as well as the solemn assurance that Brendan would be assigned as much work—and as much
unpleasant
work—as any orderly. Therefore, during his first day on the job, he emptied bedpans, changed urine-soaked bed linens, assisted a therapist with passive exercises for bed-ridden patients, spoon-fed an eight-year-old boy who was partially
paralyzed, pushed wheelchairs, encouraged despondent patients, cleaned up the vomit of two young cancer victims nauseous from chemotherapy. No one pampered him, and no one called him “Father.” The nurses, doctors, orderlies, candy-stripers, and patients called him Brendan, and he felt uncomfortable, like an impostor engaged in a masquerade.

That first day, overcome with pity and grief for St. Joseph’s children, he twice slipped away to the staff men’s room and locked himself in a stall, where he sat and wept. The twisted legs and swollen joints of those who suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, that mangler of the innocent young, was a sight almost too terrible to be borne. The wasted flesh of the muscular dystrophy victims, the suppurating wounds of the burn victims, the battered bodies of those whose parents had abused them: He wept for all of them.

He could not imagine why Father Wycazik thought this duty would help him regain his lost faith. If anything, the existence of so many pain-racked children only reinforced his doubt. If the merciful God of Catholicism really existed, if there
was
a Jesus, why would He allow the innocent to endure such atrocities? Of course, Brendan knew all the standard theological arguments on that point. Mankind had brought all forms of evil upon itself by choice, the Church said, by turning away from the grace of God. But theological arguments were inadequate when he came face to face with these smallest victims of fate.

By the second day, the staff was still calling him Brendan, but the children were calling him Pudge, a long-unused nickname which he divulged to them in the course of telling a funny story. They liked his stories, jokes, rhymes, and silly puns, and he found he could nearly always get a laugh or at least a smile out of them. That day, he went to the men’s room and wept only once.

By the third day, both the children and staff called him Pudge. If he had another metier besides the priesthood, he had found it at St. Joseph’s. In addition to performing the usual tasks expected of an orderly, he entertained the patients with comic patter, teased them, drew them out. Wherever he went, he was greeted with cries of
“Pudge!”
that were a better reward than money. And he did not cry until he was back in the hotel room that he had taken for the duration of Father Wycazik’s unconventional therapy.

By Wednesday afternoon, the seventh day, he knew why Father Wycazik sent him to St. Joseph’s. Understanding came while he was brushing the hair of a ten-year-old girl who’d been crippled by a rare bone disease.

Her name was Emmeline, and she was rightfully proud of her hair. It was thick, glossy, raven-black, and its healthy luster seemed to be a defiant
response to the sickness that had wasted her body. She liked to brush her hair a hundred strokes every day, but often her knuckles and wrist-joints were so inflamed that she could not hold the brush.

On Wednesday, Brendan put her in a wheelchair and took her to the X-ray department, where they were monitoring a new drug’s effects on her bone marrow, and when he brought her back to her room an hour later, he brushed her hair for her. Emmeline sat in the wheelchair, looking out a window, while Brendan pulled the soft bristles through her silken tresses, and she became enchanted with the winterscape beyond the glass.

With a gnarled hand more suited to the body of an eighty-year-old woman, she pointed down to the roof of another, lower wing of the hospital. “See that patch of snow, Pudge?” Rising heat within the building had caused most of the snow to loosen and slide off the pitched roof. But a large patch remained, outlined by dark slate shingles. “It looks like a ship,” Emmy said. “The shape. You see? A beautiful old ship with three white sails, gliding across a slate-colored sea.”

For a while Brendan could not see what she saw. But she continued to describe the imaginary vessel, and the fourth time that he looked up from her hair, he suddenly was able to see that the patch of snow did, indeed, bear a remarkable and delightful resemblance to a sailing ship.

To Brendan, the long icicles that hung in front of Emmy’s window were transparent bars, the hospital a prison from which she might never be released. But to Emmy, those frozen stalactites were wondrous Christmas decorations that, she said, put her in the holiday mood.

“God likes winter as much as He likes spring,” Emmy said. “The gift of the seasons is one of His ways of keeping us from getting bored with the world. That’s what Sister Katherine told us, and right away I could see it must be true. When the sun hits those icicles just right, they cast rainbows across my bed. Ever-so-pretty rainbows, Pudge. The ice and snow are like…like jewels…and ermine cloaks that God uses to dress up the world in winter to make us ooh and ah. That’s why He never makes two snowflakes alike: it’s a way of reminding us that the world He made for us is a wonderful, wonderful world.”

As if on cue, snowflakes spiraled down from the gray December sky.

In spite of her nearly useless legs and twisted hands, in spite of the pain she had endured, Emmy believed in God’s goodness, and in the inspiring
rightness
of the world that He had created.

Strong faith was, in fact, a trait of nearly all the children in St. Joseph’s Hospital. They remained convinced that a caring Father watched over them from His kingdom in the sky, and they were encouraged.

In his mind he could hear Father Wycazik saying:
If these innocents
can suffer so much and not lose their faith, what sorry excuse do you have, Brendan? Perhaps, in their very innocence and naïveté, they know something that you have forgotten while chasing your sophisticated education in Rome. Perhaps there is something to be learned from this, Brendan. Do you think so? Just maybe? Something to be learned?

But the lesson was not powerful enough to restore Brendan’s faith. He continued to be deeply moved, not by the possibility that a caring and compassionate God might actually exist, but by the children’s amazing courage in the face of such adversity.

He gave Emmy’s hair a hundred strokes, then ten more, which pleased her, and then he lifted her from the wheelchair and put her into bed. As he pulled the covers over her pathetic bent-stick legs, he felt a surge of that same rage that had filled him during Mass at St. Bette’s two Sundays ago, and if a sacred chalice had been close at hand, he would not have hesitated to hurl it at the wall once more.

Emmy gasped, and Brendan had the odd notion that she had read his blasphemous thoughts. But she said, “Oh, Pudge, did you hurt yourself?”

He blinked at her. “What do you mean?”

“Did you burn yourself? Your hands. When’d you hurt your hands?”

Bewildered by her question, he looked down at the backs of his hands, turned them over, and was surprised by the marks on his palms. In the center of each palm was a red ring of inflamed and swollen flesh. Each ring was two inches in diameter and sharply defined along all its edges. The circular band of irritated tissue which formed the ring was no more than half an inch wide, inscribing a perfect circle; the skin around and within the circle was quite normal. It almost looked as if the marks had been painted on his hands, but when he touched one of the rings with a fingertip, he could feel the bump it made in his palm.

“That’s strange,” he said.

•

Dr. Stan Heeton was the resident physician on duty in St. Joseph’s emergency room. Standing at the examining table on which Brendan sat, peering with interest at the odd rings on Brendan’s hands, he said, “Do they hurt?”

“No. Not at all.”

“Itching? A burning sensation?”

“No. Neither.”

“Do they at least tingle? No? You’ve never had these before?”

“Never.”

“Do you have any allergies that you’re aware of? No? Hmmmm. At first glance, it looks like a mild burn, but you’d have remembered leaning against something hot enough to cause this. There’d be pain. So we can rule that out. Same for acid contact. Did you say you’d taken a little girl to radiology?”

“Yes, but I didn’t stay in the room while the X-rays were taken.”

“Doesn’t really look like a radiation burn. Maybe dermatomycosis, a fungal infection, perhaps in the ringworm family, though the symptoms aren’t sufficiently indicative of ringworm. No scaling, no itching. And the ring is much too clearly defined, not like the inflammation patterns you get with a Microsporum or Trichophyton infection.”

“So what does all this boil down to?”

Heeton hesitated, then said, “I don’t think it’s anything serious. The best guess is a rash related to an unidentified allergy. If the problem persists, you’ll have to take the standard patch tests and find the source of your problem.” He let go of Brendan’s hands, went to a chair at a corner desk, and began to fill out a prescription form.

Puzzled, Brendan stared at his hands a moment longer, then folded them in his lap.

At the corner desk, still writing, Heeton said, “I’ll start with the simplest treatment, a cortisone lotion. If the rash doesn’t disappear in a couple of days, come see me again.” He returned to the examining table, holding out the prescription form.