Tuesday Night Miracles (3 page)

4

The Blue Dot

T
he lunchroom is empty when Grace Collins throws herself through the door with her brown paper bag, dangling stethoscope, and a patient list that could choke a horse. She’s so relieved that the room, the size of six coffins, is empty that she almost starts to sing. But alas, that would alert someone at this money-strapped hospital that there are two available ears.

Grace, who’s about to move into her fifty-second year and—if she eats her entire sandwich, the chips, and a calorie-ridden soft drink—her highest weight ever, is rarely alone. Sometimes she actually goes to eat in her car and once, last year during a horrid snowstorm, she ate in the broom closet. Anything for a few moments of solitude.

During the past twelve years since her divorce, she has spent so much time telling other women that this single-parent life is not what it’s cracked up to be that she’s actually weighed the benefits of a miserable marriage.

No one should have to raise daughters alone. No one should have to change broken locks from excessive door slamming, and yell through the bathroom door for someone to get out, and buy stock in sanitary-product companies. Grace often jokes that she should have traded in one of her daughters when she had a chance.

“It would have been so easy to switch one of them in the nursery,” she quips when one of the young nurses who’s about to pop out a baby asks her for advice. “See these bags under my eyes? I’m only thirty years old,” she lies. “This is what daughters do to you.”

Her best friend and sometimes confidante, Karen, keeps telling Grace she’s too hard on herself, but Grace is skeptical. Karen is like the real mother and sister she never had—supportive, kind, and reassuring. Someone who tells a half-truth if it means Grace will feel better. But Karen is being more honest than Grace realizes.

A critical-care nurse supervisor with a master’s degree, Grace has no idea that she hasn’t lost as much as she thinks she has. She has lovely chin-length blond hair that she constantly pushes behind her ears, and pale skin adorned with sweet and well-earned wrinkles that roll from her eyes as if they were part of a long, beautiful river. Her square black glasses are constantly falling off her nose, and sometimes when she doesn’t have her glasses on—hardly ever—she pushes them up onto her nose as if they are really there. She’s the kind of nurse who changes patients’ lives. She has a soft heart, with an occasional sarcastic wit, a strong voice, and an impatient temperament when it comes to mistakes that hurt people, especially her own.

Her own mistakes, or so she thinks, are lined up so close to the top of her brain that she feels like a woman with multiple personalities. The lost marriage, and what she assumes it did to her daughters, is always at the top of the list. Talk about a horrid failure. And it’s a failure that her mother and father, the perfect couple of the century, remind her about every time they open their mouths—as if she needs to be reminded.

Grace’s days always seem like a marathon. Get daughter number two out of bed, race through the house, maybe eat whatever she finds on the counter, locate a clean set of scrubs, race out the door, work way too many hours, drive home, fight with same daughter, slam doors, maybe eat, argue some more, go to bed, listen for said daughter to climb out of window to see her sorry-ass boyfriend, sleep a few lousy hours, and start all over again.

This late lunch is one perfect example. She’s due to leave work in two hours, and she’s having her first break.

Just as she’s about to tear into a leftover meat-loaf sandwich that she prays to God won’t kill her, a hot flash starts rumbling throughout her body as if a volcano is on the brink of stopping major air traffic.

“Damn,” she mutters, throwing her sandwich on top of the mangled plastic bag she just took it out of. “Menopause is like a bad marriage.”

She opens up a dangerously low button on her blue smock and tries to fan herself with her flaccid napkin. She needs a hot flash like she needs a third daughter—or a husband, for that matter.

Today it’s as if the entire world is having a heart attack. The beds on her unit are almost full and she has spent half the morning trying to deflect supervisor’s requests, time-off requests, reports-due requests, and she’s gotten more and more riled as the afternoon has progressed.

During the few seconds when she lets her mind wander, hoping that some kind of hidden rainbow will appear and drop a bag of money, a cure for hot flashes, and a solution to her youngest daughter’s badass attitude, she remembers that Kelli hasn’t yet checked in with her like she’s supposed to when she gets home from school.

“That little shit,” she says, digging through her pocket for her cellphone.

Kelli’s phone rings and rings. Grace next tries the house phone and gets no answer there, either.

“Damn it!” she fumes. “That girl pushes every button I have.”

Before she can figure out what to do about Kelli’s latest transgression, a group of nursing assistants push into the quiet lunchroom and startle her into an addled scream.

“Sorry,” one of them offers, jumping back in fright.

“It’s fine,” she lies. “I was lost in thought.”

The assistants smile nervously and try not to look at her unbuttoned top. Who wants to eat lunch with the boss sitting at the next table?

Grace glances down at her soggy sandwich and realizes that it looks like her entire life. You work so darn hard to make a meat loaf—slicing up the onions, putting in the right spices, and making sure it isn’t baked too long—and then anything can happen. The oven temperature could be off, the spices old, the onions bitter. That’s it, she decides, my life is bitter and hard and I’m sick to death of it all.

She grabs the sandwich and isn’t sure if she should take a bite out of it or fling it against the dingy wall and watch it slide slowly to the floor. In this hospital, where most of the people in the city who can’t afford health-care insurance flock, someone would pick up the sandwich and gratefully eat it in about three seconds.

She’s staring at her sandwich when the door flies open and a nurse pops in, who looks as if she has just swallowed her own cheeks. Grace can only wonder without emotion, “Now what?”

“There you are,” the woman says, finally allowing herself to breathe.

“What’s wrong?”

“Emergency wants to send up three people and we have one bed.”

Grace pushes away from the table, leaving her sandwich right where it is, and wordlessly motions for the nurse to follow her out the door. “We can handle this one easily,” she says with confidence, already solving the latest crisis with her quick-thinking, analytical mind.

Three hours later, as Grace drives out of the hospital parking lot, it dawns on her that Kelli still hasn’t called. It’s after 8
P.M.
, and Grace can only imagine the story she will hear when she pulls into her driveway. “I forgot” or “I was busy” or “I stayed late at school.” It’s never quite the truth, either. The truth lately has been the boyfriend from hell, whom Grace has banished from the house when she’s not there.

Grace lets her mind wander for a few moments as she drives across town. Ellington isn’t totally the pits, at least. It’s a large town close enough to Chicago to be almost considered hip—if you look in the right direction, and that would be away from Grace’s house. She imagines what is happening in all the houses she passes, loves it when she sees people eating outside at the sidewalk cafés, dreams of taking a long walk the next time she has a day off. This mind game helps her relax, put things in perspective, allows her to forget all the things about daily life that stress her out.

She slows to turn the corner onto her own street, closes her eyes for a second to adjust to the street lights, and when she opens her eyes she sees
his
car parked on the street in front of her house. That boy must be in the house, with her daughter, doing God knows what!

“You jerk!” she yells without thinking.

Grace speeds up as she gets close to the house and a river of sweat starts running down her face. She swerves to avoid two parked cars and then is overcome by frustration so deep that there is no way she can stop.

She slams into the back of his car once, backs up and hits it again, and then once more. Grace would have done it one more time, but she heard Kelli screaming, saw the little bastard running from her house, and then heard the police sirens wailing before she could put her severely damaged car back into first gear.

5

Hell to Pay

T
hree months following her shoe incident, it does not occur to Jane that wearing a pair of dark black leather stiletto heels to her first court-ordered anger-management class is almost as out-of-control as using them to beat a grown man into such a bloody begging pulp that he requires an ambulance and seventeen staples.

High-top tennis shoes or work boots would have been a more appropriate fit for this industrial-looking area, where pickup trucks and American-made cars hog almost every parking space.

Who the hell drives station wagons anymore? Jane thinks as she presses her ridiculous shoe on the brake and then wedges her shiny SUV in between a half-ton Chevy and a station wagon. You’d think, with all the empty real estate spread out over Chicagoland, there would be an office for this kind of thing in a decent neighborhood.

Before she swings her pretty little feet out onto the pavement Jane double-checks the address on a legal notice that was once obviously rolled into a tight ball. The day the document from the court arrived, following the great stiletto incident, Jane wanted to use the other shoe on whoever sent it. The paper is almost unreadable, and was actually crumpled several times, stepped on, thrown against a wall, and held close to the flame of a pine-scented candle that was burning on her kitchen counter.

Jane looks up at the dark, imposing brick building and knows for certain she’s in the right place. She pauses and closes her eyes. It’s not easy for a woman like her to admit that she’s frightened. Her heart is racing, and there’s a tiny ribbon of exhaustion that has wrapped itself around her internal organs. There’s a part of her that wants to simply lie down on the sidewalk and wake up in a week, a month, a year. But instead she gets out of the car and begins to walk.

Her shoes, tapping on the sidewalk, sound like small-caliber gunshots, and the sound ricochets against the huge, solid building and echoes down the block. When Kit Ferranti hears the tapping, she instinctively drops to her knees and covers her head.

“Jesus!” she snarls. “Is there no other building in this frigging state to have a stupid meeting?”

Kit stands up when she realizes that the sound is some dumb-ass wearing high heels. Probably a hooker. Her brother’s friend Bobby used to work a block from here and said—at least back then—that the women on the streets were making more money than the guys in the factories lining each side of the block. Kit figured that was because the guys were always paying the girls on the street and there wasn’t much left for take-home pay.

She checks the piece of paper she’s clutching to make sure she’s in the right place. Is this state so damn broke that they have to hold meetings in buildings that should be torn down before the entire thing collapses?

“Christ,” she mutters, pulling at her only pair of tailored jeans and wondering for the tenth time what a person is supposed to wear to something like this.

It’s early fall or late summer, depending on your personal attitude toward wind, rain, and snow. This is Chicago territory, and as much as Kit hates to be where she is right this moment, to her there is nothing like the smell of oncoming winter, bus fumes, and onions gurgling in butter from the thousands of open kitchen windows all over this lovely city.

As she dodges a series of holes in the sidewalk that look as if they were created when someone dropped a truck out of the sky, she catches a glimpse of a woman walking into the same building where she’s headed. What really catches her eye are the jet-black high heels, which look like a set of steak knives she once bought for her parents when she was in high school.

Great news. A hooker is probably going to the same class she has been ordered to attend. Kit pauses at the entrance and has to stop herself from kicking the door with her own shoe, a simple and very practical short-heeled brown leather ankle boot she’s had for at least five years.

Upstairs and already in the meeting room, Grace Collins is early. No big shocker there. She’s been pacing in the small room for a good twenty minutes.

Peering out the filthy window, wondering if she’s in the correct location, she sees a woman come parading up the sidewalk in heels she will not let her daughter touch, let alone wear. Then, not far behind her, another woman walking so purposefully with her hands tucked into the pockets of her leather jacket that for a minute Grace thinks she might be a man.

For some reason, that totally panics her; the woman she called down at the courthouse assured her there would be no men here tonight. That was one small consolation for everything else that had already happened and was about to happen. Grace has struggled with the notion of any kind of relationship with a man, even a casual encounter at something like this, since her divorce. “Please,” she prays, “let that person not be a man.” Then the two people on the sidewalk move out of sight, and now Grace isn’t even sure if they are coming into the building.

For God’s sake, what if she’s in the wrong building? What if this is some kind of trap? The nasty ways of the world have changed everything. Grace has even gone so far as to imagine her daughter’s evil boyfriend waiting in the lobby to laugh at her as she walks through the door.

What if the papers she received were fake? Anyone could have intercepted them. She’s even heard of people posing as police officers and holding unsuspecting individuals for ransom. She’s been in a continually escalating panic since the
incident
, as she has taken to calling it, happened to her.

Just as a bead of perspiration unblocks the latest menopausal dam that has been building directly below each of Grace’s temples, the door pushes open and in comes the first woman from the sidewalk. And she really is wearing those heels—gaudy needlelike stilettos that caused tons of emergency-room problems years ago, when women were falling, ripping out their thigh muscles, and in some cases beating the living hell out of one another at dance clubs and bars all across America.

It takes Grace a few moments to realize that she is staring at this woman’s shoes. They look like real stilettos, the kind with heels—if you can call something like that a heel—made of solid steel or alloy. Holy Mother of God. Weapons.

“Hello,” the woman says, totally distracting Grace from the shoes.

“Hi,” she responds, wishing she had a towel to wipe off her face.

It takes each of them only a few seconds to seize her first impressions and run with them. Jane sees a sweaty middle-aged woman who could get lost in a crowd in about two seconds. The woman standing by the window is ordinary. She has wisps of blond in her chin-length hair, and she’s in need of a touch-up because her roots aren’t blonde—they are as gray as the painted concrete floor the women are standing on. Her black glasses look as if they’ve been sat on a dozen times. And she shops at Kohl’s, for God’s sake, because Jane has seen that ugly brown jacket on about three hundred other women since the weather started turning.

Grace has a very hard time getting her mind and eyes off the shoes. A quick image of her beautiful and always perfect mother standing in a pair of them, red with black tips, merges with her vision of this woman, this throwback to the sixties.
What would my mother think of me now? Oh God, oh God, oh God!
Grace has to swallow hard to flush her emotions.

This woman ain’t her mama. The woman in front of her looks as if she stepped out of a glossy magazine. Maybe she’s Latin or Hispanic, with skin that looks like the smooth side of a candy-bar wrapper. Her hair is very, very short, and swirls of deep red are entwined with thick, tight black curls that someone with magic hands at an expensive salon must have cut. Grace has always wanted to cut her hair that short, but she’s afraid she’ll look like a bowling ball with black glasses and she can only afford to go to the local JCPenney salon. This woman is dressed to the nines; she obviously has money, and her beauty is the can’t-look-away kind of good looks that is also a little scary. What in the holy hell is she doing here? Could she be famous?

As Grace tries to answer her question by looking down at the stilettos, someone again pushes through the door. There is a swirl of energy that appears in a leather jacket, jeans, a red sweater, and an attitude that immediately reminds Grace of an old gangster movie.

Jane feels it, too, and she throws back her sculpted shoulders and gives the latest arrival a once-over that could start a fire without a match.

This woman looks so Italian that she could have pasta in her jacket pocket. Her hair is the color of coal and her dark eyes are unusually large for a woman who probably tops off at just a few inches over five feet. She looks tough, with her long jaw-line, a swagger in her walk, and that city-girl aura that should be bottled and sold so that women who are afraid of the dark can get a little help. But this woman is also nervous. She keeps moving her head, and Jane guesses that her fingernails are bitten as low as they can go without exposing blood vessels. Maybe she’s the last standing cigarette smoker in this part of the world, although it’s likely if she’s from this part of town she probably started smoking on the way home from the local hospital nursery.

Grace, much to her own surprise, has a wild urge to say something to comfort this woman. She’s nervous, too, but it looks like the newcomer could spring herself right out the window. That in itself is kind of odd, because the black leather jacket, boots, the way she sways, make her look like a middle-aged gang member, and Grace has had more than her share of nasty encounters with gang members at work.

There is a pause when all of the women are breathing the same air, hanging on to the edges of their nervous tension as if it were their only lifeline, and silently wondering what in the world is going to happen next.

“Are you both here for the party?” Kit asks as she tries without success to imagine what in the world these two suburban babes could possibly have done to get them sent to this meeting. One babe is really a babe. She looks familiar, but how would Kit know someone who has on all that makeup and looks so absolutely chic and put-together?

Jane ignores the question. “Is there anyone else behind you?”

“Only a mess of motorcycle thugs. I pushed them down the steps,” Kit answers, then slaps her left hand against her mouth. “Shit! I’m kidding. Is one of you the person in charge of this?”

Grace and Jane both laugh at the same time.

“Not me,” Grace says.

Jane shakes her head and wonders if she should have had another glass or two of the red wine she left sitting on the counter.

Kit fumbles in her pocket for a second and comes out with the same piece of paper both of the other women are holding in their hands.

“This was fun to get in the mail, huh?”

Grace turns away and decides to start putting some chairs in a circle, even though she’s not in charge and has no idea what’s going to happen next. People always seem to sit in circles when they do these group-talking things.

“Does yours say Dr. Bayer?” Kit asks, looking at Jane.

“Yes, Dr. Olivia Bayer. And isn’t this just the most asinine thing? Who has time for this crap?”

“Time.” Grace repeats the word as she stops in the middle of the room with a brown metal folding chair in her hand, and wishes she could go back in time and erase everything that happened those fifty-one days ago. “I’m behind at work with reports so overdue they’re moldy—”

She stops herself before she can mention the pesky seventeen-year-old daughter who belongs for sale on eBay, and the fact that simply thinking about this meeting has turned her into a physical and emotional wreck. How did this happen to her? Is she really this horrible?

Grace sets the chair down so hard that both Kit and Jane are startled and turn to look at her.

“Sorry,” she apologizes. “This isn’t what I usually do on Tuesday nights. It’s … well, I’m sorry.”

Standing outside the room where her three little dots are waiting for her, Dr. Olivia Bayer is thinking about how she has always wanted to place a hidden camera in this room right before the first meeting. She has seen one tiny photograph of each one of these women, but, beyond that, she really has no idea what they look like. She does know that these first few minutes are crucial and reveal many, many things about a person. She has been listening; that is not illegal.

It’s just a few minutes past 7
P.M.
, and even though she’d love to stand outside for another two days to hear what happens next, Olivia knows she has to get in there. God knows what one of them might do if she leaves them alone much longer.

She back steps about thirty paces, sets her semi-scruffy wooden-heeled clogs down, and starts walking slowly, but as loudly as possible, toward the room.

How many walks have there been? Hundreds, for sure, and during each one Olivia raises her dark blue eyes to the ceiling. She prefers to call that “looking up,” and not anything else. Surely not glancing toward heaven, because she knows where that is, and it is not in a cloud. “Looking up,” to Olivia, is being open and not judgmental.