once more as her gaze also became more intense. 'Love? you.'
'I love you, too, honey,' Celestina said shakily. 'So much.'
Phimie's eyes widened, her hand tightened painfully on her sister's hand, her entire body convulsed, thrashed, and she cried, 'Unnn, unnn, unnn!'
When her hand went limp in Celestina's, her body sagged, too, and her eyes were no longer either focused or rolling wildly. They shimmered into stillness, darkled with death, as the cardiac monitor sang the one long note that signified flatline.
Celestina was maneuvered aside as the surgical team began resuscitation procedures. Stunned, she backed away from the table until she encountered a wall. In southern California, as dawn of this new momentous day looms nearer, Agnes Lampion still dreams of her newborn: Bartholomew in an incubator, watched over by a host of little angels hovering on white wings, seraphim and cherubim.
In Oregon, standing at Junior Cain's bedside, turning a quarter across the knuckles of his left hand, Thomas Vanadium asks about the name that his suspect had spoken in the grip of a nightmare.
In San Francisco, Seraphim Aethionema White lies beyond all hope of resuscitation. So beautiful and only sixteen.
With a tenderness that surprises and moves Celestina, the tall nurse closes the dead girl's eyes. She opens a fresh, clean sheet and places it over the body, from the feet up, covering the precious face last of all.
And now the stilled world starts turning again
Lowering his surgical mask, Dr. Lipscomb approached Celestina, where she stood with her back pressed to the wall.
His homely face was long and narrow, as though pulled into that shape by the weight of his responsibilities. In other circumstances, however, his generous mouth might have shaped an appealing smile; and his green eyes had in them the compassion of someone who himself had known great loss.
'I'm so sorry, Miss White.'
She blinked, nodded, but could not speak.
'You'll need time to? adjust to this,' he said. 'Perhaps you've got to call family?'
Her mother and father still resided in a world where Phimie was alive. Bringing them from that old reality to this new one would be the second-hardest thing Celestina had ever done.
The hardest was being in this room at the very moment when Phimie had moved on. Celestina knew beyond doubt that this was the worst thing she would have to endure in all her life, worse than her own death when it came.
'And, of course, you'll need to make arrangements for the body,' said Dr. Lipscomb. 'Sister Josephina will provide you with a room, a phone, privacy, whatever you need, and for however long you need.'
She wasn't listening closely to him. Numb. She felt as though she were half anesthetized. She was looking past him, at nothing, and his Voice seemed to be coming to her through several layers of surgical masks, though he now wore none at all.
'But before you leave St. Mary's,' the physician said, 'I'd like a few mutes of your time. It's very important to me. Personally.'
Gradually, she perceived that Lipscomb was more troubled than he should have been, considering that his patient had died through no fault of his own.
When she met his eyes again, he said, 'I'll wait for you. When you're ready to hear me. However long you need. But something? something extraordinary happened here before you arrived.'
Celestina almost begged off, almost told him that she had no interest in whatever curiosity of medicine or physiology he might have witnessed. The only miracle that would have mattered, Phimie's survival, had not been granted.
In the face of his kindness, however, she couldn't refuse his request. She nodded.
The newborn was no longer in the operating room.
Celestina hadn't noticed the infant being taken away. She had wanted to see it once more, even though she was sickened by the sight of it.
Evidently, her face was knotted with the effort to remember what the child had looked like, for the physician said, 'Yes? What's wrong?'
'The baby
'She's been taken to the neonatal unit.'
She. Heretofore, Celestina hadn't given a thought to the gender of the baby, because, to her, it had been less a person than a thing.
Lipscomb said, 'Miss White? Do you want me to show you the way?'
She shook her head. 'No. Thank you, no. Neonatal unit. I'll find it later.'
This consequence of rape, the baby, was less baby to Celestina than cancer, a malignancy excised rather than a life delivered. She had been no more impelled to study the child than she would have been, charmed to examine the glistening gnarls and oozing convolutions of a freshly plucked tumor. Consequently, she could remember nothing of its squinched face.
One detail, and one only, haunted her.
As shaken as she had been at Phimie's side, she couldn't trust her memory. Perhaps she hadn't seen what she thought she'd seen.
One detail. One only. It was a crucial detail, however, one that she absolutely must confirm before she left St. Mary's, even if she would be required to look at the child once more, this spawn of violence, this killer of her sister.
Chapter 19
In hospitals, as in farmhouses, breakfast comes soon after dawn, because both healing and growing are hard work, and long days of labor required to save the human species, which spends as mu& time earning its pain and hunger as it does trying to escape them.
Two soft-boiled eggs, one slice of bread neither toasted nor buttered, a glass of apple juice, and a dish of orange Jell-O were served to Agnes Lampion as, on farms farther inland from the coast, roosters still crowed and plump hens clucked contentedly atop their early layings.
Although she had slept well and though her hemorrhaging had been successfully arrested, Agnes was too weak to manage breakfast alone. A simple spoon was as heavy and as unwieldy as a shovel.
She didn't have an appetite, anyway. Joey was too much on her mind. The safe birth of a healthy child was a blessing, but it wasn't compensation for her loss. Although by nature resistant to depression, she now had a darkness in her heart that would not relent before a thousand dawns or ten thousand. If a mere nurse had insisted that she eat, Agnes would not have been persuaded, but she couldn't hold out against the insistent importuning of one special seamstress.
Maria Elena Gonzalez-such an imposing figure in spite of her diminutive stature that even three names seemed insufficient to identify her-was still present. Although the crisis had passed, she wasn't ready to trust that nurses and doctors, by themselves, could provide Agnes with adequate care.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, Maria lightly salted the runny eggs and spooned them into Agnes's mouth. 'Eggs is as chickens does.'
'Eggs are as chickens do,' Agnes corrected. Que?'
Frowning, Agnes said, 'No, that doesn't make any sense, either, does it? What were you trying to say, dear?'
'This woman be to ask me about chickens-'
'What woman?'
'Doesn't matter. Silly woman making fan at my English, trying confuse me. She be to ask me whether chicken come around first or first be an egg.'
'Which came first, the chicken or the egg?'
'Si! Like that she say.'
