“Raina’s missing in action. I’ve left three voice messages on her cell, and her home phone must be off the hook, because it’s been busy forever.”
“I can’t reach her either.” Holly frowned. “But I couldn’t get ahold of you earlier either.”
“I just probably didn’t hear my phone ringing in the bottom of my purse. I was preoccupied, you know.”
“What if your mother had tried to call?”
“Mom’s on a date. While, I, her daughter, am sitting here feeling sorry for myself.”
“Pity parties are my strong suit, but I know just what to do to cheer us up. Come downstairs and I’ll dish up some ice cream. Mom got some chocolate fudge sauce for Christmas that’s to die for. She hides it, but I know where.”
Kathleen cracked a smile. “Do you always eat your way to happiness?”
“Whatever works.” Holly led the way downstairs toward the kitchen. “Let’s try to call Raina again. Maybe she’ll want to come over for the pig-out.”
Raina’s head hurt. Her brain felt overloaded, and she was afraid that if she tried to cram in one more thing, it would explode. She heard Vicki rattling around the kitchen making a cup of tea for herself, taking a break from their long, life-altering conversation. Vicki had promised that there was “more.” Raina was uncertain that she could handle “more.” She felt like Pandora trying to stuff all the miseries from the fabled box back inside. She was like the Trojans, wishing they’d never pulled the huge wooden horse into their walled city. If she had never signed up with the registry … Then her half sister would have little chance of beating leukemia, she reminded herself.
“Are you sure you don’t want anything? A cola?” Vicki returned to the chair, balancing her cup of tea.
“No,” Raina said. “Just finish.”
Vicki sat, joggled the tea bag a couple of times, squeezed it out with the back of a teaspoon and dumped it on the saucer.
Raina realized that her mother was procrastinating. How horrible could the next part be?
“So back to the family history,” Vicki said. “After the birth of the baby, I couldn’t return to my old high school. The principal didn’t want me there—I was a bad influence, you see. But I didn’t want to go back anyway. The place seemed frivolous to me. Girls were planning for proms. I was trying to survive.
“Dustin was finishing school in Michigan, so he was gone. My parents refused to speak to me. I had no real friends. I got a job as a clerk and an apartment with one of the other girls from the home where I’d stayed while I was pregnant. My life was awful. I was so miserable, I thought about … well, let’s just say, it was a dark time for me.”
Suicide. Raina knew that was what her mother had been about to say. She sat still, felt the rush of blood through her vessels, her breath pressing against the inside of her lungs.
“Eventually, I took the GED and got my high school diploma. Then everything was pretty much as I’ve always told you. I got into a community college and landed a job in a local hospital.”
Raina had been told this part all her life, about how her mother had worked her way through college and a nursing program. She’d just never told Raina the other details. The details that totaled the sum of all her parts, that rounded her out, the good, the bad, the ugly. A lapse, Raina thought bitterly. She should have been told all this years earlier.
Vicki sipped her tea. “Eventually, I got into a special two-year program in Norfolk, Virginia, to become a surgical nurse. I lived with three other girls and had a pretty good time. One long holiday weekend, we went into D.C. to rest and relax.” She resettled the cup in its saucer. “One of the girls knew of this little club that featured hot new bands, so we went to check it out. And guess who was playing?”
Raina’s heart thudded. She knew by the expression on her mother’s face what had happened. “Dustin?”
Vicki gave a thumbs-up. “Nine years had passed since we’d seen each other. But it was like nine minutes. And it took me all of nine seconds to know I still loved him. He had feelings for me too. Maybe not love exactly, but he cared. I dropped out of the nursing program, moved in with him and hit the road with his band.”
Raina shook her head in disbelief. Her mother? Her sensible, sane, level-headed, stay-the-course mother became a groupie? “Are you kidding?”
“Not kidding. But things were different with Dustin. He and his whole band were into the drug scene. I wasn’t. We fought a lot. He sometimes didn’t come home, or come back to our hotel when we were on the road. He was always off partying. When he was around, we fought and screamed at each other. And then, one day”—Vicki took a deep breath—“I discovered I was pregnant again.”
“Me?”
“You.” Vicki hunched down, looking like a china doll abandoned in a corner of a playhouse. “But this time, I didn’t tell him. I just packed my things, and I left. I went to D.C. because there were hospitals there where I could work and resume my schooling. When you were born, I gave us both his last name on your birth certificate.”
“You always told me he left us when I was two. Is he … does he know about me?”
“When you were two, I heard through a mutual friend that Dustin had OD’d in a filthy little motel somewhere in Arkansas. I thought the lie about him leaving us was a kinder story for a little girl who used to ask Santa Claus for a daddy every Christmas.”
Raina remembered. Growing up, she had longed for a daddy just like Patty Ellen’s, the girl who lived next door until Raina was six. Patty’s daddy was tall and strong and smelled like freshly cut grass. He used to swing Patty on her play set in the evenings and help Patty ride her little pink bike up and down the sidewalk. If Raina was in her yard, he waved to her and told her she looked pretty.
Now Raina had come full circle, back to the starting place of never knowing her father. What did it matter? He was a druggie, an addict and worse. She felt battered, as if she’d been slammed into a wall. Her mother went silent, letting Raina absorb all she’d been told. Raina couldn’t look at her. She didn’t want to look at her. How could Vicki have kept these truths from her for so many years? Her brain felt sluggish, but as she fought her way through the fog of comprehension, one nugget began to coalesce. Crystal, the firstborn, was not her half sister after all. She was her full sister, because they’d both come from the same parents. Her mother had repeated her mistakes with the same man, and Raina was just as much an accident as Crystal had been.
“Tell me about my sister. What have you learned about her?”
“Her name is Emma Delaschmidt. She’s a teacher. And she’s very sick.”
“Then we should go to Virginia as soon as we can.”
This time, Vicki offered no resistance, and her demeanor quickly became all-business. “I’ll make the arrangements to pull you out of school. I’ll ask my assistant to step in at the hospital while I’m gone. Do you want to tell your friends or not?”
Raina considered her mother’s question carefully. Kathleen and Holly were her best friends. She wanted them to know. She wanted Hunter to know too. “I’ll tell them,” she said.
“I wish … I’m just sorry …” Vicki started and stopped. “I love you, Raina.”
Raina stared at her mother as if seeing her for the first time. This very day she had cradled a baby in her arms who had tragically died. And she’d been forced to abandon a family history that was mostly fantasy. She’d gained a sister but lost all feeling for her mother. She was numb inside and out. “I want to save my sister,” she said with almost no emotion in her voice. “I’m going upstairs now. I’m really tired.”
“If there’s anything—”
“I don’t think there’s anything left for you to do. Unless there’s something else you need to tell me. Some other little revelation about your past.”
“You don’t have to be sarcastic. I’ve told you everything. The whole story.”
Raina went toward the stairs like a sleepwalker without another word to her mother.
> Over the next few days, Raina felt as if she had been cloned. Raina Number One went to school, the hospital, did homework, kept a smile on her face. Raina Number Two packed her bags for the trip to Virginia, grew nervous about the upcoming extraction procedure and imagined what it would be like to meet a sister she’d never known existed. Raina Number One listened to Kathleen’s story about finding Stephanie’s car in Carson’s driveway and heard Holly burble on about the mysterious e-mail she’d received from Shy Boy, and offered them both advice—“Call Carson immediately” and “Reply to the e-mail if you want to know who sent it.” Raina Number Two went through photo albums and pulled out old pictures of herself from elementary school—just in case Emma, her sister, might want to see them.
Raina Number One received pats on the back from hospital and school staff about her impending bone marrow donation. “How brave of you,” she was told. “How lucky you are to be able to help someone out this way,” others said. And when a reporter called from the Tampa Tribune asking to write a feature article about her (how did the paper find out?), Raina Number One begged off, said she’d rather wait until it was all over, and the reporter agreed. Raina Number Two chewed her fingernails down to the quick and cried herself to sleep at night thinking about all she was facing. I have a sister. My father was scum.
Raina Number One spoke to her mother. Raina Number Two could hardly stand to look at her as every day, the magnitude of Vicki’s deception ate away at Raina’s heart and mind. She started an e-mail to Hunter many times but always deleted it because she couldn’t put it all into words. And she delayed telling Kathleen and Holly until the night before she and Vicki were to fly to Virginia.
Raina invited her friends over for pizza, and once the deliveryman was gone, once the slices were parcelled out on plates and the sodas were poured, Raina Number One leaned back in her chair and said, “I have something to tell you. Something private and not allowed to leave our circle. You can tell your parents, but nobody else. Do you promise?”
Kathleen and Holly glanced at each other wide-eyed, then looked at Raina and nodded.
Raina Number One started the story, but Raina Number Two finished it in a rush of forlorn tears.
eighteen
THE FLIGHT to Reagan Airport should have been a fun adventure, but it wasn’t. All Raina could think about was meeting her sister and the family who had adopted and raised her. Vicki must have had a few conversations with Emma’s adoptive parents before leaving, because during the flight, she told Raina what she’d learned. Emma was their only child. Her mother, Helen, worked in the Justice Department; her father, Carl, was with the postal service. They had raised Emma in Alexandria, a Virginia suburb of Washington, not many miles from the hospital where she’d been born, and she had lived all her life in the same two-story brick house. Emma had attended Georgetown University, earned a degree in elementary education and taught fifth grade in a local school. She had first been diagnosed with leukemia when she was twelve. She’d undergone chemo, relapsed when she was sixteen, underwent treatments again and had been well until the year before, when it had been determined that only a bone marrow transplant might save her. She was placed in the national registry, and that was when Raina had entered the picture.
It all seemed simple, except for the extraordinary dynamic of Raina’s and Emma’s being related through a father whom neither had known and a mother whom Raina had grown up with but apparently had not known either. During the flight, Raina studied Vicki covertly and was surprised to see that she showed no emotion about the impending meeting. Probably all her years as a nurse had conditioned her to remain calm and cool. However, Raina wasn’t calm and cool. She felt like a bundle of tangled nerves ready to short-circuit. She hadn’t slept well in days and found eating almost impossible.
At the baggage claim, Raina saw a couple holding a cardboard sign with VICKI AND RAINA written on it. The couple looked ordinary, the woman tall and thin with dark hair, the man rounder, with steely gray hair. Her heart thudding, Raina followed her mother to face them. Introductions were polite but awkward.
“You look like Emma,” Helen said, her blue eyes filling with tears.
Raina smiled, trying to be brave. “I—I’m looking forward to meeting her.”
“She’s in the hospital,” Carl said. “They have to destroy her immune system—”
“Give them a minute to catch their breath, honey,” Helen said, patting his hand. She turned to Raina and Vicki. “We’re so grateful to you. Thank you for coming.”
Raina swallowed down the lump wedged in her throat.
Vicki said, “I’ve reserved a rental car and I booked us a room—”
“We’ll take care of your room,” Carl said, taking the suitcases from Vicki and Raina. “We know the area and we’ve selected a hotel near the hospital. It’s a nice place. And you can walk to the hospital, which might be easier than driving if the weather’s good.”
They picked up the rental car, and Vicki followed Emma’s parents through the heavy afternoon traffic. “They seem nice,” she said absently. “She was raised in a good home.”
Crystal-Emma had gone to a good home, like a puppy from an animal shelter. Raina wondered how it must feel for Vicki to look at the faces of the people who had raised her flesh and blood, who had given that child an education and had experienced the horror of Crystal-Emma’s cancer treatments. She tried to muster sympathy for her mother, for all the years she’d lost with this adopted daughter, but she kept hitting her wall of anger.
Vicki checked them into the hotel. They stashed their bags, then immediately left with the Delaschmidts to go to the hospital. The small talk between the adults sounded forced and phony—conversations about the weather and life in Tampa, and “How does Raina like school?” and “Isn’t airport security a hassle these days?” Yet it ate up time and filled in the awkward silences and helped them to avoid the more difficult questions.
Raina found the hospital, Sacred Heart, as large and complex as Parker-Sloan. The building, a monument of brick and glass, rose against the dull gray sky in sharp relief. She was glad she’d become a Pink Angel, because the place didn’t intimidate her with its size and mammoth sprawl. They walked through a Plexiglas-enclosed bridge into a state-of-the-art cancer center named after the granddaughter of a wealthy couple, a child who had died in the sixties, long before many treatments had been discovered.
“Emma’s on the fifth floor,” Helen explained as they rode the elevator.
Raina’s heart beat faster and she fought to remain calm. It seemed dreamlike to finally be nearing the end of the journey. They walked through double doors, past a nurses’ station, rounded a corner and entered a room that looked like spring. Bouquets bloomed in glass vases on every flat surface.
Raina saw a woman sitting up in a hospital bed wearing a hot pink scarf around her head. She looked gaunt, but her smile was beautiful and welcoming. “Hello,” she said warmly, holding out her hand. “So you’re my biological mother,” she said to Vicki. “And you’re Raina. I’d know you anywhere. We really do look alike, don’t we?”
Yes. They really did. Tears welled in Raina’s eyes. Emma was as delicate as a flower, her skin almost transparent, her arm attached to an IV and splotched with dark bruises. “Hi,” Raina whispered.
“Quite a bonus I’m getting. A donor and a sister. Well, a half sister, at least.”
She doesn’t know, Raina thought. Who would tell her? Vicki? At the moment it didn’t seem important. “I was surprised too,” Raina said, careful not to glance at her mother.
“You’re lovely,” Vicki said softly.
Emma laughed. “I look better with hair. Even my eyelashes and eyebrows have fallen out, but thank you for saying so.” She looked Vicki up and down, curiosity seeping through her smile. “I’ve always wondered who I came from. Mom and Dad”—she glanced at her adoptive parents—“they’ve always told me I was adopted. Still, I wondered. Not enough to go looking for you, but …” She paused, cat
ching her breath after the exertion of speaking. “Can you tell me anything about my father?”
“Yes,” Vicki said. “But later. We only stopped by to meet you.”
“Yes, later,” Carl said, stepping to the bed and pouring Emma a glass of water.
Emma smiled. “I’m always tired. But so what? I’ve wanted to meet you both ever since I heard we were a match. But of course I couldn’t until we knew we were related. Then they said we could meet. So I’ve been imagining this moment for a long time. When you’re lying in bed all day with nothing to do, well, imagination is all you have. Come closer, Raina.” Emma’s gaze caressed Raina’s face. “You’re a junior, right?”
Raina nodded, not trusting her voice.
“And I was told that you do volunteer work at a hospital.”
“Pink Angels,” Raina managed to say. “That’s what they call us. My best friends, Kathleen and Holly, work with me.”
“I have two best friends—Janie and Heather. We met in college.”
“And you’re a teacher.”
“I love my job. Each one of those kids feels like my own.” She pointed to a corkboard hanging on the back of the door. Every inch was covered with letters and messages on all kinds and sizes of paper. Some had stickers affixed, others were decorated with different-colored pens. The papers fluttered like multihued feathers in the air seeping around the door jamb.
“They must really miss you.”
“I miss them.”
“We should let Raina and Vicki get something to eat.” This came from Helen, who stepped forward and straightened the covers around her daughter. The move looked motherly and possessive at the same time. “Your doctors want to meet us here at seven. Please get some rest.”
“Of course,” Emma said, winking at Raina and Vicki. “Settle in and come back then. You’ll like my doctors. And my fiancé, Jon-Paul Franklin, will be here too. I really want you to meet him. He’s a wonderful man.”