“Tell me,” Vicki said.
Raina turned, slumped against the windowsill and began telling her story, but at the mention of Tony’s name, her mother recoiled. “He’s returned? Why didn’t you tell me? If he says one bad word about you—”
“Too late,” Raina said. “But I don’t care who he talks to about me. Except for Hunter. He told Hunter.”
Vicki rolled her eyes. “For crying out loud, Hunter’s more mature than that! Isn’t he?”
“It was a shock. I don’t want to lose him.”
“Look, you made a bad choice with Tony. Surely Hunter understands bad choices.”
Raina’s eyes filled with tears. “I’m not sure.”
Vicki looked both angry and exasperated. “That’s why I don’t like to see you get so involved with a boy. You have too much going for you, Raina. Don’t get hung up on some boy and lose yourself. Or your way.”
Raina had hoped for more sympathy, more understanding from her mother. She hadn’t wanted a lecture about the perils of love and dating. “It’s not Hunter’s fault.”
“Don’t defend him. You’ve always told me he was different. Well, he doesn’t seem too different to me. He’s acting like a child. You had sex with Tony. It was a bad choice. You got on with your life. He should accept that and not blame you.”
“But it was my fault,” Raina said, her anger rising. “I said yes to Tony.”
Vicki studied her with pursed lips. Finally, she said, “What happened with you and Tony is history. You can’t change history. But if that kid even thinks about bad-mouthing you again, I’ll have him expelled.”
“They don’t expel people for spreading stories, Mom. Especially true ones.”
Vicki rushed forward and grabbed Raina by the shoulders. “You are not any of the names Tony called you. And if Hunter’s going to hold this against you, you’re better off without him. You hear me?”
Her mother’s passion shocked Raina. When she’d been thirteen and Vicki had gone to the principal about Tony, Raina had been embarrassed. But now Vicki’s vehemence seemed out of proportion. “I’ll handle it,” Raina said, wrenching free and rubbing her arms, sore from her mother’s grip. “It’s my problem and I’ll handle it. I’m sorry I even told you.”
Vicki closed her eyes, took a couple of deep ragged breaths and stepped aside. “Of course you’ll handle it,” she said quietly, as if regretting her loss of composure. She walked to the door. “I hope Hunter will come around. I hate seeing you hurt.” She paused. “For what it’s worth, hard work is good medicine for tough times. It’s always helped me. Don’t sit around feeling sorry for yourself, because it solves nothing.”
Vicki closed the door quietly behind her, and Raina stood staring, bewildered, long after her mother had left the room.
Raina took her mother’s advice and spent every free minute in the hospital nursery with the newborns. Being around the tiny babies lifted her spirits. They were new and beautiful and cuddly. Although nothing was said, Sierra and Betsy must have sensed that she was hurting. They gave her free rein and asked little of her in the time she spent working beyond her regular shifts.
One afternoon, Betsy told Raina to gown up and follow her. Raina quickly put a sterile paper gown over her clothes, slipped paper booties over her sneakers and a cap over her hair and followed the nurse into the neonatal ICU—a rare privilege. Together they washed their hands with antibacterial soap and put on latex gloves. “Time to feed the preemies,” Betsy said.
“Me?”
“You can hold a bottle as well as anyone, and we’re short-staffed today. Flu season—please, don’t you catch it.”
Raina followed Betsy to one of the plastic bubbles, an incubator that held a tiny baby, born too soon. Gauze pads were taped over its eyes, “to protect them from the light,” Betsy said. Tubes and wires attached to portable machines ran into the baby’s body. A teddy bear had been placed in a corner of the bubble. “This one was born at twenty-six weeks. She only weighed sixteen ounces.”
“A pound?” Raina could hardly believe it.
“She’s made progress over the last six weeks—three pounds—and once she gains another, we’ll be able to bottle-feed her. When she hits five pounds and gets an ‘all’s well’ from her pediatrician, her parents can take her home.”
Betsy led Raina to other incubators, where other premature babies lay, and showed her how to lift and hold one in a nearby rocking chair and how to feed him with a bottle that looked doll-sized. “Don’t be afraid of them. They’re tougher than they look. And don’t let them fall asleep without finishing their formula. Thump them on the bottoms of their feet if they doze off.” Betsy smiled. “That’s it. Hey, you’re good at this. You’ve got five babies.”
“Thank you,” Raina said.
Betsy shrugged. “You’re my best student.”
Holding the babies calmed Raina. They were so small and helpless and they needed her. Well, maybe not her exactly, but they needed the care and food she offered. She hummed to them, offering each one a special song. She cuddled every baby, kissed each forehead and traced their tiny features with her finger, a finger that looked gargantuan beside their miniature hands. She already knew that newborns thrived on being held and touched, that without such touching, a baby seemed to wither and dry up.
Grown-up girls need touching too, she thought. Hunter hadn’t called her in more than a week and she missed him terribly. She longed to feel his arms around her. She missed the way he toyed with her hair and the way he rubbed the small of her back when he held her. Hunter was a toucher, and she thrived on it. Their separation was a physical pain that nested inside her almost every minute she was awake.
The baby in her arms had emptied the bottle, and Raina held him to her shoulder and gently tapped his back. Tears blurred her vision. Although she and Hunter saw each other in the halls at school and spoke, there was a wall between them that she couldn’t breach. “He’ll get over it,” Holly had told Raina confidently. “I mean, it’s not like you cheated on him or anything.” But Raina knew that in Hunter’s mind, that wasn’t necessarily true. He felt betrayed, not so much by what had happened in her past as by his dreams of what could have been theirs and now never would be. The first time. The first one.
The Harvest Ball was coming soon, right before Halloween, marking the end of football season. So far, Hunter hadn’t mentioned their going together, and naturally, if she couldn’t go with Hunter, she wouldn’t go at all. No one at school had picked up on their estrangement yet, but if he asked someone else, everybody would know something was wrong.
As she lowered the baby into his incubator, his little hand caught on the necklace Hunter had given her for her sixteenth birthday. She gently untangled the baby’s fingers, shut the plastic lid and fingered the heart-shaped pendant with a diamond chip at the heart’s tip. Nestled inside the heart was a cross bearing a second diamond chip. “The two most important symbols in my life,” he’d said when he’d first fastened it around her neck.
On November twenty-fifth, she’d turn seventeen. With or without him.
eight
“HUNTER AND RAINA broke up? Are you kidding?” Carson stopped chewing in midbite and stared at Kathleen across the table in the pizza parlor.
“I didn’t say that. I just said they were having serious problems.” Kathleen poked at her slice of pizza, suddenly not hungry.
“That guy’s crazy about Raina. They’ll work it out.” Carson resumed eating. “What happened?”
“I guess it’s no secret now.” Kathleen told him briefly about Raina and Tony.
“And Hunter’s pissed at Raina about something that happened before they even met?” Carson shrugged. “Seems unfair.”
“You’d have to know Hunter better. He sets the bar high. I think it’s because he’s religious.”
“I know religious people, and they don’t write off someone for things that happened before they ever met that person.”
“Holly says he’s mo
re hurt than mad.” Kathleen plucked a black olive off the slice of pizza and put it aside on her plate.
“Holly doesn’t seem that way. She comes across as kind of wild and crazy.”
“She struggles with keeping all the rules, but deep down she’s got a lot of faith. She’s told me that Hunter is thinking about going to seminary someday and becoming a minister.”
Carson grimaced. “That would be the last thing on my list.”
“Don’t you believe in God?”
“Sure. Mom goes to mass every week. Me and Dad, not so much. But then I don’t want to be a priest either.”
“But ministers can marry. Priests can’t.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s right.” He grinned impishly at Kathleen.
“I’m being serious. Raina’s my best friend and I hate seeing her hurting this way. She spends every free minute at the hospital and she hardly sleeps. She’s got bags under her eyes and she’s lost weight. I feel sorry for her. Tony is such a creep! Why did he have to say something to Hunter in the first place!”
“Whoa,” Carson said. “Back up. This wouldn’t have been a problem if she’d told Hunter before Tony did.”
“And exactly when does a girl tell her boyfriend something like that?”
“The minute things get serious.” He eyed her. “Is there something you want to tell me?”
Kathleen felt her face turn beet red. “No!”
He winked and grinned. “I figured that out the first time I kissed you.”
She threw a wadded paper napkin at him and hit his cheek. “Excuse me for being so inept.”
He laughed and caught her hand, and she struggled to break his hold. “It’s okay. You were a fast learner.” He stood, came around the table, bent down and kissed her full on the mouth. Three girls at the next table giggled. Carson turned and bowed, saying, “She loves me.”
Furious because she felt embarrassed, Kathleen said, “He’s conceited enough to think every girl loves him.”
One of the girls said, “I don’t even know him and I love him.” The others laughed and waggled their fingers at Carson.
Kathleen crossed her arms and slouched in her chair. “Are you through giving me a hard time?”
He sat back down and leaned forward, his expression serious. “I only do it because I care,” he said. “For the record, I think Hunter’s making a mistake. But it’s their problem. You can’t fix what’s broken between other people no matter how much you want to. They have to work it out.”
Carson was right, but it didn’t make Kathleen feel less sorry for her friends or resent Tony any less.
“Do you know what’s going on between Raina and your brother? And don’t say nothing, because I know something’s wrong. They didn’t go to that dance last week.” Evelyn stood in the doorway of Holly’s bedroom.
Startled, Holly looked up from the scrapbook she was working on. “The ball is highly overrated. If I hadn’t been on the committee, I wouldn’t have gone either.”
“You’re avoiding my question, Holly. Something’s happened, and I want to know what it is.”
“It’s not like I’m Hunter’s mother-confessor, you know.” There was no way that Holly would divulge the facts.
“But Raina tells you everything.”
Holly was going to have to tell her mother something. “One of Raina’s old boyfriends has reappeared, and Hunter’s jealous.” Not the whole truth, but not exactly a lie either.
Evelyn looked thoughtful. “That may not be a bad thing. I think Hunter’s far too serious about Raina, anyway. They both should date others. I don’t want them getting into trouble.”
Which was her mother’s unsubtle way of saying, “I don’t want Raina getting pregnant.” The attitude washed over Holly. “Well, Raina loves only Hunter. The old boyfriend is a jerk.”
“That’s not a nice thing to say.”
“Trust me. It’s true.”
“Why do you kids think that you have to have boyfriends and girlfriends, anyway? Whatever happened to just hanging out together?”
Holly would have laughed but didn’t think it was a good idea. “I’d answer you, but without the experience of having a boyfriend—” She shrugged without finishing.
Evelyn sighed. “I know you think your father and I are too strict with you, Holly, but it’s for your own good. Kids grow up too fast these days. And every star in Hollywood seems to think that having a baby without a husband is the thing to do. Your father and I dated three years in college before we married.”
Holly suppressed the urge to groan. Her parents had attended a small denominational college where they’d met and fallen in love. She’d heard the story many times and thought it hopelessly sentimental, even syrupy. “But how did you know Dad was the one if you didn’t date other guys?”
“We didn’t need to date hundreds to know quality when we met it,” Evelyn said. “All a lot of dating gets you is confused. And dating when you’re too young to make good judgments is a huge mistake.”
The implication was that Raina had made a mistake and now it had returned to haunt her. Her mother probably thought it was Raina’s payback. The attitude annoyed Holly. She still thought that nothing excused Hunter for treating Raina like an outcast. She said, “Mistakes should be forgiven, especially when a person says, ‘I’m sorry.’ At least I think they should.”
Her mother crossed her arms and looked hard at Holly. “In other words, you’re not going to tell me what’s happened between Hunter and Raina.”
Holly smiled sweetly. “Isn’t keeping a confidence part of being mature? I mean, you and Dad are always telling me to grow up.”
Looking annoyed, Evelyn pushed away from the door frame.
“Why don’t you ask Hunter?” Holly called as her mother walked off.
“I have,” she tossed over her shoulder. “And he says, ‘Nothing.’ In my opinion, your confidence-keeping is more like a conspiracy of silence.”
“Susan Delano, head of pediatric oncology, is asking for you to work on her floor,” Sierra told Holly on the first of November. “You up for it?”
“You bet!”
“You sure you don’t mind?”
“Why should I? I worked there a lot last summer.”
Sierra shrugged. “It’s just a difficult floor, that’s all. Nurses experience burnout up there all the time because seeing children suffer is hard to take day after day.”
“But we’re helping them,” Holly said, unsure of what Sierra was getting at. “I don’t mind. I can handle it.”
“All right. Then take your pager and go check in with Susan.”
Returning to the floor brought back summer memories of five-year-old Ben Keller, Holly’s favorite patient. He came from a family who lived too far away from Parker-Sloan to stay with him there around the clock. His mother had also been experiencing a difficult pregnancy and was confined to bed rest at the time, so Holly had taken on the child as a personal project, staying with him during his often difficult chemo infusion treatments until he achieved remission and was released. Watching him leave for home that past August had been one of her proudest, if not saddest, moments.
She checked in with Susan. “Have you heard anything about Ben?”
“On this floor, no news is good news,” Susan said.
“I was hoping you’d say that.”
“Another relapse means big trouble for him, though.”
“Wouldn’t his doctors just give him more chemo?”
“Not necessarily. Some of those drugs are really hard on a child’s system. Especially the heart.”
This was news to Holly. “I didn’t know.”
“You sure you want to stay?” Susan asked.
“Yes,” Holly answered quickly. “I want to help.”
“Then you’ve come to the right place, because we need it.” Susan smiled. “Go to room five sixteen and meet Tashauna. She’s three and had a chemo treatment this morning. Try to get her to eat a little something.”
 
; The little girl looked adorable. Tashauna had a head full of black curls, and a pink bow tied around every one. Her brown eyes stared up at Holly from her crib, where she huddled in a corner, her arms wrapped around one of the hospital-issued teddy bears. Holly introduced herself and asked, “Would you like some ice cream?” Ben had loved ice cream, and Holly had always seen that he got some after every chemo treatment.
Tashauna nodded, and Holly got a small cup of vanilla, lowered the side of the crib and offered the child a spoonful. Tashauna ate it and went on to eat every spoonful Holly gave her. Her big chocolate-colored eyes never left Holly’s face, and Holly cooed and encouraged her over every bite. When the small cup was empty, Holly praised the child for eating all of it. “Would you like me to read you a book?” she asked.
Tashauna nodded again. Holly got a book, lifted the little girl into her lap and sat in a nearby rocking chair. Tashauna sat very still while Holly read every word of the story with great enthusiasm, using different voices. She was finishing when Susan stuck her head through the open doorway. “Did she eat?”
“Every bit,” Holly said with satisfaction. “It wasn’t hard at all.”
“That’s good—”
But Susan was cut off when the child let out a retching sound and disgorged the entire contents of her stomach onto Holly’s lap. Holly gagged at the smell and sight. Susan rushed forward, grabbed Tashauna and carried her into a bathroom, where she continued to throw up.
Holly made it to the bathroom and threw up too. She wiped off her clothes with a wet towel, flushed the toilet and returned to the room, where Susan had changed Tashauna into a fresh gown and put her back into bed. The little girl had never even cried.
Embarrassed, Holly offered a shaky smile. “I’ve always had a weak stomach. Sorry.”
“Are you sure you’re up to this?” Susan asked.
Holly wasn’t sure, but then she felt Tashauna reach through the bars of her crib and pat her shoulder in sympathy. Holly’s heart melted and her doubts evaporated. “Maybe I should have started her with a little cola.”