After the Fog

  When Rose awoke from the drug-induced sleep, a blurry outline of a man sat at the end of her bed. She thought it was Bennett. Had he been there all along?

  Rose was not fully awake, but her body was shaking at the sight of the man. Mr. Reeve, the director of the orphanage came closer and bent over to whisper in her ear. His hand slid up her thigh, resting just below her pubic bone, squeezing her leg, fingers brushing her stitches as he did.

  Rose looked to her right and left—the curtains separating her from other postpartum mothers were drawn.

  “You thought you could leave the orphanage, Rose? You thought you could confide our secrets in that slick fella, Bennett, did you?”

  Rose couldn’t speak, but shook her head, eyes focused on Mr. Reeve, his face directly over hers. She would never have told Bennett what Mr. Reeves had been doing to her since she could first form a memory.

  “Well, I set Bennett straight. Told him you were a slut, whoring around the orphanage, with everyone from the janitor to the fellas in the kitchen. Everyone but me, Rose. I can keep a secret. You will not leave me. I love you Rose. I told him that earlobe of yours was the mark of the devil, that he shouldn’t bother with you anymore.”

  Rose touched her ear, sobbing quietly. She couldn’t believe Reeve was telling the truth, but she remembered the relief on Bennett’s face when he stepped into the cab, when she saw him leave the other night.

  Don’t blame me, Rose, for Bennett’s departure. I saw him leaving your room. He was cozy with his daddy’s attorney. He was on his way to Harvard. You’re not even a flicker of a memory in that big brain of his.”

  Rose shook her head. Make this man go away. “He’s coming back. We promised together. We’re not giving the baby away.”

  “I was afraid you might decide that, Rose. You orphans often do this kind of thing.” He shifted on the bed and leaned into Rose. “I told him it wasn’t his. And you signed papers. I watched you and Bennett sign them. It’s done, over. And he’s gone.”

  That couldn’t be right. Bennett would never believe the baby wasn’t his. And he had looked her in the eye and promised he would marry her, that they would have more children.

  Mr. Reeves lifted the sheets and pulled one of Rose’s legs to the side, examining her like she were an animal. Rose held her breath. She knew better than to flinch away and ignite the man’s anger.

  “You were smart to give that bastard child away, yes, to hide the evidence, but I will not see you go. You are mine. You have been since you came to me, since we were first together.”

  Rose told herself not to panic, that he couldn’t hurt her at the hospital where doctors and nurses were running in and out, where only flimsy fabric formed walls. But as Rose was completing that thought Reeve pushed on top of her. She gasped, squirming. She dug her nails into his arms, trying to wiggle out from under him.

  This was her only chance for people outside of the orphanage to know what he was doing to her. She started to scream and he covered her mouth with one hand. Rose was weak from the sedatives, but she managed to get her teeth into his palm. He hesitated at her bold bite. Rose drew a breath then heard a thunk.

  Reeve collapsed onto Rose, knocking her wind out as his full weight hit. When he didn’t move, Rose shoved him over, moving out from under him. She stood, steadying herself with a metal handrail, trying to figure out what happened.

  She stared at his unconscious body then focused on the person coming toward her. Sister John Ann, with a cracked water jug in her hand. Rose hyperventilated trying to stuff back her tears, her shame, the truth. The nun embraced Rose and shushed her, telling her not to fret, that she would help.

  Rose didn’t know what Sister John Ann understood, exactly, and the nun never forced Rose to tell her what happened. But, she decided right then she would never depend on anyone for anything again.

  Sister John Ann seemed to understand that unspoken vow Rose made to herself. She did not let Rose flounder in self-pity or grow weak in bad memories. She kept Rose busy and offered her work: doing chores and learning the discipline that resuscitated Rose’s very being.

  At Mayview Rose began her informal, though intensive nursing education. Sister John Ann provided the opportunity for Rose to nurture her first flutter of self-respect. With every biology fact and nursing protocol she learned, Rose felt as though a piece of her broken self was fitted into the place it had always belonged. A new vision of who she was and could be was forming and it wasn’t long before Rose was prepared for formal nursing school.

  And as Rose moved forward with no one calling her a slut or a whore, without any man touching her body without permission, she managed to push those characterizations out of her mind. She grew stronger and more determined to succeed in all the ways that would ensure she was safe from harm.

  But, unbeknownst to Rose the acts of two men were tattooed on her soul whether she allowed herself to recall the initial sting or not. She was marked in ways no one could see, in ways she’d thought had scarred over. She hadn’t thought the dead wounds required further attention. Slut, whore. She had forgotten the foul names, the feelings that came with knowing that’s what someone had decided she was. She’d forgotten the exact pain that came with the memories until the day she found herself uttering the same horrid sentiments to her very own Magdalena.

  Rose nearly buckled over at the thought, but kept moving forward through the fog. How could she have directed such cruelty at her daughter? She would fix that, she told herself, but first she needed to solve the problem that had plagued her for over twenty years.

  * * *

  Rose knocked on the Sebastian’s front door. The uniformed maid let Rose into the house. It smelled of a recently cleaned pine-lemon. Rose wanted to see Theresa alone. The maid protested, but Rose took the stairs two at a time, hearing the maid’s voice calling for Mr. Sebastian.

  Rose laid her coat outside the door on the chair that the Sebastians had placed there the first time Rose had come to examine Theresa. She rapped on the door with the back of her knuckles, a little harder and faster than she intended.

  “Come in,” Theresa said.

  Rose entered the stale-smelling room and headed to the far side near a window looking out at the back, not directly at the mill. She raised the window a few inches to let some air in.

  “You’ve got to open these windows, at least during shift changes, at least twice a day.” Rose said. “If the maids have to dust an additional time, that’s fine. That’s what they’re paid for, right?”

  Theresa fell back on her pillows with dramatic flourish. “Oh thank you! Someone with some sense.” Rose opened the next set of windows, glancing at Theresa, trying to casually assess her degree of illness versus just what her parents seemed to want her to experience. Theresa hung off the side of the bed, peering under it, foraging for something.

  Rose finished opening up the room and turned, hands on hips to watch Theresa full on. Theresa ratcheted her body up, sitting on her bed, a stack of medical and social work books on her lap. Rose’s heart nearly stopped at the sight of Theresa pouring over the academic texts like other twenty-year-olds studied Ladies Home Journal.

  “I’ve been reading,” Theresa said, and stopped her voice catching on asthmatic constrictions of her bronchial tubes. “Nurse, would you look at this with me? I’ve been reading up on my own case and ever since that visit to the Lipinski’s. Well, I want to be a social worker. Or a doctor.”

  Rose bit the inside of her mouth, trying to fend off the torrent of emotion sweeping through her. The last time she’d seen Theresa she was like a wet rag, intellectually uninterested, and now, look at her, fully engaged in the larger world. Rose’s world. She was surer than ever that Theresa would benefit if she knew who they both were.

  It was like watching an alien view of herself from twenty years before. Rose bustled across the room, carried the chair with her nurse’s bag, from the hall into the room and set it by the door to distract herself from her emotions. She dug throu
gh her bag, collecting her instruments and thoughts, buying time. She wanted to behave professionally in this very personal situation.

  Rose turned to Theresa, blood pressure cuff and stethoscope in hand. “You’re pale, grayish around the eyes, bluish. What’s that tell you?” Rose said as she headed toward Theresa’s bed. If Rose talked nursing, she would remain calm.

  Theresa opened her mouth to talk, her face screwed up and she began to cry. Rose wanted to hold her sobbing daughter, but that wouldn’t be appropriate. What would she do in a normal nursing situation?

  “No crying, Theresa. Look at yourself.” Rose grabbed a silver hand mirror from the dressing table and took it to the bed. “You are young and alive and aside from the asthma which I concede is problematic, you’re utterly healthy you’re just like—”

  Rose stopped midsentence and took the mirror back to its place among other silver knick-knacks.

  Theresa stared at Rose. “Like what?”

  Like me. “Like an ox. You need to move more, that’s all. You’ll get sores on your ass if you lay there like that one more second.” Rose sat beside Theresa on the bed. “Look at you. So excited now that you’ve found an interest in your health. You are alive at the opportunity to help someone else.”

  Theresa wiped her eyes, growing pinker as she became more animated. Rose moved her hand closer to Theresa’s wanting to hold it. To rock her like a baby and then push her out of the nest, to see her fly like Rose knew she could.

  “I had to beg mother for hours. Just to let me check these books out of the library,” Theresa said. She played with her bedspread grazing Rose’s fingers with hers each time she smoothed and bunched the silky material.

  Theresa drew and let out a deep breath. “Mother nearly lost her mind and said a lady like me doesn’t need to have a career, certainly not becoming a doctor or helping poor people. Then she said I paid for it by having another attack. I’m smart enough to be a doctor, you know. I just doubt myself once in a while.”

  Rose took Theresa’s chin and turned her face toward her. “You have the guts, you just don’t know it, yet. I have an uncle who’s half dead and he only accepts help when he’s so tired he’s forgotten he doesn’t want help from anyone. You can do anything you want. Look at you, diving into medical books and social work journals second year med students avoid like the plague. You are doctor material if I ever saw it. Now get up.” Rose sprung off the bed and held her hands out to Theresa.

  Theresa swung her feet over the side of the bed. Her white nightgown bunching around her knees. Her long legs were the palest Rose had ever seen. Her blue veins peeked through the skin.

  Rose dragged her to her feet. “Ever been dancing?”

  Theresa threw her head back and said, angrily. “No.”

  “Good, you have spunk.” Rose led Theresa through intricate waltz steps, the girl as light as the fog on a normal day. “Here, just keep moving, I need to see how much your system can handle.”

  “But you said I’m healthy.”

  “Yes, yes, but that’s me looking at you lying there dead as a doornail. Anyone’s healthy under those circumstances. I need to see you imitating a living person not a dead one.”

  Theresa laughed, her head back. “That’s really sort of rude.” Rose spun her around, enjoying the girl’s pluckiness, excited that there was no sign of pulmonary distress.

  “I’ve seen your file. But there’s lots missing in it.” Rose wanted to ask her if she had ever been on a date, been kissed, visited New York City, had a Christmas when she got the very thing she wished for but didn’t think possible. But she settled on the mundane. “Where would you like to live? What do you want out of life?” Rose said.

  Theresa scrunched up her face and slowed down. “I don’t know.” Theresa gripped Rose’s hands, her lotioned skin, like butter against Rose’s. She watched the girl for distress. Nothing.

  Rose felt energy surging through her; she could see it in Theresa’s face, too

  “I have something to tell you,” Rose said. “A miracle, in a way. It was years back. You won’t believe it, but—”

  Out of the corner of Rose’s eye she saw movement at the bedroom door, Mr. Sebastian.

  Rose was confused, embarrassed, as though Sebastian had walked in on her nude. He was seeing something he shouldn’t. She had let her emotions out and they took hold of her, dragged her into an unprofessional place.

  Still, part of Rose wanted to declare right there who she was, to pronounce the Sebastians unfit parents; Rose could give Theresa everything she needed. But Rose knew you didn’t do things like that. The news of an illegitimate baby was something to be buried.

  “What sort of treatment are you offering, Nurse Pavlesic?” He looked between Rose and Theresa repeatedly, his face concerned. “I doubt I would find much hand-holding and dancing suggested in the annals of nursing care if I were inclined to look.”

  Rose and Theresa dropped hands.

  “Matter of fact,” Rose said, “you would find hand-holding in the literature and practical cases. And it wouldn’t hurt you to do a little more of it yourself. I’ve read Theresa’s case and…well…” Rose glanced at Theresa who was smiling, clearly not scared anymore.

  I’m her mother, Rose said silently to herself.

  Mr. Sebastian pulled Rose by the arm, wrenching her backward toward the door. Rose couldn’t take her eyes off of Theresa, frightened this might be the last time she saw her. Sebastian’s fingers tightened on Rose’s arm, meeting at the bone under her bicep. She tripped over the chair that held her bag as Mr. Sebastian muscled her through the doorway.

  Mr. Sebastian leaned over Rose, shoving her against the wall, his voice low enough for Theresa not to hear.

  “You read her file? Just what were you going to tell her? We never told her anything regarding her birth. And there’s no way that after all these years, we would happen upon the woman who gave birth to Theresa. That woman claimed to have been on her way to Boston with some hotshot playboy. That woman was glad to be rid of Theresa and we were glad to have her.”

  He released Rose from his grip and ran his hand through his hair.

  Rose didn’t know where she summoned the courage. “I read the file,” she said. “You didn’t want her. Neither did your wife. She spent all that time in the care of psychiatric doctors, you made Theresa think she was crazy and weak. That file tells me everything I need to know.” I am her mother. “She is so much more than you’ve let her be. She’s in there hiding books and journals as though they were rancid, diseased objects rather than the key to opening up a world to a girl who’s obviously brighter than the dickens, for the love of Jesus himself! Let her be who she is.”

  Mr. Sebastian grabbed Rose’s things and prodded her down the hall toward the stairs.

  “Did the file indicate the times I didn’t sleep for days while caring for Mrs. Sebastian, when she couldn’t sleep and the baby wouldn’t either? Or how I nursed them both back to health from pneumonia? Or how I got TB and spent my days and nights away from them so to not infect either? Was there one word in those files about me?”

  Rose stopped at the bottom of the stairs. She was nauseated and light-headed. She had to stay close to Theresa. She needed to care for her.

  “Please let me continue her care,” she said. “I will tell her there was a lapsed moment, that I’d been recently grieved by an unexpected loss, that I had a moment—”

  Mr. Sebastian gripped Rose’s arm again and forced her toward the door, tossing her bag and hat out onto the porch. “I’ll let you know two things. First, I don’t know what I witnessed in that room, what you were up to, but I’m sure you are not permitted to reveal what’s in confidential files. Two, I’m not sure at all you embody the character needed to properly administer a community health clinic.

  “I’ve been nursing for nearly two decades. I can do it in my sleep.”

  “Or while drunk?”

  Rose drew back.

  He clenched his jaw. You smell like a
brewery. I smelled it last night. I wonder if you even had a patient to see at the Merry-Go-Round at all.”

  Rose covered her mouth. The vodka? Stale beer odor from the night before?

  “Just so we’re clear. I don’t want to see you back here,” he said. “Theresa believes we are her parents. Trust me, her birth mother was more than happy to give her up. I’m a practical man and I went to the mother to be sure she was okay with this and I didn’t even have to ask. She turned to the nurse before she saw me and said. “I can breathe again,” and she combed her hair as though that were her only concern.

  Rose’s eyes widened. She scraped through her memories for that phrasing. Had she really said that? Maybe. But… “I just meant…she probably meant that her diaphragm was finally relieved of the weight of a baby, not that…no, no I don’t believe any mother would have said that, meant it that way. Do you realize the gift you have lying in that bed?”

  Rose pushed her hair behind her ears, sweat licking her fingertips. She froze as Mr. Sebastian’s gaze broke from hers and leveled on her double earlobe.

  “What?” she said. “Haven’t seen a person who isn’t perfect before?”

  Mr. Sebastian reached for Rose’s ear. She stepped back.

  “The problem is,” he said stepping forward, narrowing his eyes at her ear. “I’ve seen that ear before.”

  Rose opened her mouth to ask him what the hell he meant. When she realized, she looked away so he couldn’t see that side of her face. Rose recalled that day, the way some man had entered the room and walked nearly to the bed. Rose remembered the well-dressed fellow standing there as though he had a question to ask. But, as she put her brush down, smoothed her hair, the man was gone. The nurse chased him away. Could that have been him?

  “Don’t come back,” Mr. Sebastian said. “Tell your husband he’s done for good.”

  Rose turned back to him, lifting her chin. He took her shoulders and backed her through the doorway, onto the porch.