Chapter 3
“So you are in the medical field!” my mom said triumphantly, as she pointed at my scrub top. “I knew it. Now there are two people I can call. I have a rash that I’m concerned might indicate Lyme disease.” She turned to her oldest daughter. “Nicky, after dinner you could look—”
Nicola ignored the rash reference. “Grace, why are you wearing that shirt? Do you work weekends?” my sister asked me.
I was wearing it because I liked it, even though it was Sunday and I was only at Theo’s office Monday through Friday. I shrugged.
Mom had moved on. “Carrington, please pass the vegan butter,” she requested.
She didn’t seem to notice somebody’s baby screaming in her living room, but she’d unconsciously raised her voice to be heard over the cacophony.
Cacophony was normal in this house but tonight at our family dinner, there were a lot of kids adding to it.
The crier could have belonged to any of my three oldest sisters or to my brother Patrick, who was here with his daughter and his girlfriend.
Carrington was a different person altogether. She was dating my mother’s lodger, Dion—or actually, it would have been better to call him my mother’s newest son because they were closer than she was with most of her kids. Including me, for example.
With Dion, his girlfriend Carrington, and all of my other siblings now paired up, there was no space at the table.
It was lucky that those kids kept crying, because one parent or another was always jumping up to deal with it and that gave the rest of us more elbow room.
But it was still a big crowd, and it was still a lot to deal with.
“Grace, sit back down,” my sister Juliet ordered, and her hand shot across my other sister Addie to grab my wrist as I made my exit. “You are not sneaking out of here right now.”
“Why?”
“Because I have an announcement,” she announced, and between us, Addie got really excited.
“Oh, JuJu, I hope this is what I think it is…”
“Everybody come in here,” Nicola commanded, and Sophie and Brenna and several different guys, my brother included, squeezed back into the dining room. It was a tight fit.
“Beckett, you’re going to have to start hosting these in your ballroom, or Granger at the restaurant,” I heard Nicola’s husband mutter.
Then it got quiet, mostly, and JuJu stood up.
But before she could speak, she started crying and Beckett had to be the one to tell us that they were expecting.
She’d already had an appointment with her doctor to get confirmation, and it had taken place when I’d driven her husband for his own check-up.
She hadn’t wanted to tell him why she was also going in because she had been afraid of getting his hopes up.
But now, they were past some special time period (“First trimester,” Nicola explained to me later in a text), so they were telling all of us.
My mom burst into loud sobs and everyone was hugging Juliet and Beckett, including me. She was so happy that she just kept on crying too, and it was nice to see those tears come from relief and joy instead of despair and worry.
After I’d hugged her, I tried to make it out the door again but this time Brenna called attention to me. “Where are you going, Grace?”
It was a mistake, because she also called attention to herself and our mother’s eyes lit on her. “You’re next on the baby train,” she told my sister. “Woo hoo!” She pumped her arm like she was blowing the engine’s whistle. “You don’t want to wait too long.”
“First, I need to get my business off the ground,” Brenna said, and she didn’t seem upset at being singled out.
She looked at her husband Campbell and they both smiled, in fact.
Not too long ago, she would have taken someone’s head off if they’d questioned her decisions or hinted that she wasn’t doing the right thing, but now—
“Now there’s just you, Grace,” my mom said. “My last baby, still alone.”
“Mom, please don’t,” Nicola told her. She was holding one of her own kids, so she kept her voice pleasant. “Don’t start on Grace. Let’s celebrate JuJu.”
“We always do,” Brenna muttered, and that was a bit of the sister I remembered.
Juliet hadn’t heard, though. She was passing around her ultrasounds, those unusual blobs which were supposed to represent baby humans.
I looked at them and at my happy sister, who had wanted this so much.
She’d been stuck in fear over her husband’s illness and maybe this would help her see promise for the future.
I understood that hope was sometimes hard to grasp.
I, for example, had been struggling with that lately.
I finally did make it out to my car without anyone noticing, but it didn’t brighten my mood because I fell into a puddle along the way.
Since my dad had moved out, no one was doing very much maintenance on the house and chores were going by the wayside.
A body of water had grown in the front yard that was close to the size of a pond, but it had been difficult to see in the dark.
I hadn’t seen it when it was light, either, due to the blanket of dead leaves covering is surface.
“It’s not raining,” Regina noted the next morning when I came into the office.
It was the first day of my second week working at the medical practice, and I had learned that there were windows in some of the patient exam rooms. That was how she was always up on what was happening outside, by looking down at the artificial lake and the people who sat next to it.
Were they fanning themselves? Then it was hot.
Were they carrying umbrellas? Then it might have been raining or they might have been concerned about poop from all the geese flying around.
She explained how that had been a danger before most of them had headed south.
The window was also how Pinar, the other employee here, was aware of what was going on in the building directly across from this one.
Two doctors were enjoying each other’s company in an empty office, and they didn’t close the blinds.
“I’m not wet from rain,” I agreed.
“Oh, no! Grace, you didn’t go into the lake again, did you?
” Pinar asked. “There’s so much bacteria in there.
” When I had fallen into that man-made body of water on my third day here, Regina had insisted that we go into the main hospital building so that I could shower and she’d consulted with Theo about my exposure to Pontiac fever from the fountain.
“I was trying to get to the goose,” I had explained to him after I’d dried off and returned to my job. There was definitely something wrong with its foot.
He had said that I didn’t need to worry about the fever, but he’d wanted to check me over. It had been cold and dirty in the fake lake. “Grace, we should let waterfowl experts—what is this mark on your arm?” he’d asked me. “Did the goose bite you?”
They weren’t very friendly even when you were trying to help them, and I hadn’t gone around there since (Regina’s orders). “I didn’t fall into the lake and I dried off from the pond last night,” I told them now.
“What pond?” Pinar demanded.
“My mom’s, the one she has by mistake. I’m wet at the moment because I couldn’t get into the shower until the last minute because my housemate was in the bathroom shooting up.”
Regina stared at me, and then she said, “Dr. Winter!”
Theo came out of his crowded office. Part of my job was to try to decrease the number of yellowing journals and the stacks of old paperwork in this place, all of which had been left behind when the senior partner had retired.
“What’s wrong? Another goose incident?” he asked as he took my arms and held them out, looking them over for fresh beak marks.
“No,” Pinar said, and repeated my comment about my housemate.
“Is someone using drugs where you live?” he asked me.
“Yes, several people. At least five, probably more like ten,” I responded.
They all stared at me. “How many people do you live with?” Pinar asked.
“It varies a lot because they come and go. I don’t know much about parole and conditional release,” I mentioned, and Regina’s eyes started to enlarge.
I went on to explain as best as I could, but they stopped me with a lot of questions about the location of the house, how many bathrooms there were, how I kept food, if I actually ate, and if I had sizable locks on my bedroom door.
“How did you end up in a place like that?” Regina demanded, but then she noticed that it was getting late and said that we had to start work, immediately.
I went back with Pinar to the little office we were sharing for two more weeks, when I would be fired because my contract would be up.
The week before, she had been monitoring me almost constantly and I understood that.
We were dealing with patient records that chronicled the histories of very ill people, all written in tiny little letters and numbers that were squished together.
I knew that I had to be extremely careful.
I focused as hard as I could and I asked her a lot of questions if I wasn’t sure about something, enough that she’d started sighing a little when I said her name.
But by last Friday, she had also said that I was doing a good job, and today, she wasn’t watching me as much. I didn’t let my guard down, though. It was like when I’d worked at the junkyard and I had to keep my guard up around the guard dogs, who were even less friendly than geese.
Usually, Theo stayed in his own office to work when we broke for lunch, but today, he came out into the waiting room to sit with us around Regina’s desk.
One of the patients from that morning had brought a large container of food and a chocolate cake as a gift for him.
Lots of them brought things, like eggs from their backyard chickens, muffins, flowers, and cards.