Chapter 4 - The Currency of the Daughters
My mother did not arrive at the hospital until four that afternoon, after the rain had cleared and the Spanish moss on the live oaks outside the PICU windows had turned that dull, greasy green it takes on before sunset.
She didn't come to Room Four. She stayed in the family consultation room down by the elevators—the room with the low, circular table, the box of generic tissues with the blue flowers on the cardboard, and the four framed prints of the marshes that were bolted to the drywall so people couldn't throw them through the windows.
She had changed her shoes. She was wearing her soft leather driving loafers now, the ones with the gold horse-bits across the instep, but her coat was the same beige wool.
When I opened the heavy door, she was sitting with her hands clasped around a paper cup of decaf coffee from the machine in the hall. Her silver hair was still perfect.
“Claire,” she said, looking up without standing. “Thank God. The reception on three is nonexistent. I’ve been trying to get through to Arthur’s office since two. The firm needs to issue a holding statement before the evening news runs the police blotter.”
Arthur was our father’s brother—a retired judge who still had a corner office on Johnson Square and two portrait busts of himself in the county law library.
“Lily had four centimeters of her occiput removed, Mom,” I said. I stood by the door, my back against the brass push-plate. My navy skirt had dried into stiff, salt-stained creases that crackled when I shifted my feet. “They have an external drain in her ventricle. She’s on four milligrams of vecuronium to keep her from coughing against the vent.”
Mom waved her hand—a small, dismissive flutter of pearl-ringed fingers that had settled fifty family arguments about country club seating and summer cottage rentals.
“Dr. Al-Mansoor is very dramatic, Claire. You know how these foreign specialists are. They always give you the worst-case scenario so they look like heroes when the child recovers. Vanessa spoke to a pediatric chief in Atlanta—a friend of Luke’s father—and he said these pediatric concussions look much worse on the monitors than they actually are. The skull is very pliable at five.”
“Her skull wasn't pliable, Mom,” I said. “It broke. Along the suture line.”
Mom took a slow, delicate sip of her coffee, her eyes moving over my face with that cool, evaluative squint she used when I had come home from school with a B on an algebra exam.
“You’re exhausted, darling. It’s making you vindictive. You’ve always had that streak in you—that little hard knot of jealousy because Vanessa was the one who had the presentation at the Cotillion. Your father saw it when you were twelve. He told me, ‘Eleanor, Claire is going to spend her whole life keeping score.’”
“Why were Lily’s anti-tip bars in your glove box, Mom?”
The paper cup stopped two inches from her lips.
The silence that followed was different from the silence in the chapel. The chapel had been cold; this was thin and dry, like old parchment stored in an attic near a chimney.
“The chair was too long, Claire,” she said. Her voice didn't waver. It didn't drop. It stayed right in that clear, pleasant middle register that had presided over thirty years of Junior League auxiliary luncheons. “You know how narrow the center aisle is at St. Jude’s. The rector told us three weeks ago that the fire marshal had flagged the side clearances. With those metal wheels sticking out the back, Lily was taking up forty-four inches of turn radius. Vanessa couldn't get the train of the christening gown past the fourth pew without catching the lace.”
“You pulled the safety pins with pliers,” I said.
“I took them off so the chair would sit flush against the kneeler,” she said, her voice rising just enough to show the edge of the steel beneath the pearls. “I was going to put them back on in the fellowship hall before the reception. It was a fifteen-minute service, Claire. Normal children sit still during a baptism. If you had taught Lily not to fidget with that ridiculous paper drawing, she wouldn't have leaned back.”
“She didn't lean back,” I said. “Vanessa drove her back.”
Mom set the coffee cup on the low table with a sharp, paper thunk.
“Vanessa was startled!” Mom said, her eyes flashing with that sudden, venomous authority that had kept my father sleeping in the guest room for the last twelve years of his life. “She has an infant, Claire! A four-month-old nursing infant! You have no idea what that does to a woman’s nervous system because you never had that experience—you had an emergency c-section in a state hospital with a disabled child who couldn't even latch! Vanessa is fragile right now! Her family is the one that carries the Vance name in this town, not you and your clinic bills!”
I looked at the woman who had birthed me.
I looked at her high, dry forehead, her small, sharp nose that Vanessa had inherited down to the millimeter, and the thin line of her mouth where the coral lipstick had feathered into the tiny vertical lines above her lip.
For twenty-eight years, I had thought Eleanor Vance was a monument. I had thought she was an unmovable wall of southern manners, family tradition, and social necessity that had to be placated, negotiated with, and endured so that Lily could have a Christmas check and a place at the Thanksgiving table.
Now, standing on the gray linoleum of the third-floor consultation room, I saw what she actually was: a small, frightened bookkeeper who had spent forty years trading her daughters’ bones to keep the paint from peeling on a house she couldn't afford to heat.
“The detective has the raws, Mom,” I said.
Mom’s throat worked once. “Arthur will speak to the prosecutor. The district attorney was your father’s roommate at Georgia.”
“Arthur won't speak to anyone,” a voice said from the doorway.
Luke was standing there.
He had changed out of his wet suit into a pair of faded khakis and a gray fleece jacket from his truck. His hair was still damp, plastered to his forehead, but his face had the strange, scrubbed clarity of a man who had just walked away from a multi-car pileup without a scratch.
He carried a blue legal folder under his arm.
“Arthur’s office issued a formal recusal twenty minutes ago, Eleanor,” Luke said, stepping into the room. He didn't look at his mother-in-law; he looked at me. “The managing partners told him that if his name appears on the docket for this arraignment, the firm is removing the Vance name from the letterhead by five o'clock on Monday.”
Mom stood up, her hand flying to her pearl brooch. “Luke! This is your wife! The mother of your child!”
Luke dropped the blue folder onto the table, right next to her paper coffee cup.
“That’s the emergency custody petition for Leo,” Luke said. “Signed by Judge Miller at three-fifteen. Full temporary physical custody to the father. Supervised visitation for Vanessa at the county social services building, two hours a week, with a court-appointed monitor present.”
Mom’s face turned the color of dirty river foam. “You wouldn't dare. The Millers don't wash their linen in public, Luke. Your father would turn over in his grave.”
“My father died six months ago, Eleanor,” Luke said, his voice dropping into that terrifying, quiet space where men stop caring about the neighbors. “And the last thing he told me before the cancer took his throat was that I had married a girl who would burn down our house just to have the biggest bonfire on the street.”
He turned to me, his hand reaching into his fleece pocket. He pulled out a small, yellow piece of paper, folded into four neat squares.
“Claire,” he said. “Henderson found this on the chapel floor by the font. It had Lily’s name on the back.”
I took the paper.
May you like
It was the other half of the angel’s wing—the one that had torn loose when the chair went over. In Lily’s shaky, five-year-old print, written with a purple crayon that had been sharpened with a kitchen knife, were three words:
FOR BABY LEO.
