Chapter 16
Two Mothers
The call came at 6:40 on a Tuesday morning, from a Greyfield number Nora didn't recognize. A nurse, crisp and kind: "Is this Nora Quinn? Your aunt — Mabel Quinn — was brought in last night with chest pains. She's stable, but the doctor wants to talk to family. She's at St. Aurelia's."
St. Aurelia's. The same hospital. Nora stood in the blue room with the phone in her hand and laughed — a short, cracked sound — because the universe apparently had a sense of humor, and it was a cruel one.
Claire insisted on driving her. "No arguments," she said, already in her coat, keys in hand. "And before you say it — I'm paying the bills. Not as a Beaumont. As someone who owes that woman more than money can measure."
The cardiac unit smelled like every hospital everywhere — antiseptic and overheated air and quiet fear. Mabel was in a bed by the window, small under the white blanket, an oxygen tube in her nose, her face gray. When she saw Nora, her eyes filled.
"Don't you fuss," Mabel whispered. "It's indigestion. I told them it's indigestion."
"It's your heart, you stubborn old woman," Nora said, taking her hand, crying and laughing at once. "The doctor says it's your heart."
The doctor — a tired young woman named Dr. Reyes — explained it in the corridor: an episode of unstable angina, not a full heart attack, but a warning. Medication, monitoring, maybe a stent. "She's lucky she called when she did," Dr. Reyes said. "Another hour —" She didn't finish.
"She didn't call," the nurse said. "A neighbor found her on the kitchen floor and called."
They put in the stent the next morning. Nora sat in the waiting room with Claire, both of them pretending to read magazines, both watching the clock. When Dr. Reyes came out smiling and said it had gone perfectly, Nora cried so hard a volunteer brought her water.
Mabel woke up groggy and irritable and immediately tried to pull out her IV. "I have shirts to iron," she announced.
"The bank manager's wife can wait," Nora said firmly, pushing her gently back down. "You almost died, you stubborn old woman."
"I did not almost die. I had —" Mabel glanced at the doctor's retreating back. "What did she call it?"
"Unstable angina."
"Indigestion," Mabel said with dignity. "Fancy word for it."
Claire laughed, startled, and something passed between the two old women: the beginning of an alliance, forged in the particular intimacy of almost losing someone.
Nora sat with Mabel until she slept, holding her hand, watching the monitors trace their green peaks. Claire sat on the other side of the bed, and when Mabel woke briefly and saw her, her eyes widened — and then, remarkably, she smiled.
"So," Mabel whispered. "You're the other one."
"I'm Claire." Claire took Mabel's other hand — the one Nora wasn't holding — and Mabel let her. "Thank you. For keeping her alive. For loving her."
Mabel studied her for a long moment. "I didn't keep her the right way."
"You kept her," Claire said firmly. "That's the part that counts. The rest —" Her voice wavered. "The rest we can be angry about later. Right now, rest."
That afternoon, while Mabel slept, the two women sat in the family waiting room with bad coffee, and talked — really talked — for the first time. No lawyers. No cameras. No Dane with his folder.
"She was eleven months old when Dora brought her," Mabel said, staring at her cup. "No — three days old. She was three days old and I told everyone eleven months, and after a while I almost believed it myself." She looked up. "Did you — did you have other children? Besides the boy?"
"Just Julian. Just — her." Claire's hands twisted around the cup. "I used to imagine her. Every birthday. What she'd look like, what she'd like. I imagined her so hard that when I saw Nora at the restaurant, I thought — this is it, this is what twenty-four years of imagining looks like when it walks in wearing an apron."
Mabel almost smiled. "She's a good waitress."
"She's a good everything." Claire hesitated. "Mabel — I want you to know. I'm not trying to take her from you. I know that's what it looks like. But I spent twenty-four years without a daughter. I don't want to spend the next twenty-four fighting over one."
Mabel nodded slowly, tears tracking down her face. "She calls me in the night sometimes. In her sleep, when she was little — she'd cry out, and I'd go to her, and she'd say 'Mama,' and I'd —" She stopped, breathing hard. "I answered to it. God forgive me, I answered to it."
Claire reached across the space between the chairs and took Mabel's hand, and the two old women sat there holding hands in the humming fluorescent waiting room, united by the strangest thing in the world: they had both, in their own way, stolen and been stolen from, and they both loved the same girl.
They talked until the coffee went cold, and by the time the nurse came to say Mabel could have visitors again, something had been built between them — not friendship, not yet, but the foundation of one.
"She's going to be all right," Claire said, as they walked back to the cardiac unit. "Mabel. She's tough."
"She's the toughest person I know," Nora said. "She raised me on a laundress's wages and never once made me feel poor." She glanced at Claire. "Thank you. For the bills. For sitting here."
Claire stopped walking. "Nora. I need you to know something." Her voice was low, fierce. "When this is over — when Mabel's home and the press moves on — I'm not going anywhere. Whatever you decide about names, about houses, about any of it — I'm not going anywhere. I lost you once. Never again."
Nora hugged her then, right there in the hospital corridor, with nurses wheeling carts past. And Claire held on like a woman who'd been waiting twenty-four years to hold on.