EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER 1
Rachel lay in an estranged consciousness listening to a gurney trundling along a rutted road leading to the marble corridor of St. Luke's Hospital. It stopped abruptly. She turned her head slightly, her eyes wide open now. Just outside of her door the hard rubber-wheeled O.R. cart thumped against the wall behind her bed. Someone must be going up, she thought, wondering who and why at this late hour?
All was quiet now except for the soft sound of padding footsteps of the Nuns on night duty. Rachel listened for some action to follow the placing of the gurney, but there was none. Maybe in the morning, she yawned, wincing at the raw steady pain in her side.
An emergency appendectomy. She had made her own diagnosis last night during study hall when the pain bore down on her. She had crouched along the hall, stumbling up the flight of stairs to her dorm, hoping her roomie, Janet, would be there. The small room they shared was empty, the desk lamp was on. She lay on the bed, her legs hunched up to ease the pain. Find the McBurney point, her father had instructed so many times and make a line between the navel and the hip bone on the right side and one third along that line, press. She had screamed and vomited on the floor and without even cleaning it up, she had called her mother.
The nausea was finally subsiding after the stench of ether dissipated. She would recover quickly, the surgeon had said, children usually do. Was she a child? He said so but fifteen is hardly a child. Perhaps they hadn't noticed her breasts, and the prepping made her look like a little girl again. And those childish tears were brought on because her father was dead and couldn't comfort her now when she needed him.
The gauzy hospital shirt barely covered Rachel's bandages. She pulled the rough sheet from her legs letting the full moon shining through the tall windows fall softly upon her. She thought how pretty her legs were, so strong and shapely and as long as a newborn colt. She was bathing in moonbeams, gathering strength from worlds beyond to take her racing to the ocean in summer. She'd walk the warm beach, splashing through the surf and become brown as a nut and as lazy as their maid, Marble. She would read Sentimental Journey again and write down all of Shakespeare's sonnets to fasten them in her memory. Her thoughts were cut off abruptly by the intrusion of an unidentified sound. She rolled cautiously onto her side glancing at the door as it slowly swung forward. A figure was standing there, a tall figure in white, his red hair a flame in the moonlight, a black stethoscope coiling from his white jacket pocket. He was closing the door as she quickly shut her eyes feigning sleep. Another inquisitive Intern making his nightly rounds, poking at her with questions. She moved very slowly onto her back again and opened her eyes. He was standing over her. The gurney. It had come for her. Something was wrong.
The moon flushed an eerie light into the room, too dim for day, too bright for night. He coughed nervously. "Rachel," he whispered, leaning down. "I'm Dr. Webber. Paul Webber. I examined you right after you came to this morning, remember?"
He had come to comfort her in the night, still in his white coat, like her father who had always been with her when she was sick and when she had her tonsils out, always with her in the operating room and he'd smelled of carbolic just like Dr. Webber.
"How are you feeling, little one?" he whispered. "You're even more beautiful in the moonlight, do you know that, Rachel?"
He was whispering strangely, hovering above her and she felt a sudden rush of warning. He didn't move and he was breathing so loud, he wasn't acting like a doctor, he was lingering in the dark, she couldn't place the reason for his presence. Instinctively her hand struck out seeking the bell cord under her pillow, but the odor of ether and carbolic was smothering her as his hands slid under the gauzy shirt and squeezed her breasts.
As the moon shone over frosted fields, a timpani of lust crashed around her burying her cries beneath his weight while a heavy mouth was sucking her breath away. The pain beneath her bandages fell impotently to a sudden and fierce penetration against the wall of her bowels. His mouth swallowed her screams smashing her lips against her teeth. She struggled against the salty taste of blood running to her throat strangling her while he toiled endlessly against her hymen, the sticky blood trickling against her thighs, tearing her body apart, robbing it of its innocence. Helpless in a kind of sane madness, her mind escaped from his garbling lust. She lay as though sleeping in the tent on the desert sands while the candle flickered beside her sister Lucrece. Then she was freed from his bestial pinions as he muttered "Christ, I think the rubber broke. Lie still, little one, I'll be right back."
Rachel sobbed to the frosty moon as it sailed out of sight leaving her alone in the darkness, waiting.
Sleep crept over her and carried her away to her dreams where her father waited for her. Three years had already passed in the daylight of his death but at night she drifted into the continuum of life death had tried to intercept. Dreaming restored the developing relationship they would have had. They would be together forever.
Her brain filled the void the grave had claimed too soon. Blessed mind, blessed Presence caring for her in her loneliness.
Life was so good, she had declared aloud in the bleak, windy cemetery; a scramble of gray stones and green mounds, angels and archangels spreading wings above the bones of the dead, the marble stone of him who loved her in his wonderfully ebullient way. Thomas Norman Shaw, M.D. Born 1892 Died 1936. A name, dates, a place waiting for her mother. While others wept in this field of sorrow, Rachel found peace and gratitude for the parents she believed had been culled from the pages of heroes and villains drenching her arid mind from the beginning of her life, spilling their personas into her small cupped hands from which she drank, digesting them into her own personality. They made her different from her peers whose lives were so simple and their destinies predictable. Rachel knew that even if her life would shatter like broken glass, into each shard she would find wondrous reflections of pristine purity, crawling dross, exploding blossoms of love and death, villains rushing in to rape her soul, there would be conquering heroes.
She awoke to the rustling Habit of the morning Sister peering into her face. The full, black Habit, bound by the heavy rosary about her waist was under full sail beneath the white paper boat anchored upon her head and the starched white wimple framing the rosy face.
"Are you having your menstrual period, Rachel?"
She couldn't tell her, she couldn't tell anyone, ever. If only it hadn't been a doctor.
"Are you in much pain, dear?"
Pain. She wanted to scream from the pain in her heart. "No, Sister. I'm fine, thank you. A bath would feel nice."
By noon Rachel was sitting up in her bed, washed and powdered, her thick unruly hair brushed to a shine, waiting for her lunch tray.
A large vase of fresh lilacs, their pale purple profusion perking up the sanctified, sanitized room with a fragrant perfume mingling with the smell of candle wax and Lysol. A small card wished her a speedy recovery and was signed, Mother and Bertie.
With her brother Bertie away at military school, including him on the card was a nice gesture, but then her mother, Susan, was always impeccably correct. Rachel wondered how impeccably correct she will be in Court next week when she'll be standing in front of a Judge trying to break her father's Trust Fund? She will have to prove the prominent, deceased physician was insane or at least temporarily deranged when he converted all of his insurance to a Trust Fund for her and Bertie leaving their mother nothing except heavily mortgaged properties. A mess. A Godawful mess, but she'll not get away with it. Rachel was remembering the night he mysteriously died, and swore she'd have him exhumed if need be. She killed him. Rachel was sure of that.
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