Follow the Stars Home. Luanne Rice

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       Two

      Conscious only of bright light and searing pain in her arm and head, Dianne moaned. Her eyes tried to focus. Shapes swam before her, green beings saying her name over and over.

      “Dianne?” she heard. “Dianne, can you hear me?”

      “Mrs. McIntosh, how many fingers am I holding up?”

      “Amy …”

      “Hold steady, that’s right.” She felt the pressure of a hand on her forehead. The Plaza, Christmas lights. Headlights came at her, and she cried out. But they weren’t headlights. A man in green was standing there, shining a light in her face.

      “Dianne, do you know where you are?” came a woman’s voice.

      “She’s lost so much blood,” a male voice said.

      “Her pressure’s dropping,” came another voice.

      “Please, help,” she murmured. Was this a nightmare? She could not move, and her thoughts swarmed in her mind. “Julia,” she mouthed, but she had been with Amy, hadn’t she? Julia was at home with her mother. Alan should be here … if he came, he would know what to do. He would save her. Memory fragments began to materialize, shifting around like parts of a terrible puzzle.

      “Mrs. McIntosh,” the nurse said gently. “Amy is being taken care of. Everything we can do is being done. You need to be strong. Stay with us.”

      Dianne’s mind was fuzzy with pain and injury and blood loss and whatever drugs they had given her. She felt herself losing consciousness. She wished she could open the door and walk through the snow to the marsh. Trying to see, her eyes would hardly focus. She was in New York. That’s right, they had come to New York to see The Nutcracker.

      Shivering, thinking of Amy’s imagined terror, Dianne cried out in anguish.

      “Stay with us, Dianne,” one voice said. “Mrs. McIntosh!” called another.

      She thought of her home by the Connecticut marshes, her mother and daughter, and Alan. The nurse had called her “Mrs. McIntosh” as if she were still married to Tim. A long time ago Dianne had dated both McIntosh brothers. They had both loved her, and at different times she had loved each of them. Alan was day, Tim was night. Dianne, for whom life had always been gentle, fair, and kind, had chosen the brother with a dark side. She had married Tim, and she had paid a price.

      But over the last three magical seasons, she and Alan had started to come back together. For the first time in eleven years, Dianne had just started to love again, and now she lay in this strange bed in a New York hospital, so far from home, feeling as if she were starting to die. She spun back: winter, fall, summer, all the way to last spring.…

      It was April, and the scent of flowering pear trees filled the air of Hawthorne. The trees had been planted one hundred years earlier, along the brick sidewalks around the waterfront, and their blossoms were white, fragile, and delicate. Looking up as she passed underneath, Dianne Robbins wondered how they survived the fresh sea wind that blew in from the east.

      “Flowers, Julia,” she said.

      Her daughter slept in the wheelchair, unaware. Reaching up, Dianne stood on her toes to grab hold of the lowest branch and break off a twig. Three perfect blossoms curved from thread-fine stems. The petals were pure white, soft pink in the center. Dianne thought they were beautiful, the more so because they lasted so short a time. The flowering pears of Hawthorne stayed in bloom less than a week.

      Julia had once seen a flower and said “la,” her first word. So Dianne placed the twig on her sleeping child’s lap and continued on. She passed White Chapel Square, named for the three churches that surrounded it. The sea captains’ houses came next, gleaming white Federals with wide columns and green-black shutters, overlooking the harbor and lighthouse. Dianne had always dreamed of living in one of these houses, ever since she was a child.

      She slowed in front of the one she loved most. It had an ornate wrought-iron fence surrounding the big yard and sea-flower meadow. At age nine Dianne had stood there gripping the black fence rails and imagining her life as a grown-up. She would be an architect and have a wonderful husband, beautiful children, two golden dogs, and they would all live blissfully in this house on the harbor.

      Glancing at her daughter, Dianne pushed the wheelchair faster. The breeze had picked up, and it was cold for April. Low clouds scudded across the sky, making her wonder about rain. They had been early, with time for a walk after parking the car. But now it was almost three o’clock, time for Julia’s appointment with her uncle, Dr. Alan McIntosh.

      Alan McIntosh sat as his desk while Mrs. Beaudoin went through Billy’s latest pictures in search of the perfect one for the Wall. She was a very young mother – Billy was her first baby – and Alan had long since learned that every patient’s mother’s goal was to see her child properly enshrined in the collage of photos hanging behind his desk.

      “In this one he’s drooling,” she said, smiling and proudly handing it over nevertheless. “And in this one he’s squinting. He looks just like an old man!”

      “He is one,” СКАЧАТЬ