Secrets She Left Behind (23 page)

Maggie

I
T TURNED OUT THAT BRIER GLEN HOSPITAL HAD ALMOST
doubled in size, which is why they were desperate for volunteers. They
had
to be desperate to let Maggie Lockwood work for them. That’s what I kept thinking on my first day.

The pediatric unit, which is where I asked to volunteer, had expanded from eight beds to fifteen, and they were nearly all full. I spent my first day with a longtime volunteer named Helen Rogers—
Miss
Helen to me and the patients—who had to be at least eighty. She had one of those extremely thick, mouth-f-of-marbles accents that made me think she was from someplace a lot deeper south than North Carolina. She was such a sweet-grandma type, and she practically led me around by the hand, introducing me to everyone as “the little girl who’ll be helpin’ us out from now on.” She obviously didn’t have a clue who I really was.

“You’ll spend a good half your time in here,” Miss Helen said, walking me into the playroom. The room wasn’t very large, but it was a wonderland, full of small chairs and tables, lots of toys and books and movies and a plastic slide. A couple of kids sat in beanbag chairs in front of a TV where
Finding Nemo
was playing. There were two adult-size rocking chairs, and another volunteer, an elderly
man, sat in one of them, reading a book to a pale little bald girl on his lap.

“That’s Mr. Jim,” Miss Helen said. “He’s here on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Mr. Jim, this is Maggie Lockwood. She’ll be with us every single day. Isn’t that grand?”

“Terrific!” Mr. Jim smiled at me before going right back to his reading. I wondered how long the listless girl on his lap had been a patient here. I imagined myself reading to a child that way. Holding her or him on my lap like that. My eyes got misty. What was
that
all about? I thought it had something to do with being trusted with these kids. I wasn’t even sure I should be.

Saturday—the day after I saw the Brier Glen commercial at Jen’s—I checked out the hospital’s Web site and e-mailed the woman in charge of volunteers—without using my name, of course. The woman, Cathy Moody, e-mailed me back on Monday. She asked for my phone number and said she wanted to talk to me about my reasons for volunteering and have me fill out an application, etcetera. Oh, yeah—and sign a form letting them do a background check on me.
Scratch working in a hospital,
I thought.

But I kept going back to the Web site, where it talked about how much they needed help. They especially needed someone in pediatrics. There was a picture of a little boy sitting in the beautiful playroom making something out of clay, his tongue between his lips like he was concentrating hard. Forgetting he was sick for a few minutes. I stared at his picture for the longest time. Finally, I hit Reply to Cathy Moody’s e-mail. What did I have to lose?

I typed my phone number and hit Send, and within minutes—
minutes,
which is how I knew they were totally desperate—Cathy Moody called me. We talked for half an hour, and I told her the truth about what happened when I tried volunteering at the school and the library.

“Would you allow me to speak with your therapist?” she asked.

I was surprised she didn’t just tell me it was a no-go, but she sounded amazingly sympathetic.

“You mean…to be sure I’m sane and everything?”

“Well…” She laughed. “Something like that.”

“I see him this afternoon,” I said. “I’ll make sure it’s okay with him and call you back.”

Dr. Jakes gave me two thumbs-up when I told him I was trying to volunteer at the hospital.

“Attagirl!” he said. “You took the bull by the horns.”

I didn’t like pleasing him all that much. I didn’t get why I still had trouble letting him in. He was definitely in my corner. Maybe prison did that to me—made me just not trust people who were
nice to me. Jen was the exception. She was so totally easygoing about all the stuff I told her that I felt safe opening up to her. She had some off-the-wall ideas about life behind bars, though. I told her whatever shows she’d watched about what it’s like in prison had gotten it all wrong, and she apologized for making it seem like I’d been on a spa vacation instead of in jail.

“There’s a snag, though,” I said to Dr. Jakes. “I explained about…you know. My record. And the woman in charge of volunteers asked if she could talk to you.”

“Ah,” he said. “How do you feel about that?”

“It’s okay with me. It’s not like you know anything the rest of the world doesn’t already know about me.”

“Not true,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“From what you’ve told me, much of the rest of the world thinks you deserved more punishment than you received.”

“You don’t?”

He shook his head. “No, I don’t, Maggie,” he said. “You’ve already given
yourself
a life sentence.”

I looked down at my hands. It was a sentence I needed to serve.

“Anyhow, I’d be pleased to speak with her.” He leaned forward, his poor old chair creaking beneath him. “This is the first step in saving yourself,” he said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You took the initiative this time. Your mother didn’t do it for you.”

“Well, it’s just that I saw the ad on TV and—”

“Discount it all you want, Maggie,” he said. “You’ve taken a big step forward.”

I called Jen after my first day at the hospital and told her every single detail about Miss Helen and the kids I’d met and what I’d be doing there. I was sitting on my bed, the angora teddy bear at my side, admiring the purple polish on my toenails.

“You sound totally psyched,” she said when I finally stopped talking. “I’m still amazed they let you work there. With kids, I mean.”

“Me, too, but I’m so glad.” The library suddenly seemed ridiculously tame to me. “I think I’m going to love it.”

“That’s great.” Jen sounded…I wasn’t sure what. Distant, maybe? Or just tired? Had I bored her to bits? I suddenly realized that I was always talking about myself. When did I ever ask questions about
her?
It had been so long since I’d had an honest-to-God girlfriend, I didn’t know how to be a good one anymore. She was such an excellent listener, and I was totally self-absorbed. “Sorry I talked your ear off about the hospital,” I said.

“No, that’s cool.” Was she yawning? Maybe I’d caught her in the middle of a nap or something.

“Do you want to get together again soon?” I was already formulating questions I’d ask her about herself if she said yes.

“Definitely.” She sounded a little more awake. “This weekend?”

“That’d be great.” I was relieved by the enthusiasm in her voice. “I want to hear all about
you
this time.”

The next day, Miss Helen sent me out on my own. I took the book cart around to the patients’ rooms. I entertained a couple of kids in the E.R. while their little brother got stitches. I sat with a scared four-year-old boy in his room, giving his mother a chance to get something to eat. I helped a few kids color and make things out of
clay in the playroom and I tried to keep two boys from clobbering each other over whose turn it was to go down the sliding board. And that was just the morning.

In the afternoon, I brought a new patient—a five-year-old boy named Jacob—into the playroom. He was in the hospital for asthma, like Andy’d been so many times at that age. Jacob clung hard to my hand as he looked around the room. There was so much to do in there, it could be overwhelming. He was probably already overwhelmed just by being in the hospital.

The only other kid in the room was that pale little bald girl I’d seen with Mr. Jim the day before. She looked so tired and very, very sick. She sat alone in the big rocker, watching TV. I knew her name was Madison, and Miss Helen had told me she had a rare cancer of the blood and that she was in the hospital more than she was out. “I think she likes it here better than she does at home,” Miss Helen told me at the nurses’ station. She cupped her hand around her mouth like she was telling me a dirty little secret. “Dysfunctional family,” she whispered.

“Hi, Madison,” I said to her as I pulled out a chair at the table for Jacob. She didn’t answer me and there was no trace of a smile on her face. Her eyes reminded me of my own—huge and dark—except that she had no eyelashes or eyebrows. Her skin was so pale, I could see the blue-gray veins beneath the surface of her bare scalp. She had a capped-off tube strapped to her left arm with wide bands of green-and-blue dotted tape, and she held that arm gently cradled in her lap as if it hurt her.

“Do you want to join Jacob and me?” I asked her. “We’re going to color.”

She shook her head. “No, thanks,” she whispered, and she closed her eyes.

At five o’clock, I went to the nurses’ station to check out for the day. Two men and two women were behind the counter, busily writing notes and typing on keyboards. I’d already figured out that some of the men in the peds unit were nurses and some of the women were doctors and I didn’t yet know which was which. They all looked preoccupied, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep that night unless I talked to someone about Madison.

“Excuse me,” I said.

A young woman with short blond hair and too much mascara raised her head from her keyboard and smiled at me. “How’d your second day go, Maggie?” she asked.

“Good.” I was surprised she knew my name before I remembered the name tag pinned to my blue vest, which was the uniform of the volunteers. “But I have a question about Madison…” I realized I didn’t know the little girl’s last name, but the woman—her name tag read Taffy Cruise—knew who I meant.

“Here’s her doc right here,” she said, motioning to a broad-shouldered, dark-haired man sitting in front of a computer screen. “Dr. Britten? You have a minute for the volunteer?”

He looked up at me, rubbing a hand across his chin and looking nearly as tired as Madison did. There was something familiar about him that I couldn’t place. Maybe I’d seen him the day before and just didn’t remember him.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“I…” I felt intimidated all of a sudden. I was a nineteen-year-old ex-con brand-new volunteer. What did I know? “I noticed Madison holding her arm like it hurts her,” I said. “The arm with the—” I rubbed the inside of my left arm “—the tube.”

“It probably does hurt her,” he said, like it was no big deal. “She’s
a tough cookie.” He turned to the other man at the station. “You want to check on Madison’s IV when you get a chance?” he asked.

The other guy nodded, although he kept tapping at a keyboard of his own.

“Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”

“No prob,” Dr. Britten said. He lifted a cardboard coffee cup to his lips and looked at his computer screen again. There was a gold band on his ring finger, a dimple at the corner of his mouth when he sipped his coffee, and I had a sudden, truly terrible feeling of déjà vu. I knew why he looked familiar to me. He looked like Ben. Dark hair, like Ben. Thirtyish, the age Ben would be around now. Big, teddy-bear kind of build. Maybe not quite as massive as Ben, but still. He put down his cup and began typing, and I stared at his hands. I knew those hands. I knew them, and worse—
much
worse—I suddenly missed them. I missed
Ben—
the Ben I’d thought he was. The one who touched me with hands that looked a lot like Dr. Britten’s. How could I even be
thinking
that way? I was so screwed up!

“We’ll see you tomorrow, Maggie,” Taffy said, and I realized I’d just been standing there like an idiot, staring at Dr. Britten.

“Right.” I slipped my purse strap over my shoulder. “See you tomorrow.”

I walked straight from the peds unit to the hospital exit. In the parking lot, I got into my car and rested my forehead on the steering wheel. I took a few long, deep breaths. Did he really look like Ben? He was a little older, wasn’t he? And his eyes were not quite so dark.

“Stop it!” I punched my fist on the steering wheel. “Just stop it!”

I rested my head back against the car seat with a sigh.

There were no parents protesting outside the hospital. Nobody spitting at me in the halls. But there was still one big obstacle
standing in the way of me doing my community service there—or
anywhere—
and it wasn’t Dr. Britten. It wasn’t a man at all. It was me—the weak-willed, easily seduced, insecure girl I’d become. I was the obstacle I’d be carrying around with me for the rest of my life.