Cold Betrayal

With superhuman effort, Enid forced her eyes to open and her head to nod. At least she thought she nodded.

“Thank God,” he whispered. “You’re alive. The guy from the station is calling an ambulance. Stay with me now. What’s your name?”

He’d done it again—used the Lord’s name in vain. Enid tried to move her lips, to tell him her name, but they didn’t work properly. She said Enid, but he must have heard something else.

“Okay, Edith,” he said. “Don’t move. The guy from the station is putting out flares. We’ll wait right here for the ambulance, okay?”

She wanted to tell him that Edith wasn’t her name. Edith was someone else entirely, but all she could manage was a single word. “Okay,” she whispered.

“What the hell were you doing out here in the dark?” he demanded. He sounded angry now—angry and accusatory. “You ran out right in front of me. By the time I saw you, there was no way to stop. I barely had time enough to step on the brake.”

She wanted to tell him the whole story, but she couldn’t. It was too complicated. It was too hard to talk; too hard to keep the pieces straight in her head. The world around her was turning fuzzy.

“My baby . . .” she whispered.

“What baby?” he asked. Turning his gaze away from her face, he appeared to look down at the rest of her body for the first time. His eyes stopped and widened when they focused on the bulge in her stomach.

“Oh my God, you’re pregnant! I’m sorry! I’m so sorry, but it wasn’t my fault.”

Enid felt something wet fall on her face. At first she thought it was a drifting snowflake, but then she realized it was a tear—a single tear. The young man was weeping—crying for her. She wanted to reach out and comfort him—to tell him it was all right, but a sudden surge of pain, a shocking brand-new pain, rocketed through her body, robbing her of the ability to speak. As suddenly as it had come, the pain subsided. Feeling the wetness between her legs, Enid knew exactly what it was.

In The Family, that’s what women and girls were supposed to do—have babies, lots of them. As a consequence, that was something they talked about—having babies and about the banes of pregnancy—the unrelenting nausea of morning sickness, the swollen ankles and aching backs of the final months and weeks before the baby came, and the realities and indignity of having your water break and then going into labor. That was what had just happened to Enid—her water had broken. The baby was coming.

With a strength she didn’t know she had, she somehow reached out from under the blanket and grasped the young man’s hand in hers, grinding his fingers together in something close to a death grip.

“Help me, please,” she whispered. “My baby’s coming.”

“Your baby’s coming now?” he groaned. “You’ve got to be kidding! Please, God, this can’t be happening. Please.”

“It is happening,” Enid insisted. “She’s coming. Don’t let them take me back home. Don’t let them take her there,” she urged. “Please, whatever you do, don’t let them take us back.”

Just then another labor pain roared through her, silencing her ability to speak. Her whisper turned into a howl of agony. When the contraction passed, Enid lay breathless and spent on the cold, hard pavement. She was covered by a Navajo blanket and comforted only by the grip of that one strong hand—a hand that belonged to the weeping young man—the Outsider—who knelt beside her.

For a brief moment, Enid longed to be back home in The Encampment’s birthing room. There, at least, she would have been warm and covered with a clean sheet. Dr. Johnson would have been there with her. Her bed would have been surrounded by the comfort of familiar faces.

The image passed as quickly as it came, taking everything else with it—the pain, the sounds of concerned voices in the distance, and close up, the man—the Outsider—who was now sobbing brokenly beside her. Before the next contraction hit, Enid had drifted into blessed unconsciousness.

8

Ali was sleeping soundly when she heard the distinctive chirp of Sister Anselm’s ringtone. The clock said it was one o’clock in the morning. Her first instinct was to roll over and go back to sleep. When she heard the guest room shower come on, she realized Sister Anselm was up and on the move. Crawling out of bed, Ali do

Sister Anselm emerged from her room with suitcase in hand and purse slung over her shoulder. By then, Ali was waiting at the end of the hall with a cup of coffee already loaded into a vacuum-sealed metal coffee mug that was more thermos than cup.

“Sorry,” Sister Anselm apologized. “I meant to sneak out without disturbing anybody. I’ve just been called out to St. Jerome’s Hospital in Flagstaff. Someone got run over on a highway north of there. Tell Mr. Brooks that I’ve already stripped the sheets. Is it still snowing?”

“It’s stopped now,” Ali said, handing over the cup. “I didn’t know which way you were going, but I checked road conditions on the Department of Transportation website in both directions. This is a weird storm. The worst of it came straight in from the west. The roads from here down to Phoenix are in worse shape than they are going north to Flag. It may be tricky getting down the hill from here to the main drag, but from there on, everything should be plowed, sanded, or both.”

“I’ll be careful,” Sister Anselm assured her. “I won’t be much help to anyone else if I’m laid up in the hospital, too.”

“Humor me, though,” Ali said. “No lead foot, and call me when you get there. I seem to remember that you and that ‘arrest-me-red’ MINI Cooper of yours have been pulled over more than once.”

Sister Anselm nodded grudgingly. “You’re almost as bad as the reverend mother,” she said.

“From what I know about your reverend mother,” Ali replied, “I’ll take that as high praise.”

“By the way, all I ever got was warnings.”

“That’s because young cops look at you—a sweet old nun—and figure they’ll go to hell if they write you up.”

Sister Anselm gri

The two friends were still laughing about that as Ali ushered Sister Anselm out to the car. She drove away as it was coming up on one-thirty. Ali considered going back to bed, but after a moment, she glanced at her watch. It had two faces on it—a big one for her, and a second smaller one that she used to keep track of B.’s current time zone. Using a second watch was far easier than adding and subtracting time zones in her head. In this case, it was just past eight-thirty A.M. in Zurich. Time enough for B. to be up and dressed, but a couple of hours short of his having to head for the airport.

Ali went back to the kitchen. The giant-sized traveler cup she had poured for Sister Anselm had taken almost half of the small pot Leland kept on the kitchen counter. She poured the remainder of the coffee into a large mug and then made her way back to her favorite spot in the house—one of the easy chairs in the library. After turning on the gas-log fire, she pulled out her phone.

“It’s the middle of the night where you are,” B. observed. “What are you doing up at this hour?”