Hope Street Part 3

EVENTUALLY SHE WOUND DOWN, her tears spent. Cuddling up to Curt, resting her cheek against his shoulder and drinking in his familiar scent felt too good. She used to feel so safe when he held her this way. But now she knew any safety he offered was illusory. He couldn't keep bad things away.

Sheepish about her display of waterworks, she eased out of his arms, dabbed her damp cheeks with his handkerchief and then returned it to him. The TV screen held the frozen image of her and Curt on the day he'd graduated from college, both of them smiling, wildly in love. He must have paused the DVD while she'd suffered her little meltdown.

"I can't watch this," she said, swinging her legs over the side of the bed and standing. "I need some fresh air."

"Sure." He pushed away from the bed as well.

G.o.d, no. She didn't want him to accompany her. She had to get away from him before she sank into his arms again. "I'm just taking a walk," she said brusquely. "You don't have to escort me."

"It's late." He glanced toward the windows, their closed drapes blocking out the night. When he turned back, she noticed the shadow of moisture her tears had left on his shirt and suffered a pang of remorse. She shouldn't have fallen apart like that. Not on his shoulder.

"I'm just going to step outside the building for a few minutes. I'll be fine." Like h.e.l.l she would, but she had to find her own strength. She couldn't rely on him to wipe her tears and make everything better.

She slid her feet into her shoes, grabbed the room key from the dresser and swung through the door. Only after it had shut behind her and she was halfway down the hall to the stairs did she draw in a breath. Her tongue tasted salty from her tears. She needed air. She needed the night.

She needed to get away from Curt, from his arms and his warmth and all the memories of the love they'd once shared.

The key weighed cold and heavy in her palm. Its quaintness-not one of those computer-programmed card keys-appealed to her. And the fact that she had it and Curt didn't meant he probably wouldn't come after her. If he did, he'd be locked out of the room. They had only one key between them.

Still, she hesitated on the stairway landing for a minute, waiting. Curt didn't emerge.

She continued the rest of the way down the stairs, which ended in the front hall near the taproom. Cheerful conversation bubbled out of the room, and she hurried past it. She'd endured enough cheerful conversation at her birthday party to last the next fifty years. Faking happiness, she'd learned, could drain a person of energy.

Stepping outside the inn's front door, she let the cool night wrap around her. A couple of paunchy older men stood on the path near the porch, smoking cigarettes. A young man and a woman strolled toward the parking lot, their arms wrapped around each other. After a candlelit meal at the inn's restaurant, they were probably heading home for a tres romantic night. Ellie felt a twinge beneath her breastbone as she watched them recede into the shadows. Not jealousy. Just...regret. Loss. Emptiness.

She spotted a bench on a side path that led to a small garden near the inn. The carved wooden slats were stiff and chilly against her back and thighs, but at least she had the night, a sky full of stars above her and the scent of pine around her. The air was nippy, and she hugged herself warm.

You're allowed to be a basket case, she a.s.sured herself. You've just turned fifty. You're on the verge of a divorce. Mere minutes ago, you dissolved into a blubbering fool and let Curt-the man you're planning to divorce-comfort you. Anxiety is acceptable under the circ.u.mstances.

She wasn't sure what she felt was anxiety, though. It was more those other things-regret, loss, emptiness.

Being held by Curt had felt so good. But why the h.e.l.l shouldn't it feel good? He was a man, and for many years, Ellie had a.s.sociated being held by him with joy and love and fabulous s.e.x. Just because she was prepared to walk away from what used to be didn't mean she couldn't feel wistful about her decision. Any woman would feel the way she did, especially after going so long without a man's arms around her.

She sat straighter and gave her head a shake. It hadn't been so long, she reminded herself. She'd had a man's arms around her just a few months back, when she'd been in Ghana.

Ten months ago "DON'T GET IDEAS ABOUT ADRIAN," Rose warned Ellie. In her sixties, stout and bristling with energy, boasting a crisp British accent to match her crisp blue dress, Rose Hampton was the administrator of the clinic where Ellie would be working. During the drive from the airport, Rose had provided Ellie with a brief biography of herself. She was a widow whose late husband had been in the foreign service. His last posting had been in Ghana, and after his death she'd stayed on, putting her management skills to work at the clinic so Dr. Adrian Wesker could be brilliant and perform his healing magic free of bureaucratic demands.

She continued to talk about Dr. Wesker's extraordinary abilities as Ellie unpacked her things in the cramped cubicle of a bedroom she'd been a.s.signed to in the residence compound next door to the clinic. Fortunately, she'd packed light. Had she brought more clothing, she'd have had no place to store it. The room featured a three-drawer chest, a closet the size of a high-school locker, a narrow bed with a foam mattress and a nightstand. Thin cotton drapes hung across the tiny window, which overlooked the cinderblock side wall of the clinic.

If Ellie had wanted a four-star resort, she wouldn't have come here. The stark, cell-like room would serve as a perfectly adequate home for the next six months.

"Every woman who pa.s.ses through the clinic gets a crush on him," Rose warned, looming in the doorway and watching Ellie sort her clothes into the snug drawers. "Some men, too, I'd imagine. I must warn you that his first, last and only love is the clinic."

"I'm here because I want to fall in love with the clinic, too," Ellie a.s.sured her with a smile. The notion of getting a crush on some single-minded, charismatic doctor with supernatural talents amused her. She was too old and weary for that kind of thing.

"He's been here seven years now," Rose continued. She entered the room, crowding it with her bulk, and settled herself on the wooden stool at the foot of Ellie's bed, which was made with fresh white sheets and a cotton spread. "I daresay he'll wind up dying here. He hardly ever goes back to London anymore, except on fund-raising missions. His pa.s.sion is here, with his patients. The women and children. You've familiarized yourself with the literature we sent, I presume?"

"Yes." Ellie had read about the economic upheaval in the villages surrounding k.u.masi, Ghana's second-largest city. Developers were sometimes buying and sometimes simply stealing the small farms that surrounded the city, often with the complicity of village chiefs. Men tended to own and work on farms farther out from the city, cultivating land too distant from k.u.masi's urban center to interest the developers. But the smaller, closer farms were generally owned and worked by women. Once these women lost their plots, they could no longer feed their families and earn money with their home-grown crops.

Funded by several international charities, Dr. Wesker's clinic served the medical needs of those economically displaced women and their children, as well as the farm women and children living in the territory surrounding the city. The clinic was always looking for pediatric nurses willing to serve a few months in exchange for free room and board, an exotic experience and a chance to feel they'd made some small contribution to the world.

When Ellie had learned about the program, she'd lunged at the opportunity. Both her daughters had flown from the nest and the house was painfully silent. A boy should have been thumping up and down the stairs, leaving trails of mud with his soccer cleats, devouring groceries faster than she could buy them, blasting G.o.d-awful hip-hop music through the speaker of his laptop and pretending he wasn't excited about the female cla.s.smates who called to talk to him and giggled as they pa.s.sed along the news that some other girl-never the callers themselves, of course-had a thing for him.

But no boy clamored through Ellie's house anymore, complaining about too much math homework and asking what was for dinner. Peter was dead, and so was a huge chunk of Ellie's soul. And now her marriage was dying, too. She'd had to get away.

"I a.s.sure you," she told Rose, "I have no intention of getting a crush on Dr. Wesker."

Rose shook her head, unconvinced. "They all say that."

Ellie laughed. "I'm here to give vaccinations and take throat cultures for strep. The last thing I need in my life is romance."

Rose's eyes narrowed slightly. "You're not a lesbian, are you? Not that I mind, one way or the other, but you do have to share this floor with three other ladies. They're rather young, I'm afraid. College girls on an academic semester abroad." She gestured through the doorway toward the hall, onto which several other rooms opened. "No medical skills to speak of. They're very good with the children, handing out suckers and jelly beans after the little ones have received shots. One of them has been a G.o.dsend when it comes to processing the paperwork. The other two may someday make suitable nannies, but I don't see much more in their futures. Certainly nothing in the healing arts."

"I'm sure we'll get along fine," Ellie said.

"They all have crushes on Adrian," Rose added.

Ellie laughed again. Not strained, hysterical laughter but relaxed, comfortable laughter. Coming here-flying across an ocean and landing somewhere near the equator, in a country that smelled of ferns and spice and cocoa, where people dressed in cool, colorful linens and spoke a language called Twi as well as a pungently accented English, and where impoverished women and their children needed access to free medical care-had been a wise move. When Ellie had exited the airport with Rose and stepped into the warm African morning, she'd felt her spine straighten, her eyes widen. The darkness that had been her companion for nearly two long, horrible years melted away beneath that fine tropical sun.

Once Ellie had finished unpacking, Rose took her on a tour of the clinic. The boxy, functional building wasn't much to look at, but it included the basics: a waiting room with a s.p.a.cious play area full of toys for the children, two examining rooms, a modest surgery-"Anything major we refer to one of the hospitals in the city," Rose explained-and a six-bed ward. Currently two beds were occupied by thin, sad-eyed children battling the flu. "Dehydration, both of them," Rose noted, pointing to their IV drips. "They'll recover shortly. Be prepared to encounter lots of childhood diseases you thought had vanished from the face of the earth. Measles, rubella, chicken pox. These children don't get inoculated the way your children back home do."

Ellie nodded, taking it all in. She gave each of the young patients a warm smile before leaving the ward.

Rose walked her through the nurses' station, which contained a small pharmacy, two desks and a computer that would have been obsolete ten years ago. Ellie recalled the nurses' station at Children's Hospital in Boston, where she'd taken her first job after receiving her RN degree. It had boasted clean, sleek counters, bright lighting and all the high-tech equipment a nurse could dream of. Even her office at the Felton Primary School made this clinic on the outskirts of k.u.masi seem about twelve rungs lower than primitive.

But a nurse didn't need a fancy computer to make a child with chicken pox feel better. Just lots of liquids, cool baths, calamine lotion and ice cream to slide down a tender throat.

Dr. Wesker's office door was closed, and Rose warned Ellie not to disturb him when he was shut up inside, unless it was an emergency. So Ellie didn't meet the doctor until that evening at dinner, in the dining room on the first floor of the residential compound. A long, family-style table took up most of the room, which had windows along one wall and a colorful abstract mural painted on another. She'd taken a seat at the table with the three college interns, who were bouncy and bubbly and eager to fill Ellie in on everything they felt she needed to know: "The market's a great place to connect with the women-they're always shopping and bartering. Whenever we see one with a kid, we go over and tell her about the clinic," one of the girls informed Ellie.

"And we go into the school and give talks on hygiene and the importance of vaccinations."

"A little s.e.x ed, too," the third girl said with a grin. "I'm planning to teach middle school, so I like doing the s.e.x-ed stuff." All three girls were from Georgetown University, they told Ellie, although their manner of speech indicated they heralded from different regions of the United States. One girl had a thick Southern drawl, another the flat intonations of the Midwest and the third, from central New Jersey, could have been a speech coach for the cast of The Sopranos.

Abruptly they nudged one another and fell silent. They were gazing past Ellie, and she twisted in her seat to find out what had caught their attention.

The brilliant doctor who performed magic had entered the room.

At least, she a.s.sumed that was the ident.i.ty of the man walking toward their table, a plate heaped with steaming pork stew and rice balanced in one hand and a dark beer bottle in the other. He wore blue surgical scrubs and scuffed leather sneakers, and his lean body moved with a boneless grace. His wavy chestnut-brown hair was too long, tucked behind his ears to keep from spilling into his face, and his eyes had the permanent squint of someone who'd spent too much time staring at something bright and painful.

He was undeniably handsome. His weathered face, his economical physique, the sinuous muscles in his forearms and his smooth, elegant gait...Not that Ellie cared, but yes, she could understand how some women might find him appealing.

He circled the table and set his plate down in front of the empty chair facing Ellie. "Our new nurse, then?" he asked, his accent every bit as British as Rose's.

She extended her right hand. "Eleanor Frost," she introduced herself. "You must be Dr. Wesker."

The college girls remained silent, gazing at him with adoration. He ignored them. "Eleanor Frost," he echoed, unrolling the napkin that held his silverware and spreading the square of cloth across his lap. "Pleasure to meet you. Rose tells me you're a school nurse. Good at mopping up b.l.o.o.d.y noses, I presume."

"We get our share at my school," she confirmed.

"We get our share here, too-although here, b.l.o.o.d.y noses can be a symptom of a mult.i.tude of other problems. Medicine is slightly different in this clinic than what you're likely used to." He eyed her speculatively. "You're a bit more mature than most of our volunteers," he added, shooting a meaningful glance at the college girls, who dissolved in laughter. "A little maturity should do us all some good."

"Dr. Wesker," one of the girls protested. "We're very mature."

"Terribly mature, yes." He shot Ellie a smile. "Do you prefer to be called Nurse Frost or Sister Frost?"

"Ellie would be fine," she said. His eyes, she noticed, were the same glinting color as his fork, a cool, metallic silver. She imagined they would be blinding if he ever opened them fully.

"Ellie it is, then. And you may call me Adrian. We don't stand on ceremony here, as long as everyone recognizes that I am the boss and treats me with the proper deference." He smiled again. Ellie smiled back.

The college girls dominated most of the dinner conversation, describing their most recent shopping expedition in downtown k.u.masi. Once they'd all finished eating, Adrian filled two mugs with rich, dark coffee and ushered Ellie outside. The heat of the day had evaporated, and the evening air smelled like foliage and moist soil. He gestured for her to sit on the concrete steps leading down from the back door of the residence compound, then lowered himself beside her. His knees were only an inch from hers, the smooth blue cotton of his scrubs contrasting with her khaki slacks. She considered putting more s.p.a.ce between them, but the stairway railing was at her back. And he might be insulted if she shifted away. He'd chosen this place to sit with her, so she decided to accept his nearness without making a fuss.

Perhaps his subtle body language was his way of conveying the way things worked at the clinic. Volunteers worked together. They ate together. They shared a residence-except for Dr. Wesker, who, Rose had informed Ellie, lived in a small cottage just up the street, and Rose herself, who remained in the house she'd shared with her late husband.

Personal s.p.a.ce might be a luxury unavailable in this village on the outskirts of k.u.masi, at least for the volunteers.

"They're lovely birds," he said, "but rather too giddy."

It took Ellie a minute to realize he was referring to the college interns. "They're women, not birds," she said, a stern display of feminism.

"I imagine they'd prefer to be thought of as birds. At least they'd prefer that I refer to them that way. They twitter and flutter a lot. They mean well, but our older staff tend to be more productive. You've met the other nurses?"

She had. One was a thin, towering k.u.masi native named Atu. He'd said little when Rose had introduced Ellie to him, but he'd had a marvelous smile. The other nurse, Gerda, was from Scotland and was, according to Rose, a fanatic about sterility. Ellie had contended that in a medical setting, being fanatical about sterility was not such a terrible thing.

Atu appeared younger than thirty. Gerda looked closer to sixty. Both, Ellie a.s.sumed, met Adrian's definition of mature.

"You're here for six months, then?" he asked.

She nodded. "That's the plan."

"You will work far harder during these six months than you have ever worked in your American practice, Ellie. You will see health problems you haven't heard of before. Your heart will break ten times over, and it will soar at least twice as often."

"I'm looking forward to the soaring part," she said with a smile.

He smiled back, his eyes nearly disappearing. "Tell me, then," he asked, "why are you here?"

"A friend mentioned your program to me, and I researched it on the Internet," she said. "It sounded interesting. I thought I'd enjoy it, and I knew I'd have something to contribute-"

He cut her off with a snort. "Spare me the do-gooder speech. Everyone who pa.s.ses through here is oh, so altruistic, so eager to save the world." He tempered his cynical tone with a chuckle. Deep lines framed his mouth and dented his cheeks. At one time, they might have been dimples. Ellie wondered how old he was. His hair was more brown than gray and his forehead was relatively smooth. But the creases framing his eyes and mouth indicated that he'd spent many years in the sun.

He shifted on the steps so he was facing her, his back against the wrought-iron rail and his knees bent toward his chest, and took a sip of his coffee. "People come here for one of two reasons. They come here to lose themselves, or they come here to find themselves. Which reason fits your purposes?"

She leaned back against the cast-iron posts of the railing and drank some coffee, using the time to contemplate his question. Had she come here to lose herself? h.e.l.l, she was already lost-but she'd come to get even further away from everything that was wrong with her life back home. Her empty, echoing house. Her bone-aching grief. Her husband's betrayal. Her dread of the darkness that kept threatening to swallow her.

Yes, she'd wanted to lose herself.

But she'd also wanted to stand tall again, and feel as if her life had purpose. She'd wanted to save sick children. Her own son had died, and she would never get over that. But if she could save enough other children, if she could bring them health and the promise of long, happy futures...Would that qualify as finding herself?

"Both," she told Adrian. "I think I've come here for both...."

FIVE.

AT WHAT POINT should Curt start worrying? At what point should he surrender to his Neanderthal instincts and go after Ellie? Not that worrying about her safety was Neanderthal, but she would probably think it was.

Ellie had always been a stubborn feminist, and now, more than before, she was determined to prove she didn't need him. Yet sometimes she did. When her heart was breaking, when the memories were like razors cutting her to shreds, when she needed a shoulder to cry on, the way she'd needed his shoulder after she'd been overcome by the movie the girls had made...

Once he and Ellie were divorced, he supposed, she would find another shoulder. A shoulder that belonged to a man who hadn't wounded her the way Curt had.

As far as he knew, she hadn't found that other shoulder yet. His remained the only available shoulder, and rather than let it absorb any more of her tears, she'd bolted from the room. Now she was off somewhere, wandering around late at night at an inn on a dark country road. d.a.m.n it, he wished she'd left him the key. The night clerk probably had a spare; he could go downstairs, get the extra key and then head outside in search of Ellie.

Not to control her, not to force her back to the room. Just to make sure she was all right.

His gaze snagged on the frozen image on the TV screen: him in his graduation robe and Ellie tucked into the curve of his arm, holding the roses he'd bought her. He wasn't sure why he'd thought he should present her with roses as well as a diamond ring when he asked her to marry him. She'd already told him a million times she loved him, in a million different ways. They'd constantly discussed the distance between Brown's campus and Harvard Law School, how they'd still be able to see each other regularly, how she would only apply to nursing programs in Boston so she could join him there once she graduated. They'd talked about the children they hoped to have. She desperately wanted to be a mother, and he couldn't think of anything better than to make a few babies with her.

Over winter break his senior year, he'd traveled to Pinebrook to meet her parents, and they'd fawned all over him, probably because he'd brought her family impressive Christmas presents: a staggeringly expensive bottle of Scotch for Ellie's father, a crystal bud vase for her mother and Carl Yastrzemski baseball jerseys for her brothers. Ellie had traveled to New York City to meet his family over spring break, and they'd adored her. They would have loved her even if she hadn't brought his mother a potted Easter lily. Gifts didn't dazzle them. Ellie's intelligence, her humor and her commitment to her calling did.

Despite all that, despite the family introductions and the planning and the fact that they spent nearly every night together in his bed in his scruffy third-floor walk-up on Hope Street, she could have said no when he'd proposed. She could have come up with some logical argument about how they should wait to figure out how they felt about each other when they were done with their schooling. She could have pointed out that he wasn't Catholic and she was. She could have told him she loved him as a college boyfriend but not really, not till-death-do-us-part.

So he'd softened her up with a dozen red roses to hold during the graduation ceremony. And he'd sent his parents to their hotel room for an hour and walked Ellie back to his apartment and out onto the porch where he'd first started falling in love with her, and he'd reached through the flaps of his graduation gown to the little velvet-lined box he'd stashed in a pocket of his trousers. He'd handed the box to her and told her he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. He'd said, "If you say yes, Ellie, I promise you, it will always be Hope Street. Wherever we live, wherever life takes us, we'll live on the street of hope."

And she'd wept, her tears sprinkling all over the velvety petals of the roses, and said yes.

So much for that promise. So much for hope.

People got divorced. He and Ellie weren't the first couple to have their hope shattered, to prove unable to survive the worst kind of tragedy. They'd get through this unpleasant step and move on with their lives as best they could. She'd find someone else to hold her together-if she ever allowed herself to fall apart again the way she had with him. And maybe he'd find some other woman who didn't mind crying on his shoulder every now and then. Ellie would no longer be his responsibility. He'd remind himself, every day if he had to, that he wasn't supposed to worry about her anymore.

But d.a.m.n it, she could get hurt out there in the dark. She'd been gone too long. They weren't divorced yet, and he worried.

Turning his back to the television, he closed his hand around the doork.n.o.b. It twisted in his palm and the door swung inward. Ellie had come back.

She stood in the doorway, apparently startled to see him. The perfume of an October night clung to her. Her hair hung loose around her face and her cheeks were flushed.

"I was just going to look for you," he said, backing into the room and wondering whether she'd cross the threshold.

She did. "That wasn't necessary," she said tersely as she set the key down on the dresser.

"So shoot me. I was worried. You were all alone out there." At least he a.s.sumed she was.