From the Corner of His Eye

Chapter 18

SERAPHIM AETHIONEMA WHITE was nothing whatsoever like her name, except that she had as kind a heart and as good a soul as any among the hosts in Heaven. She did not have wings, as did the angels after which she had been named, and she couldn't sing as sweetly as the seraphim, either, for she had been blessed with a throaty voice and far too much humility to be a performer. Aethionema were delicate flowers, either pale-or rose-pink, and while this girl, just sixteen, was beautiful by any standard, she was not a delicate soul but a strong one, not likely to be shaken apart in even the highest wind.

Those who had just met her and those who were overly charmed by eccentricity called her Seraphim, her name complete. Her teachers, neighbors, and casual acquaintances called her Sera. Those who knew her best and loved her the most deeply—like her sister, Celestina called her Phimie.

From the moment the girl was admitted on the evening of January 5, the nurses at St. Mary's Hospital in San Francisco called her Phimie, too, not because they knew her well enough to love her, but because that was the name they heard Celestina use.

Phimie shared Room 724 with an eighty-six-year-old woman Nella Lombardi-who had been deep in a stroke-induced coma for eight days and who had been recently moved out of the ICU when her condition stabilized. Her white hair was radiant, but the face that it framed was as gray as pumice, her skin utterly without luster.

Mrs. Lombardi had no visitors. She was alone in the world, her two children and her husband having passed away long ago.

During the following day, January 6, as Phimie was wheeled around the hospital for tests in various departments, Celestina remained in 724, working on her portfolio for a class in advanced portraiture. She was a Junior at the Academy of Art College.

She had put aside a half-finished pencil portrait of Phimie to develop several of Nella Lombardi.

In spite of the ravages of illness and age, beauty remained in the old woman's face. Her bone structure was superb. In youth, she must have been stunning.

Celestina intended to capture Nella as she was now, head at rest upon the pillow of, perhaps, her deathbed, eyes closed and mouth slack, face ashen but serene. Then she would draw four more portraits, using bone structure and other physiological evidence to imagine how the woman had looked at sixty, forty, twenty, and ten.

Ordinarily, when Celestina was troubled, her art was a perfect sanctuary from all woes. When she was planning, composing, and rendering, time had no meaning for her, and life had no sting.

On this momentous day, however, drawing provided no solace. Frequently, her hands shook, and she could not control the pencil.

During those spells when she was too shaky to draw, she stood at the window, gazing at the storied city.

The singular beauty of San Francisco and the exquisite patina of its colorful history spoke to her heart and kindled in her such an unreasonable passion that she sometimes wondered, at least half seriously, if she had spent other lives here. Often, streets were wondrously familiar to her the first time that she set foot on them. Certain great houses, dating from the late 1800s and early 1900s, inspired her to imagine elegant parties thrown there in more genteel and gilded ages, and her flights of imagination sometimes acquired such vivid detail that they were eerily like memories.

This time, even San Francisco, under a Chinese-blue sky stippled with a cloisonne of silver-and-gold clouds, couldn't provide solace or calm Celestina's nerves. Her sister's dilemma wasn't as easily put out of mind as any problem of her own might have been-and she herself had never been in such an awful situation as Phimie was now.

Nine months ago, Phimie had been raped.

Ashamed and scared, she told no one. Although a victim, she blamed herself, and the prospect of being exposed to ridicule so horrified her that despair got the better of good judgment.

When she discovered she was pregnant, Phimie dealt with this new trauma as other naive fifteen-year-olds had done before her: She sought to avoid the scorn and the reproach that she imagined would be heaped upon her for having failed to reveal the rape at the time it occurred. With no serious thought to long-term consequences, focused solely on the looming moment, in a state of denial, she made plans to conceal her condition as long as possible.

In her campaign to keep her weight gain to a minimum, anorexia was her ally. She learned to find pleasure in hunger pangs.

When she did eat, she touched only nutritious food, a more well balanced diet than at any time in her life. Even as she desperately avoided contemplation of the childbirth that inevitably approached, she was trying her best to ensure the health of the baby while still remaining slim enough to avoid suspicion.

Through nine months of quiet panic, however, Phimie grew less rational week by week, resorting to reckless measures that endangered her own health and the baby's even as she avoided junk food and took a daily multivitamin. To conceal the changes in her physique, she wore loose clothes and wrapped her abdomen with Ace bandages. Later she used girdles to achieve more dramatic compression.

Because she had suffered a leg injury six weeks before being raped, and had undergone subsequent tendon surgery, Phimie was able to claim lingering symptoms, avoiding gym class-and the discovery of her condition-since the start of school in September.

By the last week of pregnancy, the average woman has gained twenty-eight pounds. Typically, seven to eight pounds of this is the fetus. The placenta and the amniotic fluid weigh three pounds. The remaining eighteen are due to water retention and fat stores.

Phimie gained less than twelve pounds. Her pregnancy might have gone undetected even without the girdle.

The day previous to her admission to St. Mary's, she awakened with an unremitting headache, nausea, and dizziness. Fierce abdominal pain afflicted her, too, like nothing she had known before, though not the telltale contractions of labor.

Worse, she was plagued with frightening eye problems. At first, mere blurring. Followed by phantom fireflies flickering at the periphery of her vision. Then a sudden, half-minute blindness that left her in state of terror even though it passed quickly.

In spite of this crisis, and though she was aware that she was within a week or ten days of delivery, Phimie still could not find the courage to tell her father and mother.

Reverend Harrison White, their dad, was a good Baptist and a good man, neither judgmental nor hard of heart. Their mother, Grace, was in every way suited to her name.

Phimie was loath to reveal her pregnancy not because she feared her parents' wrath, but because she dreaded seeing disappointment in their eyes, and because she would rather have died than bring shame upon them.

When a second and longer spell of blindness struck her that same day, she was home alone. She crawled from her bedroom, along the hall, and felt her way to the phone in her parents' bedroom.

Celestina was in her tiny studio apartment, working happily on a cubistic self-portrait, when her sister called. Judging by Phimie's hyste ria and initial incoherence, Celestina thought that Mom or Dad—-or both-had died.

Her heart was broken almost as completely by the actual facts as it would have been if she had, indeed, lost a parent. The thought Of her precious sister being violated made her half sick with sorrow and rage.

Horrified by the girl's nine months of self-imposed emotional isola tion and by her physical suffering, Celestina was eager to reach her mother and father. When the Whites stood together as a family, their shine could hold back the darkest night.

Although Phimie regained her sight while talking to her big sister, she didn't recover her reason. She begged Celestina not to track down Mom or Dad long-distance, not to call the doctor, but to come home and be with her when she divulged her terrible secret.

Against her better judgment, Celestina made the promise Phimie wanted. She trusted the instincts of the heart as much as logic, and the tearful entreaty of a beloved sister was a powerful restraint on common sense. She didn't take time to pack; miraculously, an hour later she was on a plane to Spruce Hills, Oregon, by way of Eugene.

Three hours after receiving the call, she was at her sister's side. In the living room of the parsonage, under the gaze of Jesus and John F.

Kennedy, whose portraits hung side by side, the girl revealed to their mom and dad what had been done to her and also what, in her despair and confusion, she had done to herself Phimie received the all-enfolding, unconditional love that she had needed for nine months, that pure love of which she had foolishly be lieved herself undeserving.

Although the embrace of family and the relief of revelation had a bracing effect, bringing her more to her proper senses than she'd been in a long time, Phimie refused to reveal the identity of the man who raped her. He'd threatened to kill her and her folks if she bore witness against him, and she believed his threat was sincere.

“Child,” the reverend said, “he will never touch you again. Both the Lord and I will make sure of that, and though neither the Lord nor I will resort to a gun, we have the police for guns."

The rapist had so terrorized the girl, so indelibly imprinted his threat in her mind, that she would not be reasoned into making this one last disclosure.

With gentle persistence, her mother appealed to her sense of moral responsibility. If this man was not arrested, tried, and convicted, he would sooner or later assault another innocent girl.

Phimie wouldn't budge. “He's crazy. Sick. He's evil.” She shuddered.

“He'll do it, he'll kill us all, and he won't care if he dies in a shootout with the police or if he gets sent to the electric chair. None of you will be safe if I tell."

The consensus, among Celestina and her parents, was that Phimie would be convinced in this matter after the child had been born. She was too fragile and too ridden by anxiety to do the right thing just yet, and there was no point in pressing her at this time.

Abortion was illegal, and their folks would have been reluctant, as a matter of faith, to consider it even under worse circumstances. Besides, with Phimie so close to term, and considering the injury she might have sustained from prolonged hunger and from the diligent application of the girdle, abortion might be a dangerous option.

She would have to get medical attention immediately. The child would be put up for adoption with people who would be able to love it and who would not forever see in it the image of its hateful father.

“I won't have the baby here,” Phimie insisted. “If he realizes he made a baby with me, it'll make him crazier. I know it will."

She wanted to go to San Francisco with Celestina, to have the baby in the city, where the father-and not incidentally her friends and Reverend White's parishioners-would never know she'd given birth. The more her parents and sister argued against this plan, the more agitated Phimie became, until they worried that they would jeopardize her health and mental stability if they didn't do as she wished.

The symptoms that terrified Phimie-the headache, crippling abdominal pain, dizziness, vision problems-had entirely relented. Possibly they had been more psychological than physical in nature.

A delay of a few hours, before getting her under a physician's care, might still be risky. But so was forcing her into a local hospital to endure the mortification she desperately wanted to avoid.

By invoking the word emergency, Celestina was able quickly to reach her own physician in San Francisco. He agreed to treat Phimie and to have her admitted to St. Mary's upon her arrival from Oregon.

The reverend couldn't easily escape church obligations on such short notice, but Grace wanted to be with her daughters. Phimie, however, pleaded that only Celestina accompany her.

Although the girl was unable to articulate why she preferred not to have her mother at her side, they all understood the tumult in. her heart. She couldn't bear to subject her gentle and proper mother to the shame and embarrassment that she herself felt so keenly and that she imagined would grow intolerably worse in the hours or days ahead, until and even after the birth.

Grace, of course, was a strong woman for whom faith was an armor against far worse than embarrassment. Celestina knew that Mom would suffer immeasurably more heartache by remaining in Oregon than what pain she might experience at her daughter's side, but Phimie was too young, too naive, and too frightened to grasp that in this matter, as in all others, her mother was a pillar, not a reed.

The tenderness with which Grace acceded to Phimie's desire, at the expense of her own peace of mind, filled Celestina with emotion. She'd always admired and loved her mother to an extent that no words-or work of art-could adequately describe, but never more than now.

With the same surprising ease that she had gotten a plane out of San Francisco on a one-hour notice, Celestina booked two return seats on an early-evening flight from Oregon, as though she had a supernatural travel agent.

Airborne, Phimie complained of ringing in her ears, which might have been related to the flight. She also suffered an episode of double vision and, in the airport after landing, a nosebleed, which appeared to be related to her previous symptoms.

The sight of her sister's blood and the persistence of the flow made Celestina weak with apprehension. She was afraid she had done the wrong thing by delaying hospitalization.

Then from San Francisco International, through the fog-shrouded streets of the night city, to St. Mary's, to Room 724. And to the discovery that Phimie's blood pressure was so high-210 over 126-that she was in a hypertensive crisis, at risk of a stroke, renal failure, and other life-threatening complications.

Antihypertensive drugs were administered intravenously, and Phimie was confined to bed, attached to a heart monitor.

Dr. Leland Daines, Celestina's internist, arrived directly from dinner at the Ritz-Carlton. Although Dairies had receding white hair and a seamed face, time had been kind enough to make him look not so much old as dignified. Long in practice, he was nevertheless free of arrogance, soft-spoken and with a bottomless supply of patience.

After examining Phimie, who was nauseous, Daines prescribed an anticonvulsant, an antiemetic, and a sedative, all intravenously.

The sedative was mild, but Phimie was asleep in mere minutes. She was exhausted by her long ordeal and by her recent lack of sleep.

Dr. Daines spoke with Celestina in the corridor, outside the door to 724. Some of the passing nurses were nuns in wimples and full-length habits, drifting like spirits along the hallway.

“She's got preeclampsia. It's a condition that occurs in about five percent of pregnancies, virtually always after the twenty-fourth week, and usually it can be treated successfully. But I'm not going to sugarcoat this, Celestina. In her case, it's more serious. She hasn't been seeing a doctor, no prenatal care, and here she is in the middle of her thirtyeighth week, about ten days from delivery."

Because they knew the date of the rape, and because that attack had been Phimie's sole sexual experience, the day of impregnation could be fixed, delivery calculated with more precision than usual.

“As she comes closer to full term,” said Dairies, “she's at great risk of preeclampsia developing into full eclampsia."

“What could happen then?” Celestina asked, dreading the answer.

“Possible complications include cerebral hemorrage, pulmonary edema, kidney failure, necrosis of the liver, coma-to name a few."

“I should have gotten her into the hospital back home."

He placed a hand on her shoulder. “Don't beat up on yourself She's come this far. And though I don't know the hospital in Oregon, I doubt the level of care would equal what she'll receive here."

Now that efforts were being made to control the preeclampsia, Dr. Daines had scheduled a series of tests for the following day. He expected to recommend a cesarean section as soon as Phimie's e's blood pressure was reduced and stabilized, but he didn't want to risk this surgery before determining what complications might have resulted from her restricted diet and the compression of her abdomen.

Although she already knew that the answer could not be cheerily optimistic, Celestina wondered, “Is the baby likely to be . . . normal?"

“I hope it will,” the physician said, but his emphasis vas too solidly on the word hope.

In Room 724, standing alone at her sister's bedside, watching the girl sleep, Celestina told herself that she was coping well. She could handle this unnerving development without calling in either of her parents.

Then her breath caught repeatedly in her breast as her throat tightened against the influx of air. One particularly difficult inhalation dissolved into a sob, and she wept.

She was four years older than Phimie. They hadn't i;.mn a great deal of each other during the past three years, since Celestina had come to San Francisco. Although distance and time, the press of her studies, and the busyness of daily life had not made her forget that she loved Phimie, she had forgotten the purity and the power of love. Rediscovering it now, she was shaken so badly that she had to pull a chair to the side of the bed and sit down.

She hung her head, covered her face with her chilled hands, and wondered how her mother could sustain faith in God when such terrible things could happen to someone as innocent as Phimie.

Near midnight, she returned to her apartment. Lights out, in bed, staring at the ceiling, she was unable to sleep.

The blinds were raised, the windows bare. Usually, she liked the smoky, reddish-gold glow of the city at night, but this once it made her uneasy.

She was overcome by the odd notion that if she rose from the bed and went to the nearest window, she would discover the buildings of the metropolis dark, every streetlamp extinguished. This eerie light would he rising, instead, from drainage grates in the street and out of open manholes, not from the city, but from a netherworld below.

The inner eye of the artist, which she could never close even when she slept, ceaselessly sought form and design and meaning, as it did in the ceiling above the bed. In the play of light and shadow across the hand-troweled plaster, she saw the solemn faces of babies-deformed, peering beseechingly—and images of death.

Nineteen hours following Phimie's admission to St. Mary's, while the girl was undergoing the final tests ordered by Dr. Daines, the beetled sky grew sullen in the early twilight, and the city once more arrayed itself in the red gesso and gold leaf that had indirectly illuminated Celestina's apartment ceiling the previous night.

After a day of work, the pencil portrait of Nella Lombardi was finished. The second piece in the series-an extrapolation of her appearance at age sixty-was begun.

Although Celestina had not slept in almost thirty-six hours, she was clearheaded with anxiety. At the moment, her hands weren't shaking;

lines and shading flowed smoothly from her pencil, as words might stream from the pen of a medium in a trance.

As she sat in a chair by the window, near Nella's bed, drawing on an angled lapboard, she conducted a quiet, one-sided conversation with the comatose woman. She recounted stories about growing up with Phimie and was amazed by what a trove she had.

Sometimes Nella seemed to be listening, although her eyes never opened and though she never moved. The silently bouncing green light of the electrocardiograph maintained a steady pattern.

Shortly before dinner, an orderly and a nurse wheeled Phimie into the room. They carefully transferred her into bed.

The girl looked better than Celestina expected. Though tired, she was quick to smile, and her huge brown eyes were clear.

Phimie wanted to see the finished portrait of Nella and the one herself that was half complete. “You'll be famous one day, Celie."

“No one is famous in the next world, nor glamorous, nor titled, nor proud,” she said, smiling as she quoted one of their father's most familiar sermons, “nor powerful-"

— nor cruel, nor hateful, nor envious, nor mean,” Phimie recited, “for all these are sicknesses of this fallen world-"

— and now when the offering plate passes among you-"

"—give as if you are already an enlightened citizen of the next life-"

"-and not a hypocritical, pitiful-"

"-penny-pinching-"

"—possessive—"

"—Pecksniff of this sorry world."

They laughed and held hands. For the first time since Phimie's panicked phone call from Oregon, Celestina felt that everything would eventually be all right again.

Minutes later, once more in a corridor conference with Dr. Daines, she was forced to temper her new optimism.

Phimie's stubbornly high blood pressure, the presence of protein in her urine, and other symptoms indicated her preeclampsia wasn't a recent development; she was at increased risk of eclampsia. Her hypertension was gradually coming under control-but only by resort to more aggressive drug therapy than the physician preferred to use.

“In addition,” Daines said, “her pelvis is small, which would present problems of delivery even in an ordinary pregnancy. And the muscle fibers in the central canal of her cervix, which ought to be softening in anticipation of labor, are still tough. I don't believe the cervix will dilate well enough to facilitate birth."

“The baby?"

“There's no clear evidence of birth defects, but a couple tests reveal some worrisome anomalies. We'll know when we see the child."

A stab of horror punctured Celestina as she failed to repress a mental image of a carnival-sideshow monster, half dragon and half insect, coiled in her sister's womb. She hated the rapist's child but was appalled by her hatred, for the baby was blameless.

“If her blood pressure stabilizes through the night,” Dr. Daines continued, “I want her to undergo a cesarean at seven in the morning. The danger of eclampsia passes entirely after birth. I'd like to refer Phimie to Dr. Aaron Kaltenbach. He's a superb obstetrician."

“Of course."

In this case, I'll also be present during the procedure."

I'm grateful for that, Dr. Daines. For all you've done."

Celestina was hardly more than a child herself, pretending to have the strong shoulders and the breadth of experience to bear this burden. She felt half crushed “Go home. Sleep,” he said. “You'll be no help to your sister if you wind up a patient here yourself."

She remained with Phimie through dinner.

The girl's appetite was sharp, even though the food was soft and bland. Soon, she slept.

At home, after phoning her folks, Celestina made a ham sandwich. She ate a quarter of it. Then two bites of a chocolate croissant. One spoonful of butter pecan ice cream. Everything was without taste, more bland than Phimie's hospital food, and it cloyed in her throat.

Fully clothed, she lay atop the bedspread. She intended to listen to a little classical music before brushing her teeth..

She realized she hadn't turned on the radio. Before she could reach for the switch, she was asleep.

Four-fifteen in the morning, January 7.

In southern California, Agnes Lampion dreams of her newborn son. In Oregon, Junior Cain fearfully speaks a name in his sleep, and Detective Vanadium, waiting to tell the suspect about his dead wife's diary, leans forward in his chair to listen, while ceaselessly- turning a quarter across the thick knuckles of his right hand.

In San Francisco, a telephone rang.

Rolling onto her side, fumbling in the dark, Celestina White snared the phone on the third ring. Her hello was also a yawn.

“Come now,” said a woman with a frail voice.

Still half asleep, Celestina asked, “What?"

“Come now. Come quickly."

“Who's this?"

“Nella Lombardi. Come now. Your sister will soon be dying."

Abruptly alert, sitting up on the edge of the bed, Celestina knew the caller could not be the comatose old woman, so she said angrily, “Who the hell is this?"

The silence on the line was not merely that of a caller holding her tongue. It was abyssal and perfect, as no silence on a telephone ever can be, without the faintest hiss or crackle of static, no hint of breathing or of breath held.

The depth of this soundless void chilled Celestina. She dared not speak again, because suddenly and superstitiously, she feared this silence as though it were a living thing capable of coming at her through the line.

She hung up, shot out of bed, snatched her leather jacket off one of the two chairs at the small kitchen table, grabbed her keys and purse, and ran.

Outside, the sounds of the night town-the growl of a few car engines in the nearly deserted streets, the hard clank of a loose manhole cover shifting under tires, a distant siren, the laughter of drunken revelers wending their way home from an all-night party-were muffled by a shroud of silver fog.

These were familiar noises, and yet to Celestina, the city was an alien place, as it had never seemed before, full of menace, the buildings looming like great crypts or temples to unknown and fierce gods. The drunken laughter of the unseen partyers slithered eerily through the mist, not the sound of mirth but of madness and torment.

She didn't own a car, and the hospital was a twenty-five-minute walk from her apartment. Praying that a taxi would cruise past, she ran, and although no cab appeared in answer to her prayer, Celestina reached St. Mary's breathless, in little more than fifteen minutes.

The elevator creaked upward, infuriatingly slower than she remembered.

Her hard-drawn breath was loud in this claustrophobic space.

On the dark side of dawn, the seventh-floor corridors were quiet, deserted. The air was redolent of pine-scented disinfectant.

The door to Room 724 stood open. Lights blazed.

Both Phimie and Nella were gone. A nurse's aide was almost finished changing the linens on the old woman's bed. Phimie's bedclothe's were in disarray.

“Where's my sister?” Celestina gasped.

The aide looked up from her work, startled.

When a hand touched her shoulder, Celestina swiveled to face a nun with ruddy cheeks and twilight-blue eyes that would now and forever be the color of bad news. “I didn't know they'd been able to reach you. They only started trying ten minutes ago."

At least twenty minutes had passed since the call from Nella Lombardi.

“Where's Phimie?"

“Quickly,” the nun said, shepherding her along the hall to the elevators.

“What's happened?"

As they dropped toward the surgical floor, the solemn sister said, “Another hypertensive crisis.

The poor girl's blood pressure soared in spite of the medication. She suffered a violent seizure, eclamptic convulsions."

“Oh, God."

“She's in surgery now. Cesarean section."

Celestina expected to be taken to a waiting room, but instead the nun escorted her to surgical prep.

“I'm Sister Josephina.” She slipped Celestina's purse off her shoulder—“You can trust this with me”-and helped her out of her jacket.

A nurse in surgical greens appeared. “Pull up the sleeves of your scrub nearly to your elbows. Scrub hard. I'll tell you when to stop."

As the nurse slapped a bar of lye soap in Celestina's right hand, she turned on the water in the sink.

As luck would have it,” the nun said, “Dr. Lipscomb was in the when it happened. He'd just delivered another baby under emergency conditions. He's excellent."

“How's Phimie?” Celestina asked, scrubbing fiercely at her hands and forearms.

“Dr. Lipscomb delivered the baby like two minutes ago. The afterbirth hasn't even been removed yet,” the nurse informed her.

“The baby's small but healthy. No deformity,” Sister Josephina promised.

Celestina's question had been about Phimie, but they had told her about the baby, and she was alarmed by their evasion.

“Enough,” said the nurse, and the nun reached through clouds of steam to crank off the water.

Celestina turned away from the deep sink, raising her dripping hands as she had seen surgeons do in movies, and she could almost believe that she was still at home, in bed, in the fevered throes of a terrible dream.

As the nurse slipped Celestina into a surgical gown and tied it be hind her back, Sister Josephina knelt before her and tugged a pair of elastic-trimmed cloth booties over her street shoes.

This extraordinary and urgent invitation into the sanctum of surgery said more-and worse-about Phimie's condition than all the words that these two women could have spoken.

The nurse tied a surgical mask over Celestina's nose and mouth, fitted a cap over her hair. “This way."

From prep along a short hallway. Bright fluorescent panels over head. Booties squeaking on the vinyl-tile floor.

The nurse pushed open a swinging door, held it for Celestina, and did not follow her into surgery.

Celestina's heart was knocking so hard that the reverberations of it in her bones, traveling down into her legs, seemed as though they would buckle her knees under her.

Here, now, the surgical team, heads bent as if in prayer rather than in the practice of medicine, and dear Phimie upon the operating table, in linens spattered with blood.

Celestina told herself not to be alarmed by the blood. Birth was a bloody business. This was probably an ordinary scene in that regard.

The baby was not in sight. In one corner, a heavyset nurse was attending something at another table, her body blocking whatever occupied her attention. A bundle of white cloth. Perhaps the infant.

Celestina hated the baby with such ferocity that a bitter taste rose into the back of her mouth. Though not deformed, the child was a monster nonetheless. The rapist's curse. Healthy, but healthy at the expense of Phimie.

In spite of the intensity and urgency with which the surgical team was working on the girl, a tall nurse stepped aside and motioned Celestina to the head of the operating table.

And finally, now to Phimie, Phimie alive, but-oh-changed in a way that made Celestina feel as though her rib cage were closing like a clamp around her thudding heart.

The right side of the girl's face appeared to be more strongly affected by gravity than the left: slack yet with a pulled look. The left eyelid drooped. That side of her mouth was turned down in half a frown. From the corner of her lips oozed a stream of drool. Her eyes rolled, wild with fear, and seemed not to be focused on anything in this room.

“Cerebral hemorrhage,” explained a doctor who might have been Lipscomb.

To remain standing, Celestina had to brace herself with one hand against the operating table. The lights had grown painfully bright, and the air had thickened with the odors of antiseptics and blood, until breathing required an effort.

Phimie turned her head, and her eyes stopped rolling wildly. She locked gazes with her sister, and for the first time, she seemed to know where she was.

She tried to raise her right hand, but it flopped uselessly and would not respond, so she reached across her body with her left hand, which Celestina gripped tightly.

The girl spoke, but her words were badly slurred, her speech incoherent.

She twisted her sweat-drenched face in what might have been frustration, closed her eyes, and tried again, getting out a single but intelligible word: “Baby."

“She's suffering only expressive aphasia,” the doctor said. “She can't get much out, but she understands you perfectly."

With the infant in her arms, the heavyset nurse pressed in beside Celestina, who almost recoiled in disgust. She held the newborn so that its mother could look into its face.

Phimie gazed upon the child briefly, then sought her sister's eyes again. Another word, slurred but made intelligible with much effort: “Angel."

This was no angel.

Unless it was the angel of death.

All right, yes, it had tiny hands and tiny feet, rather than hooked talons and cloven hooves. This was no demon child. Its father's evil was'nt visibly reflected in its small face.

Celestina wanted nothing to do with it, was offended by the very sight of it, and she couldn't understand why Phimie would so insistently call it an angel.

“Angel,” Phimie said thickly, searching her sister's eyes for a sign of understanding.

of understanding. “Don't strain yourself, honey."

“Don't strain yourself, honey."

“Angel,” Phimie said urgently, and then, with an effort that made a blood vessel swell in her left temple, “name.

“You want to name the baby Angel?"

The girl tried to say yes, but all that issued from her was “Yunh, yunh,” so she nodded as vigorously as she was able to do, and tightened her grip on Celestina's hand.

Perhaps she was afflicted with only expressive aphasia, but she must be confused to some degree. The baby, which would be placed for adoption, was not hers to name.

“Angel,” she repeated, close to desperation.

Angel. A less exotic synonym for her own name. Seraphim's angel. The angel of an angel.

“All right,” Celestina said, “yes, of course.” She could see no harm in humoring Phimie. “Angel. Angel White. Now, you calm down, you relax, don't stress yourself."

“Angel.

“Yes."

As the heavyset nurse retreated with the baby, Phimie's grip on her sister's hand relaxed, but then grew firm once more as her gaze also became more intense. “Love ... you."

“I love you, too, honey,” Celestina said shakily. “So much."

Phimie's eyes widened, her hand tightened painfully on her sister's hand, her entire body convulsed, thrashed, and she cried, “Unnn, unnn, unnn!"

When her hand went limp in Celestina's, her body sagged, too, and her eyes were no longer either focused or rolling wildly. They shimmered into stillness, darkled with death, as the cardiac monitor sang the one long note that signified flatline.

Celestina was maneuvered aside as the surgical team began resuscitation procedures. Stunned, she backed away from the table until she encountered a wall. In southern California, as dawn of this new momentous day looms nearer, Agnes Lampion still dreams of her newborn: Bartholomew in an incubator, watched over by a host of little angels hovering on white wings, seraphim and cherubim.

In Oregon, standing at Junior Cain's bedside, turning a quarter across the knuckles of his left hand, Thomas Vanadium asks about the name that his suspect had spoken in the grip of a nightmare.

In San Francisco, Seraphim Aethionema White lies beyond all hope of resuscitation. So beautiful and only sixteen.

With a tenderness that surprises and moves Celestina, the tall nurse closes the dead girl's eyes. She opens a fresh, clean sheet and places it over the body, from the feet up, covering the precious face last of all.

And now the stilled world starts turning again....

Lowering his surgical mask, Dr. Lipscomb approached Celestina, where she stood with her back pressed to the wall.

His homely face was long and narrow, as though pulled into that shape by the weight of his responsibilities. In other circumstances, however, his generous mouth might have shaped an appealing smile; and his green eyes had in them the compassion of someone who himself had known great loss.

“I'm so sorry, Miss White."

She blinked, nodded, but could not speak.

“You'll need time to ... adjust to this,” he said. “Perhaps you've got to call family.. . ."

Her mother and father still resided in a world where Phimie was alive. Bringing them from that old reality to this new one would be the second-hardest thing Celestina had ever done.

The hardest was being in this room at the very moment when Phimie had moved on. Celestina knew beyond doubt that this was the worst thing she would have to endure in all her life, worse than her own death when it came.

“And, of course, you'll need to make arrangements for the body,” said Dr. Lipscomb. “Sister Josephina will provide you with a room, a phone, privacy, whatever you need, and for however long you need."

She wasn't listening closely to him. Numb. She felt as though she were half anesthetized. She was looking past him, at nothing, and his Voice seemed to be coming to her through several layers of surgical masks, though he now wore none at all.

“But before you leave St. Mary's,” the physician said, “I'd like a few mutes of your time. It's very important to me. Personally."

Gradually, she perceived that Lipscomb was more troubled than he should have been, considering that his patient had died through no fault of his own.

When she met his eyes again, he said, “I'll wait for you. When you're ready to hear me. However long you need. But something ... something extraordinary happened here before you arrived."

Celestina almost begged off, almost told him that she had no interest in whatever curiosity of medicine or physiology he might have witnessed. The only miracle that would have mattered, Phimie's survival, had not been granted.

In the face of his kindness, however, she couldn't refuse his request. She nodded.

The newborn was no longer in the operating room.

Celestina hadn't noticed the infant being taken away. She had wanted to see it once more, even though she was sickened by the sight of it.

Evidently, her face was knotted with the effort to remember what the child had looked like, for the physician said, “Yes? What's wrong?"

“The baby ...

“She's been taken to the neonatal unit."

She. Heretofore, Celestina hadn't given a thought to the gender of the baby, because, to her, it had been less a person than a thing.

Lipscomb said, 'Miss White? Do you want me to show you the way?"

She shook her head. “No. Thank you, no. Neonatal unit. I'll find it later."

This consequence of rape, the baby, was less baby to Celestina than cancer, a malignancy excised rather than a life delivered. She had been no more impelled to study the child than she would have been, charmed to examine the glistening gnarls and oozing convolutions of a freshly plucked tumor. Consequently, she could remember nothing of its squinched face.

One detail, and one only, haunted her.

As shaken as she had been at Phimie's side, she couldn't trust her memory. Perhaps she hadn't seen what she thought she'd seen.

One detail. One only. It was a crucial detail, however, one that she absolutely must confirm before she left St. Mary's, even if she would be required to look at the child once more, this spawn of violence, this killer of her sister.