From the Corner of His Eye

Chapter 23

CELESTINA RETURNED TO Room 724 to collect Phimie's belongings from the tiny closet and from the nightstand.

Her hands trembled as she attempted to fold her sister's clothes into the small suitcase. What should have been a simple task became a daunting challenge; the fabric seemed to come alive in her hands and slip through her fingers, resisting every attempt to organize it. When eventually she realized there was no reason to be neat, she tossed the garments into the bag without concern for wrinkling them.

Just as Celestina snapped shut the latches on the suitcase and turned to the door, a nurse's aide entered, pushing a cart loaded with towels and bed linens.

This was the same woman who had been stripping the second bed when Celestina arrived earlier. Now she was here to remake the first.

“I'm so sorry about your sister,” the aide said.

“Thank you.

“She was so sweet."

Celestina nodded, unable to respond to the aide's kindness. Sometimes kindness can shatter as easily as soothe.

“What room has Mrs. Lombardi been moved to?” she asked. “I'd like to ... to see her before I go."

“Oh, didn't you know? I'm sorry, but she's gone, too."

“Gone?” Celestina said, but understood.

Indeed, subconsciously, she had known that Nella was gone since receiving the call at 4:15 this morning. When the old woman had finished what she needed to say, the silence on the line had been eerily perfect, without one crackle of static or electronic murmur, unlike anything Celestina had ever heard on a telephone before.

“She died last night,” said the aide.

Do you know when? The time of death?"

“A few minutes after midnight."

“You're sure? Of the time, I mean?"

“I'd Just come on duty. I'm working a shift and a half today. She passed away in the coma, without waking."

In Celestina's mind, as clear as it had been on the phone at 4:15

A.M., the frail voice of an old woman warned of Phimie's crisis:

Come now.

What?

Come now. Come quickly.

Who's this?

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

If the call had really come from Mrs. Lombardi, she had placed it more than four hours after she died.

And if it hadn't come from the old woman, who had impersonated her? And why?

When Celestina had arrived at the hospital, twenty minutes later, Sister Josephina had expressed surprise: I didn't know they'd been able to reach you. They only started trying ten minutes ago.

The call from Nella Lombardi had come before Phimie was stricken with eclamptic seizures and rushed to surgery.

Your sister will soon be dying.

“Are you all right, dear?” the nurse's aide asked.

Celestina nodded. Swallowed hard. Bitterness had flooded her heart when Phimie died, and hatred for the child that had lived at the mother's expense: feelings she knew were not worthy of her, but which she could not cast out. These two amazements—Dr. Lipscomb's story and Nella's telephone call-were an antidote to hatred, a balm for anger, but they also left her half dazed. “Yes. Thank you,” she told the aide. “I'll be okay."

Carrying the suitcase, she left Room 724.

In the corridor, she halted, looked left, looked right, and didn't know where to go.

Had Nella Lombardi, no longer of this beautiful world, reached back across the void to bring two sisters together in time for them to say good-bye to each other?

And had Phimie, retrieved from death by the resuscitation procedures of the surgical team, repaid Nella's kindness with her own stunning message to Lipscomb?

From childhood, Celestina was encouraged to be confident that life had meaning, and when she'd needed to share that belief with Dr. Lipscomb as he struggled to come to terms with his experience in the operating room, she'd done so without hesitation. Strangely, however, she herself was having difficulty absorbing these two small miracles.

Although she was aware that these extraordinary events would shape the rest of her life, beginning with her actions in the hours immediately ahead of her, she could not clearly see what she ought to do next. At the core of her confusion was a conflict of mind and heart, reason and faith, but also a battle between desire and duty. Until she was able to reconcile these opposed forces, she was all but paralyzed by indecision.

She walked the corridor until she came to a room with empty beds. Without turning on the lights, she entered, put down the suitcase, and sat in a chair by the window.

Even as the morning matured, the fog and the rain conspired to bar all but a faint gray daylight from St. Mary's. Shadows flourished.

Celestina sat studying her hands, so dark in the darkness.

Eventually she discovered within herself all the light that she needed to find her way through the crucial hours immediately ahead. At last she knew what she must do, but she was not certain that she possessed the fortitude to do it.

Her hands were slender, long-fingered, graceful. The hands of an artist. They were not powerful hands.

She thought of herself as a creative person, a capable and efficient and committed person, but she did not think of herself as a strong person. Yet she would need great strength for what lay ahead.

Time to go. Time to do what must be done.

She could not get up from the chair.

Do what must he done.

She was too scared to move.