Ian Jones had called her from the bookstore and told her to take as long as she needed to to come back to work. She was going to keep her job, in spite of the money she had inherited. She loved working in the bookshop, and she still had plenty of time for her writing. And she had no plans to move out of Mrs. Boslicki's house. Now that Steve was gone, she felt safe there.
“So what have you been up to while I was gone?” Peter asked her after examining her. “Dinner? Dancing? The usual?”
“Very usual. Someone came to wash my hair, and they still won't let me go to the bathroom.” She laughed, her victories were still very small here, but she was happy to see him.
“We might be able to change that.” He made a note on the chart, and looked at her arm, and how the plastic surgeon's work was repairing. She was doing nicely. And then he asked her something he had wondered about when he saw her X rays. “Were you ever in a car accident, Gabbie? You look like you've had a few broken bones before. Your ribs look like they've been through the wars.” And he'd seen scars in her scalp when he was checking her head for swelling.
“More or less,” she answered vaguely, with an odd look in her eyes. He noticed her withdrawal immediately. She was a woman with a lot of secrets.
“That's an interesting answer. Well have to talk about it sometime.” But he had other patients to see.
He came back later that night with a ginger ale for her and a cup of coffee.
“I thought I'd check on you. I just had dinner. They keep a stomach pump in the cafeteria in case they poison anyone. We use it at least four times every evening.” He sat down in the chair and she laughed at him. She noticed that he looked tired tonight, and could see how hard he worked there.
He asked her about her writing, and where she went to school. He was from the Southwest, and in a way, she thought he had the look of a cowboy. He had a long, easy lope as he crossed the halls, and she'd noticed that he wore cowboy boots with his whites. He had noticed how blue her eyes were, and that as the swelling in her face went down, as he had suspected, she was very pretty. And very young. And very old at the same time. She was a woman of many contrasts. There was something very wise and sad about her eyes, which fascinated him, but then again, being beaten within an inch of her life by the man she'd lived with couldn't have been easy. He asked about him a little bit and she didn't seem anxious to talk about him. One of the nurses had shown him the article in the paper, but he didn't mention it to Gabbie.
“So where did you grow up?” he asked easily, curious about her, as he sipped his coffee. She was nice to talk to.
“Here. In New York.” But she didn't mention the convent. They discovered that they were both only children, and he had gone to Columbia Medical School, which was what had brought him to New York originally, and something they had in common. But in many ways, they seemed very different. He was very easy and open, and had seen a lot of cruelty in his life, but he had never lived it. There was something about her that suggested to him that she had seen more than most people her age, or many far older. There were doors that he knew were closed to him, but he didn't know how to find the key to unlock them. She seemed to do a lot of thinking.
And then, purely by coincidence, he mentioned that one of his friends from school had become a priest, and they had stayed close. He seemed very fond of him, and Gabriella smiled as she listened. He thought she was making fun of him, and he tried convincing her that even priests were people. She couldn't resist telling him then that she'd been a postulant, and grew up in a convent. But she didn't tell him about Joe or any of what had happened the year before.
He was fascinated by her history, and the fact that she'd almost been a nun, and eventually he asked her what had changed her mind about it.
“That's a long story,” she said with a sigh, ignoring the question.
He had to go back to work and promised to see her the next day. But he came back later that night, and was sure she'd be asleep by then, it was after midnight, and he was surprised to find she wasn't. She was lying in bed quietly, with her eyes open. There was something very quiet and peaceful about her.
“Can I come in?” He'd been thinking about her all evening, and felt drawn toward her room when he was passing it, when he finished with his patients.
“Sure.” She smiled and propped herself up on her good elbow. There was a small light on in the corner of the room, but it was mostly dark and cozy. She'd been lying there, reflecting about her parents. She had been doing that a lot lately, particularly her father.
“You looked pretty serious for a minute there. Are you okay?”
She nodded. She was, actually, considering everything that had happened. Steve had disappeared from her life like a dream. It was almost as if he had never existed. In one way or another, all the people she had ever cared about had vanished, except lately she seemed to feel more peaceful about it.
“I was thinking about my parents,” she admitted, and he was sympathetic. Her chart said she had no next of kin, and he assumed they had died at some point, and he asked her when it happened. She hesitated before she answered. “They didn't. I think my father is in Boston, and my mother lives in California. I haven't seen him in fourteen years, and my mother in thirteen.” He looked startled.
“Were you a bad girl? Did you run away to join the circus?” he asked, and she laughed at the image.
“No, I ran away to join the convent,” but he already knew that. “It's a long story, but my father left when I was a kid, and then my mother dropped me off at the convent and never came back.” It sounded like a fairly simple story, but he suspected it wasn't.
“That's a little unusual. Why couldn't they keep you? Had you done anything to seriously annoy them?”
“They thought so. They weren't too keen on children.”
“They sound like lovely people,” he said, watching her, wishing he could move closer to her, but he was on duty, and she was his patient. He was already spending a lot of time with her, and he didn't want to cause any comment.
“They weren't,” Gabriella said softly, and then decided she had nothing to hide from him. She felt strangely safe talking to him. And it was their dark secret as much as her own. She had always felt so ashamed about it, but now she didn't. “They were the car accident you asked me about. Or actually, she was. He was just the casual observer.”
“I'm not sure I understand.” He looked troubled as he said it. He didn't want to understand, couldn't conceive of what she was saying.
“The broken ribs. A Christmas present from my mother, several years in a row. It was her favorite gift, actually. She gave it to me often.” She tried to put a little levity into it, but it was a tough subject to lighten.
“She beat you?” He looked stunned. “That's what I saw on the X rays?”
“Probably. I never broke anything any other way. She spent ten years beating me up constantly before she left me.” Her eyes were big and sad and he reached out and touched her. He held her hand in his own, as his heart went out to her. He couldn't imagine what she'd been through.
“Gabbie… how awful… didn't anybody help you, or stop her?” That was even more inconceivable to him, that she had been a child with no allies.
“No, my father used to watch, but he never said anything. He was afraid of her, I think. And finally, he just couldn't take it anymore, so he left her.”
“Why didn't he take you with him?” It was a question she had never dared ask herself, but she wondered now, and shrugged as she looked up at Peter.
“I don't know the answer to that. There are a lot of answers I don't have about them. I've been thinking about it since all this happened. I know why Steve did it. It was right out front. I made him angry. He wanted money and I wouldn't give it to him. At least it was direct. But I never knew why they hated me, what made them hate me so much, I never understood it. They always said I was so bad… so terrible… that if I hadn't been so bad they wouldn't have had to do it. But how bad can a kid be?” It was a question that had begun to haunt her lately.