Читать книгу These Things Hidden - Heather Gudenkauf, Heather Gudenkauf - Страница 14

Ever since she started her nursing practicum hours at St. Isadore’s, not a day goes by that Charm doesn’t think about the baby. Even though she knows he is well cared for and loved, she can’t walk by the yellow Safe Haven signs in the hospital without remembering both the sadness and the relief she felt after giving him up, although he wasn’t just hers to give away. In all honesty, she feels mostly relief. If she hadn’t taken him to the fire station, she probably would never have been able to manage to finish high school, let alone go to college. And Charm is convinced that her mother would have somehow found a way to ruin that baby’s life.

Charm rushes down a street lined with the venerable brick buildings that make up St. Anne’s campus. The small, private college sits in the middle of Linden Falls and is surrounded by historical homes and cobblestone streets that are beginning to crumble. Out of breath, she joins a group of students walking to their Leadership and Contemporary Issues in Nursing class. Sophie, a tall, gangly girl who wants to work in pediatric oncology, is in the midst of insisting that she has a psychic link with her mother.

“Seriously,” Sophie says as they enter the classroom, “I can just be thinking of my mother and she’ll call me a minute later.”

“No way.” Charm snorts. “I don’t believe you.” Charm looks at her classmates for support but they are all smiling knowingly, nodding their heads and saying things like, “It’s true, I’ve got that with my sister.”

“Try it,” Charm tells her, crossing her arms and leaning back in her chair.

“Okay.” Sophie shrugs her shoulders and digs into her purse, pulls out her cell phone and sets it on the desk in front of her.

“Now what?” Charm asks.

“Nothing, we just wait. She’ll call in the next minute or so,” she explains.

Charm shakes her head in disbelief but in a matter of minutes Sophie’s phone begins to vibrate, doing a little dance across the table. Sophie picks up the phone and shows everyone the display screen. Mom.

“Hey, Mom,” Sophie says into the phone. “I was just thinking of you.” She smiles in triumph at Charm.

Charm is impressed but saddened, too. She can recall no one with whom she has such a profound connection. Certainly not her mother. Reanne always needs to be the center of attention. Charm was never enough for her, her brother wasn’t enough, Gus wasn’t enough. Reanne Tullia was always on the search for something better, more exciting. Charm has no idea where her brother is and her father could be dead for all she knew. Charm did have a boyfriend last year who called her all the time, but that had more to do with his crazy insecurity than any supernatural bond.

Gus, she thinks. She may have that bond with Gus. He’s the one who taught her to ride a bike, how to multiply fractions, the one who sat in the audience and blinked back tears when she walked across the stage to receive her high school diploma.

Everything Charm has learned about being a good parent, a good person, she learned from Gus. One thing she knows for certain, when she gets married and has children, she will be there, day in and day out. She won’t leave when things get hard or sad or just plain boring.

That’s something her mother or her brother never learned.