The Reverend Mother spoke to him in a whisper. “He’s the first friend to visit,” she said. “I think Mary could stand to see a friend? Just for a short while?”
Zelinsky didn’t answer. He sank into his chair, shaking his head, and buried his face in ink-stained hands.
“Ten minutes, love,” the Reverend Mother told me. She placed a gentle hand on the small of my back, guiding me through the doorway. “Mary’s had a long day, do you understand?”
“Thank you,” I said.
I stepped cautiously into the room. I didn’t know anything about babies—I’d never even held a baby—so part of me was scared to go any farther. The room was divided into halves by a curtain: The front half was empty. The back half had a bed and a chair and a window overlooking the parking lot. Mary was sitting up in the bed, chewing on a pencil eraser and reading a large binder full of computer code. Her hair was pulled back in a headband, and some of the color had returned to her face. If she hadn’t been dressed in a hospital gown, you might not have realized that anything was wrong.
“You’re all right?” I asked.
“All the gory stuff is over,” she said. “Be glad you weren’t here five hours ago.”
I looked around the room. There was a dresser and a television, but I didn’t see any cribs or boxes or containers that might be holding a baby.
“Where is it?” I asked.
“Where’s what?” she asked. “The baby?”
“Yeah.”
“She’s down the hall. With her parents. They just got here from Scranton.”
I took a moment to process this, to understand what she meant.
“Are they nice?”
“Super nice. They’re music teachers. And they already have a daughter, so she’ll have a sister. They have a house with three bedrooms, and they live across the street from a park. My father and I drove out there a month ago so we could see exactly where she’d live. It’s really nice, nicer than Wetbridge.”
A month ago. And all this time I had no idea. A month ago, I had walked into the store to buy hearing aid batteries, and Mary gave me a flyer advertising a computer programming contest. And I had no idea.
All this time she’s been fooling you right back, Zelinsky told me. You don’t know her at all.
“Scranton’s not very far,” I said. “I guess you could visit?”
Mary shook her head. “It’s not going to work like that,” she said, and her voice cracked. She looked at the open binder in her lap. “But look what they brought me. As a gift.” She closed the binder and showed me the cover. It was the operating guide for the new IBM PS/2 computer. “No more messing around on 64s for me. I’m moving on to the big time. VGA graphics and a twenty-megabyte hard disk.”
It’s crazy: In spite of everything she’d been through, I felt a pang of envy. With a PS/2, Mary would rocket into the big time. Nothing would hold her back now.
“Do you want to sit down?” she asked.
The only seat in the room was a hard-backed metal folding chair, but I took it anyway. “I’m glad you’re okay.”
“Me too.”
“I thought you were dying.”
“Dying of embarrassment, maybe.”
“I didn’t know,” I said. “I really had no clue.”
“God, it was so obvious,” Mary said. “Did you notice how many times I went to the bathroom?”
I shrugged. “I thought that was normal. In movies, girls are always running to the bathroom.”
“I guess I did a good job of hiding everything.” She gently patted her hips. “The perks of having a full figure.”
I didn’t know what to say to that.
“At the end of this month,” Mary continued, “I was supposed to visit my aunt in Harrisburg. Have the baby out there. You never would have known.”
“You could have just told me.”
“No, I couldn’t have,” she said, and I knew Mary was right. I wouldn’t have understood. I didn’t even understand now. There was only one explanation for all of this, and yet it seemed impossible: “Tyler Bell?”
“Yeah.”
“Was it— You know— Did he force himself on you?”
She shook her head. “More like the other way around.”
“You forced yourself on Tyler Bell?”
Mary scrambled for the remote control and turned on the television. “Can you keep your voice down?” She raised the volume, concealing our conversation with an ad for Calvin Klein Obsession. “It was stupid, Will. I know it was stupid. He took me out on his motorcycle, and I thought we’d just kiss.”
“But you liked him? Liked him liked him?”
She didn’t answer right away. She looked like she was trying to remember something that happened many years ago.
“My mom had this thing about second chances,” she explained. “?‘Everybody deserves a second chance,’ she’d say. Even criminals. Especially criminals. Before she got sick, when she worked at the store, she’d hire part-timers who were straight out of prison. She said it was the Christian thing to do, that Jesus commanded us to forgive them. My father hated this idea. He thought she was crazy. Hiring thieves to stock our shelves. It was nuts, right? But Mom didn’t care. She hired ex-cons for years, never had any problems. And then after she died—”
Mary stopped, reached for a plastic cup, and took a long drink of water. “Maybe a year after she died, our part-timer quit, so now it’s Dad’s turn to hire someone. And he decides he wants to honor Mom’s legacy. He wants to do the Christian thing. So he goes to the cops and says, ‘Bring me a screwup.’ Meaning, bring me some kid who’s always in trouble so Dad can straighten him out. The very next day, a cop comes by with Tyler Bell.”
“Did you know him?”
“No, I’d never met him. But I’d seen him riding around Market Street on his Harley. Every girl in Wetbridge knows him by sight. They would come by the store and buy crap they didn’t need, just for the chance to see him. His hair and his eyes and the whole biker thing. To be honest, I’m not sure if I really liked him, or if I just liked him because everybody else liked him.”
She explained that the first few weeks passed without incident. Tyler did his work and kept to himself. “He was nice to me because he had to be,” Mary said. “I was the boss’s daughter, right? So even though he’s three years older, I felt really safe talking to him. Making little jokes. I guess it was flirting. But always when Dad had his back turned. Tyler didn’t mind, he just laughed. So every day I got a little bolder.”
Then one night Tyler invited Mary to take a ride on his motorcycle. She described how he drove them into the woods behind the Ford motor plant. They sat on blankets and smoked a cigarette. Then they started kissing and didn’t stop. “I was so mad at myself, Will. As soon as it ended, I knew it was a mistake. Tyler was nervous. He wouldn’t stop talking. He said that out of all the girls he’d been with, I had the nicest hair. Like that was a compliment, you know?”