Part 3 — Room Four Remembered
“Back then her name was Darlene Pike,” the voice of my daughter said from the little white box. “Mom, you trained her.” I knew before the recording finished. I had known the moment Renee called the lace a rag, in a voice I had heard before, in a break room, fifteen years ago.
Darlene Pike. A nurse aide I trained on the oncology floor at Eastern Maine, a quick, friendly girl with blond highlights who called every patient hon. I wrote the report that ended her job. Wedding rings missing from the drawers of patients. A cash envelope short. A chart she had falsified to cover a shift she skipped. Her aide certification was revoked that spring, and she left the hospital in tears, and I never saw her again.
Jenna kept speaking from the speaker, calm and a little amused. “Mom, I never told you because I was dying and I did not want my last months to be a fight. But Darlene was assigned to my room that winter. She sat on my bed and was kind to me. I think she was lonely. I also saw her take the ring from the woman in Room 6. I think she changed her name to hide from that. I know she would do it again if she thought no one was looking.”
Doug turned in the front pew. He looked at the woman he had been married to for six years like a stranger. “Renee?” he said. “You told me you were a nurse.” Her voice came out small and cracked. “I said I worked in healthcare,” she whispered. “I said it, Doug. I never said nurse.” Nobody in that church drew breath.
Father Callahan stepped forward with the folder. “As co-trustee of the money for Molly, I asked the probate court on Thursday to remove Douglas as trustee and to appoint an independent bank in his place. The judge signed the order this morning.” The bank attorney had copies of every statement. There was a dock lift, a pontoon, a Lexus lease, and a vacation in Jamaica, all paid from the school money of a twelve-year-old girl who had just lost her mother.
Doug put his head in his hands in the pew. “Phyllis, I thought it was my money,” he said, when he could talk. “After Jenna died, I stopped looking at the statements. Renee told me Molly would be fine. I let her tell me.” I did not forgive him on the spot. I did tell him that he would have the chance to make it right, and I told him that making it right would take longer than saying so.
Then something happened that I will carry to my grave. Molly stood at the altar in the lace of her mother with her bouquet trembling, and she looked at the little white box, and she said, “Father, is there more?” The old priest smiled. He pressed the button once more. “Molly-bird,” said Jenna, “that is enough about the grown-ups. Marry that boy. Dance for me.” The whole church laughed and cried at once.
The wedding went on. Caleb, the groom, a tall quiet young man who studies to be a teacher, said his promises in a voice that carried to the back pew. Molly said hers. Father Callahan, eighty-four years old and unsteady on the altar steps, married them, and when he finished, he kissed the girl on the forehead. A mother had reached across fifteen years to put one honest man in front of an altar, and he had arrived right on time.
By spring the new bank had recovered the $54,000. The pontoon boat was sold, the dock lift too, and the Lexus went back to the dealer. Doug repays the rest from his salary every month under the supervision of the court. He pleaded guilty to misapplying trust money and was given probation. Renee pleaded to fraud for using a false name on her credit applications, and she was ordered to repay what she spent and barred for life from any work in healthcare.
Molly finished nursing school in May with no loans at all. She wore her white coat at the ceremony and asked me to pin her badge. I could hardly do it for crying. I thought of Jenna, and the freezer bag of bank statements under the blueberries, and the long cold years when I did not know what to do with what I knew.
Renee wrote me a letter from her new apartment in Brewer. I read the first line and put it in my cedar chest, still sealed, beside the place where the lace used to lie. Maybe I will read it one day. Not yet. A person is allowed to wait until she is ready to hear another voice.
The lace is back in the chest now, wrapped in tissue, but only for a while. Molly says she wants her own daughter to walk down an aisle in it someday. I told her that I would be there. I am seventy-one years old, and I plan to be there a good long time.
