Reborn

3

Later, when she was calmer, Grace sat on the edge of her bed and thought about what Carol had told her about Jim being an heir to the Hanley estate.

She felt good now. The Rosary, a bowl of hot cream of mushroom soup, and it was as if nothing had happened. Within minutes of Carol and Jim's departure, she had felt fine.

An anxiety attack, that's what it had been. She had seen so many of them back in her days as an emergency-room nurse but had never imagined she would ever fall victim to one. A little phenobarbital, a little reassurance, and the patient, usually a thin young woman who smoked too much—I certainly don't fit that picture—would be sent on her way in much-improved condition.

But what could have triggered it?

Guilt?

Very likely. She had read articles in her nursing journals about guilt being at the root of most anxiety.

Well, I've certainly got plenty to be guilty about, haven't I?

But Grace didn't want to think about the past, nor even about her anxiety attack. She turned her thoughts to what Carol had said. Astonishing things, such as Jim being an orphan—Grace hadn't had the slightest notion about that—and about his being named in a will…

Dr. Roderick Hanley's will.

Grace vaguely remembered doing private duty for a Dr. Hanley, in the early days of World War II. She had cared for a newborn boy in a town house about twenty blocks uptown in Turtle Bay. It had been a live-in job. The child's mother, whoever she was, was nowhere to be seen. The doctor never mentioned her. It was as if she had never been.

Could that have been the same Dr. Hanley?

Could that infant have been Jim Stevens?

It didn't seem probable, but the timing was right. Jim would have been an infant at that time. Jim Stevens could very well have been that child.

Oh, I hope not, Grace thought.

Because there had been something wrong with that child, with that whole house. Grace hadn't been able to identify exactly what it was that had made her so uncomfortable there, but she remembered being grateful that the job lasted only a few days.

Shortly thereafter she changed her evil ways and returned to the Church.

She wished Carol would return to the Church. It saddened her to think of her only niece as a fallen away Catholic. She blamed that on Jim. Carol said he wasn't to blame. She said the Church just didn't seem "relevant" anymore. Everyone seemed to talk about "relevance" these days. But didn't she see that the Church, as God's instrument in the world, was above and beyond something as transient as "relevance"?

No, the relevance angle sounded like Jim talking. The man was an incurable skeptic. The Church taught that no one was beyond hope of redemption, but Grace was quite certain that Jim was testing the limits of that teaching. She hoped he hadn't permanently endangered Carol's soul."

But he seemed to make Carol happy—happier than she had ever been since her parents died. And there was much to be said for making another person happy.

Maybe there was hope for Jim yet. Grace vowed to pray for both their souls.

Grace worried about souls. Especially her own. She knew that before she returned to the Church in her late twenties, she had blackened her soul almost beyond repair. Since then she had worked at cleansing it by doing penance, doing good works, and seeking absolution.

Absolution was the hardest for her. She had received a plenary indulgence on a number of occasions from various visiting bishops, but she wondered if it had worked for her, wondered if it had really had the effect she'd prayed for: to wipe her soul clean of all her past sins. There were so many! She had committed the worst of sins in her younger days, terrible sins she was afraid to think about, hideous sins that so shamed her, she had never been able to speak them to a priest, even in the confessional. The lives she had taken! She was sure—knew—that if anyone in the Church learned of the things she had done in her youth, she certainly would be excommunicated.

And excommunication would kill her. The Church was her only source of peace now.

Grace glanced at the clock next to her bed—the dial was set into a pair of hands folded in prayer—and saw that she would be late for choir practice if she didn't hurry. She didn't want to miss that. She felt so good when she was praising the Lord in song.