Hatch would not have been surprised to see furniture spun aloft and
artwork flung off walls as the attorney passed, for he seemed to radiate
enough energy to levitate anything within his immediate sphere of
influence.
Keeping up a continuous line of patter, Gujilio gave Jiminez a bear hug,
shook hands vigorously with Duran, and bowed to each of the nuns with
the sincerity of a passionate monarchist greeting members of the royal
family. Gujilio bonded with people as quickly as one piece of pottery
to another under the influence of super glue, and by their second
meeting he'd greeted and said goodbye to Lindsey with a hug.
She liked the man and didn't mind the hugging, but as she had told
Hatch, she felt like a very small child embracing a sumo wrestler. "He
lifts me off my feet, for God's sake," she'd said. Now she stayed on
the sofa instead of rising, and merely shook hands with the attorney.
Hatch rose and extended his right hand, prepared to see it engulfed as
if it were a speck of food in a culture dish filled with hungry amoebas,
which is exactly what happened. Gujilio, as always, took Hatch's hand
in both of his, and since each of his mitts was half-again the size of
any ordinary man's, it wasn't so much a matter of shaking as being
shaken.
"What a wonderful day," Gujilio said, "a special day. I hope for
everyone's sake it goes as smooth as glass."
The attorney donated a certain number of hours a week to St. Thomas's
church and the orphanage. He appeared to take great satisfaction in
connecting adoptive parents with disabled kids.
"Regina's on her way from the ladies," Gujilio told them. "She stopped
to chat a moment with my receptionist, that's all. She's nervous, I
think, trying to delay a little longer until she has her courage screwed
up as far as it'll go. She'll be here in a moment."
Hatch looked at Lindsey. She smiled nervously and took his hand.
"Now, you understand," Salvatore Gujilio said, looming over them like
one of those giant balloons in a Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, "that
the point of this meeting is for you to get to know Regina and for her
to get to know you. Nobody makes a decision right here, today. You go
away, think about it, and let us know tomorrow or the day after whether
this is the one. The same goes for Regina. She has a day to think
about it."
"It's a big step," Father Jiminez said.
"An enormous step," Sister Immaculata concurred.
Squeezing Hatch's hand, Lindsey said, "We understand."
The Nun with No Name went to the door, opened it, and peered down the
hallway. Evidently Regina was not in sight.
Rounding his desk, Gujilio said, "She's coming, I'm sure."
The attorney settled his considerable bulk into the executive office
chair beside his desk, but because he was six-feet-five, he seemed
almost as tall seated as standing. The office was furnished entirely
with antiques, and the desk was actually a Napoleon III table so fine
that Hatch wished he had something like it in the front window of his
shop. Banded by ormolu, the exotic woods of the marquetry top depicted
a central cartouche with a detailed musical trophy over a conforming
frieze of stylized foliage. The whole was raised on circular legs with
a can thus-leaf ormolu joined by a convoluted X stretcher centered with
an ormolu urn finial, on toupie feet. At every meeting, Gujilio's size
and dangerous levels of kinetic energy room, saying, "Here she comes,"
as if she didn't want Regina to think she had been looking for her.
The sound came again. Then again. And again.
It was rhythmical and getting louder.
Thud- Thud.
Lindsey's hand tightened on Hatch's.
Thud Thud!
Someone seemed to be keeping time to an unheard tune by rapping a lead
pipe against the hardwood floor of the hallway beyond the door.
Puszled, Hatch looked at Father Jiminez, who was staring at the floor,
louder and closer, Father Duran stared at the half-open hall door with
astonishment, as did The Nun with No Name. Salvatore Gujilio rose from
his chair, looking alarmed. Sister Immaculata's pleasantly ruddy cheeks
were now as white as the linen band that framed her face.
Hatch became aware of a softer scraping between each of the hard sounds.
Thud! Sccccuuuurrrr... Thud! Sccccuuuurrrr..
As the sounds grew nearer, their effect rapidly increased, until Hatch's
mind was filled with images from a hundred old horror films: the-thing
from-out of the-lagoon hitching crablike toward its prey; the-thing-from
out-of-the-crypt shuffling along a graveyard path under a gibbous moon;
the-thing-from-another-world propelling itself on God-knows-what sort of
arachnoid-reptilian-horned feet.
THUD!
The windows seemed to rattle.
Or was that his imagination?
Sccccuuuurrrr..
A shiver went up his spine.
THUD!
He looked around at the alarmed attorney, the head-shaking priest, the
wide-eyed younger priest, the two pale nuns, then quickly back at the
half-pen door, wondering just exactly what sort of disability this child
had been born with, half expecting a startlingly tall and twisted figure
to from a laboratory where the scientists are doing some really
interesting genetic research. A shadow tilted across the threshold.
Hatch realized that Lindsey's grip on his hand had become downright
painful. And his palm was damp with sweat.
The weird sounds stopped. A hush of expectation had fallen over the
room.
Slowly the door to the hall was pushed all the way open.
Regina took a single step inside. She dragged her right leg as if it
were a dead weight: sccccuuuurrrr. Then she slammed it down: THUD!
She stopped to look around at everyone. Challengingly.
Hatch found it difficult to believe that she had been the source of all
that ominous noise. She was small for a ten-year-old girl, a bit
shorter and more slender than the average kid her age. Her freckles,
pert nose, and beautiful deep-auburn hair thoroughly disqualified her
for the role of the-thing-from-the-lagoon or any other shudder-making
creature, although there was something in her solemn gray eyes that
Hatch did not expect to see in the eyes of a child. An adult awareness.
A heightened perceptivity. But for those eyes and an aura of iron
determination, the girl seemed fragile, almost frighteningly delicate
and vulnerable.
Hatch was reminded of an exquisite 18th-century Mandarin-pattern
Chinese-import porcelain bowl currently for sale in his Laguna Beach
shop.
It rang as sweetly as any bell when pinged with one finger, raising the
expectation that it would shatter into thousands of pieces if struck
hard or dropped. But when you studied the bowl as it stood on an
acrylic display base, the hand-painted temple and garden scenes
portrayed on its sides and the floral designs on its inner rim were of
such high quality and possessed such power th
at you became acutely aware
of the piece's age, the weight of the history behind it. And you were
soon convinced, in spite of its appearance, that it would bounce when
dropped, cracking whatever surface it struck but sustaining not even a
small chip itself.
Aware that the moment was hers and hers alone, Regina hitched toward the
sofa where Hatch and Lindsey waited, making less noise as she limped off
the hardwood floor onto the antique Persian carpet. She was wearing a
white blouse, a Kelly-green skirt that fell two inches above her knees,
green kneesocks, black shoes-and on her right leg a metal brace that
extended from the ankle to above the knee and looked like a medieval
torture device. Her limp was so pronounced that she rocked from side to
side at the hips with each step, as if in danger of toppling over.
Sister Immaculata rose from her armchair, scowling at Regina in
disapproval. "Exactly what is the reason for these theatrics, young
lady?"
Ignoring the true meaning of the nun's question, the girl said, "I'm
sorry I'm so late, Sister. But some days it's harder for me than
others." Before the nun could respond, the girl turned to Hatch and
Lindsey, who had stopped holding hands and had risen from the sofa.
"Hi, I'm Regina. I'm a cripple."
She reached out in greeting. Hatch reached out, too, before he realized
that her right arm and hand were not well formed. The arm was almost
normal, just a little thinner than her left, until it got to the wrist,
where the bones took an odd twist. Instead of a full hand, she
possessed just two fingers and the stub of a thumb that all seemed to
have limited flexibility.
Shaking hands with the girl felt strange distinctly strange but not
unpleasant.
Her gray eyes were fixed intently on his eyes. Trying to read his
reaction.
He knew at once that it would be impossible ever to conceal true
feelings from her, and he was relieved that he had not been in the least
repelled by her deformity.
"I'm so happy to meet you, Regina," he said. "I'm Hatch Harrison, and
this is my wife, Lindsey."
The girl turned to Lindsey and shook hands with her, as well, saying,
"Well, I know I'm a disappointment. You child-starved women usually
prefer babies young enough to cuddle-" The Nun with No Name gasped in
shock. "Regina, really!"
Sister Immaculata looked too apoplectic to speak, like a penguin that
had frozen solid, mouth agape and eyes bulging in protest, hit by an
arctic chill too cold even for Antarctic birds to survive.
Approaching from the windows, Father Jiminez said, "Mr. and Mrs.
Harrison, I apologize for-"
"No need to apologize for anything," Lindsey said quickly, evidently
sensing, as Hatch did, that the girl was testing them and that to have
any hope of passing the test, they must not let themselves be coopted
into an adults-against-the-kid division of sympathies.
Regina hopped-squirmed-wriggled into the second armchair, and Hatch was
fairly certain she was making herself appear a lot more awkward than she
really was.
The Nun with No Name gently touched Sister Immaculata on the shoulder,
and the older nun eased back into her chair, still with the
frozen-penguin look. The two priests brought the client chairs from in
front of the attorney's desk, and the younger nun pulled up a side chair
from a corner, so they could all join the group. Hatch realized he was
the only one still standing. He sat on the sofa beside Lindsey again.
Now that everyone had arrived, Salvatore Gujilio insisted on serving
refreshinentPepsi, ginger ale, or Perrier-which he did without calling
for the assistance of his secretary, fetching everything from a wet bar
discreetly tucked into one mahogany-paneled corner of the genteel once.
As the attorney bustled about, quiet and quick in spite of his
immensity, never crashing into a piece of furniture or knocking over a
vase, never coming even close to obliterating one of the two Tiffany
lamps with hand-blown trumpet-flower shades, Hatch realized that the big
man was no longer an overpowering figure, no longer the inevitable
center of attention: he could not compete with the girl, who was
probably less than one-fourth his size.
"Well," Regina said to Hatch and Lindsey, as she accepted a glass of
Pepsi from Gujilio, holding it in her left hand, the good one, "you came
here to learn all about me, so I guess I should tell you about myself.
First thing, of course, is that I'm a cripple." She tilted her head and
looked at them quizzically. "Did you know I was a cripple?"
"We do now," Lindsey said.
"But I mean before you came."
"We knew you had some sort of problem," Hatch said.
"Mutant genes," Regina said.
Father Jiminez let out a heavy sigh.
Sister Immaculata seemed about to say something, glanced at Hatch and
Lindsey, then decided to remain silent.
"My parents were dope fiends," the girl said.
"Regina!" The Nun with No Name protested. "You don't know that for
sure, you don't know any such a thing."
"Well, but it figures," the girl said. "For at least twenty years now,
illegal drugs have been the cause of most birth defects. Did you know
that?
I read it in a book. I read a lot. I'm book crazy. I don't want to
say I'm a bookworm. That sounds icky, don't you think? But if I were a
worm, I'd rather be curled up in a book than in any apple. It's good
for a crippled kid to like books, because they won't let you do the
things ordinary people do, even if you're pretty sure you can do them,
so books are like having a whole other life. I like adventure stories
where they go to the north pole or Mars or New York or somewhere. I
like good mysteries, too, most anything by Agatha Christie, but I
especially like stories about animals, and most especially about talking
animals like in The Wind in the Willows.
I had a talking animal once. It was just a goldfish, and of course it
was really me not the fish who talked, because I read this book on
ventriloquism and learned to throw my voice, which is neat. So I'd sit
across the room and throw my voice into the goldfish bowl." She began to
talk squeakily, without moving her lips, and the voice seemed to come
out of The Nun with No Name: "Hi, my name's Binky the Fish, and if you
try to put me in a sandwich and eat me, I'll shit on the mayonnaise.
"She returned to her normal voice and talked right over the flurry of
reactions from the religiosities around her. "There you have another
problem with cripples like me. We tend to be smart-mouthed sometimes
because we know nobody has the guts to whack us on the ass."
Sister Immaculata looked as if she might have the guts, but in fact all
she did was mumble something about no TV privileges for a week.
Hatch, who had found the nun as frightening as a pterodactyl when he'd
first met her, was not impressed by her glower now, even though it was
so intense that he registered it with his peripheral vision. He could
no
t take his eyes off the girl.
Regina went blithely on without pause: "Besides being smart-mouthed
sometimes, what you should know about me is, I'm so clumsy, hitching
around like Long John Silver now there was a good book-that I'll
probably break everything of value in your house. Never meaning to, of
course. It'll be a regular destruction derby. Do you have the patience
for that? I'd hate to be beaten senseless and locked in the attic just
because I'm a poor crippled girl who can't always control herself. This
leg doesn't look so bad, really, and if I keep exercising it, I think
it's going to turn out pretty enough, but I don't really have much
strength in it, and I don't feel too damned much in it, either." She
balled up her deformed right hand and smacked it so hard against the
thigh of her right leg that she startled Gujilio, who was trying to
convey a ginger ale into the hand of the younger priest, who was staring
at the girl as if mesmerized. She smacked herself again, so hard that
Hatch winced, and she said, "You see? Dead meat.
Speaking of meat, I'm also a fussy eater. I simply can't stomach dead
meat. Oh, I don't mean I eat live animals. What I am is, I'm a
vegetarian, which makes things harder for you, even supposing you didn't
mind that I'm not a cuddly baby you can dress up cute. My only virtue
is that I'm very bright, practically a genius. But even that's a
drawback as far as some people are concerned. I'm smart beyond my