What would bring him back to her after so long?
Unable to find an answer, she walked with Josie down the empty, shadowed hallway, stained glass and burnished wood wrapping her in a cocoon of silence.
She spent the next two hours working in the nursery, having a good time with the babies and Josie, doing something that kept her from thinking too much about things she would just as soon forget. She concentrated instead on diaper changing, bottle feeding, telling stories, and playing games, and left the world outside her bright, cheery room of crayon pictures and colored posters to get on by itself as best it could.
Once or twice, she thought about Paul. It was impossible for her to be around babies and not think about Paul, but she had found a way to block the pain by taking refuge in the possibility that she was not meant to have children of her own but to be a mother to the children of others. It was heartbreaking to think that way, but it was the best she could do. Her legacy of magic from the Freemark women would not allow her to think otherwise.
Josie helped pass the time with wry jokes and colorful stories of people they both knew, and mostly Nest found herself thinking she was pretty lucky.
When the service was over, a fellowship was held in the reception room just off the sanctuary. After returning her small charges to their proper parents, Nest joined the congregation in sipping coffee and punch, eating cookies and cake, and exchanging pleasantries and gossip. She wandered from group to group, saying hello, asking after old people and children come home for the holidays, wishing Christmas cheer to all.
"What's the world coming to, young lady?" an indignant Blanche Stern asked when she paused to greet a gaggle of elderly church widows standing by the narthex entry. She peered at Nest through her bifocals. "This is your generation's responsibility, these children who do such awful things! It makes me weep!"
Nest had no idea what she was talking about.
"It's that boy shooting those teachers yesterday at an outing in Pennsylvania," Addie Hull explained, pursing her thin lips and nodding solemnly for emphasis. "It was all over the papers this morning. Only thirteen years old."
"Takes down his father's shotgun, rides off to school on his bike, and lets them have it in front of two dozen other students!" Winnie Ricedorf snapped in her no-nonsense teacher's voice.
"I haven't read the papers yet," Nest explained. "Sounds awful. Why did he do it?"
"He didn't like the grades they were giving him for his work in some advanced study program," Blanche continued, her face tightening. She sighed. "Goodness sakes alive, he was a scholar of some promise, they say, and he threw it all away on a bad grade."
"Off to his Saturday Challenge Class," Winnie said, "armed with a shotgun and a heart full of hate. What's that tell you about today's children, Nest?"
"Remember that boy down in Tennessee last year?" Addie Hull asked suddenly. Her thin hands crooked around her coffee cup more tightly. "Took some sort of automatic rifle to school and ambushed some young people during a lunch break? Killed three of them and wounded half a dozen more. Said he was tired of being picked on. Well, I'm tired of being picked on, too, but I don't go hunting down the garbage collectors and the postal delivery man and the IRS examiner who keeps asking for those Goodwill receipts!"
"That IRS man they caught dressing in women's clothes earlier this month, good heavens!" Winnie Ricedorf huffed, and took a sip of her coffee.
"His wife didn't mind, as I recall," Blanche Stern advised primly, giving Nest a wink. "She liked to dress up as a man."
Nest excused herself and moved on. Similar topics of conversation could be found almost everywhere, save where clusters of out-of-season golfers looking forward to a few weeks in Florida replayed their favorite holes and wrestled with the rest of the sports problems of the world while the teenagers next to them spoke movie and rap and computer talk. She drifted from group to group, able to fit in anywhere because she really belonged nowhere at all. She could talk the talk and pretend she was a part of things, but she would never be anything but an outsider. She was accepted because she had been born in Hopewell and was a part of its history. But her legacy of magic and her knowledge of Pick's world and the larger life she led set her apart as surely as if she had just stepped off the bus from New York City.
She sipped at her coffee and looked off at the blue winter sky through the high windows that lined the west wall. What was she doing with herself anyway?
"Wish you were out there running?" a friendly voice asked.
She turned to find Larry Spence standing next to her. She gave him a perfunctory smile. "Something like that."
"You could still do it, girl. You could still get back into training, be ready in time for St. Petersburg."
The Olympics in four years, he was saying. "My competitive days are over, Larry. Been there, done that."
He was just trying to make conversation, but it felt like he was trying to make time as well, and that annoyed her. He was a big, good-looking man in his mid-thirties, athletic and charming, the divorced father of two. He worked as a deputy sheriff with the county and moonlighted nights as a bouncer at a dance club. His family were all from Hopewell and the little farm towns surrounding. She had known him only a short while and not well, but somewhere along the line he had decided he wanted to change the nature of their relationship. He had asked her out repeatedly, and she had politely, but firmly, declined. That should have been the end of it, but somehow it wasn't.
"You were the best, girl," he said, putting on his serious-guy mask. He always called her "girl." Like it was some sort of compliment, an endearment intended to make her feel special. It made her want to smack him.
"How are the kids?" she asked.
"Good. Growing like weeds." He edged closer. "Miss having their mother with them, though. Like there was ever, anything about her for them to miss."
Marcy Spence had not been what anyone could call dependable even before she had children, and having children hadn't improved her. She was a party girl with a party girl's tastes. After numerous flings with just about anyone inclined to show her a good time, and a number of screaming knock-down-drag-outs with her husband, the marriage was over. Marcy was on the road and out of Hopewell even before the papers were filed, husband and kids be damned. She was twenty-four when she left. "Babies raising babies," Nest had heard the old ladies tut-tut.
"Got any plans for Christmas?" Larry asked her suddenly. His brow furrowed. "You know, it would be good for the kids to have a woman around for the present opening and all."
Nest nodded, straight-faced. "Sort of a stand-in mother."
Larry paused. "Well, yeah, sort of, I guess. But I'd like it if you were there, too."
She gave him a pointed look. "Larry, we barely know each other."
"Not my fault," he said.
"Also, I've met your children exactly once. They probably don't even know who I am."
"Sure, they do. They know."
She shook her head. "The timing's not right," she said diplomatically. "In any case, I have my own plans."
"Hey, just thought I'd ask." He shrugged, trying to downplay the importance of the request. "No big deal."
It was, of course, as any teenage girl, let alone a woman of Nest's age, could see in a heartbeat. But Larry Spence had already demonstrated with Marcy that he was far from wise in the ways of women. In any case, he was in way over his head with Nest. He had no idea what he was letting himself in for by pursuing her, and she was not about to encourage him by spending Christmas at his home with his children. In this instance ignorance was bliss. Let him tie up with someone normal; he would be far better off.