Cody Goodfellow [Radiant Dawn Radiant Dawn (epub)

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.Every so often, the nasal squawk of the intercom summoned someone she'd never heard of to somewhere she'd never had cause to go, but nothing was going on in the ER.Stella Orozco's features were what men called "exotic," and women called "striking," when they wanted to say "weird" and "intimidating."From her father she'd inherited the bronze skin and ebony hair common to Mexican mestizos, but her face was a gift from her Indian mother, with angular brow and cheekbones, deepset black eyes, an aquiline nose and an almost too-wide, generously lipped mouth that scarcely moved even when it spoke, which wasn't often.Her shortness, her fragile slimness could do nothing to contradict that face, those eyes that were forever saying, Leave me alone with my secrets, or I might just tell you one.At twenty-nine, Stella had been an LPN for only three years, having taken community college courses for four years to get certified.Her age and temperament led her coworkers to think Stella had drifted into nursing the same way other young women of poor prospects might end up in retail or clerical work, and she offered them nothing that made them think otherwise.But Stella's path to her present life had been a struggle up out of depths none of the other staff could imagine, and she wanted no one's pity.Her parents were migrants from lower Mexico who began crossing the border to work the fields of Central California in 1970.They scrambled over fences and through sewers to get into the U.S.every harvest season; toiled for twelve to fourteen hours a day for a few dollars every week, inhaling pesticides like DDT, malathion, parathion and experimental compounds the USDA would never hear of; lived in shanties with no electricity or running water for five months out of the year, and snuck back over the border like thieves, their only crime a season of backbreaking labor for pennies.Stella's mother was already three months' pregnant with her that first season, and they stayed in California long enough for her to be born a U.S.citizen.They still migrated back to Mexico for the next couple of years before legitimately applying for citizenship themselves and settling in the dusty farm town of Modesto.By the time she was eight, Stella's father was doing landscaping and construction work and owned a truck, and her mother stayed home and devoted herself to spoiling her only daughter rotten.Stella's mother was so generous and radiant with love for her that Stella never noticed how sick she was.She died just before Stella turned twelve; her father started drinking in earnest and abandoned her less than a year later, most likely returning to Mexico.Cycled through a route of wildly variant foster homes, Stella forgot that parents were for loving, and learned to view them as models to be observed, obeyed and evaded.She quickly picked up which responses earned her her privacy, her meals, and minimal emotional support, and learned to spot which ones simply couldn't be reasoned with, and how to keep them from hurting her.From them, she had learned that an education and a calling were what separated the former from the latter types, and she threw herself into getting both.She worked long and hard, and got further than statistics predicted for one so poor, and so late in learning English, but not nearly so far as she'd dreamed.For all that her quick, cautious mind ran circles round most others who'd never had to work as hard, the language would always be a strange tool on her tongue, with appendages she could not grasp, and textures that eluded her palate.Fortunately, Stella recognized this early on, with the characteristic talent for accepting hard, ugly reality that comes naturally for those who have never been able to afford self-pity.Taking stock of her marketable natural talents, Stella discovered that she enjoyed caring for people, was excited by science, and (perhaps a scar of her years in the fields, an untouchable whom even transients never willingly saw) needed invisibility.She decided to become a nurse.She'd worked odd jobs to pay her way through college while interning as a candy-striper in the hospital, then moved in as a nurse.Now, she felt secure and safely detached, and wanted nothing more from life.She'd reflected deeply and meaningfully, and seen that she would do all right if things stayed this way forever, with or without a man or a winning lottery ticket or a best friend.The only thing wrong now was that she had liver cancer, and about six months to live.She hadn't told anyone at the hospital about this, either."Heads up, Stella." The voice made her jump and scald her thumb on the tea [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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