Miracle (32 page)

The room was now done in soft gray and ivory, hardly traditional nursery colors, but not surprising in view of Marie’s nature. They gave the place dignity. Surrounded by such colors and furnishings of Victorian wicker, their child would develop eclectic tastes, she vowed.

Sebastien and she were happier and closer than they had ever been. During her sixth month they went to Sainte Crillion’s outpatient clinic together. Marie had scheduled a sonogram.

Sebastien sat down beside the cushioned table where she lay propped on pillows, her tailored maternity blouse pulled up to expose her rounded stomach above a dark skirt. Filled with anticipation, Sebastien playfully thumped her belly with a forefinger. “This melon is ripe, I believe.”

She looked embarrassed. “I beg your pardon.”

“When I worked in America, in the South, people were always in the markets during the summer, thumping enormous green watermelons. Thumping watermelons is really quite a regional custom, it seems.”

“It is
not
summer, and I am
not
a watermelon.”

“You are not smiling, and you should be. Even a watermelon should have a sense of humor.”

“Sometimes, Sebastien, I think you consider yourself funny. You really aren’t, my darling, and you shouldn’t try to be amusing.”

Frowning mildly, he sat back while the technician, a pleasant little woman, prepared to begin. He
had
a sense of humor, he told himself. He could remember times with Amy when he had laughed with a deep, belly-tugging joy that had made him feel clean inside. More than that, he recalled making Amy laugh in return.… But why was he thinking about her when his wife waited to share a child with him?

“Oh, look, Sebastien!”

Marie’s exclamation drew him out of his pensive reverie. Sebastien leaned forward, watching as the technician moved a sensor over Marie’s abdomen and an X-ray-like picture flickered on a video monitor. With all his years in medicine, with all his knowledge of sonograms and what to expect, still the sight of his own baby awed him. This little one he could love. This little one he could protect.

“It’s a boy,” the technician noted, smiling. “Large. Very handsome, too. We’ve obviously caught him in the middle of a nap. Maybe he’ll move, in a second. In the meantime, I’ll try to show you a picture of his heart. To see it beating is a marvelous—hmmm. His position is making it difficult to locate. This little one is going to test my skill, I see.”

As the technician continued to move the scanner and make exasperated sounds, Sebastien straightened rigidly in his chair. His attention never left the murky screen.

“I’m gong to ask Dr. Reginau to have a try at this,” the technician said in a carefully nonchalant tone of voice. “He’s much more skilled than I.” She avoided looking at Sebastien and hurried from the room.

Marie raised up on her elbows. “Sebastien? Is something wrong?”

Because he didn’t want to believe it, he answered no. Sebastien stared at the screen, then at Marie’s stomach.

She lay back but grasped one of his hands. “You’re
freezing cold. What is it? You know how to read a sonogram. What are you afraid of?”

Slowly he raised his eyes to hers. She shivered. He squeezed her hand tightly. The words hung in his throat like shards of ice. “She can’t find the heartbeat because there isn’t one. The baby is dead.”

Labor was induced, and a few hours later Marie expelled the fetus. She didn’t want Sebastien present for the pitiful event, and he didn’t protest. Dr. Reginau, the obstetrician, came to him afterward and said all the appropriate things: There was no obvious abnormality, no obvious problem with the pregnancy, no reason to think such a thing would happen again. This was just nature’s way of correcting a mistake.

Your father honors his mistakes
.

My mother is not a mistake, you whore
.

The words came back to Sebastien with startling vividness. That was when he hit Marie’s doctor. When Reginau was being helped to his feet by several shocked nurses, Sebastien told him that his child had not been a mistake, by nature’s standards or any others.

There would be repercussions because of such uncalled-for violence. He had struck a fellow physician, and a popular one, at that. He had struck a physician at the same hospital where he himself was on staff. Where he hoped to become head of the proposed transplant unit.

Marie lay in a private room, sedated, attended by her mother and Annette. She gave Sebastien a glazed look and told him to go home, that she didn’t need him. He was relieved to hear it. He spent the night walking the boulevards, his bruised hand throbbing.

Marie had the workmen come back and put a lock on the nursery door. Then she bolted it and kept the key in her jewelry box. She told Sebastien that she didn’t want the room opened again until she brought a baby into it. He had never
seen her distraught and depressed before, and his efforts to soothe her were complicated by his own depression.

It was typical of their relationship that she didn’t really want to share her grief with him, and he didn’t know how to share his with anyone, including her. So they retreated into their work. She moved into another bedroom temporarily, preferring her privacy. He lay in their big, canopied bed each night, exhausted from another twenty-hour day, and stroked himself roughly. At those times he rarely thought of Marie but instead saw a piquant face with expressive green eyes and a scarred chin.

Three months passed in that way. Life began to feel normal again, although normal was not as it had been before. And then, one cold winter night just after one, the police came. Two detectives stood stiffly in the downstairs hall. The older of the two, a grim-looking veteran, spoke brusquely.

“Doctor de Savin?”

“Yes.”

“You have a brother named Jacques?”

“Yes.”

The younger man shifted and cleared his throat. “We’re sorry to tell you that he has … been found … dead.”

Sebastien took a step back and rested a hand on the banister. He stood very still, his shoulders stiff, his head up. “You must be mistaken. My brother isn’t even in Paris. He’s living in Amsterdam.”

The older detective, looking as if he’d been through this sort of scene a thousand times, rubbed his neck above a sweat-stained shirt collar and sighed. “No, Doctor. He had plenty of identification. It was with him in his hotel room. A guest reported hearing a gunshot. An officer went to investigate.”

They are simply mistaken
, Sebastien thought firmly, “This person you found, he was murdered?”

“No. It appears to have been suicide.”

“That is not something my brother would do.”

The older detective grimaced. “Doctor, we have a note. It was written to you. We’re keeping it at the station. If you’d come with us, we can show it to you. And the body, as well.”

After a silent moment, Sebastien found his voice. “I see.” He turned smoothly and started up the stairs. “Let me tell my wife some delicate lie for the moment, and then I’ll go with you.”

“Very good.”

Sebastien heard the younger detective whisper to the other, “No brotherly love lost here, it seems.”

They took him to the police station and showed him a note written on hotel stationery in Jacques’s sweeping script.

Sebastien read the words a dozen times.
What courage, you coward?
he demanded silently.
What honor? What code of honor tells you to die
?

“Do you know what he might have meant?” one of the detectives asked.

“No.”

“Did you know that he was sick?”

Sebastien looked up, frowning. “I suspected that he had a drug habit. What do you mean?”

“There was no evidence of drugs in the room.”

“Then what was there?”

The younger detective fetched a pamphlet from Jacques’s belongings. “Perhaps it means nothing.” He handed it to Sebastien.

“Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome—Facts and Fallacies.”

Sebastien stared at the title. It absorbed him. It brought back his conversation with Jacques at Annette’s wedding. It ripped at his conscience.

“Are you all right, Doctor?” someone asked. Then, “Bring the doctor some water. Doctor? Would you like to call
someone else in your family? Someone who can come to the station? Or a friend, perhaps? Here. The water.”

Sebastien tossed the pamphlet on a table and waved the glass of water away. “I’d like to see my brother’s body.”

They took him to the morgue. The chief medical examiner was very blunt. “The body has a nasty head wound,” he warned, as an assistant wheeled a sheet-draped gurney into a room with walls of stained concrete and floors dotted with drains.

Someone offered Sebastien a pair of yellow rubber gloves. Sebastien shook his head. The medical examiner coughed awkwardly and said that he couldn’t allow him to touch the body without them, under the circumstances.

Sebastien took the gloves and slid them onto his hands. These were not a surgeon’s gloves, meant for the artistry of life; these were the sort of gloves one wore to handle filth and death.

The drape was pulled back, and he stepped close, deliberate and silent, feeling as if he were in a dream. The gloves were appropriate. The thing on the table, with its misshapen head wrapped in bloody plastic, was only an obscene imitation of Jacques’s beauty.

Sebastien pushed the plastic away and looked at his brother’s face, then stroked his fingers down the silent artery in the throat, convincing himself. At the edge of his brother’s bloodstained T-shirt he found an ominous lesion.

“A typical sarcoma related to the syndrome,” the medical examiner interjected. “Probably, that is.”

“Yes. Yes.” Sebastien’s voice was low and hollow, for Jacques alone. “What you did took courage. It took honor. I wish I had known.” He laid his fingertips on Jacques’s lips.

“You and your brother were very close,” the medical examiner said with sympathy.

“No.”
Not until now, when there’s only a secret to share, as there was with our mother. Forgive me, forgive me
. “I want the nature of his illness kept from the rest of the family. Will that be possible?”

“I don’t see why not. We’re very good at misplacing information that would otherwise shame the serviving relatives.”

Sebastien turned Jacques’s face toward him and looked into the empty eyes.
There is no shame, little brother
.

He had spent so many years frowning at Jacques. He wanted to give him a smile now, but he was afraid it would ruin his control. His love for Jacques wasn’t lost at all. It was bottled inside his chest, cold and hard, where it hurt more than anyone could imagine.

Annette was openly devastated by Jacques’s death. She was six months pregnant, the same as Marie had been when she lost a baby, so Giancarlo whisked her away for a vacation in Tuscany after the funeral. He was a charismatic man, too much so, Sebastien thought. Annette was almost slavish in her devotion to him. But in this case, Sebastien was grateful that Giancarlo took her away from Paris and its memories.