Miracle (58 page)

“No. You look like hell. Stop being stubborn.”

“
You’re
making me sick by arguing with me. All Frenchmen like to argue. It’s a national sport.” She sucked in a sharp breath as her lower stomach cramped. Without thinking she rubbed a hand over the front of her wraparound blue dress.

He saw her reaction and shook his head. “Are you getting diarrhea?”

“What a romantic question. Yes!”

“Don’t blush, for God’s sake. I spent years studying, smelling, and cleaning up every unlovely by-product the human body can make. Nothing offends me. Or embarrasses me. And after all the intimacies you and I have shared, I’m surprised that you’re embarrassed.”

“We only have a week left! I don’t want to be sick!” She sagged against the door frame, shook her head angrily when he stepped inside, then groaned with exasperation when he picked her up. “Shall I take you back to the toilet, my lady?” he asked in a gentle, if somewhat droll, tone.

She clutched her stomach and gave up with a weary nod.

Sebastien sent one of the house servants to a pharmacy with a prescription, but the medicine barely eased Army’s stomach. All that night and the next day she struggled with what she began to call Napoleon’s revenge. Sebastien waited on her hand and foot, forcing her to accept a new role in their relationship. She loved him for it but was miserably uncomfortable with her helplessness. He refused to leave her for the office or the hospital. His father, still unconscious, wouldn’t know if he visited or not, he told her, and Annette would hardly notice his absence among her nightly parade of friends.

The next afternoon Jacques and Louise peeked in at her once when the suite’s door was open. She waved at them wanly from under the bed covers, and they waved back. Louise looked tearful, and Jacques frowned with anxiety. She knew that the adult world must seem unpredictable and dangerous to them right now.

“I’ve only got a stomach ache,” she called, with all the cheerfulness she could muster. “And boy, do I stink.”

They clasped their mouths and giggled. Sebastien watched from a desk across the room, where he was reading business documents. “Let Amy rest, now. Go and play.”

They dragged their heels when their nanny herded them away. Amy shut her eyes as her stomach made gurgles of queasy protest. “If you want to make me feel better, go visit with them.”

“Sssh. I’m going downstairs in a minute and fix you another cup of tea.”

“I don’t want a cup of tea. I want—” Her stomach revolted unexpectedly, and she flung herself to the edge of the bed. When she threw up on an antique tapestry rug beside it she burrowed her head on her arms and began to cry, thumping the mattress with one fist as frustration overwhelmed her.

Sebastien came to her with soothing murmurs, then cleaned both her and the rug. She pulled a pillow against her face to muffle weak, indignant sobs. “This flu usually disappears as quickly as it comes,” he whispered, sitting down beside her to caress her hair. “Try to sleep, love.”

“I want to take care of you. I wanted everything to be perfect. We don’t have very much time left. It’s all ruined.”

His patience deserted him. He grasped her chin, turning her face toward him. “Goddammit, you’re ruining it by being too hard on yourself. Do you think I’m going to desert you if you’re not always strong? Why is it fine for me to have faults, but you have to be some kind of Joan of Arc, always riding to my rescue?”

“It’s why you loved me in the first place. You wanted me because I tried to save you from yourself.”

“And you did. You do.” He gently wiped her face with a
damp washcloth as she stared up at him in puzzlement. “Dear Miracle, do you think I would be capable of putting aside everything else to take care of you this way if you hadn’t already accomplished your rescue mission? If I’m able to be human, to give and deserve love, it’s because of you. God knows what I would have become if we’d never met. God knows what I
did
become before I found you again.”

“Oh, Sebastien.”

“You’ve done your duty, Joan of Arc. You continue to do it, just by loving me and wanting me to love you in return. Now please, let me take care of you. It’s what I’m best at myself, believe it or not.”

“I believe it,” she said tenderly. “It’s why you became a doctor, isn’t it?”

“It was the earliest motivation, yes. Somehow … it became lost as the years passed.” His expression hardened, and he looked sad.

“You miss your work, don’t you? It was your whole life. I’m beginning to understand how much it hurts you to be away from it.”

“I thought I’d die when I was forced to leave my career. But then I realized that I’d been dying
because
of it. I’ve needed this time to get my perspective straight.” His eyes filled with tenderness as he studied her. “When I return to medicine, it won’t be my life’s only focus. I’ll be a better doctor, because I’ll be a complete person. Because of you.”

He held her hand while she fell asleep. By the next morning she was recuperating, eating dry toast and watching him thoughtfully over cups of honeyed tea. “Since you’re a great doctor, I’m trying to be a great patient. You see?”

He winked. “Your attitude certainly smells better.”

That night, in honor of her recuperation, he offered her brandy with her tea. Soon she was smiling at him impishly and beckoning with a crooked finger. When he took her in his arms she felt a greater gentleness and confidence than
she’d ever known before. They made love slowly, simply, but every sensation seemed full of portentous meaning. She tried to decipher it but lost track in the flood of emotion. Afterward she lay with her head on his shoulder, his warmth spreading through her, great changes whispering just beyond the edges of her control.

H
e met her three weeks later, in Illinois, after she finished her work in the movie. They had three days before her first club date, in Chicago. She was booked in an unending grind of shows for the next four weeks. Her agent was thrilled.

She and Sebastien drove to the state’s rugged northwestern corner and rented a cabin overlooking a steep ravine filled with wildflowers, a waterfall, and majestic granite boulders. Even in June the nights were crisp; they built a fire in the cabin’s fieldstone fireplace and put the mattress by the hearth. Wrapped in quilts, they made love there with the slow, thorough attention of connoisseurs sampling the last bottle of a vintage wine.

She slipped away during the night and went to the bathroom. Behind a closed and locked door she washed herself and scrubbed between her legs with a white towel until she burned. Desperation fed her frantic examination of the towel. There wasn’t even a tiny red trace of reassurance. She had begged her body to show some evidence of it by today. There was no reason for the delay. She always took her pills. She hadn’t been careless.

The pristine towel mocked her. She threw it on the floor and sat down beside it, hugging her knees. Over the past two days she had searched her memories through the years with Elliot, trying to recall whether her pill-regulated cycle had ever been late before. It hadn’t. She hoped, for both
her and Sebastien’s sakes, that there wasn’t a baby. She had agreed to honor Sebastien’s wishes. What now?

Compromise
. But there might be no way to compromise on this.

Shivering, she got up and tiptoed through the cabin. Beside the mattress she paused, looking down at him as he slept. He lay on his back, the quilts twisted around him like a patchwork landscape that had been wrenched by earthquakes, his turbulence and powerful spirit evident even when he was at rest.

In her own way she was as strong as he, but if what she feared came true, she didn’t know if strength would help. Wrapping herself in a blanket, she went to the cabin’s front deck and sat on the edge, grateful that the darkness hid her and that the rush of the waterfall a few yards away muffled her crying.

He woke up and came searching for her, a long quilt bound around his waist and trailing the wooden floor in a graceful train that was suitably, and disturbingly, majestic. Unaware of his effect on her anxieties, he knelt down beside her and touched her damp face, then crooned a word of sorrow and took her in his arms.

“Nothing to cry over, dear Miracle,” he whispered, rocking her. “We’ll only be apart a little while longer. It’s only a temporary setback. Only a temporary parting. You know that. Now convince me that the time will pass quickly, or I’ll kidnap you.”

She thought she’d die from missing him, even before he left.

There was something he felt he had to do, Sebastien told her on the last day of his visit. He conceded that it was impulsive and impractical, but he’d already chartered a private jet for the trip.

He wanted the two of them to fly down to Atlanta for the day. He wanted to see her father, at the nursing home. “Why?” she asked, bewildered.

“Perhaps the visit will help me deal with my own father.”

“You met Pop ten years ago, and that was enough for me. I don’t want you to see him again. He’s pitiful. I’m ashamed of him in a different way, now.”

“Be fair, love. I’m ashamed of my father, also, but I took you to see him.”

While in Paris she had talked Sebastien into taking her to the hospital one night. She had needed to put Philippe de Savin in perspective for her own peace of mind. When she had seen him—thin, frail, paralyzed, unconscious—she could hardly imagine the commanding patriarch Sebastien described, the man who had alienated or destroyed most of his family because he had refused to live by anyone’s traditions but his own. She felt that she understood him, to Sebastien’s shock. No one understood his father, he told her.

She had touched one of the blue-veined hands, examined it with her fingertips, noted the strength and grace still evident in it. Her father’s hands were like it; so were Sebastien’s. She kept that observation private and told Sebastien that his father and hers were more alike than not, products of their own disappointments, their own inability to see the world outside their grand expectations.

So now Sebastien insisted on seeing Pop. She dreaded the visit. On the chartered jet she paced and fidgeted, not soothed by Sebastien’s reassurances.

At the nursing home they located Pop by a sunny window, dressed in one of the jogging suits Amy had bought for him during an earlier visit. He was strapped into his wheelchair because he couldn’t sit up without help. His face was slack and tranquil. He’d had several small strokes over the past year; his few coherent thoughts were expressed with garbled sounds and weak movements of one hand. One side of his mouth hung downward, and the skin around it sagged like wax that had been warmed and allowed to melt a little.

She kissed his pale, mottled forehead and watched his hand flutter; she felt sure that he recognized her, but whether he was pleased, she couldn’t tell. All her life she’d had that problem with him, so it didn’t depress her now.

“They cut his hair,” she said, frowning as she touched the short, red-gray strands. She called a nurse’s assistant over and asked about it. From the first she’d told the staff to leave his hair alone. “We hired a couple of new attendants,”
the woman explained. “One of them took Mr. Zack down to the barbershop by mistake. Just didn’t know he wasn’t supposed to.”

“I want it left alone. He likes it long.”

“We’ll let it grow.”

After the assistant walked away Amy promised, “It’ll grow back, Pop.”

He made a noise. It might have been an oath or a laugh. She glanced at Sebastien, who was watching them both closely. “It was his sign of rebellion,” she said with a choked voice. “He ought to be able to keep it, even in this place.” She patted Pop’s shoulder then pointed to Sebastien. “This is Dr. de Savin, Pop. You met him once a long time ago. At a medieval fair up in the mountains. Remember?”

He blinked sluggishly and said nothing. Sebastien took Pop’s hand and introduced himself, squeezing gently. Poignant hope rose in Army’s chest, but Pop looked at him with vague, curious eyes that soon moved away absently, then rested on her. “Ellen?”

He said the name with startling clarity. Amy felt goose bumps on her arms. To Sebastien she whispered, “My mother’s name was Ellen.” To Pop she said in a patient voice, “I’m Amy.”

“Ellen.” His hand wavered, crept forward, prodded her stomach with a bony knuckle. “Baaaah-be. Don’t dah.”

Amy felt the blood drain from her face.
Baby. Don’t die
. She cleared her throat and told Sebastien, “My mother died when I was born. He’s just gettin’ confused.”

Her hands trembled as she took his and held it on her knees. He repeated the warning, his crooked mouth having trouble with it but still managing to say it louder than before. Amy stroked his hand fervently.
I’ll let Sebastien worry about curses. I refuse. Stop it, Pop
.

He said the words again, then shifted in his chair with growing agitation. Sebastien put a hand on Amy’s shoulder, and she jumped. “I don’t know what’s gotten into him!”

“Calm down, love. Just talk to him.” Sebastien leaned forward and placed his other hand on Pop’s knee. “She is not Ellen,” he said in his deep, attention-holding voice.
Pop stared at him. “She is not Ellen,” Sebastien repeated. “She doesn’t have a baby. She’s not going to die.”