Suddenly (22 page)

For a minute she didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t stay long; having a naked man in her bed was the worst kind of example to set for Jill, and she wasn’t sure whether Sami should be seeing him, either, though the little girl seemed no worse for the experience. She was drinking her milk happily, making the same sweet sucking sounds, now mixed with the slow sough of Noah’s breathing.

Kitty rose from her ball, stretched herself shoulders to rump, and hopped over the lumps in the bed until she reached Noah’s face. She explored it with her nose. He didn’t move. She caught sight of a corner of the sheet extending beyond his shoulder and bounded toward it. He didn’t move then or when she began to play.

It struck Paige that for someone who had spent years enjoying a wide expanse of bed in solitude, she had quite a crowd in it now. Assuring herself that it was a temporary condition, she felt an odd pang low in her stomach. But the pang wasn’t unfamiliar. She let Sami finish her bottle and burped her, then sat her in the playpen and retreated into the bathroom.

A short time later, she emerged freshly showered. Noah hadn’t moved an inch. His damp hair looked darker than usual, all the more so against the white of her pillow, and his limbs seemed to stretch forever under the covers. He had the solid build of a casual runner, not skinny as a fanatic would be, but well toned. Even as she told herself that he had no business being in her bed, she couldn’t deny that he did wonderful things to the shape of her sheets.

Sami was still sitting—the skill had come quickly, as Paige had known it would—and was gravely studying a small stuffed dog while kitty struggled to climb the mesh walls of the playpen and join her. The tiny animal made it halfway up before losing her footing and tumbling back down, but on the next try she crested the top and scrambled inside. Sami looked at her, made a soft sound of greeting, and reached out.

Something was agreeing with her here, Paige thought with more than a little pride. Granted, someone else would be taking over her care before long, but Mara would be pleased with what Paige had done. Not that it had been hard. Sami was an incredibly easy baby. She ate and she slept. She took her shots with barely a peep and put up with the exercises Paige did morning and night. The amoeba infection she had come with had cleared itself up, and if there had been emotional problems, they were responding to love.

Wrapped in a large towel, Paige bent over the playpen. She reached in and stroked Sami’s head. “That’s kitty. Can you say it? Kit-ty. Look at her play…. Oooops, she has your ball. Let’s get it.” Paige reached for the knobbed toy. She squeezed it into a squeak, then held it out for Sami to grab.

Sami stared at Paige.

“Here,” Paige said. She rubbed the ball against Sami’s hand. Sami looked down, studied the ball, cautiously put her hands on either side of it. “That’s right,” Paige encouraged. “That’s my girl.”

She straightened and looked at Noah, who remained dead to the world. So she dressed and dried her hair, then scooped Sami from the playpen. The silence from the second floor told her that Jill was still asleep, which was nothing new. She was a typical teenager. Paige didn’t have the heart to wake her until it was absolutely necessary.

Holding Sami on her hip, a shield against temptation, she came down on a knee on the bed and called a soft, “Noah? Wake up, Noah.”

He breathed deeply in, deeply out.

“You can’t sleep here,” she sang. “I have impressionable children in this house.”

Actually, Sami didn’t seem impressed at all. She was studying Noah the same way she had her stuffed dog, curiously but unattached.

“Noah?” Paige called more loudly, then gave a staccato,
“Noah
.”

He drew in a breath and turned over.

She sighed, straightened, and said in a full voice, “Okay. Just until Sami and I have breakfast. Then you have to leave.”

She shut the door tight with kitty inside and told Sami, “Let her pounce on him for a while. He’ll wake up.”

But he didn’t. Twenty minutes later he was sleeping as soundly as before. This time Paige shook his shoulder. “Noah?” She shook it again. “Wake up, Noah.”

He made a disgruntled sound.

“Noah
.”

One eye came open. Paige saw no sign of recognition in it.

“You have to get up, Noah. You can’t sleep here. Jill will be waking up soon, and a representative from the adoption agency is coming by. The last thing I need is for either of them to see you.”

He stared at her for another minute. “Paige?”

She rolled her eyes.

He looked around in confusion, until understanding slowly came. Then he made a tired sound.

“Look,” she said, and one part of her wasn’t lying, “I’d like to let you sleep here, but this is a really bad time. The rain has let up. You can run on back to Mount Court.”

He had both eyes open now, focused on her in a muzzy way. “How long have you been up?” he asked.

“A while now.”

“You look great.”

She didn’t want his compliments. They were too potent at a time when she had other things on her mind. “You have to leave, Noah.”

“Did I tell you about the trip?” he asked without raising his head from the pillow.

She nodded. “I’m glad it worked out well, given that half of my team missed practice yesterday. So now who’s the stickler for discipline?”

“I was taking your advice and being flexible.” He shifted under the covers. “Your bed feels great.”

“You shouldn’t be here.”

“Did you get your period?”

She nodded.

“Thanks for telling me.”

“It happened just this morning.”

“Ahhh. Are you relieved?”

“Very. Aren’t you?”

“You bet. Kids should be planned. I bought a box of condoms the other day. Of course I didn’t think to bring any along when I ran over here.”

“That’s fine, because nothing’s happening,” she said, though there was a stirring inside that belied the words. Something was happening all right. He hadn’t touched her, and he was turning her on, particularly incredible given the ache her period caused. She stood up and begged, “Please leave, Noah. I have to get on with my day, and I can’t do it while you’re in my bed.”

One long arm came from beneath the covers. It lay on the comforter for a minute, before the rest of him emerged.

Paige stepped back. She told herself to leave the room—then told herself to stay and make sure
he
left—and all the while she watched him dress. When he was done, he put on his glasses and finger-combed his hair. Then he looked at her and kept on looking.

“What?” she asked, none too steady.

He said nothing, simply came forward, took her face in both hands, and kissed her on the mouth.

It wasn’t until she heard the front door closing that she realized he was supposed to have gone back out the window and snuck off through the trees.

An hour later Paige was sitting in the living room, holding Sami on her lap, while the adoption agency’s Joan Felix looked through the papers Paige had just passed her.

“Financial report, personal report, medical report, professional record, birth certificate—everything seems to be here,” she said and smiled up at Paige. “There was never any question about a temporary placement, of course. You’re eminently qualified for that. I don’t have to study these papers to know that you’re every bit as qualified for a long-term placement. I take it you’re willing to do that?”

Paige turned one bright plastic key after another around a plastic key ring, while Sami watched in fascination. “From the start I said I’d keep Sami until an adoptive family is found. The last thing she needs is to be passed from foster home to foster home.”

“Will you have a problem attending the preadoptive sessions we run?”

Mara had told Paige about those. Held biweekly in Rutland, they were group meetings of the agency’s foster and adoptive parents of foreign-born children. Their purpose was both educational and supportive.

“I have no problem with those,” Paige said.

“It may take a while to find the right family.”

“I understand that.”

“Do you?” Joan asked kindly but bluntly. “Given Sameera’s background, placing her won’t be as easy as placing some babies, not in as homogenous a state as Vermont. Of those families currently in our files, none are appropriate. New families are always coming forward, and we do coordinate with agencies in other states, but I think you ought to know what we’re up against.”

Looking at Sami, adorable in a green-and-white-striped playsuit with a white ribbon in her hair, Paige couldn’t understand why any parent-to-be wouldn’t snap her up in a minute. She was healthy, even-tempered, and bright. Paige also could swear that she saw the germs of affection, if the way the little girl was clinging to her arm was any indication.

“What if it takes a year or two?” Joan asked.

A year or two. Paige felt a twinge for Sami’s sake. “Won’t placing her get harder the older she gets?”

“Yes and no. The older she gets, the more personality she has, and the more appealing she may become. Parents are often scared off by statistics. Knowing that this little one was nearly killed at birth because she was born female, knowing that she was stashed away for the first two months of her life before being passed from orphanage to orphanage, is pretty gruesome. The older she gets, the more that fades away. The older she gets, the more Americanized she becomes. Vermonters like that.”

Paige grunted.

“The problem,” Joan cautioned, “is that the older she gets, the more attached she’ll be to you and vice versa. It’s a problem all foster parents face. When the time comes, will you be able to give her up?”

“I think so,” Paige said. She didn’t look at Sami this time. “There’s so much else going on in my life.”

“Do those other things make taking care of her difficult?”

“Oh, no.” She held Sami closer, loving her warmth and her sweet baby smell. “Not at all. It’s working out fine. She’s doing well.”

“That’s obvious,” Joan said. She sat back, looking from Paige to Sami and back. “Would you consider adopting her yourself?”

“Me? Oh, I couldn’t. I never planned on having a child.”

“That doesn’t mean you wouldn’t make a wonderful mother.”

But Paige had her doubts. Her own mother had been lousy at it; she had needed her freedom, and though Paige was much more of a homebody than Chloe, everything was relative. Being a homebody to Paige didn’t mean staying home with a baby. It meant being daily on the go within the confines of a small town and returning home quite happily each night. Now she had Jill to baby-sit, but Jill would have her own baby before long, and Paige would have to hire another sitter, which wasn’t fair to Sami. She deserved a full-time mother.

“Well…” Joan sighed and slipped the papers into her briefcase. “Do think about it. I’ll file these and be back next week to talk more. In the meantime, we’ll be on the lookout for an adoptive family, if you’re sure that’s what you want.”

“It’s the best thing for Sami,” Paige said, and believed that it was, all the more so when Peter cornered her the next morning.

“W
HAT’S UP?” PAIGE ASKED, SETTLING IN AT
her desk with a cup of coffee and a curious look at Peter.

“We have to talk,” he said from the door. He slid a look at Angie, then folded his arms over his chest. “What’s going on around here is absurd. I’m tired, Angie’s tired, you’re tired. Things were supposed to level off once the trauma of Mara’s death passed, but it hasn’t happened. We need help. We need a fourth doctor.”

Angie groaned, expressing Paige’s sentiment exactly.

“I know it’s hard for you both”—he looked from one to the other—“you’re still feeling an allegiance to Mara, but, damn it, she’s dead. She’s up on that hillside, cold as stone. She doesn’t know we’re working our butts off, so what’s the point?”

Paige couldn’t put the point into words.

“Okay,” he tried, “so you don’t want to see someone else walking in and out of her office, but you sold her house, didn’t you?”

“I had to,” Paige said, defending the action, reluctant though it had been. “The monthly mortgage was going to waste. And besides, the realtor had a buyer.” Paige liked the family. Husband and wife were stockbrokers, fed up with city life, determined to work by computer out of their home. They had two children and believed in feeding the birds. “But it wasn’t easy for me. It doesn’t seem right that Mara isn’t there.”

“She’s
dead,
” Peter snapped. “Why can’t people accept that? It’s bad enough here in the office; not a day goes by without someone asking about her, like she has a cold and will be back at the end of the week, and it’s worse in town.”

“She was loved,” Angie said with envy and no small amount of sadness.

So are you, Paige thought, and tried desperately to catch Angie’s eye to convey the message, but Angie was looking at Peter, who was scowling.

So she reached into her pocket and unfolded the letter she had been reading that morning before work. “Mara didn’t think she was loved.”

“Are you kidding?” Peter asked sharply. “People thronged to her. She
adored
that.”

“Listen,” Paige said, and read, “‘Life is so busy here sometimes that I fool myself into thinking that there’s a deeper meaning in it, but the fact is that everyone has his own life and it’s separate from mine. They see me, they talk to me, they even tell me how wonderful I am, then they go home to their own lives and don’t think of me at all. I’m incidental in the overall scheme of things. I come and go in people’s lives, just as people come and go in mine. Relationships go only so far, then stop, always short of the deep connect. I wonder what’s wrong.’”

Angie was stunned. “Mara wrote that?”

“When?” Peter asked.

“I couldn’t find an exact date,” Paige answered. “It’s one of a whole bunch of letters. None of them were ever mailed, but they’re all addressed to a Lizzie Parks. Do either of you know that name?”

“Not me,” said Angie.

“A
bunch
of letters?” Peter asked. “Have you read them all?”

“Not all. They’re pretty heavy. I can only take them in small doses. She truly saw herself as a failure.”

“What did the other letters say?” he asked.

“Most of the ones I’ve read have to do with her family. She would have had us believe that she didn’t care about them, but the opposite was true. Calling it an obsession might be taking it too far, but she thought about them a lot.”

Peter left the door, took the letter from her, and stared at it front and back. “Why didn’t you tell us about these before?”

“Because I felt guilty reading them, they seemed so private, and now I’m betraying her by reading them aloud.”

“Then why did you?”

It had been unpremeditated, an impulsive thing, but Paige didn’t regret it. “We’re all pretty uptight. I thought maybe sharing them would help. It’s easy to feel sorry for ourselves, picking up the remains of Mara’s life like we are, but the fact is that compared to Mara, we’re in good shape. The deep connect—what a phrase. She felt so
alone,
it boggles the mind.”

Peter tossed the letter onto the desk. “She was unbalanced. I’ve been saying that for weeks.” He glanced at Angie, then back at Paige. “So, can we interview for a replacement, or should we sit around agonizing over Mara a little longer?”

Put that way, Paige felt foolish. “You’re right, I guess. It’s silly to wait. We’ll need someone else eventually. Eventually might as well be sooner.”

When she thought Peter would savor the victory, he was checking his watch. “I’m off for an allergy meeting in Montpelier. You’re both covering, right?”

Angie sat straighter. “Not right. I had the afternoon off. What allergy meeting?”

“My usual.”

“But that’s on Mondays.”

“This is a supplemental one.”

“Ginny didn’t have it on the schedule.”

“Then Ginny messed up.” He went to the door. “This is why we need a fourth. We’re stretched too thin. Can you help Paige, or should I skip the meeting?”

“I can help,” Angie said, and he left.

Paige turned to Angie, who was sitting at the side of the room looking peaked, and not only from lack of sleep, Paige knew. Dougie was boarding now, which left her home alone with Ben or, more aptly, waiting for Ben, who wasn’t doing much more than making brief appearances there. They were tiptoeing around each other, and though Paige had urged Angie to talk to him, argue with him, even beg him to see a counselor, she refused. She had been burned for years of taking charge, so she was lying low, waiting for him to take the initiative. It was a painful wait. She was dying a little more each day.

Paige, in turn, felt the agony of seeing a friend suffer and wanting to help but not knowing how. “Is working now a problem, Angie?”

Angie let out a breath. “No problem. I didn’t have specific plans. I never do lately, it seems. I feel like I need time to think, only when I sit down to do it, I can’t.”

“Did you talk with Dougie last night?”

“Sure did. He’s having a ball, and that’s a quote. Don’t ask me what it means. He may be doing very little of what he should and a whole lot of what he shouldn’t, but one thing’s for sure, he’s pleased to be free of me.”

“Don’t you think that’s taking it too personally?”

“Maybe.” She picked her cuticle. “At any rate, Ben isn’t upset. He believes that whatever Dougie does at Mount Court is important for his development.”

“You must agree on some level,” Paige pointed out, “or you wouldn’t have gone along with the decision to let him board.”

“I do agree. I guess.” She tucked her hand in her lap. “I don’t know, Paige. I’m terrified when I think of the harm that could be done to my son’s mind, body,
ego
, if this doesn’t work out. But then, some of Ben’s arguments have merit. I have been protective. Maybe overly so. I can see that now. I just wish that we could have found an in-between measure. Boarding is so
total
.” She rubbed her palm against her skirt. “Then again, he’s home on weekends, and on those times he’s his old affectionate self, so maybe Ben’s right. Maybe the problem was me, after all.”

Paige could hear it coming. She left the desk. “Angie—”

“I’ve failed as a mother.”

“No way.” Paige perched on the edge of the chair by Angie’s. “No way
at all
, and you have an incredible kid to prove it. Think about it, Angie. We’ve seen hundreds of kids over the years. Some of them have been troubled in ways that stem directly from their parents. Think of the Welkes, the Foggs, the Legeres—
they
are failures as parents, but you aren’t in any way, shape, or form related, even with a gross stretch of the imagination, to any one of them. Dougie isn’t troubled. He isn’t suicidal. He doesn’t skip school to play body games with girls behind the maintenance building. He doesn’t drink on the steps of the war memorial. He doesn’t steal hubcaps from tourists passing through town. He’s a well-adjusted kid who has reached the very normal stage of needing to share more of his life with his peers. It’s possible that if Mount Court had been three hours away, he would never have wanted to board, but it was an incredible temptation to him—to board and still have his parents close by. The kid has the best of both worlds. He’s a smart little guy.”

“Not so little,” Angie mused. “I have to keep reminding myself of that—and of the fact that he’s rooming with one of the top students in his grade, and that his dorm parent is new and very good, and that the Head of School has enough confidence in the system to let his own daughter live in a dorm. Did you know he had a daughter at Mount Court?”

Did she ever; but Paige had thought it a secret. “Who told you?”

“Marian Fowler,” one of the few Tucker natives on the Board of Trustees. “I called her right before Dougie moved into the dorm. I knew she’d give me a positive picture of the school, but that was what I wanted. She said that if the new Head trusted the school with his child, I should, too.” She paused, cautious now. “I heard something else about the new Head.”

Paige arched a brow, understating her curiosity.

“I heard,” Angie said, “that he was seen leaving your house early one morning. Do you run with him?”

The front door, rather than the window. Paige had known that would come back to haunt her. “Uh, not really. But we are friends. He was out running one morning and stopped by to say hello.”

“Good friends?”

Paige shrugged as casually as she could. She didn’t know what to call the kind of friend Noah was. She wasn’t even sure she should be calling him a friend, but the alternatives were either boss or lover, neither of which would do.

“He’s a handsome man,” Angie invited.

Had Paige denied it, Angie would have been instantly suspicious. So she didn’t try. “That was the first thing that struck me. I would have thought the girls at Mount Court would have crushes on him right and left.” She shook her head. “They can’t stand his rules. Neither can I. He can be rigid.”

“Reassuringly so, from a parent’s standpoint,” Angie commented. “It was only after I talked with him that I felt at all at ease about Dougie boarding.”

Paige imagined Noah at his desk talking with Angie. No doubt he would be reassuring. He was articulate, smooth, clearly dedicated to his cause. Given that his was only a year’s appointment, he might have easily maintained the status quo. Instead he had gone out on a limb, taking unpopular stands. Paige might not agree with some of those stands, but she had to respect his courage.

She hadn’t seen him since the morning he had left her bed. Not in real life, at least. In her mind, a dozen times, and each time in the buff.

“Paige?”

“Hmmm?”

“What’s that look?”

“No look,” she said, embarrassed. “Just irrelevant thoughts.”

“Then add these. The last school Noah Perrine worked at was a private school on the outskirts of Tucson. He had worked his way up from science teacher to director of development and was on a direct track to the headship when he suddenly resigned his position. It seems that his work required a fair amount of travel. His wife, who was a native New Yorker and wasn’t wild about being in the desert to begin with, was even less pleased when he was gone. She felt he was abandoning her to raise their daughter alone. So she took up with another teacher at the school. By the time Noah returned from his last trip, the whole school knew what was going on.”

Paige’s heart went out to Noah. “How awful.”

“It was a small school. Word spread quickly. He knew right away that he couldn’t ever be Head there, so he left.”

“He must have been humiliated,” Paige argued. She didn’t believe he had left solely because he would never be Head. He didn’t strike her as that ardently ambitious. “In such a close environment, it would have been an untenable situation.”

Angie went on, seeming steadier now that she was imparting information. “The wife and her boyfriend left soon after he did. They moved to San Francisco and married, and for years they were part of what they thought to be the academic elite. Last year they split.”

Ahhhh. That might explain problems between Sara, whom Paige had always seen as more wounded than malicious, and her mother. If the tension of a failing marriage was rocking the home, if Sara blamed her mother for it, if she was losing the father whose name she had taken years before and turning to Noah as a source of stability, the move made sense.

Of course, that said nothing about the dubious involvement Noah had had with Sara over the years and the fact that their relationship was far from strong.

Angie was looking crushed. “It seems to happen more and more, parents splitting, kids suffering. That’s what worries me most.”

Paige forced herself back. “Dougie?”

“What he’s thinking about Ben and me.”

“What are
you
thinking about Ben and you?” Paige asked just as the phone buzzed. She pressed the intercom. “Yes, Ginny.”

“The examining rooms are filled.”

“Be right there.” She hung up, looking at Angie expectantly.

“I’m not thinking much,” Angie said in dismay, and rose. “I’m trying to get through one day at a time.”

“But if you talk with Ben—”

“If I talk with him,” she went to the door, “I may hear things I don’t want to hear.”

Paige was right beside her, holding the door shut. “Like what?”

“Like without Dougie there’s nothing. Like we’ve grown in different directions. Like he wants a divorce. Like he loves
her
.”

All painful things. Paige wanted to deny each, but she wasn’t an expert on Ben or on any other man, where matters of the heart were concerned. The only thing she knew was that she didn’t want the demise of Angie’s marriage to haunt her the way Mara’s death did.

“So you’re not saying anything, hoping the problem will go away. But it won’t, Angie. It may recede for a time, but if it’s there, it’s there. You can only ignore it for so long. Talk with him. You have to.”

“I know,” Angie wailed softly. “I know.” She drew herself up, the professional once again. “Have to go to work.”

“Will you talk to him?”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Please, Angie? Talk soon?”