Suddenly (33 page)

“Who is she?” Angie asked curiously.

He took a deep breath, slipped his hands in the pockets of his slacks, and exhaled. “No one important.” He took another breath and said more hesitantly, “There’s something else. I’m thinking of suing Jamie Cox.”

Angie looked startled.

Peter was instantly defensive. “You don’t think I should?”

“I
think
you should. I’m surprised. That’s all. He’s one of yours.”

“He’s sleaze. Do you know what he’s going around town saying? He’s saying that the reason the balcony collapsed is that there were too many people up there. That there were more people than tickets he sold. That people snuck in and were sitting in the aisles and standing up in back and on the sides. He’s saying that what happened was their own fault, and that no jury in the world would find him guilty. He’s saying that no one can possibly prove that that balcony was structurally unsafe, and that anyone who tried would be a fool.”

“A threat if ever there was one.”

“And untrue. People can prove the balcony was unsafe. Any laborer in town who’s done incidental work there has seen the weaknesses. The problem is, most of them won’t come forward because Jamie owns the houses they live in. He’s got ‘em by the balls.” Peter tucked his hands behind his suspenders. “But he doesn’t have me that way. I own my own place. And he has money that can help those people who need care and can’t pay for it themselves.” Like Kate Ann. She was a perfect example. She had paid full price for a ticket and mustered up her courage to go to a concert for the very first time. Now she was a paraplegic. No one could give her back the use of her legs—it was too late for that—but someone could sure as hell make the life that she had left a little easier.

“The question,” he went on, “is how to get that money. I was thinking I’d ask Ben if he knew of a lawyer, someone out of town, who’s good and would be willing to take on the case. Maybe someone in Montpelier who knows how the state courts work. Think he’d give me a name?”

“Of course he’d give you a name. And in any case, I’m sure he’d like to see you. You don’t stop over anymore.”

Not since Mara had died. He used to like seeing her there. She had always been more laid-back in a family setting.

And then there was the matter of the trouble between Angie and Ben. That had started up soon after. Dropping by to see Ben would have been awkward.

“Why don’t I mention it to him tonight,” Angie offered.

“I’d appreciate it,” Peter said, and started to leave.

She touched his arm. “Are you doing this for Mara?”

He considered that. “Maybe.” And maybe a little for Lacey, though she had gone back to Boston, and he was just as glad. He didn’t want her back. She had pricked his conscience, was all.

He shrugged. “Who knows. Maybe I’m doing it for me.” He grinned. “Maybe I want to be a new kind of hero. With you ladies giving me a run for my money on the medical front, I need a new niche. Peter Grace, civic activist. Sounds impressive, don’t you think?”

A
NGIE SAW THE LAST OF HER PATIENTS
shortly before three, left the office soon after that, and drove straight home. She was disappointed when Ben’s car wasn’t there, but not surprised. It was the third day this week that she’d come home early. He hadn’t been there once.

Sometimes she drove around; sometimes she waited. This time she decided to make use of the time by going to the fish market in Abbotsville. Fresh fish was trucked there every morning from the coast of Maine, and the prices were high. But Ben loved lobster. As she saw it, the expenditure was an investment in her marriage.

Back home again, she waited. With the coming of darkness, she turned on the lights. She did a load of laundry, set the table, put the lobster pot on the stove, made a salad, spread garlic butter on bread that was ready for toasting. She read
Newsweek
. She called Dougie and left a message when he wasn’t in the dorm.

It struck her that Ben might have gone to see him. The eighth-grade class was going to Acadia National Park that weekend, so Dougie wouldn’t be home, but if he had called, needing something, Ben might have dropped over whatever it was. He might have taken him for ice cream. No, not ice cream. Hot chocolate.

He might have wanted to talk with Dougie about school. About Thanksgiving, which was approaching fast. About Angie.

She wondered what he would say about her.

Then again, maybe he was with Nora. He claimed it was over between them—the times she had driven around, she had driven by the library first and his car wasn’t there—but if he wasn’t with her, where was he?

Angie pulled the newspapers from the day’s mail, one from Chicago, one from Seattle, one from New York, and opened to the editorial pages. Ben’s cartoon was the same in each, a single-frame tongue-in-cheek drawing of three prominent members of the House of Representatives, each wearing a Boy Scout uniform, a halo, and a benevolent grin, each hiding a knife marked, in turn,
THE POOR, THE ELDERLY
, and
THE CHRONICALLY ILL
.

It was something he might have drawn twenty years before. His priorities hadn’t changed. Not politically, at least. She trusted that he would always root for the underdog. But she wasn’t sure what else she could trust.

She heard the Honda turn into the driveway and stayed where she was. Although he must have seen her car, he looked startled to find her sitting there when he opened the kitchen door.

“Hi. When’d you get home?” he asked.

“A while ago.”

He glanced at the counter. “Wow. You’ve been working. What’re you making? Hey, those are lobsters in the sink!”

“I bought them in Abbotsville. I thought they’d be fun.”

“We haven’t had lobster in ages.”

“That’s why I bought them.”

He studied her. Innocently he asked, “Is something wrong?”

Was something wrong?
Was something wrong
? It was the wrong thing to ask her, in the wrong tone of voice. Something snapped inside, only this time there were no tears. “Is something wrong? You’re
damn right
something’s wrong. I came home early to see you. I’ve come home early three times this week, only you’re never here. Where have you been?”

He pursed his lips, seeming defiant for a minute, before shrugging. “Here and there.”

“Where’s here and there?” She didn’t care if she sounded shrewish. They had been walking politely around each other, pretending that everything was all right. Only it wasn’t.

“You want a rundown?” he asked, defiant indeed.

“Yes. Yes, I do.”

He leaned against the counter and started ticking off his stops in a robotic tone. “I started off at the post office. George Hicks was there. He suggested we go for coffee. I didn’t have anything else to do. As far as I knew, you’d be at work. So we had coffee. Then I went to the hardware store and talked with Marty. While I was there, the Freemans came in. They said they were on their way to an estate sale in White River Junction, so I followed them there.”

“An estate sale?” Angie asked. “Since when are you interested in antiques?”

“I’m not,” he said in his own voice, looking her in the eye, “but the house the antiques were in was gorgeous. And there were other people looking around just like I was. That means human contact, which is a damn sight better than sitting here all by myself.” He braced his hands on the counter behind him. “If you’d told me you were coming home early, I might have made a point to be here.”

“You wanted spontaneity. I was trying to surprise you.”

“Surprise me? Or check up on me? I told you before, Angie, I go out. I stop in town, I drive around, I do whatever I can to keep busy. And don’t look at me that way. I wasn’t with Nora. I told you
that
before, too.”

“Okay.” Angie held up a hand. “Fine. You weren’t with Nora.” Her hand fell. She felt overwhelmingly discouraged. “But this isn’t right, Ben. Something’s not working. I wasn’t coming home to check up on you. I was coming home to spend time with you. I’ve been trying to change, really I have. I’m not telling you what to do or think. I’m not orchestrating our lives anymore. So what do we do? Nothing. We don’t go places. We don’t do things. And we don’t talk. Not the way we used to. Not honestly. Not impulsively. Certainly not about hopes and dreams, the way we used to when we were younger.”

He swore softly, let out a long, tired sigh, and looked away. “I don’t know what those hopes and dreams are anymore. Seems like we should be living them out now, only we’re not. And suddenly I’m forty-six. More than half of my life is behind me. What’s ahead? I just don’t know.”

“What do you
want
to be ahead?” Angie asked with some urgency. Her future lay in the answer.

“I don’t know. That’s the problem. If I did, I could act on it. I just feel this goddamned…inertia. Like I wake up in the morning and see this guy in the mirror who has a successful career and makes lots of money that he’s stashing away for a rainy day that may not ever come. I see the same road stretching before me, day after day after day. It’s so fucking boring.” He pushed a hand through his hair. “So maybe it wasn’t you. Maybe the problem was me after all.”

“Not completely. The things you said about me made sense. I didn’t hear what you were saying. I was a doctor first, a mother second, and a wife third. I’m trying to change. But I need help from you. You were always the lighthearted one of us. You had the exciting ideas. I was the realist, the pragmatist, and that is boring if it dominates the other all the time.” She paused, then asked in frustration, “So why did you let me do it?”

“Because it was easy,” he shot back. “It seemed the thing to do. I knew my life would change once I left New York. I surrendered to the inevitable.”

Angie felt a spark of anger. “Then what happened is your fault.”

“That’s what I’m
saying
,” he answered, which took the wind from her sails and set them back to square one.

Rising from the table to stand at the window, she thought about what he wasn’t saying. He wasn’t saying that he wanted a divorce. He wasn’t saying that he was bored with
her
. Taking courage from that, she went to where he stood and, shyly almost, slipped her arm through the crook of his. She had always found reassurance in his nearness; she still did; this was what she had missed most in recent weeks.

“So where do we go from here? You have to give me a clue.”

“I wish I could.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I don’t
know
. That’s what I’m saying.”

“Now,” she goaded. “Right now. If you had your choice of doing anything, anything at all, what would you want? What would give you a boost? What would be exciting enough to pull you out of this funk?”

She knew she was taking a chance. If he said that he wanted to see Nora Eaton, she was sunk.

He thought for a minute, then said, “Go somewhere.”

“Me?”

“Us. I want us to go somewhere.”

Relieved, she asked, “Where?”

He thought again. “Williamsburg, Virginia.”

She grinned. “Yes?”

“When we were in New York, we used to talk about going, but you were always so busy and then we had Dougie, and somehow we never found the time.”

“Okay.” Her grin faded. “Let’s do it now.”

He looked surprised. “Right now?”

She nodded. “Right now.”

“What about Dougie?”

“He’s not here.”

“What about work?”

She didn’t have to think about it. She had put in more than enough hours to compensate, and now there was Cynthia to cover. Angie had a right to the time. This was a family emergency of sorts.

“They’ll be able to function without me for a long weekend,” Angie said. “How about you?”

“I’m always ahead a few days. I can swing it.”

She left his side and went to the phone. But whereas in the past she would have been the one to make the arrangements, now she held out the receiver to him. He stared at it for a bemused minute. By the time he took it, his eyes held a hint of excitement and his lips a touch of the smile that never failed to curl her stomach.

He looked empowered—and Angie didn’t care how much Mara would have denied it, an empowered man was a sexy man. With that thought and a smile of her own, she went upstairs to pack.

Paige didn’t put on scrubs. She wasn’t needed in the operating room. Jill was under general anesthesia and wouldn’t know who was there and who wasn’t. Her mother, on the other hand, was alone and frightened in the waiting room.

They sat together quietly, holding their breath each time the door opened, releasing it when the doctor who emerged wasn’t Jill’s. Paige thought of the parents she saw in prenatal sessions, the ones getting a head start on pediatric care, who came to her with questions shortly before their babies were to be born. Their excitement was always contagious.

There was no excitement now—just dread that the baby might be deformed, or too small to live, or ill in some way that demanded prolonged and expensive medical treatment, and fear that Jill, whose insides were already battered, would react adversely to surgery.

When the doctor finally came to see them, it was with a mixed bag of news. “Jill’s fine,” she said, “but we lost the baby. I’m sorry, Mrs. Stickley. The pelvic fracture caused other internal injuries. It’s a miracle the baby stayed in so long.”

Jane was holding a hand to her chest. “But Jill’s all right.”

“She will be. Once the baby was taken, we did some repair work. If all heals well, she’ll be able to have other children.”

“When can I see her?”

“If you go back to her room, she’ll be along soon.”

Paige had no intention of waiting. She sent Jane on, then made her way to the recovery room, where Jill was drifting in and out of sleep. As time passed, she was more out than in. Paige held her hand and waited quietly with her arms propped on the bars of the bed.

After a bit, Jill kept her eyes open long enough to focus on Paige.

Paige smiled. “Welcome back.”

“What happened?” she whispered hoarsely.

“You’re going to be just fine.”

“And my baby?”

Paige’s smile faded. She shook her head. “It was too little. It couldn’t make it.”

Jill swallowed and closed her eyes. “What was it?”

One part of Paige didn’t want to tell her. Giving the baby a sex made it more real. But then, it had been real. To deny that would be to deny Jill the right to grieve as she needed to do.

Softly she repeated what the surgeon had told her. “It was a boy. Very tiny. There may have been some damage from the accident. It’s for the best, Jill.”

Jill nodded. She dozed off. Paige remained with her, holding her hand. A few minutes later Jill turned her head and opened her eyes again. She frowned, then remembered.

“A boy. Did he look like Joey?”

Paige smiled sadly. “I don’t know. I didn’t see him. My guess is he was too little to look like anyone at all.”

“I kept wondering…kept thinking I’d be walking somewhere…see a little kid who looked like one of us.” She made a face. “My stomach hurts.”

“That’s your incision. They took the baby by cesarean section. But you’re going to be just fine.”

“Only no baby.”

“Not now. Another time. When it’s right.”

Jill nodded. Her eyes pooled. She closed them, but tears trickled from the corners.

Paige held her hand more tightly, letting her cry until the lingering effects of the anesthesia doped her again. When she woke up this time, Paige summoned an orderly and they wheeled her back to her room.

Jane was waiting there, along with Jill’s father, who hadn’t spoken with Jill since she had announced that she was pregnant. Apparently Jane had called to tell him that she no longer was.

As soon as Jill was shifted onto the proper bed and covered, he leaned over. “Jill? Jillie? It’s me.”

Jill opened her eyes. They took him in and filled with tears again.

“It’s all right, honey,” he said, taking her hand and patting it. “You’ll be just fine now. Don’t you worry about a thing.”

Purposefully, Paige moved in close to him. Had he smelled of liquor, she would have summoned Norman Fitch to kick him right out of the hospital. That was how much she thought of Frank Stickley.

But he smelled clean.

So she touched Jill’s shoulder and said softly, “I’m going home now, Jill. Your parents will sit with you for a while, but I’ll be back first thing in the morning. If there’s any problem, ring for the nurse and she’ll call me, okay?”

Jill nodded.

Paige left the hospital thinking that Frank Stickley reminded her of Thomas O’Neill. Both men were stubborn; both considered their own values sacrosanct; both had the ability to cut off a child as though it were a fingernail rather than a piece of the heart.

Jill would never forget what her father had done. She might be able to set it aside for the present, but she wouldn’t forget it. It was a piece of emotional baggage that she would likely carry for the rest of her life.

Rejection was like that. A borer, it drilled a tiny hole deep inside that never went away. In good times it might be filled with the overflow of happiness, but in bad times it got bigger and bigger, until finally it choked off the will to live. That was what had happened to Mara. Paige was convinced of it. Rejection had become synonymous with failure. Whether her death had been accidental or not was a moot point. She had lost the will to live.