Love Potion #2

by Margot Early

  Cameron, who had been talking on one of the lines at the Women’s Resource Center, abruptly feared that somebody might have overheard, that she shouldn’t have said out loud that she was pregnant. Because she had not yet told Paul. Wasn’t sure how—or even if—to tell him. What if he thought her silly for doing a pregnancy test, because it was so early? What if he believed she wanted to be pregnant with his child?

  In any case, she was alone at the Women’s Resource Center, catching up on work—checking statistics for a grant writer who was trying to get more funding for the center—and holding down the hotline until the scheduled volunteer showed up later that afternoon.

  The hotline rang, and Cameron picked it up from her desk. “Women’s Resource Center Helpline.”

  “Hi. Mm. I’m upset by something. Something my husband did.”

  “Yes?”

  As she listened to the horror story that slowly unfolded, Cameron’s skin began crawling. She felt a terrible anger toward the man who had treated his wife so shamefully.

  “He says it’s his right because he’s my husband.”

  “He’s wrong.” Cameron questioned the woman about what she planned to do. Nothing. I can’t leave him, can I?

  Fifteen minutes later, when she was off the phone, Cameron wondered if her answering the helpline might be bad for her baby. Weren’t you supposed to avoid negative emotions? And on the helpline, she listened to women in impossible situations, who truly believed there was no way out. The doubt and despair of rape, of violence, the constant echoing of Was it my fault?

  She liked helping people, liked helping other women, and she knew she was good at it. She’d experienced enough unpleasantness in her life, seen enough, that she had compassion, that she knew bad things, or at least sad things, happened—eventually, to everyone. She’d been in bad situations with men, and what had been ghastly at the time had ultimately made her stronger.

  But she wanted to do everything right for this baby, and she was only going to think positively about out-comes. Not for a second would she allow a negative thought to enter her head.

  She wondered if it was too early to see a physician. Or a midwife.

  Cameron believed that most women in the United States in particular—and especially their babies—were better off when birth happened at home. Hospitals routinely did things that made it difficult for women to labor and that compromised the health of the baby. The perfect example was the electronic fetal monitor. Hospitals used these, which forced a laboring woman to be on her back; the only worse position for giving birth would be standing on one’s head. The weight of the baby then pressed down on the mother’s vena cava, robbing the baby of blood and oxygen. Then fetal distress occurred.

  But Cameron didn’t have a normal pelvis. Well, she suspected she didn’t, though she couldn’t really judge for herself. She was built like Beatrice. After miscarriage number four, Beatrice had decided to have her baby at the hospital. The baby had been premature, so the best place was the hospital. Preemies should always be born in the hospital. They were so vulnerable with their organs not fully formed.

  Cameron knew midwives, of course. Clare Cureux was a “lay” or direct-entry midwife, meaning she hadn’t been to school to become a midwife, though she certainly was well-educated, her office filled with medical texts. And she went to workshops and conferences—or had done, for years. Bridget was thinking of going to school to become a certified nurse-midwife.

  But Cameron couldn’t go to the Cureux women because she hadn’t yet told Paul she was pregnant.

  She reached for the phone book to see who else she could find.

  Thanksgiving

  Myrtle Hollow

  DAVID CUREUX had carved the turkey and was filling plates for the assembled family. Though he had divorced Clare more than two decades earlier, this was still his family: his eldest, Paul; his daughter, Bridget; Bridget’s husband, Beau; their two children, Nick and Merrill; and Clare.

  He and Paul had put the extra leaf in the table so that the entire family would fit.

  Bridget said, “Couldn’t Cameron make it?”

  “She’s with her family at her grandmother’s house,” Paul said, not liking something sly in Bridget’s tone. He refused to encourage Bridget by asking what kind of concoction she’d brewed for Cameron or if it really had been innocuous, just something to help Cameron get over Graham Corbett.

  Bridget was annoyed with him anyhow; she said he’d been insensitive in how he’d told her that she needed to watch Nick at the zoo when Nick was near the pond. Basic child safety! He hadn’t thought tact was an issue. Bridget, your kid could drown, hello? Which wasn’t what he’d said, admittedly.

  His sister could hold a grudge for a lifetime.

  Clare said, “We’re supposed to get snow next week.”

  She spoke matter-of-factly. She loved to listen to weather reports. Though Clare had “the Sight” and knew some things in advance, she never knew what the weather would do except by listening to forecasters.

  Bridget said, “Is her black eye gone?”

  “Yes,” Paul answered succinctly.

  “How’d she get a black eye?” asked David.

  “Walked into a cabinet door.” Paul had given this explanation so many times that he’d begun to feel as though it was a lie. He did not want to talk about Cameron. Cameron was acting very strangely. She’d been avoiding him for two weeks. It reinforced that their sleeping together had been a mistake.

  Bridget said, “Who’s that hunk she’s been hanging around with?”

  Paul deliberately kept his face expressionless. “Someone we knew at school. Sean Devlin. New drama teacher at the high school.”

  He could feel his sister watching him as though expecting him to turn neon-green.

  “Are they seeing each other?”

  “How should I know?”

  Bridget made a sound that could have expressed amusement or scorn or triumph. “Because you talk to her every day?”

  “She doesn’t talk to me about him.”

  Bridget seemed to have exhausted the topic, for she exclaimed suddenly to her mother, “Oh, did you hear about Lou Anne Shaw?”

  “That was a travesty,” her mother replied tartly.

  Paul listened as Bridget described everything that had been done wrong by the local hospital for Lou Anne Shaw and her baby.

  Paul’s father remained uncharacteristically silent on the subject. He was not going to leap in and support the colleague in question, which meant, Paul decided, that he felt that the people at the hospital had made some mistakes.

  “They should have sectioned her right away,” exclaimed Bridget, an unusual point of view from a woman who’d grown up in a home where homebirth was considered the best way to have babies.

  “Is everyone all right?” Paul finally asked, unable to forget Cameron’s hysteria a couple of weeks earlier. Childbirth was normal. He knew that. And, of course, Cameron wasn’t pregnant, would probably never get pregnant. But it seemed to him that labor and birth could be a risky business.

  “Yes, everyone’s fine,” said Bridget. “No thanks to that quack.”

  Her father roused himself to make tut-tutting sounds.

  As far as Paul could make out, the woman had been a true case of something called CPD, which seemed to be what Cameron thought she had. A pelvis too small for having babies. The woman, who’d grown up in Logan but had moved away and was receiving prenatal care elsewhere, came in with premature labor. The physician, rather than listening to anything she told him, said he’d have a nurse monitor her for a bit and see what happened. Or something of that nature.

  It sounded like malpractice to Paul, and he reflected how he’d hated this aspect of his mother being a midwife, how sometimes his parents had traded horror stories across the table, some catastrophes seemingly caused by midwives, others by physicians. But he was curious about something. Not quite looking at his mother, he said, “Isn’t that what happened with that lady back when we w
ere little? Only the baby didn’t make it?”

  The table became unnaturally still and quiet.

  Paul ignored this. “Why did that happen again?”

  Clare said, “We’ll talk about it later,” in a very firm, quick voice that meant she wasn’t going to discuss it over Thanksgiving dinner. Paul wondered if he’d been insensitive. The long-ago incident involved someone his mother had known, hadn’t it? She had been involved.

  But Clare said, “She wasn’t my client,” said it almost as though to herself.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The caving trip

  “YOU SHOULDN’T GO

  caving when you’re pregnant,” Mary Anne told Cameron as they waited in the parking lot of the Women’s Resource Center to see if anyone showed up for the Women of Strength trip. “Of course I can,” Cameron replied.

  It had taken Mary Anne approximately three seconds to guess that Paul must be the father of Cameron’s baby. Asked bluntly, Cameron had been unable to lie. She’d been unmoved by Mary Anne’s assertion that her little cousin was going to be beautiful. Mary Anne had hips made for childbearing, so of course she could be lighthearted.

  “I’m going to see a midwife next week. She’s in McDowell County,” Cameron said tersely.

  “Shouldn’t you have an obstetrician? And if you’re going to a midwife,” Mary Anne asked, “why not Clare Cureux?”

  Even Mary Anne knew that Cameron would be unable to give birth normally. Her inner panic intensifying in a familiar wave, Cameron said, “Yes, I probably will end up with an obstetrician, but I haven’t seen anyone yet at all. So I’m starting with a midwife. But the point is to see a birth attendant in another county, for the time being. And I’m not going to the Cureux family for anything!”

  “But you’ve got to tell—”

  “I’m only a few days pregnant!”

  Finally, one person showed for the trip, dashing Mary Anne’s hopes that it could be called off. Angie Workman joined them in Mary Anne’s car, and they headed for the State Park Zoo.

  Cameron loved caving. She was small—thus made for caving—and had participated in several cave rescues over the years. Outside Big Jim Cave, while they suited up in coveralls, helmets and headlamps, Cameron gave her standard rules-of-caving lecture on protecting the cave environment, light sources, general safety.

  Then they started into the cave. It wasn’t one of Cameron’s favorite grottoes, but it was free of tight passages. Mary Anne hated those. Angie, who was built on Cameron’s scale, exclaimed over the beauty of the cave.

  It happened when they reached Boulder Gulch.

  Mary Anne stepped on a boulder, and it rolled. Once.

  Cameron heard the sound and spun around as her cousin tumbled over the edge of the area into a crevasse a dozen feet below. She heard Mary Anne’s cries.

  And then she heard the buzzing.

  Rattlesnakes? In a cave?

  She pointed her headlight over the edge and saw Mary Anne’s eyes gazing up at her. And she saw the snakes.

  Angie said, “They’ll be sleepy. Just don’t move around, Mary Anne!”

  “I’ll come down, just be still!” Cameron said.

  “No!” cried Mary Anne. As in, No, you’re pregnant!

  It was Angie who insisted on going down, using one of Cameron’s hiking poles to move snakes away from Mary Anne so that they could try to move a rock pinning Mary Anne’s leg. But Mary Anne said they wouldn’t be able to move it.

  Cameron and Angie both looked at a rock the size of a trashcan pinning her and agreed they couldn’t move it.

  Cameron went for help. She ran for the entrance. Mary Anne wouldn’t have been there at all but for her; now she was lying in a crevasse with her leg trapped by a boulder, surrounded by rattlesnakes. Outside the cave, she dropped her pack and grabbed her cell phone, then began running down the trail, looking at the mobile’s screen for a signal.

  She slammed into someone and looked up into the friendly face of Graham Corbett. Out for a hike with his mother.

  Instantly, two things occurred to Cameron. One was that Mary Anne was trapped in the cave surrounded by venomous snakes. The second was that Graham had a snake phobia. She blurted out, “Mary Anne’s trapped in the cave, but you can’t help!” and she ran on. She supposed she could have given Graham more information, but what could he do? His cell phone wouldn’t work any better on the trail than hers did, and Cameron knew he was pathologically terrified of snakes. Time was of the essence. She didn’t know the number of the ranger station. When she got to a place where she had a signal, she would call Paul and let him call the rangers.

  She was almost at the parking lot before a signal appeared on the screen, and she punched in her code for Paul’s mobile.

  “Hello?”

  “Paul, it’s Cameron.” He knows that, he can see it on his mobile, can see who’s calling. “Mary Anne’s trapped in the cave, and there are rattlesnakes down there.”

  “Rattlesnakes? In a cave?”

  She did not need male skepticism at the moment. “Yes! I saw them. There’s a nest, and she’s in it, and I think her calf’s crushed. I don’t know. Please get help. I’m going to call 911. It’s Big Jim Cave.”

  “Right.” He hung up, and Cameron felt as though she could breathe. Paul would know what to do and do it. He would assemble the fastest rescue team that could be mustered. She would call for an ambulance now. She punched 911 into her cell phone.

  RETURNING TO THE CAVE, Cameron found them all in Boulder Gulch above the crevasse.

  Her headlamp shone from Mary Anne’s white face and the sweat on her upper lip to Graham Corbett crouched beside her, stroking her hair, making sure she was warm. “Should we elevate her legs?” asked Graham.

  “Don’t…touch…” Mary Anne whispered.

  “Not an unsplinted broken leg,” said Cameron. “The paramedics are on their way. Is anyone bitten?”

  “No,” said Graham, who seemed absolutely unconcerned with the snakes.

  “Graham just plucked that boulder right off her,” Angie said.

  That was love for you.

  Graham, Cameron could see, was madly in love with Mary Anne. Cameron no longer wanted Graham—which surely meant Bridget’s potion had worked—but part of her thought, Will anyone ever love me that way? Enough to tread through rattlesnakes to save my life?

  Cameron pushed Graham aside to do a quick check over Mary Anne to make sure she wasn’t bleeding and that everything possible was being done to prevent her going into shock. “Paul is getting the rescue team—the rangers—and the paramedics will be here really soon. If your leg really hurts—”

  “It does,” Mary Anne whispered.

  “—just try and let go. We’ll be quiet. Yell if you need to. Want a sip of water?”

  “Nooo….”

  The minutes seemed interminable. Mary Anne had passed out when Graham moved the boulder and had come to only after he had got her above the crevasse. Now, she seemed to swim in and out of consciousness.

  This is my best friend, Cameron thought. How could she ever have let something as stupid as a man come between them? Why had she ever thought Graham was so wonderful anyway?

  “Were those voices?” Angie said.

  Cameron had heard the sounds, too, from the mouth of the cave. She stood up. “I’ll guide them back here. They’re here, Mary Anne.

  “Back here!” she called and started toward the rescue team.

  She met them halfway, and the first face she saw was Paul’s, beneath his helmet and headlamp. Relief washed through her. He was so damned competent and reliable. Then, she saw that there were rangers and two paramedics from the ambulance team with him. The ambulance must be here.

  They had a backboard with them, and Cameron led the way to where Mary Anne lay. As she watched the paramedics work over her friend, there was a moment when Mary Anne’s eyes drifted toward Paul and Cameron, and Cameron knew that Mary Anne was thinking about the pregnancy. Mary Anne knew, and Paul did
not. It was wrong.

  I’ve got to tell him.

  Paul, however, was watching Graham Corbett crouch beside Mary Anne, holding her hand, and Paul’s face showed a mixture of mystified bemusement and hardened cynicism.

  The paramedics agreed to immobilize Mary Anne’s leg. Angie said she would ride back to town with Graham, and Cameron said she’d meet Graham at the hospital.

  Graham was obviously worried about Mary Anne. What Cameron felt surprised her. It seemed childish to wish, at this moment, that Graham would care about her, Cameron, this way. Maybe what she wanted was for someone to care about her, but that wasn’t it, either. She didn’t need a man caring about her to feel valuable within herself.

  Perhaps what Bridget had given her was what she’d said it was—a specific to restore emotional equilibrium. And maybe it was working. It couldn’t be a love potion, in any case.

  Why not, Cameron? Surely a potion that made you fall in love with Paul would stop your being in love with Graham….

  But she wasn’t in love with Paul.

  She looked toward him. He was taking off his helmet as Cameron slung on her backpack. The others went ahead, following Mary Anne on the backboard, and she and Paul fell in behind them under the gray skies and half-denuded autumn trees, the ground thick with leaves. He said, “Isn’t she supposed to be madly in love with Jonathan Hale?”

  It was a convoluted story. Mary Anne had been madly in love with the manager of the local public radio station, Jonathan Hale. When he became engaged—to Angie Workman, actually—Cameron had suggested that Mary Anne buy one of Clare Cureux’s love potions and dose him with it. All in fun, of course. But Graham Corbett had ended up drinking the potion. Then, Jonathan had broken his engagement with Angie anyway—though she seemed to think goodbye and good riddance at this point, which was Cameron’s opinion, too. And now Mary Anne was in love with Graham, and he was in love with her. But Cameron couldn’t tell Paul all of this, because who had received the love potion was a secret, though he had discovered that Mary Anne had bought one.