Against All Odds

by Danielle Steel

  Peter’s behavior got steadily worse. In June she was doing some gardening in shorts and a tee shirt and he came home unexpectedly at lunchtime, dragged her into the house, and called her a whore. He accused her of trying to entice the neighbor again, who was old enough to be her father and married to a very nice woman. Peter beat her and then raped her and left her barely able to crawl across the floor to the bathroom to clean herself up. She looked in the mirror when she was washing, and saw what she had become. She remembered the stories she had heard at the abuse group. One of the women had wound up in the hospital the week before and was still in a coma from a head injury inflicted by her husband. Another woman in the group had been stabbed by her boyfriend a month before, and he was in jail. The woman had survived it but was shattered by the experience. Julie knew she was heading there and it had to stop. She knew now what was going to happen. He was going to keep beating her until he killed her.

  She washed her face in cold water, put on jeans, a tee shirt, a denim jacket, and running shoes, grabbed her purse, and ran out of the house as fast as she could before he could return. He had gone back to the office after raping her.

  She walked to a nearby hotel, and had enough money for a cab to the airport, but nothing else without credit cards. She called her brother when she got to the airport. She forced herself to calm down enough to read the list of flights. There was a flight leaving for New York in half an hour.

  Justin answered on the second ring, and she could hear Milagra crying in the background. He told Julie to wait a minute while he handed her a bottle and put her in her playpen so they could talk. He was back in a minute.

  “I’m in trouble,” she said as soon as he came back on the line.

  “What kind of trouble?” Justin sounded shocked. His sister had never been in trouble in her life.

  “He’s crazy…he’s going to kill me…I’ve been going to a group for abused women…he does all of it…he beats me, he tried to drown me, he took my credit cards away. Justin, I’m scared.” She started to cry and so did he as he listened. He wanted to kill Peter. “I have no money, there’s a flight to New York in twenty minutes. If you pay for a ticket, I’ll pay you back.”

  “Give me the flight number.” He grabbed a pen. “We’ll talk when you get here. Get on that flight, Julie. Get out of there. Does he know where you are?”

  “No, he came home at lunchtime and beat me up, raped me, and he went back to work. That’s what he always does.” Justin felt sick as he listened.

  “Go, get your boarding pass and go to the gate. I’ll pick you up in New York.”

  “Don’t tell Mom!” she said to him quickly before they hung up. She didn’t want anyone to know.

  “I won’t,” he promised, and hung up on her so he could pay for her flight. He had nothing left on his credit card after he did, he had reached his limit, but he had a little money in the bank. He would have used that too to save her from Peter.

  Julie went to the counter and waited, and ten minutes before they closed the doors, the ticket came through. She got her boarding pass for the last coach seat left, and ran through security and to the gate to board. She held her breath until they closed the doors, and then heaved a sigh of relief. She had been terrified that Peter would appear, but he hadn’t. He had called several times while she was at the airport and she didn’t answer. The nightmare was over. She was safe. Or she would be in New York.

  And in Vermont, Justin was throwing everything he needed for the baby into a bag. The drive from Vermont would take him as long as her flight. He backed out of his driveway ten minutes later, and twenty minutes after that, Milagra was sound asleep in her car seat, as he drove steadily toward New York as fast as he could, thinking about his sister. It was small consolation to know that his instincts about her had been right. He’d been feeling it since March when she came to see Izzie’s baby, and that had been three months before. He couldn’t imagine the hell she had lived through in the meantime, and he thanked God she had had the guts to get out, and had called him. What if he had killed her? Justin cried as he thought about it and kept driving.

  He got to JFK Airport half an hour before she was due to arrive. He used the men’s room, with Milagra, and had a cup of coffee and a doughnut. Milagra never woke up, as he carried her around in her car seat. He was waiting for Julie where arriving passengers came out, and when she saw him she flew into his arms and clung to him as though she’d been drowning. She almost had. He saw immediately that there was a bruise on her cheekbone and another one on her neck from when he had almost strangled her the day before. It made Justin feel sick when he saw them.

  “Thank you for the ticket,” she said as they walked slowly out of the terminal toward the garage where he had left the car. She kept glancing over her shoulder as they walked. She was terrified that Peter would suddenly appear. What if he had followed her? Justin could see her terror. “I knew I had to get out. It’s been getting worse,” she said, talking quickly. “I don’t know what happened. Everything changed after we got married. It made him crazy or something.”

  “No, he is crazy, and he hid it before. Mom kept saying he was too perfect and something was wrong, and we all thought she was nuts. When did it start?”

  “As soon as we got to L.A., after I came home for Zach’s funeral, he went nuts. And it just kept spiraling down after that. He didn’t want me to see any of you, or come home. He said that if I told you anything, or called the police, he’d kill me. And I think he would have.” She took a breath and tried to calm down.

  “Thank God you had the guts to get out. He probably would have killed you.” Justin’s stomach turned over as he thought about it, and he looked at her when they got to the car. “Did you sleep on the plane?”

  “A little. Why?”

  “Can you drive if I get tired?”

  “Sure.” But he was too wide awake to sleep now. He wanted to talk to her and understand what had happened.

  She turned her cellphone on when they got in the car, and it rang immediately. It was Peter. She jumped and didn’t answer, and Justin could see the panic in her eyes.

  “Don’t answer it. He won’t suspect where you are for a while. Don’t talk to him.” She nodded, and he called again a little while later. He probably thought she was hiding somewhere in L.A., but she knew that, eventually, when she didn’t come home, he would guess where she was. But there was nothing he could do now. She was safe.

  They talked all the way back to Vermont, and Julie told him she didn’t want their mother to know where she was, or what had happened. She needed time to figure it out herself, and try to understand how she could have been so duped, and so wrong about him to let this happen, and why she didn’t leave immediately. He had paralyzed her.

  “He’s a psychopath or a sociopath,” Justin told her. “Mister Too Good to Be True. That’s what Mom called him. She’s smarter than we give her credit for.”

  “We all know she is.” Julie smiled at her twin. “We just don’t like to admit it. Izzie says she knew it about Zach too. She just didn’t want Mom to be right.”

  “Yeah.” Justin grinned sheepishly. “Me too. I think she sensed that having a baby was too much for us, and our relationship wasn’t as solid as I wanted to believe.”

  “What’s happening with you two?” Julie asked him. He and Richard had been separated since March. They had seen each other a few times over baby exchanges, but they hadn’t had a meal together or spent time with each other in three months.

  “I guess it’s over. Neither of us has the guts to say it, but it is. We keep calling it a time-out. But I think he’s done.”

  “What about you?” Julie asked gently, as the sun came up over the Vermont hills. They were almost home, and had been driving for six hours.

  “I don’t know. I was so shocked when I walked in on him. I’m not sure I can get over it, or if I want to. And he doesn’t like being a father as much as I do. He’s a big kid. He just wants to have fun. I think havi
ng a baby and everything that goes with it was a huge shock to him. And he’s not up for a second baby if he can’t cope with the one we have.”

  “And you’re okay with that?”

  “I can’t wait.” He grinned at her. And Shirley was as big as a house. It looked like a twelve-pound baby this time, instead of ten. “Maybe I was just meant to have kids.” He smiled at his sister as they drove into his driveway, and he turned off the car.

  “Well, you’d better start writing again if you want more kids,” she teased him, and they looked up at the sunrise. It was a magnificent day. They were both exhausted after traveling and talking all night, but they were so happy to be together. Peter had stopped calling her eventually, and must have gone to sleep, but he had sent about a dozen texts. She had read the first few, and then stopped. He was begging her to come home and telling her how sorry he was. She didn’t answer, but she looked devastated each time she read one.

  They had given Milagra a bottle while they were driving and she’d fallen asleep. She woke up as they walked into the house.

  “Oh God, there goes my chance for an hour’s sleep,” Justin said. He was exhausted after driving for twelve hours and being up all night. He was running on adrenaline. They both were.

  “I’ll take care of her,” Julie volunteered. “You drove all night, go to bed. I can sleep when you wake up.” It was great having another adult in the house again, someone who could give him a break once in a while. Julie lifted Milagra out of her car seat, and went to change her, and then came back to the kitchen to give her breakfast. Justin headed up the stairs to take a nap. He looked like he was sleepwalking, he was so tired. He lay down on his bed and was asleep a minute later, and when he came downstairs at noon, Julie was playing with Milagra and feeding her lunch, and she looked half asleep. Justin was refreshed after six hours’ sleep, and took over for her.

  He heard another text come in on her phone, as she got up from the chair.

  “What’s he been saying?” Justin asked her.

  “He wants to know where I am. He’s starting to get nasty again.” Although he was still trying to lure her back.

  “Have you answered him?” She shook her head. She didn’t want to hear his voice, or talk to him, or see him. She knew that sooner or later she would have to tell him that she was gone for good, but for now, she felt safer in silence. She wasn’t ready to communicate with him, and didn’t want to ever again.

  They talked about it that night, after Justin put Milagra to bed. Julie had played with her again after a long nap.

  “I assume you’re going to divorce him.” She nodded. “What are you going to do about your stuff?” She had abandoned everything she owned in L.A., and had left with only her purse and the clothes on her back.

  “I’ll have to figure that out. Maybe he won’t give it back.”

  “You have you, that’s all that matters. Everything else can be replaced. When are you going to tell Mom that you’re here?”

  “I need some time to chill out first,” she said, thinking about it. It was humiliating to admit she had made a terrible mistake. They’d only been married for six months, and after their honeymoon, everything had been a nightmare. “I don’t want to deal with what everyone thinks about it, Mom, Izzie, Willie, Grandma Lou. They’ll all have opinions about it.”

  “I have one too,” he said seriously. “He’s a sociopath who should be behind bars.”

  “Can I stay here for a while?” she asked him, looking embarrassed. “I have some money in a savings account, not much. I have to find out how to get it transferred here. I can share expenses with you when I get it.” And she was going to report her credit cards stolen, so she could get new cards. They had commingled no funds.

  “Why don’t you stay for the summer?” Justin suggested. “You can go to New York and get your life together after that. Maybe you can get your old job back.”

  “I don’t think so. They replaced me with a pretty good designer from Paris. They don’t need us both.”

  “You’ll get a job.”

  She got twenty irate texts from Peter that night, accusing her of everything imaginable, including having run off with another man. “Did you ever photograph the bruises after he beat you?” Justin asked her, and she shook her head.

  “I was too scared that he’d find the pictures and beat me up again. He used to check my phone.” It still pained him to think of what his sister had gone through for the past six months, and he liked the idea of her sticking around for a while. They were never happier than when they were together.

  And on Friday, he invited her to come to the sonogram to see the baby. They were doing a fancy 3D one at the hospital, and he would get photos to take home. Shirley had had only one sonogram so far, at the very beginning, since she was young and healthy, and everything about the pregnancy had been normal.

  “The one at our OB’s office is about a hundred years old and you can barely see the baby. It looks like a weather map of Vermont. It’s really cool in 3D. We did it once with Milagra too. They give you pictures afterward.” He smiled at her.

  “Do you have to wear special glasses like in the movies?” she asked him, laughing.

  “No, you dork. It just allows you to see the baby all the way around. Milagra was sucking her thumb when we did hers, and she fell asleep.”

  “That sounds amazing,” she admitted, as she thought how life could change in a few days. Suddenly she was safe, living with her brother, laughing and happy, and three thousand miles from the man who had almost beaten her to death, and might have, if she’d stayed. She still remembered the statistics from the group, about abusers who kill their partners. She could have been one of them, and nearly was.

  —

  They went to the sonogram lab at the hospital that afternoon, and met Shirley there. Julie had never seen her in person before, and thought she was nice. They went into the sonogram lab together, and the woman who ran it handed Shirley a gown and told her what to do. She had to drink three glasses of water and they’d be ready. Half an hour later, they had her lie down on the table, and her belly looked like a mountain as the technician put gel on it and moved it around with a metal wand, as they warmed up the machine.

  Julie was looking at the screen intensely, waiting for the baby to appear. They took several angles, of the placenta and uterus, and then the technician looked startled and turned the screen around to face herself, and Julie, Justin, and Shirley couldn’t see it. The woman smiled at them, asked about the date of Shirley’s last sonogram, and left the room. She came back with a female doctor, who looked at the screen with her and smiled too. Justin was watching them, panicked that something was wrong, but he didn’t want to scare Shirley by asking. She looked worried too.

  “We have an interesting view for you,” the doctor said to all three of them. She knew that Shirley was a surrogate from the chart, and she assumed that Justin and Julie were the parents of the baby in her womb. “This doesn’t happen often nowadays with the kind of technology we have, but I gather your doctor has a very rudimentary machine, and your last sonogram was very early in the pregnancy. Once in a while, not often anymore, a fetus can be hidden by another one, and even the heartbeats appear to be one.” She swung the screen around toward them then, and in 3D and living color they could clearly see two babies. “You’re having twins. Two little girls.” They had already said they wanted to know the baby’s sex. All three of them stared at the screen for a minute, and then Justin threw his arms around his sister and lifted her off the ground, and then he bent to kiss Shirley on the forehead.

  “Oh my God, Shirley, we’re having twins!” Two of the fertilized ova had taken, and no one had seen or suspected it till now. It made total sense, given her size. She looked a little nervous, Justin was ecstatic, and Julie was grinning from ear to ear.

  They had to take Shirley back to her OB afterward, to reevaluate the situation, measure her again in light of the fact that it was twins, reassess her due date, which
hadn’t changed, and discuss any problems with her, but she had had none. They told her that there was a higher risk that the babies would be premature, and at any sign of early onset of labor, she was to call them immediately. They said she might have to be on bed rest for the last month or two if there were problems. She had said this would be her last surrogacy, and she was going out with a bang. Justin was so proud he looked like he was about to burst when he walked Shirley back to the car. And Milagra was cooing happily in her aunt Julie’s arms.

  He could hardly wait to call their mother when he got home. He sent Alana an email in London that they had hit the jackpot, and he turned to his sister with a look of panic. “Shit, I’m going to be supporting three kids, not two,” particularly with Richard not involved with the twins. Justin had given him that option with the second pregnancy, since he had admitted he didn’t want the second baby, and Justin did. Now Justin was going to be supporting all three of them. It made him realize that he had to work harder than he had in the ten months since Milagra was born. He was so busy and having so much fun with her that he had been writing much less than before, and almost never worked on his book.

  Kate was as stunned as he was when he told her the news. After they talked about it for a few minutes, she told him that she had been thinking of coming up for the Fourth of July weekend with Izzie and Tommy and Grandma Lou to spend the holiday with him. There was a small hotel nearby where she usually stayed. He turned to Julie, grimacing and making signals, not sure what to say, and she looked resigned and nodded her head. Her mother would find out that she was there sooner or later, and the weekend together sounded like fun. She missed her mother and wanted to see her, and she was ready to talk about Peter now.

  “Sure, Mom, that sounds great,” he responded. They were going to keep Julie a surprise until then.

  After thinking about it, he decided not to call Richard and tell him about the twins. Since they were not together at the moment, and he had already backed away from their second child, he didn’t need to know that Shirley was carrying twins. That was Justin’s problem or blessing now, not his.