Paradise Cove

by Jenny Holiday

  “Yeah, that’s what I figured. I had to have that done a couple years ago. And I know it’s not a big deal, but I just thought, if someone is going to stick a probe up my nose and, like, fry the inside of it, I want it to be Dr. Walsh.”

  Nora chuckled. “I’m flattered. I think.”

  At her lunch “break,” which was only ten minutes because Eiko had overbooked her due to all the demand, she looked at résumés for the reception job and emailed the top three candidates to set up interviews.

  She was pleased to find that her first appointment after lunch was Eve.

  “Hi! Happy New Year!” Eve said from the visitor’s chair. She wasn’t on the exam table, and she’d apparently told Amber she wanted to speak to Nora without the prescreening Amber usually did.

  “Same to you. What’s up?”

  “I think I want an IUD.”

  “Okay. What are you using for birth control now?”

  “Well, when Sawyer and I first got together, we were using condoms. Then I went on the pill…”

  The pill.

  Oh. Holy. Shit.

  Nora’s stomach dropped, and she had to force herself to pay attention to the rest of what Eve was saying.

  “I just feel like I need a more long-term solution.” Eve lowered her voice and leaned in. “We don’t want kids anytime soon.”

  Focus. Focus. This was not a big deal. It was a little deal, and it could be remedied the moment this appointment was over. For now, her patient deserved her full attention.

  “We might not ever want kids. That’s why I didn’t want to talk to Amber. You know what this town is like with its meddling. I mean, I know she would probably keep it confidential, but—”

  “She would definitely keep anything you tell her confidential.” Interrupting one’s patients was bad form, but Nora had to set the record straight. “Or I’d fire her ass.” Eve smiled. “But it’s also fine to just talk to me.”

  “Clara just started university, and this is the first time Sawyer’s been not on kid duty since he was a kid. And the inn is doing well, but it’s still new. We’re just so busy and we’re kind of thinking if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it?”

  “You know, you don’t have to have a reason to want to prevent pregnancy. You can just not want a kid, either right now or ever, and that’s okay. You don’t have to justify yourself to me or anyone else.”

  “Right.” Eve visibly relaxed. “Okay.” She rolled her eyes self-deprecatingly. “I just have visions of it getting out and the old folks, like, dropping a baby on my doorstep in the middle of the night. But I’m being paranoid.”

  “No, I know what you mean. They can be very—”

  Eve perked up. “Are they on your case? Why?”

  “That would be something to talk about in our capacity as friends.” She hadn’t told anyone about her and Jake, but she suddenly kind of wanted to. Mostly because she hadn’t heard from him since she’d left his place yesterday morning. Which wasn’t all that unusual, she told herself. Anyway, she’d been planning to try to cool it a little with him, anyway.

  “Right. Gotcha.”

  “So for an IUD, I’ll need to give you a pelvic exam and test you for STIs. Then I’ll give you a prescription for the actual IUD, you bring it back, and I’ll insert it. Sound good?”

  She pulled a curtain while Eve undressed, and they talked about the different models and how much pain to expect during and after insertion.

  Nora gloved up for the exam. “Here we go.”

  “Is it weird to be friends with people and then have your fingers in their vagina?” Eve asked cheerfully.

  Nora chuckled. “It’s actually not as weird as I thought it was going to be.”

  “What about balls, though? That must be weird. You feel up someone’s balls and then you run into him at, like, the farmers’ market?”

  She remembered how nervous she’d been about that very thing, about whether people should call her Dr. Walsh or Nora. All that junk had just faded away. “Not really. I think I’ve learned to compartmentalize.” Even more, she sort of liked the whole feel-someone’s-balls-and-run-into-them-at-the-farmers’-market thing. She felt like a mother hen to the town—in a good way. She handed Eve some tissues. “All done. I’m going to write you a requisition for blood tests. Get those done and get this”—she handed Eve her prescription—“filled and make an appointment to come see me. IUD insertion is generally easier when you’re on your period because your cervix is dilated, so if you can, try to time it so you come back then.”

  “Great. Thank you so much. Dr. Walsh.”

  “Nora.”

  “Yeah, but we’re compartmentalizing, right?”

  Nora smiled. “Right.”

  “But do you want to hang out in another compartment soon? I haven’t seen you since you got back, and— Crap. I never even asked you about your family, the funeral.”

  “It’s okay, and yeah. Let’s get together. Let’s get together soon.” She suddenly felt like she really needed to…be in another compartment with someone who wasn’t Jake. “But can we do it not at the bar? Or the inn?”

  “Oooh, the plot thickens.”

  Hopefully not.

  Definitely not.

  Or at least it was highly statistically unlikely that the plot was going to thicken.

  “How about Maya’s place?” Nora suggested. “I’ll arrange it with her and let you know.”

  “Great!” Eve said. “Can’t wait to have some drinks and talk about something other than my vagina.”

  Right. We’ll talk about mine.

  It was the second day of the new year, and Jake was still freaking out. It was the day Jude would have been four years and three days old. Because Jude’s birthday was December thirtieth.

  Jake always spent Jude’s birthday by the lake. Sometimes on it, in the canoe, depending on how cold it was and how icy the cove was.

  Regardless, he always spent Jude’s birthday alone. The first year, Sawyer and Law had invited him to a movie, and when he’d demurred, they’d tried to elbow their way into his house. What he’d said that day, rebuffing them, was the most he’d ever said directly to them about Jude—about the Jude-shaped hole in his life. “I am only going to say this once. I know you mean well, but back the fuck off. December thirtieth is never going to be a normal day. I don’t want it to be. Get the hell out of here and leave me alone.”

  And to their credit, they had. It hadn’t come up again, with them or with anyone else. Probably because he made sure to spend every subsequent December thirtieth alone. Well, alone with his boy under the big starry sky next to the big black lake.

  Until the year he hadn’t spent December thirtieth alone with his boy.

  Because he’d forgotten his boy.

  His hands were frozen as he paddled back to shore. He’d spent most of today canoeing. Yesterday, too, after Nora had finally fallen asleep and he’d crept out of the cottage. His muscles ached from all the paddling, but it still didn’t feel like enough.

  He should have felt bad leaving her—she was mired in her own grief, and none of this was her fault. But what he had done—what he had not done—was too big for him to stay there.

  It still was. Being on the move was the only way he could outrun his panic. Keep it even slightly in check. Give himself the space to think.

  He had to cool it with Nora. What they had was supposed to be casual. Friendly.

  But if it was making him forget his own child, his own dead child, how casual was it? If he was capable of being distracted from what was important to him by zombies and orgasms, it followed that he needed to arrange his life so it contained fewer zombies and orgasms.

  So that was what he was going to do. He wasn’t going to break up with her or anything. They weren’t together to begin with, so that wasn’t called for. He just needed to…cool things a bit.

  After Nora emerged from her office—where she’d retreated after seeing Eve—Amber cornered her. “We’re getting a little backe
d up. I have what I’m sure is strep in Room Two, and—”

  “I need to step out for a minute.”

  “Uh…okay?”

  Amber was surprised. Nora wasn’t prone to bailing in the middle of a busy day.

  “Just quickly.” She was already on her way down the short hallway to her office for her coat and keys. “I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

  Nora hadn’t counted on the fact that she and Eve would be going to the same place. Eve was putting on her coat in the waiting room when Nora rushed out—and ground to a halt. “Hi. I was…ah…I forgot something in my room at the inn.”

  “I’ll walk with you.” Eve was chipper, which must have meant Nora was doing a sufficient job disguising her internal terror.

  “Everything okay?” Eve asked as they waited for a lone car to pass before crossing Main Street.

  “Yeah, yeah.” But actually…“No. Everything is not okay. Can you come up to my room with me for a second?” She had just decided, back in the exam room, that she was going to confide in Eve and Maya. She’d been thinking some evening this week. She’d buy a pizza and take it to Maya’s place.

  But what the hell—why not now?

  “Of course.” Eve’s brow knit as they climbed the stairs to the top of the inn, and when she closed the door behind her in Nora’s room, she said, “What’s up?”

  It was kind of funny the way the tables had turned. Ten minutes ago, in a room as small as—though considerably less pink than—this one, she’d asked Eve that exact question. She sighed. “I suddenly realized I forgot to take my birth control pill three days in a row, and they’re in my suitcase somewhere.” She started rummaging through said suitcase, which had gone from Toronto to Jake’s to here and which she hadn’t gotten around to unpacking yet.

  “Okay, well, you’re the doctor, but don’t you just double up for the next two days?”

  “Yes.” She extracted the pill packet and popped two out. They both looked around the room. There was a can of Diet Coke on the dressing table Nora knew was half-finished. She picked it up and took the pills.

  “Okay, so that’s fine, then?”

  “Yes.” It was fine. It was. That’s what she would have told a patient in her circumstances. The chances that she was pregnant were extremely slim. It was just that…“I have had so much sex in the past few days.” She buried her head in her hands and sat on the bed.

  “You were getting it on in Toronto!” Eve sounded altogether too delighted. “Who’s the lucky guy? Oh my gosh! Was this funeral sex?”

  Nora sighed. “No. I came back on Friday.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “I came back to town. I wasn’t staying here.”

  “Ohhhh,” Eve breathed.

  “Yeah.” Here she went. She squeezed her eyes shut. “I’ve been sleeping with Jake Ramsey for three months.”

  Eve started laughing.

  Nora opened her eyes. “Thanks for your support.”

  “Sorry! Sorry! I just…Jake. Wow.”

  “If you tell anyone, I’ll…” She didn’t know what to threaten. She had no leverage here.

  “Tell everyone I’m getting an IUD?” Eve supplied helpfully.

  “No. No. I would never do that.”

  “Wow. You are hard-core.”

  Nora stood. “I have to get back to work.”

  “Hang on. You can’t just drop that bomb and leave!”

  “I have patients waiting.”

  “Okay, okay, but hang on for a second.” The smile slid off Eve’s face and she grabbed Nora’s upper arms. “Are you okay?”

  “We’re not together. It’s just a sex thing.”

  “Okay.” She did not sound convinced.

  “It is. I mean, it’s a friend thing, too. But we’re not together. It’s a friends-with-benefits thing.”

  “I don’t think those work in this town.”

  “What?”

  “Sorry. Nothing. Your secret is safe with me.”

  That was one small piece of good news. “I have to get back to work.”

  She turned and fled, but Eve followed. “You were gonna tell Maya about this, right? That’s why you were suggesting getting together at her place?”

  Nora nodded.

  “Okay, then. Maya’s tonight. I’ll arrange it. In fact, no, we’ll pick you up.”

  Hey, happy New Year. Now that you have a phone I thought I’d wish you a great year and say that I was thinking of you on the thirtieth. I almost texted then, but IDK, it’s a weird day.

  Jake looked at the text from Kerrie for the millionth time. This was the problem with phones. People texted you shit, and you had to reply. What was he supposed to say? “Happy New Year. I wasn’t thinking of you on the thirtieth or of Jude because I was too wrapped up in having meaningless sex”?

  Or maybe—and this was the terrifying part—not-so-meaningless sex.

  He went with It’s a hard day, isn’t it?

  Kerrie: Yeah. But it gets easier with time. Life goes on, I guess.

  Jake: Do you ever feel guilty about that?

  Kerrie: About life going on, you mean?

  Jake: Yeah.

  Kerrie: Not really. Maybe at first. But I saw a shrink who read me the riot act about that. I don’t know if you’ve done that, but it helped a lot.

  Clara had told him you didn’t necessarily need to formally close off a texting conversation, that it was okay to stop responding when things wound down. He was going to take her word for it. Because he had no idea what to say to that. He didn’t need a shrink to tell him to stop feeling bad that his child was dead.

  More to the point, he didn’t want that.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  I can’t stop worrying about it. It’s irrational, but I can’t stop.”

  “Of course you can’t,” Eve said. “We’ve all been there.”

  Nora was hanging out with Eve in Maya’s apartment—Maya herself had gone on a food run. It was two weeks after the three of them had initially retreated here—the day Nora confided in them about Jake and the pregnancy scare—and it had become a tradition of sorts. A couple nights a week, they’d bring dinner and drinks to Maya’s and hang out and talk. It was nice.

  Or it would have been nice, if Nora hadn’t been freaking out. “I haven’t been here, though,” she said to Eve.

  “Really? You’ve never had a pregnancy scare?”

  “Not really. I mean, I’ve been a day or two late once or twice.” And in those cases she’d always known what she would do. She’d been too young, or too buried in her education, to contemplate motherhood.

  A baby was something she always vaguely planned on later. When she was older. More settled.

  “Hello, hello, and welcome to Pregnancy Watch Day Seventeen.” Maya hustled into the apartment carrying a pizza box and some shopping bags. “What did I miss?”

  “You went to Grand View for pizza?” Eve asked, nodding at the box emblazoned with the name of a pizzeria in the neighboring town.

  “I did.” Maya set everything on the coffee table—Eve and Nora were on the sofa in her living room. “I also went to Grand View for this.” She rummaged in her bag, produced a pregnancy test, and banged it down on the table like she was triumphant over a winning poker hand.

  Nora could practically feel her blood pressure spike. “Whoa.”

  “Your period was due today, right?”

  “Yes, but I wasn’t going to test for another day or two.” That’s what she would have advised a patient. Save your money. Most of the time your period will come—hell, most of the time it will come on the way home from the drugstore.

  It was science.

  Or denial.

  One or the other.

  “Anyway, it’s best to take those tests first thing in the morning when your HCG levels—that’s the pregnancy hormone—are highest.”

  “Which is why I also got this.” Maya produced a second test, and Eve giggled. Maya shrugged. “I figured I was already in Grand View for the pi
zza. It’s not like you can stroll into the drugstore here and buy a pregnancy test without the whole town knowing your business.”

  “That’s true,” Eve said.

  “Just take it,” Maya said. “It’s one of those early tests that’s supposed to detect even before your period is due. If it’s negative, it will ease your mind at least somewhat, won’t it? And then you can take the other one first thing in the morning tomorrow to be sure.”

  “Well…” Nora wasn’t sure why she was hesitating. Even though the doctor in her thought it was premature to pee on a stick at this point, the woman in her was like Gimme that thing.

  “And if it’s negative tomorrow, you can come back here for some of this.” Maya produced a bottle of tequila.

  Nora laughed and held out her palm. Maya slapped the test into it. “Go forth and pee. Think happy thoughts of tequila tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow’s Friday, though,” Eve said. “Bar night.”

  “Well, I think we can all agree that a break from boys is in order.” Maya made a face at Eve. “Or at least two-thirds of us can agree. All boys do is cause problems.”

  Nora left the door to the bathroom ajar so she could hear the conversation.

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Eve said.

  “You’re such a liar—that’s fake solidarity. Yours doesn’t cause problems.”

  “That’s because he got it all out of his system when we were teenagers.”

  “True.”

  Eve, Nora had learned, used to come to Moonflower Bay in the summers when she was a kid, and had had a romance with Sawyer and then not seen him again for a decade, until she inherited the Mermaid Inn.

  “Have you heard from Jake?” Eve called to Nora.

  “No.”