Paradise Cove

by Jenny Holiday

  Also, it was hard to hide the sounds of her violent retching.

  Jacques might not realize what was happening. Out at the front desk, he was farthest from the barfing. And he was very young and not medically trained like Amber was.

  But Amber was being cool about it. “Did you see that there’s a new midwifery practice forming in Grand View?” She handed Nora a brochure for Lambton County Midwifery. “I was thinking we should make contact with them. We might want to…make some referrals. Obviously, as a family doctor you’re more than qualified to provide primary care to pregnant women and babies. I mean, your town square emergency delivery is legendary. But you know how this place can be. Some people might be more comfortable seeking care a little farther away.”

  Should she keep deflecting? Amber winked at her. She clearly already knew. Nora sighed and opened the brochure. “I’ve been driving to London, but it would be nice to have someone closer. I just never thought of myself as a midwife person.”

  Amber beamed and gave her a quick, affectionate squeeze on the shoulder before reverting back to professional mode. “They’re fully licensed by the province. They have hospital privileges.”

  “Right.” She referred women with low-risk pregnancies to midwives all the time.

  Amber lowered her voice. “I’m guessing you’re about eight or nine weeks?”

  “Ten.”

  “Well, then you should be feeling much better soon, regardless of what kind of care you choose.”

  “And showing soon, too.” Her pants were already tight.

  “I can’t help you there. You’re just going to have to fess up.” She grimaced. “And in this town…Well, I’m glad I’m not you.”

  She almost fessed up a week later when she threw up on Mick.

  “Oh, shit, are you okay?”

  Jake did his signature at-her-side-in-an-instant thing. It startled her. Made her realize how much she had missed his solid, quiet presence in her life.

  But in answer to his question, no, she was not okay. She was mortified. “I’m fine. I have a bug.”

  “I’ll take you home.”

  “I live across the street.”

  He looked at her like, So?

  “I have patients.”

  “Patients you want to give your germs to?”

  She pulled a packet of Kleenex out of her bag and started trying to clean off poor Mick, who was, she comforted herself, taking this all in stride. She should just tell Jake. She was going to have to soon anyway. The end of first-trimester hell—she vehemently hoped she would not be one of those unlucky women who were sick through their whole pregnancy—was in sight, and here was the perfect opportunity.

  The problem was, things were starting to feel more…normal between them. Not sexy-normal. Her libido was in the toilet, but still. Things were less weird. He was bringing Mick around more often. He’d brought her some fish the other day. It felt like maybe they were getting their friendship groove back. Probably it was weird that they’d just stopped having sex, as if by silent agreement. Probably they should at least acknowledge that fact? Agree that the benefits phase of their friendship was over? But honestly, she was so tired and sick. And she didn’t know how to have that conversation.

  So she kept her mouth shut.

  Which had an added benefit: it made her less likely to throw up again.

  Jake couldn’t shake the sense that something was wrong with Nora. She wasn’t her usual self. He knew because he’d been watching her extra closely. She just seemed…heavier. Not her body, really, though she might have put on a few pounds, but her gait. Her way of moving through the world. She seemed less sparkly than usual, like all her silver icing had faded to gray.

  It was probably her grandma.

  It was probably grief.

  He had handled this all wrong. He had been trying to put some distance between them. He’d honestly thought it was for the best. She made him forget Jude. When she was around, he wasn’t himself. So if he wanted to protect himself—to protect the memory of his boy—he had to stay away. That was the theory, anyway. The problem was, try as he might, he couldn’t stay away. She was too easy to be with. He missed her. He felt himself drawn back to her, almost against his will, like she was a planet he was orbiting. He’d started bringing Mick around more. Stopping into the Mermaid’s cocktail hours. Putting himself in her path.

  Also, he was worried about her.

  Which was why, a couple weeks after she’d thrown up in the gazebo, he invited her to the cottage for dinner. Picked up his stupid phone and texted her. I never made you any of that panfried pickerel I promised. You want to come for dinner?

  He was surprised when she accepted, given how weird things had been between them lately.

  And even more surprised when she showed up looking like a million bucks. Gone was the dullness he’d noticed before. She looked rested and radiant.

  He suppressed a sigh as he took her coat and steadied her while she stepped out of the boots he’d left on the other side of the outcropping. She was so gorgeous. It wasn’t fair.

  Well, if she was suddenly fine, maybe that made what he’d been planning to say obsolete. But hell, he’d just say it anyway. So as he was dredging the fish in flour and transferring it to an egg bath, he came right out with it. “I’ve been texting with Kerrie a little bit. She went to this grief counselor after Jude died, and she said it really helped her. I thought you might want the name.”

  She blinked rapidly. He’d offended her. He tried to change the subject. “You sure you don’t want some wine? Or bourbon?”

  “No!” She sounded a little manic. She blew out a breath, paused, and her voice sounded calmer when she spoke again. “You’ve been texting with Kerrie?”

  “Yeah. Not much. Just…it was Jude’s birthday recently, so we kind of reconnected.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh.”

  She probably thought this was why he’d pulled away from her. “Not like that,” he hurried to say, even as he made himself carry on with the flour-egg-parmesan fish prep. “We’ve just been reminiscing about Jude a bit.”

  “Oh, well, that’s good.” She didn’t sound like she meant it. But he didn’t have much time to ponder it because she hit him with a doozy of a question. “If you hadn’t had Jude, do you think you and Kerrie would still be together?”

  “Probably not.” He had never really thought about it, but once the question was posed, the answer was right there. “I think we would have grown apart. We got together so young, before we figured out that we wanted different things.” That was the first time he’d verbalized that, but once again, as soon as he said it, he recognized its truth. His hand shook a little as he laid the first prepared fillet into a pan of oil.

  “What things? How were they different?”

  It was easier to talk about this stuff without looking at her, so he stayed by the pan to fuss over the fish. “Well, she was a hotshot lawyer. She commuted to Guelph every day, and I suspect she regretted that she couldn’t get a job with a big Toronto firm. She would’ve rather we moved, but she let it go—probably because we did have Jude. She knew I’d never want to leave Moonflower Bay, and she knew it was important to me to raise him here. So she didn’t force the issue.”

  “She loved you.”

  He turned. “Yes.”

  “And if Jude hadn’t died?”

  “We probably would have made it work for no other reason than we were both stubborn. But in a hypothetical world without Jude, I’m not sure there would have been any point to digging our heels in.”

  It struck him as funny suddenly, the way that thought announced itself in his head. A hypothetical world without Jude. He’d meant a world in which Jude had never been born. But a hypothetical world without Jude wasn’t hypothetical. It was this world. He no longer had Jude.

  That was a big thought. It was a fact. It was a fact he confronted every day. But it was still intense to think it like that, so overtly.

  He wondered why she
was asking all these questions. She didn’t seem like the jealous type. And that didn’t seem like what was going on now. She seemed more curious than anything, but he wondered why now? They’d had ample time to talk about anything and everything.

  They needed to clear the air. He couldn’t stand any more of this weirdness between them. He was going to have to address the elephant in the room. He flipped the fish and turned to her. “Look, I need to apologize for a couple things. I’m sorry I—”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “I do. I’m sorry I busted out that stuff about the grief counselor. I was just worried about you. But mostly I’m sorry I haven’t been around much lately. I know I’ve been distant. I need to explain…”

  She was rummaging in her bag, her back half-turned. She wasn’t listening to him at all.

  When she straightened, she was holding a piece of paper. She slid it across the island to him.

  “What’s this?” It was a gray blob of some sort. It looked like a weather—

  No. It looked like…

  “I’m pregnant.”

  Nora wasn’t sure what she’d expected. Incredulity, if she’d had to put money on it. Shock. Anger, even. She was, after all, ambushing him.

  She hadn’t been prepared, though, for utter and complete silence.

  Which she felt compelled to fill, once it had stretched out to an uncomfortable degree. “I forgot my pills while I was here for New Year’s. I don’t know what happened. I had them here. They were in my bag all along. I just was so…overcome, I guess. And we were keeping a really weird schedule. The days blurred together…”

  This wasn’t going well. This wasn’t how she wanted to deliver the news, all tentative and full of excuses. She tried again. “I’m sorry. This is my fault.”

  His eyes were completely blank. “I may have almost flunked out of school, but I’m pretty sure it takes two to tango.” His tone was blank, too.

  “We agreed that the pill was going to be our method of contraception, and I failed to take it properly. It is my fault. But I’ve decided I’m keeping it. I’m not asking you for anything, though.”

  “Do you want to give me a little bit of credit here, Nora?”

  There. There was some anger. His voice was low, but not the sexy-low she’d heard so many times. No, this was shaking-so-I-don’t-go-postal low. He sounded like his control could snap at any moment. “I do give you credit,” she said quietly. “I’m just trying to say that I know I’m ambushing you here. I know you don’t want this.”

  “Well, we can’t always get what we want, can we? If I could have what I wanted, I’d already have a kid. If I could have what I wanted, this kid”—he shoved the ultrasound picture back toward her—“would be obsolete. So yeah, this is pretty much the last thing I want.”

  It wasn’t until the smoke alarm went off—Jake had continued standing at the kitchen island long after Nora fled crying—that he realized he didn’t know anything. When was she due? Did she know if it was a boy or a girl? If not, was she planning to find out?

  Was this why she’d been sick?

  Well, of course this was why she’d been sick. He felt like an idiot for not seeing it.

  The questions kept coming. Had she been eating enough through the morning sickness? Had she felt it kick yet? Did she have names picked out? Was she going to take a leave from work?

  Why hadn’t she told him right away? And, oh God, was she going to take the kid and move back to Toronto?

  And one more question: What kind of man was he that he’d watched her face crumple and tears start flowing and just stood there? Let her stumble off the stool and, as her silent tears became sobs, flee?

  Had she even taken her boots?

  He had no answers to any of these questions.

  He felt strange. Weak and shaky, like he was barely inhabiting his body. Like he was floating above it. It was a kind of panic, he supposed, but it was different from the waves. It was an emptiness. Just like he had no answers to all the questions that had been swirling through his mind, he had…no sensations in his body. He had been angry before. Shocked, then angry. Now he was just…blank.

  Smoke was filling the kitchen. He should deal with that. That was a thing a person should do in this situation. He turned to the stove, grabbed the pan, and—

  “Fuck!”

  He burned his hand. Because that was what happened when you grabbed a hot pan with your bare hand.

  Pain seared through him, yanking him back into his body, and as he jammed his hand under the cold water tap, it didn’t stop. It started spreading, up through his arm and down into his chest. It radiated down his legs until they couldn’t hold him up anymore. He slid to the floor of the kitchen with the sink still running and the smoke alarm still blaring. He was drowning. This was like the waves, except instead of being inside him, they were all around him. They were subsuming him. They were going to kill him. He couldn’t breathe.

  What should he do? What should he do?

  Think. What did drowning people do?

  Drowning people needed life preservers. Rescuers.

  He stumbled out to the living room where he’d left his phone. It took him a stupid amount of time to get his fingers steady enough to type. I know this is a random question, and you don’t have to answer it if you don’t want to, but do you ever think about having kids again?

  Kerrie replied with a photo. This is Sienna. She’s eighteen months old. I should have told you. I’m sorry I didn’t.

  He sucked in a breath. The little girl looked a lot like Kerrie and a little like Jude. He hadn’t cried, before, when he was drowning, but suddenly he had to bite back tears.

  Jake: You don’t owe me anything. She’s beautiful. Congrats.

  Kerrie: I got remarried. He’s a good guy. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you that, either.

  He felt a little better. It was working. He wasn’t going to drown after all. He took a deep breath. And another one. Don’t be sorry. How would you have told me? Driven here and hiked into the cove?

  He’d been kidding—or trying to, because although she was his life preserver, he didn’t want her to know that—but she replied Maybe.

  Jake: You don’t owe me an accounting of your life.

  Kerrie: I know. It’s just weird to go through so much with someone and then just have them be gone.

  Jake: Yeah.

  He knew she meant the two of them, after they split, but he also kind of felt that way about Nora. She’d been his best friend. His lover. One minute she’d been having a five-minute orgasm, and the next she was practically a stranger. The next she’d been pregnant with his baby.

  Kerrie: Don’t feel pressured to say yes, but would you ever want to meet for coffee? We could meet halfway. In Stratford, maybe. You could meet Sienna. She’s Jude’s little sister. Or at least that’s how I think of her.

  He let the tears come. I’d love that. Can we do it soon? I think I really fucked something up, and I could use some advice.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Kerrie looked the same. She was a little fuller in the face, and her hair, which she used to highlight with blond streaks, was one solid color. But when she turned as Jake approached her table at the coffee shop in Stratford, her eyes were the same. Her smile was the same.

  He hadn’t been sure how to greet her. A handshake? A friendly nod? How did a person greet the ex-wife he hadn’t seen in years? A person he had once shared everything with but who was now a stranger?

  She settled the question for him by standing up and throwing her arms around him. She smelled the same, too, like the perfume she used to wear, kind of flowery and minty at the same time. He could still see the little pink bottle sitting on the bathroom vanity in their old house.

  The sameness of her was a shock.

  He wasn’t sure what he’d expected. It was just that he had storms inside him and he wondered if she did, too. Or if she had, past tense. She’d gone to a grief counselor, she’d told him, so she must have. He
sort of felt like when you had such violent storms inside you, it should change you visibly. But she was the same.

  She pulled back and studied his face. He remembered how much he used to love the dimple she had on her left cheek. It was still cute, objectively, but there was no longer any heat behind his appreciation of it. Whatever spark had brought them together had gone out a long time ago. He could smile at her, smell her perfume, and think of her only as…what? A fellow soldier, maybe. Like they were the sole survivors of the same bloody battle.

  “Jake, this is my husband, Cody.”

  He hadn’t even noticed there was a guy seated with her at the table. And he was holding a little girl with Kerrie’s dark hair and Jude’s big green eyes. He sucked in a breath and took the guy’s outstretched hand.

  “I know it’s probably a little weird to bring my current husband to meet my ex-husband,” Kerrie said. “But I wanted you to meet Sienna but then also for us to be able to talk. So Cody’s gonna take Sienna to the park in a little bit.”

  Jake nodded, his throat tightening. He couldn’t take his eyes off Sienna. She had a way of tilting her head that was just like Jude.

  “I’m sorry for your loss, man,” Cody said. “We talk about Jude all the time. Sienna has a picture of him in her room.”

  Kerrie opened a locket she was wearing around her neck and held it out to him. There were two tiny pictures inside—one of Sienna and one of Jude.

  If Jake had imagined being undone by this meeting, he had imagined it being the result of a magnified dose of grief, his constant, persistent companion. He hadn’t imagined it being the result of kindness.

  He swiped at the tears that were starting to fall.

  “Actually, should we all go to the park?” Kerrie asked gently, and he could only nod.

  The short walk to a nearby school playground allowed him a moment to get himself together. Kerrie, walking beside him, was silent, and Cody pushed Sienna in the stroller at a pretty good pace, which was putting them farther and farther ahead. Jake suspected he was doing it on purpose, and he appreciated it.