Dr. Dad

by Judith Arnold

  “Make love,” he said deliberately. Stoicism didn’t suit him. He was seething, and he wanted Susannah to feel as uncomfortable as he did.

  He didn’t rattle her as much as he’d hoped. “Make love,” she agreed, still stroking the cat, her eyes crystalline as she lifted them to meet his. His anger only seemed to strengthen her resolve. “How would it affect Lindsey if we were to do that?”

  “I’ve been trying really hard to stop basing all my decisions on how they’d affect Lindsey.”

  A smile flitted across her lips. “Well, then…I guess this decision is going to be based on how it would affect me.” The hint of a smile vanished, and she returned her attention to the coffeemaker. “I’m not looking for a romance.”

  “Just a friendship,” he deduced, his anger cooled by a splash of irony. “Isn’t that what they say in Hollywood? ‘We’re just friends.”’

  “Do you mind being just friends with me?” she asked in a small, hesitant voice.

  A dry laugh escaped him. “I think I can handle it.”

  She turned back to him. “Because I treasure this friendship, Toby. I want us to stay friends. I want to come and observe you while you work. And I want to help you out with Lindsey if you need it. We can make a good friendship here, don’t you think?”

  A good friendship. He supposed he could use one of those. He would have preferred to have that good friendship with someone he hadn’t kissed the way he’d kissed Susannah, someone who didn’t turn him on simply by existing. Someone who didn’t keep him up at night, in every possible interpretation of the phrase.

  But if he couldn’t have anything more than a friendship with Susannah, so be it. As his friend, she would still be his sounding board when he had concerns about Lindsey. And he’d still be able to help her with tasks that required a man, whether they entailed hanging a mirror or rescuing her from an avid crowd of fans. He could do that for her.

  In the meantime, he’d better talk to Molly, his Daddy School teacher, and see if she had any good ideas about how he could live his own life—specifically, how he could live it without Susannah’s guest-starring in it.

  “Sure,” he conceded, feeling the last hot embers inside him die and fade to gray, feeling his disappointment chill to grudging resignation. “We can be friends.”

  AMANDA’S BEDROOM was pink. Really pink. The walls were light pink, her bedspread was Barbie pink and the carpet was a kind of purplish pink, the color of raspberry sherbet. Her furniture was white with pink roses painted on the drawers and pink scrolling on the headboard.

  The funny thing was that the pink sort of clashed with Amanda. She had brown hair and tan skin. Meredith matched the room much better.

  Lindsey had darker hair than Amanda, and lighter skin, so she wasn’t sure whether she matched or not. It didn’t matter. This was an emergency meeting of the Susannah Dawson Admiration Society, and she was glad that it was being held in someone else’s house instead of hers.

  Actually, she’d hoped they could have their meeting at the mall, so they could have bought stuff and treated themselves to ice-cream cones after the meeting was over, but Dr. Dad had vetoed that plan. So had Amanda’s and Meredith’s parents. None of the adults had felt like driving them all the way to the mall and then sitting around for an hour or two while the girls hung out.

  But it was just as well that they were meeting at Amanda’s house, because Amanda had her sister’s magazine. It was one of those tabloids, the kind they sold at checkout counters in supermarkets, usually with an ugly picture of a famous person on the cover and a headline about some famous person’s breast implants or mysterious pregnancy or heartbreak. Almost always, a famous person’s heartbreak was featured on the cover: the famous person’s heartbreaking final days, or the heartbreak of the famous person getting a divorce, or the famous person’s heartbreak over drugs or bankruptcy or the childhood secret no one knew about. Except the tabloid knew about it, of course, and published it so the whole world would know about it, too.

  Amanda had brought a bag of chocolate-chip cookies up to her room for them to munch on as they had their meeting. “So tell us about their date,” she said.

  “It wasn’t really a date,” Lindsey said. She was a little uneasy about telling the club about her father’s dinner date with Susannah. Judging from Dr. Dad’s mood when he came home Saturday night, she didn’t think it had gone well.

  He’d told her that he and Susannah had had a good time. At Lindsey’s insistence, he’d described the food they’d ordered—“Yes, we had wine,” he’d said—and then he’d driven Susannah home and come home himself. Lindsey had still been awake, watching TV in the den, when he’d arrived. “We had a very nice meal, and we talked” was his summation of the evening.

  Well, of course that was all they’d done: talk. Susannah Dawson could have her pick of any single man in the country, maybe the world. Lindsey bet Mercy Hospital was broadcast all around the planet. They probably aired the show in Italy and France and Japan, and Susannah would appear on the screen with Italian or French or Japanese coming out of her mouth in someone else’s voice. Lindsey would bet lots of Italian and French and Japanese guys had big crushes on Susannah.

  So there was no way she’d fall for Lindsey’s father. He should have known that going in. If he had, he might not have been wearing such an expression of disappointment when he’d gotten home.

  He’d definitely looked disappointed. Even when he smiled. Even when he told her he’d had a good time. Even the following morning, just hours ago, when Lindsey had found him in the kitchen, brooding over a cup of coffee and staring out the window at nothing.

  “Where did they go?” Meredith asked.

  “Dominic’s.”

  “Dominic’s?” Amanda sneered. “He should have taken her someplace classy, like Reynaud.”

  “I told him that,” Lindsey said.

  “Well, it probably wouldn’t do him any good,” Amanda said, flipping through her sister’s magazine.

  “Because if this is anything to go by, she’s in love with Stephen Yates.” She found the page she was looking for and flung it toward Lindsey.

  Meredith crowded behind Lindsey to read over her shoulder. There was a big color photo of Susannah and Stephen Yates, both of them dressed to kill. Susannah wore a designer gown, sleek and slinky, with spaghetti straps that showed off her shoulders and throat. Her hair was piled on top of her head and she had humongous diamonds dangling from her ears. Stephen Yates was in a tuxedo—one of those Hollywood tuxedos, way too stylish, with a black shirt with a banded collar underneath. They were holding hands, looking in opposite directions and smiling, as if they were greeting fans who surrounded them on all sides.

  “She is so pretty,” Meredith murmured.

  “He’s so cute,” Amanda added, coming around Lindsey to read over her other shoulder. “They look perfect together, don’t they?”

  “Well, they looked perfect together on Mercy Hospital,” Meredith pointed out. “I don’t know what Lucien Roche is going to do now that Dr. Davis is gone.”

  “They’ll find someone else for him,” Lindsey predicted. “They’ll hire a new actress.”

  “She won’t be as perfect for him as Susannah was,” Meredith complained. “See how perfect they are?”

  Lindsey studied the picture. She had to admit Stephen Yates looked a lot more right with Susannah than her father did. Her dad was so just plain normal. If he ever wore a tuxedo, it would be the usual kind, with a pleated white shirt, a satin sash and one of those dippy little bow ties. Dressed to kill, Stephen and Susannah were like high-style royalty.

  “Read the article,” Amanda urged her. “You’ll see how perfect they really are for each other.”

  “Read it out loud,” Meredith requested, crawling around Lindsey to sit facing her, her legs extended across the pink carpet and her back resting against Amanda’s pink bed.

  Lindsey lifted the magazine and read:

  “‘Oh, Susannah! In the Life Imit
ates Art department, romance is sizzling both on-screen and off-screen between Mercy Hospital stars Susannah Dawson and Stephen Yates. According to friends, the handsome actor known as Lucien Roche on the medical drama moved into Susannah’s cozy canyon abode months ago. “They’re inseparable,” this friend says. “They live together and they work together. They’re completely and totally in love.” Any chance of wedding bells in the couple’s future? A reliable source says marriage is the only way this relationship can go. “Susannah’s an old-fashioned kind of girl,” this source insists. “Now that she’s expecting, she’ll want Stephen to marry the mother of his child.”’

  Lindsey dropped the magazine to her knees and scowled. The mother of his child? “This whole thing’s a crock,” she declared. “Susannah doesn’t have a child.”

  “How do you know that?” Amanda asked. “Maybe she had the child and left it back in California with Stephen.”

  “Oh, come on! I’ve been watching Mercy Hospital every week. The shows that are on now would have been taped when she was pregnant. She doesn’t look pregnant on them.”

  “They have ways of hiding pregnancies,” Amanda claimed. “It’s showbiz. They can do special effects. They can design her costume to hide a pregnancy. In any case, this magazine is from last June, which means she would have had the baby in December or January. The shows we’re watching now could have been taped after she had the baby, couldn’t they?”

  “If she had a baby, she would have it here in Arlington with her. You think she left it with Stephen Yates? No way. She wouldn’t do that,” Lindsey argued.

  “How do you know? It says right here—” Amanda jabbed her index finger at the magazine “—that she’s expecting.”

  “Maybe it meant she was expecting him to marry her.” Lindsey simply couldn’t believe Susannah had a baby. She turned to Meredith, searching for support.

  Meredith shook her head. “Expecting is expecting, Lindsey. And it says she’s the mother of Stephen’s child.”

  “She doesn’t look pregnant.” Lindsey scrutinized the photo. “She looks skinny in that dress.”

  “She was probably just a little pregnant when the picture was taken,” Amanda explained. “Or maybe it’s a file photo taken earlier and printed because they wanted a picture of her and Stephen to go along with the article about how she was expecting.”

  “I still don’t believe it.” Lindsey tossed the magazine aside. “You know these tabloids are always full of lies.”

  “I don’t think it’s a lie,” Amanda declared.

  Lindsey turned once more to Meredith, who suggested, “Maybe you could ask Susannah.”

  “Oh, sure. Like, I can just go up to her and say, ‘So, is it true you’ve got a baby? And if so, where might the little one be? Did you just, like, leave him behind when you moved to Arlington?”’

  “Well, you could be more subtle,” Meredith advised.

  “Or get her someplace where we can meet her, and I’ll ask her,” Amanda said, almost boasting. “She doesn’t scare me.”

  “That would be so rude.” Lindsey stared at the magazine with a combination of disgust and dread.

  “She’s a very nice lady. She wants her privacy. I can’t ask her such a personal question. I mean, we’re an admiration society. We admire her. We have to show some respect.”

  “Especially if she’s dating your dad,” Meredith added.

  “She’s not. They just had dinner, that’s all.” If Susannah had a baby, there was no way Lindsey was going to let her date Dr. Dad. He might be a pain in the butt, but he was her father and she loved him. She couldn’t let him get tangled up with some woman who had heartlessly abandoned her own baby.

  Besides which, if Susannah and Stephen Yates were destined for marriage, she was probably going to go back to California to be with him sooner or later. Lindsey wasn’t going to let her father get involved with a woman who was going to be leaving town. If Susannah hurt him, it would be awful—not just for him but for Lindsey. When Dr. Dad was miserable, he wasn’t fun to be with.

  “We need to investigate this more,” she resolved.

  “As a society, we need to know the truth. I can’t ask her flat-out, but maybe I can get her talking or something. And we’ll find out about this baby, one way or the other.”

  “Okay.” Amanda nodded her approval, then pulled out a cookie from the bag and bit into it. A real bite, not just one of her little crumbly nibbles.

  Lindsey had sort of lost her appetite, but she took a cookie anyway. She bit off a crescent and let it dissolve on her tongue while she tried to sort her thoughts.

  Magazines lied. Tacky tabloids in particular lied.

  Yet Susannah and Stephen Yates did look perfect together. And what Amanda said about how actresses could disguise their pregnancies with carefully designed outfits and special effects was true. And if this story about the pregnancy wasn’t factual, wouldn’t Susannah have sued the magazine for printing falsehoods about her?

  Lindsey didn’t want to believe any of it, but she had to admit Susannah was awfully private. She hated talking about her life back in Los Angeles. She might just be hiding something.

  Lindsey was appalled by the idea, but she couldn’t deny its plausibility. And maybe there was something exciting about it—maybe Susannah had had to abandon her baby for a reason. Maybe she was planning to return to Stephen and their child as soon as whatever it was that had driven her away was resolved. Maybe there was a deep, dark mystery behind the whole circumstance.

  As the founder of the Susannah Dawson Admiration Society, Lindsey acknowledged that it was her responsibility to find out the truth.

  SUSANNAH ALMOST DIDN’T call him Sunday. She was embarrassed about the way things had gone Saturday night, embarrassed by the mixed signals she’d sent him. When he kissed her, she seemed unable to do anything but kiss him back. But when he stopped kissing her long enough for her to restart her brain, she had to force herself to bring things to a halt. She couldn’t give up what she’d fought so hard to attain—her independence—and she knew that if she kept kissing Toby, if she let him insinuate himself deeper and deeper into her heart, she would lose her independence.

  It wasn’t his fault. It was hers, and admitting that added a hefty dose of guilt to her embarrassment.

  She’d sat at her desk late into the wee hours of Sunday morning, hoping that she might be able to get some writing done, since she couldn’t sleep. But after struggling over the script, she’d acknowledged that she was going to have to observe Toby at work. Not just because she wanted to get the technical details right but because the pediatrician character she’d created seemed stagnant to her. She’d concocted a few crises for him in the story arc and developed some nice interaction between him and the series regulars, but she needed to see him at work to nail him down. Which meant she needed to see Toby at work.

  Screwing her courage, she dialed his number at around six Sunday evening. His phone rang four times, and then his answering machine came on. She left a message for him to call her back, her voice smooth and amiable, without a hint of her ambivalence or her anguish. Then she hung up and groaned.

  MacKenzie gave her a disgusted look. He knew her too well. He knew she was a wimp, too spineless to trust her emotions around a man she could fall in love with. “Well, I’m trying to develop my spine,” she told him, wondering if she should let him walk on the kitchen table. Even though she sponged the table clean before she ate, having a cat stroll across the tabletop wasn’t exactly sanitary.

  MacKenzie licked his lips and puckered his little pink nose.

  “I can’t develop my spine if I start leaning on Toby,” she justified herself to the judgmental beast. “I know he’s nothing like Stephen. He’s nothing like anyone I ever knew in my life. But I’m really trying to be my own person for a change. Not Daddy’s wage earner, not Lee Davis, not Stephen’s arm candy. Just me, myself. And your slave, of course,” she added, scooping MacKenzie off the table and giving him a hug, which
he coolly tolerated.

  She set him down on the floor and he glided silently away. Too restless to remain indoors, she went upstairs to her bedroom and changed into a pair of athletic shorts, a sweatshirt, thick cotton socks and her sneakers. She pulled her hair back into a barrette, donned her eyeglasses, strapped on her wrist weights and headed out for a brisk, aerobic walk. She pumped her hands and pushed her feet, block after block, until a film of sweat coated her face and her wrists and biceps ached. Would there be a message from Toby on her machine when she got home? Or would he ignore her call, dismissing her as a bitch, a tease, someone he couldn’t trust?

  Lights were on in his house when she concluded her three-mile loop through the neighborhood and returned to their block. The last of the sun had faded, making the glowing gold light spilling through his windows terribly inviting. Did he know how lucky he was to have a daughter who loved him, a house that was a home, a sense of himself and his strength? All the power walks and wrist weights in the world couldn’t make Susannah as strong as he was.

  Sighing, she accelerated to a jog, passing his house and springing up the porch steps to her own front door. She entered the house and listened for the rhythmic beep that would indicate she had a phone message. She heard nothing.

  All right. She couldn’t blame him for wanting nothing to do with her, despite his insistence that they could still be friends. She would have to write her scripts without his input. Maybe she’d scrap the pediatrician character altogether. She had several other story arcs she could work with. She’d telephone her editor back in Los Angeles on Monday and describe the new direction she was taking her scripts. He’d been keen on the story line she’d faxed him, but if she couldn’t execute it, she couldn’t. If he told her he wasn’t going to buy her other scripts, she’d deal with that. She could manage her finances comfortably until another opportunity arose. In the meantime, she could get rid of her sexy pediatrician and—

  The phone rang.