The Doctor's Wife

by Cheryl St. John

  “I’m not angry,” he said as calmly as he could, wanting to touch her to show his sincerity, but holding back. “I was a little worked up there and I misunderstood you. I’m sorry, Ellie. Forgive me.”

  “No.”

  “What?”

  “No, you shouldn’t be sorry.”

  “Well, I am.” Something had happened back there and he’d missed it. Maybe she’d been trying to tell him to slow down and it had been so long for him that he’d just pressed on like an insensitive lug. “I didn’t pay attention to your needs, Ellie, and I am entirely sorry and at fault. We got off to a bad start. It’s okay.”

  Her shoulders shook then and she cried a few silent sobs that tore at his fortitude. What a heel. He’d been so eager to bed her he’d barely questioned her change of heart. Maybe she hadn’t been as ready as he’d hoped. He thought back over her words. I’ve changed my mind, she’d said and they’d straightened out that aspect. I thought you’d want to. Oh, he’d wanted to…but had she? It’s important for a marriage.

  She’d never said she wanted him.

  She’d obviously started out with very strong reasons for not wanting to sleep with him, and he suspected that those reasons went far beyond not having a baby. She’d trusted him to prevent that.

  Maybe his other suspicions were correct. Maybe she’d loved a man so deeply that Caleb’s touch repelled her. “Ellie, have you loved another man?”

  “What?”

  “Was there someone else? Is there someone else? Some man who holds your heart and won’t let you give yourself to me?”

  She pushed herself to a kneeling position and the moonlight made a halo of her tousled hair. She shook her head slowly.

  “No, Caleb. No.” It was a mere whisper.

  Should he ask her? Should he ask if his suspicions were true and if she’d had a baby? Or would that push her further away? She hadn’t told him herself. If it were so, and she wanted him to know, she would have confided in him. “Why did you come to my room tonight? Why did you bring me in here?”

  “You know why.”

  “You wanted us to have—relations.” Even to his ears it sounded way too blunt.

  But she nodded in the darkness.

  “Not for the purpose of having a baby, though.”

  “No.”

  “Then why?”

  She brushed the fingers of both hands beneath her eyes and took a breath, sitting straighter. She gave a small shake of her head. “I want to make you happy, Caleb. Truly I do.”

  He said nothing, thinking, absorbing her words and her actions.

  “I’ve never known anyone like you. You’re kind. And good. All the way through. You love people. You love children. You’ve made the boys a home and given us…so much. So very much. I can’t ever repay you for that.”

  The first trickling comprehension of this breathless explanation threaded its way through his previously passion-jaded mind. He almost wanted to get up and leave before she could say any more, but his practical, self-torturing mind had to know. “No one ever mentioned repayment,” he said. “You are Nate’s mother now. That was the arrangement. This,” he said, gesturing to the rumpled bed and his nakedness, “was not part of the deal.”

  “I know.” She scooped the side of her hair back nervously, then released it. “It…it didn’t seem like enough on my part. You’ve done so much more. You’ve given us so much.”

  That us got to him. “So you decided you had something to give me in return,” he said, his voice still soft, but taking on an edge. “For all of you.”

  She grew very still.

  “A payment.”

  She gave her head a shake, but didn’t speak.

  “Only prostitutes pay for things with their bodies, Ellie.”

  He could hear her breathing. Ragged. Tortured.

  “You thought you could just lie there and let me do it even though you don’t feel anything for me.”

  A tiny sound escaped her. Not a sob really.

  “You were wrong.” He got up and had to walk around the end of the bed and back toward her to pick up his pants. To her credit, she didn’t cower. “It didn’t work out, and now you know you can’t do it.”

  There was no dignified way to stand on one leg and pull his trousers on, so he perched at the foot of the bed, well away from her, and stuck a foot in.

  “No, it’s not like that at all,” she denied, finally speaking in a tremulous voice and rising on her knees to lean toward him. “Please, Caleb. Please don’t make it sound like that. Don’t make it sound…”

  He turned his face toward her, placing the other foot in a trouser leg.

  She had extended a hand toward his shoulder, but she drew it back. “It’s not that way, not at all.”

  He stood and pulled up his pants, covering his nakedness. “How is it then? Make me understand.”

  She covered her mouth with her open hand and sat back on her heels on the disheveled sheets. The hand moved to her knee. “We can try again.”

  Her voice sounded so weak he wanted to laugh. “I don’t force myself on women who don’t want me, Ellie. A marriage bed is not an altar to make sacrifices on. What kind of person do you think I am?”

  “I think you’re a wonderful person. Please don’t be angry.”

  He cocked his head and stood grappling with his bruised feelings. She had him so mixed up right now he probably shouldn’t speak. “I get angry sometimes. See, I’m not so wonderful after all. I’m mad as hell right now.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He turned to leave before he said anything he shouldn’t—before his hurt and confusion made him say things he’d regret.

  “Caleb, please,” she cried behind him.

  He left and closed the door with a final click.

  Ellie wrapped her arms around herself and ached for him. For herself. For the person she couldn’t be and desperately wanted to become. She leaned forward until her forehead touched the mattress, and clamped her teeth shut against the anguished cry that threatened to burst from her throat and purge her agonized spirit.

  Bitter regret and wretched sorrow turned inward, tying her heart in knots. If she could just be numb to this. If she could just guide her tormented feelings to a corner of her soul and lock them away. Would she ever be stronger? Would she ever be able to feel and give and enjoy as she craved doing? She couldn’t bear to live her whole life as this bottled-up weakling who couldn’t let herself feel.

  If she let herself feel, she’d know that his words had cut her more deeply than any pain she’d ever endured. If she let herself feel, she’d see just how much she needed him to accept her and love her. If she let herself feel, she’d have to acknowledge that her love for him was destined to be another of her deeply buried secrets.

  It was hurting him now to believe she didn’t care. If she was a human with any courage at all, she’d prevent that hurt.

  It angered him that she’d felt the need to repay him. People like him didn’t want payment. They wanted love, and Caleb deserved love.

  And she loved him, oh, she did. But loving him still wasn’t enough. Just saying the words wouldn’t change what had happened to her when they’d been on the verge of joining their bodies.

  Ellie had no control over the panic that had seized her mind. And she could never explain it to him—not without telling him the truth. And she didn’t have the courage to do that, for if she did, she’d lose him forever.

  She was still alone. And she was still empty on the inside. Only now she’d hurt the man she’d only wished to please. Her foolishness had made things worse. She curled into a ball and sobbed her misery into the pillow.

  Caleb behaved as though nothing had happened. She placed a cup of coffee before him the following morning.

  “Thank you.”

  She took a platter of hot flapjacks from the oven and placed it on the table beside the bacon she’d fried, glad she’d arrived downstairs early enough to chip a slice of melting ice and hold it agains
t her swollen eyelids.

  If anyone noticed her haggard appearance they didn’t say anything. The boys ate and she fed Nate. Caleb and Benjamin finished their meals and stood to leave.

  “Bye, Ellie.” Her brother gave her a peck on the cheek.

  She returned the kiss and patted his shoulder affectionately, allowing her distressed gaze to lift to Caleb. He bent to place a kiss on Nate’s head, and she remembered thinking of that daily goodbye last night when he’d kissed her.

  He straightened and ruffled Flynn’s hair. “You’ll take care of the goat today?”

  “You mean Nanny?”

  “Is that her name?”

  “Yup.”

  Caleb grinned endearingly and raised his gaze to Ellie. His smile grew stilted.

  Heat rose in her cheeks. An ache swelled in her chest. She wished she could go back and change last night. Either relive the whole encounter so that she wouldn’t experience that terrible suffocating panic, or go back to the point before she’d gone to his room and make a different choice.

  But she couldn’t do that. If she had the ability to change things that had already happened, her life wouldn’t have ended up where it had.

  She wanted to be someone who could walk over to him and place her arms around him, tuck her head beneath his chin and rest against him, feel the beat of his heart and the warmth of his body and his love. She wished there were words that would fix what had happened and erase the ugliness from her memories.

  He and Benjamin walked from the room, and no one seemed to notice that Caleb hadn’t told her goodbye. That such a trivial omission could leave this enormous cleft in her heart was amazing. She’d lived through some mighty rough times and had weathered the storms without caving in, so what made the difference?

  Why did a man so gentle have the ability to hurt her in places violent people had never reached?

  Ellie lived with the ache. A living, breathing wound she couldn’t patch or block out. And a discovery she hadn’t anticipated.

  Love hurt, too.

  Caleb remained unceasingly polite. Their life went on just as it had before. Only now there was a palpable undercurrent between them, an invisible boundary that kept their eyes averted and made certain there were no accidental touches.

  The morning school began, Caleb arrived with the buggy and they delivered the boys to the schoolhouse together.

  Caleb introduced Ellie to Mr. McCracken, a lean, balding man who wore suspenders over a poorly ironed white shirt. The collar appeared cinched at his throat by a string tie that bobbed comically beneath his Adam’s apple when he spoke.

  But he smiled at Benjamin and Flynn and asked them questions about their education up to this point, and when one of the boys sitting at a desk in the back in the back of the room emitted a loud belch, he merely turned his head and raised a brow, and the lad apologized.

  Ellie liked Mr. McCracken immediately. She shifted Nate’s pleasant weight in her arms.

  Flynn had made her promise not to kiss him, so she gave him a little wave, offered Ben a smile of encouragement and followed Caleb back out the door.

  Another piece of her dream was being fulfilled with the boys attending school. She couldn’t enjoy it as she wished she could, because of this rift between her and Caleb—because it didn’t feel as if they were sharing anything anymore. He assisted her into the buggy.

  “You can drop me off on Main between Fifth and Sixth,” she said. “I have some shopping to take care of.”

  He nodded and flicked the reins over the horses’ backs in silence.

  They arrived at the corner she’d indicated and Caleb helped her down. “You won’t have Nate’s pram, and he’ll get heavy. I can go home and get it for you.”

  “No, I’ll be fine. Everything will be delivered, and I’ll only have him to carry. I’ll stop and rest if I get tired.”

  He bent to kiss Nate’s head, and Ellie’s stomach quivered. She tried not to notice the familiar way he smelled or allow herself to look up at him. She balanced Nate on her hip and glanced across the street.

  Caleb straightened and turned away. “I’m sure I have patients waiting.”

  “Goodbye.”

  He gave a nod, hurried over to the buggy and climbed up, driving the horses away.

  She stared after him for several seconds, collecting her wits, tamping down her disappointment. There was a nip in the air that morning, making her realize Nate and the boys would need jackets. She should visit Eva Kirkpatrick and see if it would be less expensive to buy the material and have her sew them than to purchase them ready-made. Eva had promised her a dress as a wedding gift and she needed to call on her anyway.

  Ellie took her time in the stores, selecting food items and placing orders. She was learning which merchants sold items for a few pennies less than others and it was a satisfying challenge to tally how much she could save. The freedom of buying food—buying anything for that matter—was still unique. She could never take money or good fortune for granted.

  Later in the morning Ellie wandered through Luke Swensen’s store. She had picked out a few jars of fruit for pies and stood looking over the canned goods. “My wife said next time you were in I was to send a bag of oranges and one of those new teakettles home with you,” he said. “I got a shaving kit from a salesman the other day and I thought maybe Caleb would like it.”

  “I’m sure he would,” she replied. “That’s very kind of you.”

  “I figure we owe a debt we can never repay,” the man said, coming around the counter. “Seems like just payin’ a doctor bill isn’t enough for savin’ someone’s life.”

  Ellie knew how he felt. She hoped Caleb wasn’t as insulted at Mr. Swensen’s offers of appreciation as he’d been at hers.

  All the merchants Ellie had spoken with in the past weeks had praised Caleb equally. He’d proved himself and been accepted by the community he desired to help. He deserved to see his dream fulfilled.

  “Will you please send them to the house with the other items? I’ll be sure to tell Caleb they’re gifts from you and your wife.”

  “You holler if you need anything else.”

  “I will.” She had a fair walk to the dressmaker’s shop and needed to start out if she wanted to make it before the noon hour. She exited the store and hurried along the boardwalk, adjusting Nate on her hip.

  A prickling sensation alerted her to someone’s presence, and she looked askance to see a man walking toward her from the other side of the street. He wore a dark suit and his hat was cocked to keep the sun from his eyes, but she recognized him immediately.

  Winston Parker stepped up onto the boardwalk ahead of her, blocked her progress and tipped his hat in mock politeness.

  She stopped in her tracks.

  “Mrs. Chaney.” The way he said it made it seem obscene.

  A few other shoppers walked around them.

  Ellie started to move past, but he stepped in front of her. Her heart thudded against her breast. She didn’t want to see that face. She didn’t want to acknowledge his existence. Panic welled up inside her.

  Shifting Nate, she moved sideways quickly and entered through a door without reading a note tacked to the wood. Ellie glanced around. It was a tailor’s shop. The bell over the door had rung, but there wasn’t anyone in the semidark room. Dress forms held chalked and basted suit coats with facings exposed.

  She bumped her hip against a counter.

  Steps sounded behind her.

  She whirled to face the man she detested and feared with all her being. She clutched Nate protectively.

  “Nice of you to find somewhere for us to meet alone.”

  Ellie’s glance shot around the deserted work space. Surely someone in the back room would step out. This man wouldn’t risk doing anything to her in broad daylight and in a public place.

  Nate whined, and she realized she was squeezing him too tightly. She eased her hold and pressed him to her breast protectively.

  Winston’s attention shif
ted to the baby and his expression changed subtly. “I heard he was sick.”

  He reached to touch Nate’s head and Ellie’s stomach quaked. She moved him away and took a step back.

  “Come now, Ellie. I have every right to see my grandson.”

  Her heart pounded and she wanted to throw up. This horrible person didn’t deserve any rights. Especially not to this innocent child. “You stay away from us.”

  He raised his brows and grinned. “I don’t think so. I think we’re going to be seeing a lot more of each other. In fact, I’m going to make some arrangements for us—you and I. I’ll let you know when and where to meet me.”

  “You must be crazy if you think I’ll meet you.”

  “Not at all. You’ll meet me. You don’t have any choice.” He stepped closer, backing her against a dress mannequin that toppled and hit the floor with a thud. She caught her balance on a wooden counter. Nate squirmed. “I can request a meeting with you any time I please, and you won’t say a word.”

  “I will. I’ll tell Caleb what an awful person you are.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  “I will!”

  “Will you tell him your name is Foster and that your mother was a whore? I can always add those details for you. Then who would he believe? You—a whore? Or me—the father of the respectable woman he loved?”

  She loathed him with very cell in her body. How dare he call her that vile name after what he’d done to her?

  At the sound of a door opening and closing in the back of the building, he stepped away. “I’ll let you know when. And you’ll come to me.”

  He turned, replacing his hat and exiting the shop. The brass bell clanged.

  A moment later a man appeared from the back room. “Hello! Can I help you?” He walked over and removed the note from the door. “You must have seen my note that I’d be right back.”

  Ellie collected her senses and stumbled forward. “No, no, I just needed to get out of the sun for a moment.”

  He studied her curiously. It wasn’t a hot day compared to those they’d left behind. “Can I get you some water?”