by Karina Bliss
“We haven’t got time to come up today,” Kaitlin began, then frowned as she eyed Pip’s hair, still damp from the shower. “Are you nearly ready? We don’t want to miss the ferry.”
Belatedly, Pip remembered Kaitlin had organized the whole outing herself.
Avoiding Joe’s gaze, she began, “I can’t…”
Kaitlin’s face fell.
“…wait,” Pip finished weakly, then put on her happy face. “I can’t wait.”
KAITLIN HAD BEEN to Alcatraz heaps of times, but never at night. She spent the twilight ferry ride to the island arguing with Melissa over whether it was dark enough yet to be truly scary, and fussing because Pip couldn’t see anything through the squall of rain that had hit the minute they’d boarded.
“It’s okay, Kaitlin,” her teacher soothed, “I’ve seen the city from the harbor before.”
“And you’re not getting seasick?” Because Pip did look kind of washed out, and she wasn’t eating any of the sugar doughnuts they’d bought on the wharf.
“I think I can cope for fifteen minutes.”
“Pip,” said Melissa, “there’s the lighthouse. Do you see it, Pip?”
Kaitlin looked at Dad and rolled her eyes. Melissa was making the most of calling Pip by her first name, which she had said they could do outside school. Kaitlin shared the thrill, but at least she managed to act cool about it.
“Shush,” she told Melissa, “Pip needs to listen to the captain.” As tour officiator, she didn’t want her to miss a minute.
And she certainly seemed to listen pretty intently, because she didn’t say much, except “Wow,” whenever Kaitlin looked at her to make sure she was having a good time. It did mean that Melissa got most of the doughnuts, though she claimed Sanderella ate a couple, which didn’t deserve an answer.
Dad was watching Pip, too, Kaitlin noticed, and she started watching him instead. Lately he looked at Pip like it kinda hurt, when he used to smile.
He and Pip never hugged or anything when Kaitlin was around, but when they sat together they liked to have their legs touching. Except today, Pip sat with her legs crossed and her arms folded.
“You okay?” Dad asked at one point, and she nodded and smiled at Kaitlin.
“Fine!”
“I was hoping they’d kiss or something,” Melissa said as she and Kaitlin went to use the bathroom on the ferry, in case it was fun to pee on a boat.
“They never do,” said Kaitlin, opening the restroom door.
Wrinkling her nose, Melissa closed it again. “Gross,” she said. “So do you think they’ve changed their mind about getting married?”
“Miss Br…Pip’s going home in four weeks, remember?”
“So? She could stay, or come back when she’s seen her folks…or your dad could go with her.”
“He can’t do that, he’s got me. And I can’t go because of Mom.”
“Let’s go stare at them again,” said Melissa, “just in case they kiss.”
AT THE ALCATRAZ DOCK, when Kaitlin put her hand in his and whispered, “You’re going to miss her, aren’t you?” Joe felt like the emperor caught in public with no clothes on.
It took a kid to state the obvious and explain his growing sense of foreboding.
Swept forward by the surging crowd, Pip and Melissa stepped to one side and waited for them to catch up. The rain had stopped, but the dusk was chill with sea fog. Pip was hugging herself again, something she’d been doing intermittently through the ferry ride, although she’d refused Joe’s jacket. “I’m not cold, just impressed by the spookiness of it all,” she’d insisted, which tickled Kaitlin.
She’d been distracted ever since they’d picked her up, and right now, thinking herself unobserved, she reminded him of a prisoner on her way to incarceration. She caught his eye, smiled and turned away.
Kaitlin tugged on his hand again. “Make her stay, Dad.”
“How am I supposed to do that, honey?”
His daughter looked up at him like a dog begging for a bone. “Marry her?”
“Kaitlin, men and women who like to spend time together aren’t always planning marriage.” But the guy you eventually date better be. “Pip and I always knew she’d be going home.”
“I don’t see why she can’t stay,” said Kaitlin.
“She wants to be with her family. You can understand that, can’t you?” He’d realized in the weeks they’d been together that Pip felt about her whole family the way he did about Kaitlin. As if something was missing if they weren’t around.
The way—as his daughter had pointed out—Joe was starting to feel about Pip.
Kaitlin pulled a face. “I guess.”
“Look, there’s Melissa waving.” His daughter dropped his hand and ran ahead, leaving Joe with a truth he could no longer ignore. And a question. What was he going to do about it?
As he came up behind Pip, Joe took off his jacket and laid it around her shoulders.
She acted as though he was trying to put a straitjacket on her. “I can take care of myself, Joe.”
“I know you can,” he said quietly.
“Sorry.” For a moment she leaned into him. “Wrong side of the bed this morning.”
“Premenstrual tension?” Nadia had suffered from it.
Pip didn’t answer, rejoining the girls, who were listening to a brief overview of Alcatraz’s history before the guide sent everyone up to the cell house. “What did I miss?”
“Al Capone got taken away from Alcatraz when his syphilis got worse,” said Kaitlin. “What’s syphilis?”
Things went downhill from there. Darkness lent the prison a menace it didn’t have by day, scaring Melissa, who saw ghosts around every corner.
Joe’s ghosts walked, too. He might have got over Sue a long time ago, but the experience had taught him a valuable lesson. Love hurts. Hold back.
Pip seemed oblivious to the atmosphere, walking through the multitiered cell block and listening to the audio tour through her headset. “Have you got to the good bit yet?” Kaitlin asked. When Pip didn’t respond, she turned to her dad. “You know, when the inmates dug escape routes using spoons?”
He gave his daughter the reassurance she needed. “She’s having a great time, sweetheart.”
Satisfied, Kaitlin put her own headset back in place and ran to catch up to Pip.
Clutching Sanderella to her chest, Melissa hung back with Joe. Her free hand, sticky with doughnut sugar and fear, stole into his. “This is too creepy,” she wailed. She’d refused to listen to the audio commentary, claiming her “imagination was too vivid,” and kept glancing around nervously. “An’ I don’t want to touch anything,” she murmured, “in case I catch syphilis.”
Deliberately vague, he and Pip had explained to the girls that it was a communicable disease.
“Okay, everybody,” the guide called. “We’re gonna turn off the lights and reenact prison shutdown.”
Melissa’s hand tightened on Joe’s. The lights went off and they heard a graunching sound, then the cell doors rattled closed, floor by floor, the groans and clangs echoing through the vast space.
“I need to go out,” whimpered Melissa. “Now!”
Joe lifted Pip’s headset. “I’m taking Melissa outside,” he said. “You and Kaitlin finish the tour.”
Outside, the lights of the city shimmered in the darkness while the Golden Gate Bridge glittered like a diamond bracelet. Melissa’s spirits made an immediate recovery. “Isn’t it pretty? Let’s go to the lookout.”
Joe remained where he was, contemplating his dilemma. His world was here, Pip’s in New Zealand. And even if he could persuade her to stay, he was still a loner with a disastrous relationship history who would never marry again. In his mind, these were absolutes, convictions he’d held for so long they were beyond question.
But if he and Pip separated now—by choice, instead of circumstance—he could retain a sense of control. And the relationship would remain what they’d always intended it to be—a wonderful h
iatus.
His decision made, Joe followed Melissa to the lookout. He’d expected to feel lighter. Instead he felt as heavy as lead.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“REMEMBER THAT PACT we made?” said Joe. “Honesty, no matter what?”
They were parked on Pip’s street after dropping the girls home. She’d made some excuse why Joe couldn’t come up, because her smile had worn so thin with pretending nothing was wrong, she felt sure he’d see through it.
Except it seemed he’d already seen through it. Pip tried to read Joe’s expression, but passing cars only briefly illuminated his face.
“Honesty no matter what,” she echoed. She had every intention of telling him, but not tonight, not until she’d processed the news herself and made some sort of peace with it. Right now, she ached for solitude in the same way a wounded animal needed a cave, somewhere to curl up small and wait for the emotional maelstrom to pass.
“You also said if it gets too difficult with you leaving we can part with no hard feelings.” His voice was rough. “It’s getting that way, Pip.”
This morning her only dilemma had been whether to take an umbrella on her walk to the doctor’s. This morning she hadn’t known she was pregnant or acknowledged she was in love with him. If Joe had told her this morning, she would have understood.
She sat completely still in the eye of the hurricane. Don’t hate him. He doesn’t know and it’s not fair. Then a roaring in her ears blocked out reason.
“I’m pregnant, you son of a bitch!”
Scrambling out of the car, she slammed the door behind her. Rage swept her up the steps and into her apartment before he’d had a chance to react. There it left her, a piece of flotsam standing in the dark in her tiny apartment.
The strength suddenly went out of her legs. Pip sank to the floor with a whimper, absolutely determined not to cry. She sat on the rug, arms wrapped around her knees, rocking herself, needing her family with a desperate, painful yearning.
For ten minutes, maybe more, she sat like that before she could stand and go to the window. His car was still parked on the street, Joe motionless inside it. She knew what he was feeling because she was feeling it, too. Pip pulled the mulberry drapes on his suffering because right now she could only cope with her own. Except…that was the coward’s way out.
Before she could chicken out, she walked back downstairs. As she approached the car, Joe turned his head. She saw in his eyes the same desolation as when he’d talked about his father’s prognosis. The same helpless anger, the same grief.
Opening the passenger door, Pip dropped her spare key on the seat. “When you’re ready,” she said, and her voice sounded thick even though she hadn’t shed a single tear since hearing the news. “Come up and we’ll talk.”
Joe nodded. Clicking the passenger door shut, she went back upstairs, where she drank a glass of water to moisten her dry throat, then put on pajamas and her velour dressing gown. It was pale blue with lambs marching around the hem and cuffs, a silly farewell present from her brothers, specifically designed, they’d said, to keep foreign wolves at bay.
Blinking back tears, Pip dragged a comb through her hair and brushed her teeth. Then curled up on the couch and waited.
NOT AGAIN. The car seemed to close in on him as the windows fogged up, until it felt as if he were entombed in a chill, damp coffin. He started the engine, set the heat on high until the windows cleared and Pip’s princess balcony came into view, the plastic geraniums a ghostly white in their pots. She’d pulled her curtains open again and the French doors were a yellow maw in the tall, dark building, an openmouthed silent scream.
He’d trusted her. Not just with contraception, but at some deep, instinctive level. And he felt bitterly, furiously betrayed. Joe tried to remember his previous feelings for her, but there was only anger and a fear that he’d reached the end of his ability to cope. Already staggering under responsibility, he had no idea how he was going to carry another one.
Briefly, he fantasized about getting on the freeway and driving until the tank ran dry. Starting again, free, somewhere far away from here.
Instead he started the engine and drove to a bar where he downed two whiskeys in quick succession, then sat brooding over a third, barely aware of his surroundings or the abortive attempts of the bartender to engage him in conversation. Alcohol numbed his emotions, but left him with a profound sense of melancholy.
What the hell was he going to do?
He considered calling Daniel, and glanced at his watch, blinking to bring the luminous dial into focus. He stared at the display: 1:00 a.m. It had been two hours since Pip had left him her key and told him to come up when he was ready.
The chair made a harsh, scraping sound as Joe pushed it back and stood up. Except he’d never be ready for this conversation.
Leaving his drink untouched, he walked back to his car, still with no idea what he was going to do. What he was going to say. He could offer marriage, but he’d been down that road before—and failed. Then, he’d been fully confident of loving Nadia; now he knew his limitations. And the painful fallout of good intentions.
And right now, Joe didn’t even have those.
PIP WOKE UNDER A BLANKET, sometime around dawn. Joe was sprawled in a chair opposite, staring out the window at the lightening sky, his jaw shadowed with beard. Despite his casual posture, his body vibrated with tension. When she pushed back the blanket and sat up, he glanced over.
“How?” he said. “I saw you take the damn pill I don’t know how many times. How is this possible?”
“The food poisoning…all that throwing up…compromised my protection.”
He made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a groan. “I want to blame you so bad,” he said, “so bad, Pip. But I made you responsible for contraception. Despite everything I knew about the repercussions of an unplanned pregnancy, I still—”
“Trusted me,” she said quietly.
“It’s not a question of trust, dammit, it’s a question of never, ever ceding control of what matters to anyone else. I knew that!” Raking a hand through his hair, he stood up. “Could there be a worse time?”
“No,” she whispered, “there couldn’t.”
His expression inscrutable, he looked down at her. “Are you considering an abortion?”
You. Making it plain this wasn’t his problem. She’d tried to prepare herself for that, yet it still hurt. “No. If it comes to that, I’ll adopt.” She needed something to do with her hands other than wringing them, so she straightened the cushions, then picked up the blanket. “At the moment it’s not real, so I can’t think clearly. I only found out yesterday.”
“You’re due to go home in four and a half weeks.”
Pip stopped folding the blanket. “I’m still going home.”
“Carrying my baby?” His voice was flat.
Her anger was a relief after so much guilt. “So an abortion’s okay, but you’re horrified if I take the baby away?” Dumping the blanket, she stood and retied the sash of her dressing gown in a tight knot. “What difference does it make, if you’re not required to have anything to do with it?”
“I never said I was in favor of an abortion, Pip.” His gaze remained level on hers. “And I’m not the enemy.”
Tears finally prickled her eyes; Pip blinked them back. “What can I say except I’m sorry?” It was cold in the apartment and she switched on the electric space heater, watching the elements warm to bright glowing orange. “I don’t want to deal with this, either. I’m not ready for a baby. Not until I’m thirty-five and living in New Zealand with a husband who loves me.”
“You forgot to add ‘one that can support you,’” Joe said grimly. “Be that as it may, I can offer our child legitimacy, at least.”
“What is this, some knee-jerk reaction when you get a woman pregnant?” She faced him. “You just dumped me and now you’re suggesting marriage? Yeah, that’ll work.”
His mouth tightened. “I do learn from my mistakes
. We marry to give the child legitimacy and, more importantly, from your point of view, to institutionalize my obligations as its father. Then divorce further down the track.”
So clinical, so detached. He was back to the guy he’d been when she met him. And she was another load to carry. Her throat tightened. “I don’t need your support or sanction or whatever you think you’re offering. Whatever help I need, I’ll get from my family…people who love me, not look on me and this baby as another burden.”
She sounded petulant and needy, and Pip hated being reduced to that. Somehow she mustered a smile, trying to convey some sort of benevolent autonomy. “I only told you because you have a right to know. I absolve you of any responsibility or obligation.” Walking to the front door, she opened it. “Go in peace.”
“Peace!” Joe stared at her as though she was crazy. “You really think I’m going to say, ‘well, good luck with that,’ and walk away? This isn’t some damn souvenir you picked up on your visit to the States, it’s my child.”
“That’s why I told you, Joe.”
But he’d stopped listening. “We’ll need to talk to an immigration expert.”
Pip stiffened. “Why?”
“Marriage could also be a prerequisite for dual citizenship for the baby.”
“I haven’t decided against adoption yet,” she reminded him, unconsciously twisting the cord of her dressing gown. He was making this terrifyingly real and she wasn’t ready for real yet.
“Oh, you’ll keep the baby.” For the first time since she’d told him, his expression softened when he looked at her. “First scan…the baby’s first kick, and it’s not sacrifice anymore, it’s devotion. And that’s from a tough guy. You’ll be Jell-O.”
Things were going too fast. She needed solitude to process not only her emotions, but also her options. “Joe, I need some time to think.” Pip gripped the open door. “I’ll call you in a couple of days.”
