Secrets at the Beach House

by Diane Chamberlain

  “Which makes you four or five weeks late.”

  “If you say so.”

  “You’re really fighting me.”

  “Sorry,” she said.

  He set her chart on his desk and stood up. “I want to do a pelvic.”

  “But, Cole—”

  “Humor me, okay? I need to rule out pregnancy before I rack my brain looking for something else. Take the examining room across the hall.”

  He extended his hand to help her up. She stood and a curtain of darkness dropped over her eyes. “Oh, God,” she said, sitting down again.

  He leaned over her, his hand on the back of her head. “Put your head down. Kit.”

  “No, I’m okay. I just stood up too fast.”

  “Have you eaten anything today?”

  She shook her head.

  “We’ll get you something right after your appointment.”

  “I don’t think I can eat.”

  “We’ll see. Let’s try it again.” He held out his hand to her. “Slower this time.”

  Cheryl, the nurse practitioner in Cole’s office, took her blood pressure and tried to make small talk, but Kit couldn’t concentrate. Cheryl was small and blond, a very young-looking thirty-seven. She was married with two nearly grown kids, and she was going to be on the fetal surgery team. Kit liked her. She knew how much Cole respected her, and at any other time she would have enjoyed talking with her. But not today.

  He looked in her throat and her eyes. He listened to her heart and poked at her stomach. It was all perfunctory. She knew what this exam was about, and with every second her shivering intensified.

  The speculum felt cold. When he removed it she braced herself for what he would tell her.

  “How about a blanket?” was all he said.

  “Okay,” she said through chattering teeth, and Cheryl took one from the shelf and laid it over her. The weight of it hurt her breasts. She hadn’t told him about the pain in her breasts, how they hurt even from the spray in the shower.

  His fingers were inside her and with his other hand he pressed on her stomach under the blanket. “You are almost certainly pregnant,” he said.

  She stared at the mobile of tiny silver sailboats hanging from the ceiling above her head, feeling his eyes on her. “I can’t be.”

  “I don’t feel the string of your IUD.”

  “I checked it last week. It was there.” Last week or the week before? Certainly it had been no longer than that.

  “Let’s do a sonogram,” he said to Cheryl. He pulled off his glove and dropped it in the wastebasket.

  She took her feet out of the stirrups and sat up, clutching the blanket to her and trying to recapture her dignity. She ignored the dizziness that washed over her. “Cole, I can’t be pregnant,” she pleaded.

  Cheryl handed her a glass of water. “Got to fill your bladder,” she said.

  “I’ll throw up if I drink this.”

  “Get down as much as you can,” said Cole, playing with the ultrasound machine.

  She was trapped. She sipped at the water, her throat tightening with every swallow.

  Cheryl told her to lie down again so that she could smear some gel on her stomach.

  “Look how flat my stomach is,” she said.

  “You’ve eaten like a bird for two weeks,” Cole said. He looked at Cheryl, telling her without words to leave them alone. She squeezed Kit’s shoulder and left the room.

  Cole slid the transducer back and forth over her stomach and studied the images forming on the screen in front of them. Black and white blotches were all she could see.

  “Here’s the fetus.” He pointed to the screen as if he were showing her a hurricane on a weather map. “And there’s the IUD.”

  She frowned at the screen. “I don’t see anything,” she said stubbornly. Then she noticed the tiny blinking light near the center of the screen and she stared at it in horror. A heart. It had to be. “Cole, the blinking . . .”

  “Do you want me to turn it off?”

  “Oh my God. Yes.”

  In an instant the gray blotches and the light disappeared. He handed her a tissue and she realized she was crying.

  “You’re early,” he said. “What do you want to do?” His voice was soft, in control. What did he have to worry about? Nothing. This was all in a day’s work for him. She felt close to hating him.

  She struggled to sit up again and for a horrible moment thought she might throw up on the blanket. The ultimate indignity. “I don’t know what I want,” she said angrily.

  “Let’s go to lunch and talk about it.” His hands rested in the pockets of his white coat, his face calm.

  “I told you I can’t eat.”

  “Kit, come on. I know this is hard but—”

  “You can’t possibly understand how I’m feeling.”

  “That’s true,” he said. “But that’s not my fault.”

  He was right, of course. Innocent by virtue of his gender.

  “Give me a prescription for the nausea,” she said, hating that she needed anything from him. It wasn’t fair that he’d known something about her body that she hadn’t known. Or hadn’t admitted to herself, in any case.

  “There’s nothing I can give you.”

  “What do you mean? My sister always took something when . . .”

  He shook his head. “There’s nothing currently on the market that’s safe enough to prescribe during pregnancy. Not unless you become a whole lot sicker than you are right now.”

  Bastard. She stared at him.

  “Try some saltines,” he said. “Drink liquid throughout the day, a few sips at a—”

  “How am I supposed to get anything down when I’m so sick I can’t even stand to hear you mention food?”

  He put his hand on the doorknob. “We can talk about it later. When you’ve calmed down.” He walked out of the room and she jumped at the sound of the door slamming.

  The Point Pleasant Library was a converted old brown shingled house on a tree-lined street that reminded her of her grandparents’ neighborhood in Seattle. She felt as if she were paying a visit to some old relative, but to her relief, there wasn’t a soul she knew inside. A handful of school kids whispered to each other at the tables, and a few old men sat around the nonworking fireplace, chatting and reading.

  She picked up a couple of magazines without looking at their covers and carried them to a back corner of the room. She sat in a big, hard wooden chair that faced the side of one of the bookshelves, cut off from everyone’s eyes.

  She’d never wanted a baby. Not ever. That made her peculiar as a female right from the start. For a year or two she’d played with her Barbie doll, that independent, worldly creature, but she’d cast aside the baby dolls who’d always struck her as limp and perpetually needy.

  Once, when the marriage was starting to sag, she’d thought about it. Maybe that was what she and Bill needed—someone to care about other than themselves. It would be easier to have a baby than to split up and start over.

  They’d even talked about her having the IUD removed, but she never got around to it. A lot of good it was doing her now. She should have had her tubes tied.

  She opened one of the magazines in case someone came near her chair and caught her staring into space. Why was this so hard? From the time she’d first had sex—the night of high school graduation—she’d known that if she ever got pregnant she would have an abortion. Simple. A few minutes in a doctor’s office, comfortable in the knowledge that her family would never know and that a girlfriend would be sitting in the outer office, waiting to drive her home.

  It would kill her parents. Eight years of pleading with her for a grandchild and she produces one out of wedlock? She smiled at the irony. But her sister would be thrilled. Maybe it would narrow the gulf between them. Paula talked baby teeth and diaper rash, and Kit talked shin splints. They’d never had much in common anyway. Blue-eyed, blond Paula. She’d practically flunked out of school her senior year but no one care
d. After all, she’d already been crowned Miss Woodley High School. What else mattered?

  And what would Sandy have to say about all this? Better yet, what would his new wife have to say? She wished it weren’t Sandy’s baby. If only it were Cole’s. But she’d had a period after she’d been with Cole. She shut her eyes. She didn’t like to remember that night.

  She could see the corner of the card catalog. She shut the magazine and walked to the bulky wooden case of drawers. An old woman was fingering the cards in the B drawer, and Kit smiled at her as she pulled out the Ps. I’m pregnant, she said in her head to the woman. What do you think about that? She jotted down the numbers of a few books on pregnancy.

  She found only one of them in the stacks. A lot of women in Point Pleasant must have been pregnant. She couldn’t imagine when they’d come into the library to get the books. She was the only person of childbearing age there now.

  She carried the book back to her chair and began to leaf through it. It was full of glossy, full-page pictures of fetal development. Just what I need, she thought, making a face.

  She pulled her calendar from her purse and counted the weeks from December fifteenth, the night of the party. Eight weeks and one day. She turned the pages of the book slowly, deliberately, wanting to see and not wanting to. Two weeks, three weeks, four, five . . .

  Fetus at eight weeks. She stared in awe, as if she’d never seen a picture of a fetus before. It took up every inch of the page, so that the caption itself had to be on the page next to it. It’s much, much tinier, she told herself. Much less significant than it looks.

  The little fingers were stubby, the eyes big and dark. Its skin was lavender mother-of-pearl. On the top of its skull was a shiny area in the shape of a heart. The umbilicus looked wiry and strong. There was no hint of the woman at its other end. No clue as to what she thought of this exquisite little intruder.

  She closed the book. She wouldn’t check it out. It was just a form of torture.

  She could tell by their faces that Janni and Maris knew. They were chopping vegetables at the kitchen counter when she walked in the door.

  Janni wiped her hands on a paper towel and grabbed Kit by the wrist. “Sit down,” she said, pulling a chair out from the table.

  “Cole told you.”

  “He called hours ago, looking for you. He’s worried about you.”

  They waited for her to say something. She guessed they’d been waiting half the day to hear what was going through her head.

  She wouldn’t keep them in suspense any longer. “I don’t want a baby.” She shuddered at the thought and looked guiltily at their faces. “I feel selfish saying that to you two.”

  Maris sat across the table from her with her sad gold eyes. “Maybe it’s those of us who want a baby who are selfish,” she said.

  “Look, Kit,” Janni said, “you can’t have a baby you don’t want to absolve your guilt over my hysterectomy or Maris’s miscarriages, got it? You have to think about yourself, not us. If you have an abortion, we’ll go with you and hold your hand, right, Mar?”

  Maris nodded.

  “I saw the baby’s . . . the fetus’s heartbeat on the sonogram.” Kit shivered. “And then I made the mistake of looking at a picture of an eight-week-old fetus in a book at the library and I’m not sure I can go through with an abortion.”

  “Eight weeks is nothing,” said Janni. “Just a bunch of cells.”

  “I can’t believe that you, of all people, would say that.”

  “You looked at a picture and suddenly you’re caught up in the romance of it all. You need a dose of reality.” She poked Kit’s stomach. “That little zygote couldn’t live outside of you for a fraction of a second.”

  “I know. That’s what bothers me.”

  “It’s fun to imagine what it would look like and what college you’d send it to, but you’re not thinking about the twenty-one years of food and care.” Janni waved her arms in the air as she spoke.

  “You sound as if you want me to have an abortion.”

  “I want you to do what’s right for you.” Janni fell suddenly silent and sat down at the table. “Lord, Kit, you’re right,” she said. “If I’m honest with myself, then yes, I wish you would have an abortion. You’ve never wanted kids, and it would be hard for me to see you pregnant and with a child. I would be”—she looked apologetic—“so damn jealous.”

  She was sitting under her afghan on the window seat when Cole came into her room. He hugged her and sat next to her, deliberately on her feet, making them feel snug and warm.

  “I’ve felt like shit all afternoon,” he said.

  “Me too. I wasn’t on my best behavior in your office.”

  “You had an excuse. I didn’t. It was thoughtless of me to do the sonogram. I knew you were pregnant and I wanted you to stop kidding yourself. I should have sent you up to the lab for a test instead to give you more time to get used to the idea.”

  “I had to face it sooner or later.”

  “You’re not really considering having it, are you?”

  “I’m not ruling anything out. Though it seems I won’t get much help from my friends if I do decide to have it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Obviously you think it’s a bad idea, and Janni says she’s jealous and wishes I’d have an abortion.” She was still shaken by Janni’s reaction.

  “I’d just hate to see you go through a pregnancy you’re unhappy about to have a baby you don’t want.”

  “It does sound stupid, doesn’t it? I don’t know, Cole. It’s incredible to me that there’s this little creature in my body. And it’s not like I’m a kid. What excuse do I have for not having it?”

  “You don’t want children. You’ve been pretty clear about that. I’ve never heard you express any ambivalence about it.”

  “I could have the baby and give it to Janni.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  The way he said it made her laugh. She didn’t want him to know how seriously she’d been considering that plan. “Then I think about Boston. Could I still run?”

  “Yes, you could still run, but not in a marathon.”

  She shut her eyes.

  “I want to do Boston more than anything. I haven’t wanted something this much for as long as I can remember. But my training schedule’s a wreck. I’m a wreck. Look at me sitting here like an old lady under an afghan.”

  “You can have an abortion tomorrow and be training hard by Monday,” he said. “It’s an option. That’s all.”

  She looked at him. How simple it could be. Why was she making it so hard for herself?

  For three days she ate saltines before she got out of bed and ran at night on the track at the Y. She was more introspective than she’d ever been in her life. The others moved around her carefully, allowing her to grapple with her decision in private.

  She looked at pregnant women on the street and wondered what they were thinking. Did they feel trapped? Had they considered abortion? How did they make up their minds? But most of them probably had husbands. Their pregnancies had probably been well planned.

  A few times she’d strolled past the nursery at Blair. She’d look at the little pink and blue bundles in the plastic cribs and feel a stabbing pain, a longing she’d never known was there. And then one or two of the babies would begin to cry and she’d walk away, the aching gone. She had a career, she reminded herself. She had a passion: running. And she had no husband. There was no room in her life for a child.

  If she had this baby, she’d have to put off moving. She couldn’t go through this without Cole as her obstetrician. The thought of staying filled her with relief, and she was annoyed with herself. Staying or leaving shouldn’t color her decision about the baby.

  She was beginning to think she would never be able to decide when the decision was made for her. She dreamt she was walking through a park where everything was lush and green. She was carrying Silver in her arms, like a baby. Silver was wrapped in her afghan,
and he looked up at her with his attentive cat eyes. He reached a soft paw up to touch her chin and she hugged him closer.

  Then she spotted Paula. Walking happily toward her sister, she covered Silver with the afghan so that Paula would think she was carrying a real baby.

  “Oh, let me hold him!” Paula reached out her arms and Kit started to hand the bundle to her, but Silver looked up at her, pleading. He wrapped his paws around her neck and clung to her, burying his furry face against her breast.

  She woke up near tears, certain of what she must do for the first time. She hadn’t thought about Silver in years, how she’d handed him over to her sister when he didn’t fit into her lifestyle any longer. She’d never been too good at taking care of another living being.

  The sky outside her window was beginning to lighten. She put on her robe and walked across the hall to Cole’s room. “Cole, are you awake?”

  “Not really.” He rolled over in a tangle of blankets. The Amish quilt was folded neatly at the foot of his bed. “What’s up?”

  “I had a dream about my cat Silver. I gave him away and never should have, and I have to have this baby.”

  He sat up. “Sit.” He patted the bed next to him. He took his shirt off the chair next to his bed and put it on. She wondered if he was cold or just afraid of her reaction to his body.

  She sat down, facing him. “I’ve made up my mind.”

  “A cat is not a baby.”

  “It’s not just the dream. I think I’ve known from the moment you said I was pregnant.”

  “What the hell will you do with a baby?” His voice was kinder than his words.

  “I don’t know. That’s my next decision. But I can’t abort it.”

  “I didn’t think you were hung up about abortion.”

  “I’m not. I would still fight to the death for a woman’s right to choose, but I can’t do it myself. Not right now.”

  “Are you thinking rationally? What is this about your cat? You’re guilty about a cat so you have a baby? Or are you guilty that you can reproduce when the other women in this house can’t? Or are you punishing yourself for screwing Sandy again when you knew it was a mis—”