He didn’t say anything. He just stood there, swaying slightly, gazing down at her as if he had already lost her.
The next morning, Annie was so depressed she didn’t even go to Nick’s. Instead, she lay in bed and alternately cried and stared.
Her mind was too full; it was making her crazy, all the things she had to think about. Her husband—the man she’d loved since she was nineteen years old—wanted another chance to make their marriage work. He was sorry. He’d made a mistake.
Hadn’t she begged him to give their marriage a chance just a few months ago?
Beside her bed, the phone rang. She leaned over and picked it up. “Hello?”
“Annie Colwater? This is Madge at Dr. Burton’s office. I’m calling to remind you of your ten-thirty appointment this morning.”
She’d forgotten all about it. “Oh, I don’t know—”
“Doc Burton told me not to take no for an answer.”
Annie sighed. Last week she’d thought she’d beaten the depression, but now she was there again, slogging through the bleak confusion, unable to break through to the surface. Maybe it would be good to talk to the doctor. If nothing else, it gave her somewhere to go and something to do. She would probably feel better just getting out of bed. “Thanks, Madge,” she said softly. “I’ll be there.”
With a tired sigh, she rolled out of bed and headed for the shower. By ten-fifteen, she was dressed in a pair of jeans and a worn sweatshirt. Without bothering to comb her hair—what was the point?—she grabbed her handbag and car keys and left her room.
Hank was on the porch, sitting in his rocker, reading a book. At her hurried exit, he looked up. “You’re running late this morning.”
“I have a doctor’s appointment.”
His smile faded. “Are you okay?”
“Other than the fact that I’m depressed and retaining more water than a Sea World seal tank, I’m fine. Doc Burton made the appointment when I saw him. He wanted to make sure I wasn’t still feeling blue before I . . . went home.”
Blue. Such a nothing little word for the emptiness seeping through her bloodstream.
Forcing a smile, she leaned down and kissed his forehead. “ ’Bye, Dad.”
“ ’Bye.”
She hurried down the steps and jumped into her Mustang.
Downtown, she parked in the shade of an elm tree and left her car without bothering to lock the door. She hurried up the concrete steps and into the brick building she’d visited so often in her youth.
Madge grinned up at her. “Hello, sweetie. The doctor’s waiting for you. Go on back to exam room two.”
Annie nodded and headed down the white-walled hallway. She found a door with a huge black 2 stenciled on it, and she went inside. Taking a seat on the paper-covered table, she flipped through the current issue of Fishing News.
About five minutes later, Dr. Burton knocked on the door and pushed it open. “Hi, Annie. Are you still feeling blue?”
How in the hell could she answer that? One minute she was pink, and the next—especially since Blake’s call—the blue was so bad it was a dark, violent purple. She tossed the magazine onto the vacant chair. “Sometimes,” she answered.
“Marge tells me you tried to make an appointment while I was gone. What was that about?”
“A bout with the flu. I won, but . . . in the last day or two, the nausea has come back a bit.”
“I told you that this was a time to take extra good care of yourself. When the depression bites, your system has a hard time with bugs. How about if we draw a little blood and see what’s what. Then, if everything’s okay, we can talk about how you really feel.”
Three hours later, Annie stood in front of her father’s house. Shivering, she moved forward. Her legs didn’t seem to work; it felt as if she were walking through a dense gray fog that resisted her movements.
Slowly, she climbed the steps and went inside.
Hank was sitting by the fireplace, doing a crossword puzzle. At her entrance, he looked up. “I didn’t expect you until—”
She burst into tears. He was beside her in an instant. He scooped her into his big arms and held her, stroking her hair. Holding her close, he guided her onto the sofa, sitting beside her. Behind her, the door slammed shut, closing out the world.
“What is it, Annie?”
She sniffed hard and wiped her runny nose on her sleeve. She turned to him, but the words wouldn’t come.
“Annie?”
“I’m pregnant,” she whispered, and at the words, she started to cry again. She wanted to be filled with joy over the news; she was three months pregnant. After endless years of taking her temperature, religiously charting her ovulation cycles, and standing on her head after sex, she had effortlessly conceived a child.
Blake’s child.
She’d never been so confused and shaken in her whole life, not even when Blake had asked for a divorce. At first when Dr. Burton had given her the results of the blood test, she’d assumed it was a mistake. When she realized it was no mistake, she’d had a moment of paralyzing, gut-wrenching fear. She wondered whose baby it was.
Then she remembered what Nick had told her. He’d had a vasectomy when Izzy was two. And then there’d been the pelvic exam, which showed that Annie was three months along.
It was definitely Blake’s child.
Hank touched her cheek, gently turned her to face him. “It’s a miracle,” he said, and she knew it was true. She felt it, the small seed of a baby growing inside her. She placed her hand on her stomach. It thrilled her and terrified her.
“It changes everything,” she said softly.
That’s what scared her most. She didn’t want to step back into the cold, sterile life she’d had in California. She wanted to stay here, in Mystic, to let the cool green darkness become her world. She wanted to keep on loving Nick. She wanted suddenly, ferociously to watch Izzy get braces and cut her hair and learn to dance. She wanted to open her own bookstore and live in her own house and be accountable to no one but herself.
But mostly, she wanted to be in love for the rest of her life, to wake up every morning with Nick beside her and go to sleep each night in his arms. But she couldn’t do that. There wasn’t a good enough perinatologist within a hundred miles of Mystic, and no hospital with a neonatal ICU. She’d called her obstetrician in Beverly Hills and been told to get home. Bed rest was the order of the day. Just like it had been with Adrian. Only this time Annie was almost forty years old; they weren’t going to take any chances. The doctor was expecting Annie in three days—and not one day more, she’d said sternly.
“Have you told Blake?”
This time, she wanted to cry, but she couldn’t. She stared at her dad, feeling already as if everything she wanted was moving away, receding just beyond her touch. “Oh, Dad, Blake will want—”
“What do you want?”
“Nick,” she whispered.
Hank gave her a sad smile. “So, you think you’re in love with him now. Annie, you’ve been with him for a few months. You’ve loved Blake since you were a teenager. Just a couple of months ago, you were so devastated by the breakup of your marriage that you couldn’t get out of bed. Now you’re willing to toss it out like yesterday’s garbage?”
She knew her father was right. What she had with Nick was special and magical, but it didn’t have the foundation that was her marriage. “Blake and I tried for so long to have more children. After Adrian, I was desperate to conceive again, but years went by and . . . nothing. When he finds out about the baby . . .”
“You’ll go back to him,” Hank said, and the quiet certainty in his voice tore her apart.
It was the right thing to do, the only thing to do, and Annie knew it. She couldn’t take Blake’s child from him and move up here on her own. A baby deserved its father.
There it was, the truth that stripped her soul and left her with nothing but a handful of broken dreams and soon-to-be-broken promises.
She was crying aga
in; she couldn’t help herself. She kept picturing what was to come—the moment when she would tell Nick about the baby—and it hurt so badly she couldn’t breathe. She didn’t want to be strong, didn’t want to be honorable, didn’t want to do the right thing.
She thought about all their time together, all the moments he’d held her and touched her and kissed her lips with a gentleness she’d never imagined. She thought about Izzy, and how much she’d lost, and then she thought about going back to California, to Blake’s bed, to a place where the air was brown and the earth was dry. But most of all, she thought about how desperately lonely her world would be without Nick. . . .
Annie drove and drove, until she couldn’t drive anymore. Finally, she made her way back to Nick’s house. When she got there, he was in the garden with Izzy.
It would all go on without her, this place, this family. Izzy would grow up and learn to dance and go on her first date, but Annie wouldn’t be there to see it.
She looked at Nick and was horrified to realize that tears were blurring her vision.
“Annie?”
She took a deep, shaking breath. More than anything, she wanted to throw herself into his big, strong arms. She ached suddenly to say the precious words, I love you, but she didn’t dare. She knew that if Nick could, he’d promise that the sun would shine on them forever. But neither of them was so naive anymore; both had learned that everything could change in an instant, and that the heartfelt vows of people in love were fragile words that, once shattered, could cut so deeply you’d bleed forever.
He stood up, moved toward her. With one dirty finger, he touched her chin, so gently it was like the brush of a butterfly’s wing. “Honey, what is it?”
She forced a bright smile, too bright, she knew, but there was no help for that. “I got something in my eye. It’s nothing. Let me change my clothes, then I’ll come out and help you guys.”
Before he could answer—or ask another painful, loving question—she ran into the house.
Nick and Annie lay in bed, barely touching, the sheets thrown back from their naked legs. A big old oak fan turned lazily overhead, swooshing through the air, stirring it with a quiet thwop-thwop-thwop.
After Izzy had been put to bed, they’d circled each other, he and Annie, saying none of the things that seemed to be collecting in the air between them. Now, he held her tightly, stroking the soft, damp flesh of her breast. She’d been quiet all evening, and every so often he’d looked at her and seen a faraway sadness in her eyes. It scared him, her sudden and unexpected quiet. He kept starting to ask her what was wrong, but every time the words floated up to his tongue, he bit them back. He was afraid of whatever it was that lay curled in all that silence.
“We need to talk,” she said softly, rolling toward him.
“God, if those aren’t the worst four words a woman can say.” He waited for her to laugh with him.
“It’s serious.”
He sighed. “I know it is.”
She angled her body until she was almost lying on top of him. Her eyes looked huge in the pale oval of her face, huge and filled with sadness. “I went to see a doctor today.”
His heart stopped. “Are you okay?”
The smile she gave him was worn and ragged at the edges. “I’m healthy.”
His breath expelled in a rush. “Thank God.”
“I’m also three months pregnant.”
“Oh, Christ . . .” He couldn’t seem to breathe right.
“We tried for years and years to get pregnant.”
Blake’s baby. Her husband’s baby, the man who’d said he’d made a terrible mistake and wanted her back. Nick felt as if he were melting into the hot, rumpled sheets that smelled of her perfume and their spent passion.
I always wanted more children. Those had been her exact words, and in them, he’d heard the residue of a lifetime’s pain. He’d known then it was the one thing he couldn’t give her. Now it didn’t matter.
He knew Annie too well; she was a loving, honorable person, and a ferocious mother. It was one of the things he loved about her, her unwavering sense of honor. She would know that Blake deserved a chance to know his child.
There would be no future for them now, no years that slid one into the next as they sat on those big rockers on the porch.
He wanted to say something that would magically transform this moment into something it wasn’t, to forge a memory that wouldn’t hurt for the rest of his life. But he couldn’t.
Before their love song had really begun, it was coming to an end.
Chapter 23
Nick knew that Annie was making her arrangements to return home, but she was careful around him. She hung up the phone when he came into the room.
He tried to erect a shield between them, something that would soften his fall when she left, but it was impossible. Yesterday, he and Annie had driven to Seattle to see a specialist in high-risk pregnancies. He couldn’t stay detached. He was there for her every minute, encouraging her to keep drinking water when she thought she couldn’t take another sip, holding her hand during the ultrasound. When he saw the baby—that tiny, squiggly gray line in a sea of fuzzy black, he’d had to turn quickly away and mumble something about having to go to the bathroom.
Each day, he tried not to think about what was to come, but he felt the silent, insistent march of every hour, ticking away what he wanted most in his life.
Sometimes, in the middle of the day, when a strand of sunlight slid through an open window and highlighted Annie’s cropped hair, he was stunned by her beauty; and then she’d smile at him, that soft, sad, knowing smile, and it would all come crashing back. He’d hear that ticking in his head again.
She had changed him so much, his Annie. She’d given him a family and made him believe that love was a heavy winter coat that kept you warm all year. She’d shown him that he could pull himself out of the destructive patterns of his life; he could quit drinking and take care of his daughter. She’d given him everything he’d dreamed of.
Except a future.
When they were together, they didn’t talk about the baby or the future.
Now she was standing in the living room, staring at the pictures on the fireplace mantel. Absently, she stroked her still-flat abdomen.
As he walked down the stairs, he wondered what she was thinking. The steps creaked beneath his weight, and at the sound, she looked up, giving him a tired smile. “Hey ya, Nicky,” she said.
He went to her, slipped his arms around her, and pulled her against him. She leaned her head back against his shoulder. Tentatively, he reached a hand out, let it settle on her stomach. For a single heartbeat, he allowed himself to dream that the child was his, that she was his, and this moment was the beginning instead of the end.
“What are you thinking?” he asked quietly, hating the fear that came with the simple question of lovers everywhere.
“I was thinking about your job.” She twisted in his arms and looked up at him. “I . . . want to know that you’ll be going back to it.”
It hurt, that quiet statement of caring. He knew what she needed from him right now, a smile, a joke, a gesture that reassured her that he would be all right without her. But he didn’t have that kind of strength; he wished he did. “I don’t know, Annie . . .”
“I know you were a good cop, Nick. I’ve never known anyone with such a capacity for caring.”
“It almost broke me . . . the caring.” The words held two meanings, and he knew that she understood.
“But would you give it all up . . . the caring and the love and trying . . . would you give it up because in the end there is pain?”
He touched her face gently. “You’re not asking about my job. . . .”
“It’s all the same, Nick. All we have is the time, the effort. The end . . . the pain . . . that’s out of our control.”
“Is it?”
A single tear streaked down her face, and though he longed to wipe it away, he was afraid that the tiny bead
of moisture would scald his flesh. He knew that this moment would stay with him forever, even after he wanted to forget. “I’ll never forget us, Annie.”
This time he didn’t care how much it hurt; he let himself dream that the baby she carried was his.
Annie showed up at her dad’s house bright and early. For a moment after she got out of the car, she simply stood there, staring at her childhood home as if she’d never seen it before. The windows glowed with golden light, and a riot of colorful flowers hugged the latticework below the wrap-around porch. She wouldn’t be here to see the chrysanthemums bloom this year, and though she hadn’t seen them flower for many, many years, now it saddened her.
She would miss seeing her dad. It was funny; in California she had gone for long stretches of time without seeing him—sometimes as much as a whole year would slip by without a visit—and she hadn’t had the ache of longing that now sat on her chest like a stone. She felt almost like a girl again, afraid to leave home for the first time.
With a sigh, she slammed her car door shut and walked up to the house.
She hadn’t even reached the porch when Hank flung the door open. “Well, it’s about time, I haven’t seen you in days. I was—”
“It’s time, Dad.”
“Already?”
She nodded. “I’m leaving tomorrow morning.”
“Oh.” He slipped through the door, closing it behind him. He sidestepped around her and sat down on the wicker love seat. Then he motioned for her to sit beside him.
She sat down in her mom’s rocking chair and leaned back. Memories of her childhood were close out here; they came encoded in the sound of the rocker on the wooden porch. She could almost hear her mother’s voice, calling Annie to come into the house.
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