Paradise

by Judith McNaught

  “I was asking if that’s what you were thinking.”

  Relief surged through her, and Meredith smiled as she shook her head and explained, “I was thinking it’s hard for me to understand you tonight because we’ve only known each other for such a short time.” When he didn’t reply to that, she looked at him and saw that he still looked grim and preoccupied. “It’s your turn now,” she said with a nervous, determined smile. “What have you been thinking about?”

  His silence tonight had unnerved her; now that he was talking, his words chilled her. “I was thinking that the reason we got married was because you wanted the baby legitimized, and because you didn’t want to tell your father you were pregnant. The baby’s legitimized. Your father already knows you’re pregnant. Instead of trying to make this marriage work, there’s another solution, one we didn’t consider before, but we should now: I can take the baby and raise it.”

  Her resolve to react with calm maturity collapsed, and she leapt straight to an obvious conclusion. “That would relieve you of the burden of an unwanted wife, wouldn’t it.”

  “I didn’t suggest it for that reason.”

  “Didn’t you?” she said scornfully.

  “No.” He shifted onto his side and touched her arm, sliding his hand caressingly over her skin.

  Meredith’s temper exploded. “Don’t you dare try to make love to me again!” she burst out, jerking her arm away. “I may be young but I still have a right to know what’s going on, and not be used all night like a—a—body with no mind! If you want out of this marriage, just say so!”

  His reaction was nearly as volatile as hers. “Dammit, I’m not trying to get out of anything! I am drowning in guilt, Meredith. Guilt, not cowardice! I got you pregnant and you came to me in a panic, so I got you married too. As your father eloquently phrased it,” he added with bitter self-contempt, “I have stolen your youth. I’ve stolen your dreams and sold you mine.”

  Overjoyed that guilt, not regret, was causing his mood, Meredith expelled her breath in a rush of relief and started to say something, but Matt was now intent on proving to her that he was truly guilty of stealing her youth and that her expectations for the future were probably unrealistic. “You said you didn’t want to stay at the farm while I’m gone,” he pointed out. “Has it occurred to you that the farm is one hell of a lot nicer than where you’re going? Or are you under some infantile impression that you’ll live like this in Venezuela, or after we come back? Because if you are, you’re in for a shock. Even if things work out exactly like I think they should, it will be years before I can afford to support you in the manner to which you’re accustomed. Hell, I may never be able to afford a house like this—”

  “A house like this—” Meredith interrupted, gaping at him in laughing horror, then she flopped face down on the pillow and dissolved into gales of muffled mirth.

  Above her, his voice was taut with angry bewilderment. “This is not a damned bit funny!”

  “Yes it is,” she said, laughing into the pillow. “Th-this is an awful house! It’s unwelcoming and I’ve never liked it.” When he didn’t respond, Meredith got herself under partial control and shoved back up onto her forearms, then she pushed her hair aside and stole a laughing peek at his inscrutable face. “Want to know something else?” she teased, thinking of his confession that he’d stolen her youth.

  Determined to make her understand the sacrifices he was causing her to make, Matt restrained the urge to run his hand over the shimmering mass of waving hair that spilled over her back, but he couldn’t keep the answering smile from his voice. “What is it?” he whispered tenderly.

  Meredith’s shoulders trembled with fresh merriment. “I didn’t like my youth, either!” She’d hoped for a favorable response to that announcement, and she got one. He seized her mouth in a hard kiss that robbed her of breath and the ability to think. While she was still trying to recover from the effects of it, he said harshly, “Promise me one thing, Meredith. If you change your mind about anything while I’m gone, promise me you won’t get rid of the baby. No abortion. I’ll arrange to raise it myself.”

  “I’m not going to change my—”

  “Promise me you won’t get rid of the baby!”

  Realizing it was senseless to argue, she nodded, looking deeply into those ominous gray eyes. “I promise,” she said with a soft smile.

  Her reward for that promise was another hour of lovemaking, but this time he was the man she knew.

  Meredith stood in the driveway and kissed Matt good-bye for the third time that morning. The day had not started off very well. At breakfast, her father had asked if anyone else knew about their marriage, and that reminded Meredith that she’d called Jonathan Sommers last week when no one answered the phone at the Edmunton house.

  To save face, she’d told Jonathan she’d found a credit card of Matt’s in her car after she gave him a ride home from Glenmoor, and that she didn’t know where to send it. Jonathan had provided the information that Matt was still in Edmunton. As her father pointed out, it made the idea of announcing their marriage just two days after that phone call to Jonathan ridiculous. He suggested that Meredith go to Venezuela and let everyone think they’d gotten married there. Meredith knew he was right, but she wasn’t good at deception, and she was angry because she’d inadvertently created the need for more of it.

  Now Matt’s departure was hanging over her like a cloud. “I’ll call you from the airport,” he promised. “Once I get to Venezuela and check out the facilities, I’ll call you from there, but it won’t be on a phone. We’ll have radio communications with a base station that has an actual telephone. The connection won’t be very good, and I’m not going to have access to it except in emergencies. I’ll convince them this time that calling you to tell you I arrived safely constitutes an emergency,” he added. “I won’t be able to pull off something like that again though.”

  “Write to me,” she said, trying to smile.

  “I will. The mail service will probably be lousy, so don’t be surprised if days go by with no letters and then they arrive in a group.”

  She stayed there in the drive, watching him leave, then walked slowly back into the house, concentrating on thinking of a few weeks from now when, with luck, they’d be together. Her father was standing in the hall, and he gave her a pitying look. “Farrell is the sort of man who needs new women, new places, new challenges all the time. He’ll break your heart if you let yourself count on him.”

  “Stop it,” Meredith warned, refusing to let what he said bother her. “You’re wrong. You’ll see.”

  Matt kept his promise to call her from the airport, and Meredith spent the next two days finding things in the house to keep her occupied while she waited for him to call from Venezuela. The call came on the third day, but Meredith wasn’t there; she was waiting nervously to see her obstetrician because she was afraid she was miscarrying.

  “Spotting during the first three months isn’t that unusual an occurrence,” Dr. Arledge said when she was dressed and sitting in his office. “It may not mean anything. However, most miscarriages occur during the first three months.” He said it as if he half expected her to be relieved. Dr. Arledge was a friend of her father’s. She’d known him for years, and Meredith had no doubt that he’d already done what her father had—assumed she’d gotten married because she was pregnant. “At this point,” he added, “there’s no reason to presume you’re in jeopardy of miscarrying.”

  When she asked him about going to Venezuela, he frowned a little. “I can’t advise it unless you’re absolutely certain about the quality of available medical facilities.”

  Meredith had spent nearly a month hoping fiercely that if she was pregnant, she’d miscarry; now she was incredibly relieved that she wasn’t going to lose Matt’s baby. . . . Their baby.

  The thought kept her smiling all the way home.

  “Farrell called,” her father said with the same disdainful voice he used whenever he spoke of Matt.
“He said he’d try to call you again tonight.”

  Meredith was sitting by the phone when it rang, and Matt hadn’t exaggerated when he said the phone connection would be bad. “Sommers’s idea of adequate is a joke,” he told her. “There’s no way you can come down here right away. It’s mostly barracks housing. The good news is that one of the cottages should be vacant in a few months.”

  “Okay,” she said, trying to sound cheerful, because she didn’t want to tell him why she’d gone to the doctor.

  “You don’t sound very disappointed.”

  “I am disappointed!” she said emphatically. “But the doctor said miscarriages occur in the first three months, so it’s probably better if I stay here ’til then.”

  “Is there a particular reason you’ve started worrying about miscarrying?” he asked during the next pause in the static and racket.

  Meredith assured him she was feeling just fine. When he’d originally told her he wouldn’t be able to call her after the first time, she’d been disappointed, but it was so hard to hear him above the static and shouting voices all around him, she didn’t mind so much. Letters, she decided when she hung up, would be almost as good.

  Lisa came back from Europe to start college when Matt had been gone two weeks, and her reaction to Meredith’s story about meeting and marrying Matt was almost comic—once she realized Meredith wasn’t at all unhappy about anything that had happened. “I can’t believe this!” she said over and over again as she gaped at Meredith, who was sitting on her bed. “There is something wrong with this picture,” she teased. “I was the reckless one and you were Bensonhurst’s own Mary Poppins, not to mention the most cautious person alive! If anyone fell for a guy on first sight, got pregnant, and had to get married, it was supposed to be me!”

  Meredith grinned at her infectious merriment. “It’s about time I got to be first doing something.”

  Lisa sobered a little. “Is he wonderful, Mer? I mean, if he isn’t really, really wonderful, then he isn’t good enough for you.”

  Talking about Matt and her feelings for him was a new and complicated experience, particularly because Meredith knew how odd it would seem if she said she loved him after knowing him for six days. Instead, she nodded and smiled and said feelingly, “He’s pretty wonderful.” Once she started, however, she found it a little difficult to stop talking about him. Curling her legs beneath her, she tried to explain. “Lisa, have you ever met anyone and then known within minutes that he’s the most special person you’re ever going to meet in your life?”

  “I generally feel that way about everybody I date at first—I’m kidding!” She laughed when Meredith threw a pillow at her.

  “Matt is special, I mean that. I think he’s brilliant—I mean literally brilliant. He’s incredibly strong and a little dictatorial at times, but inside him there’s something else, something fine and gentle and—”

  “Do we by any chance happen to have a picture of this paragon?” Lisa interrupted, as fascinated by the glowing look on Meredith’s face as the words she said.

  Meredith promptly produced a picture. “I found it in a family photo album his sister showed me, and Julie said I could have it. It was taken a year ago, and even though it’s just a snapshot and not very good, it reminds me of more than just his face—there’s some of his personality too.” She handed Lisa the snapshot of Matt; he was squinting a little in the sunlight, his hands shoved into the back pockets of his jeans, grinning at Julie, who was taking the picture.

  “Oh, my God!” Lisa said, wide-eyed. “Talk about animal magnetism! Talk about male charisma . . . sex appeal . . .”

  Laughing, Meredith snatched the picture away. “That is my husband you are drooling over.”

  Lisa gaped at her. “You always liked clean-cut, blond, all-American types.”

  “Actually, I didn’t think Matt was especially good-looking when I first saw him. My taste has improved since then though.”

  Sobering, Lisa said, “Mer, do you think you’re in love with him?”

  “I love being with him.”

  “Isn’t that the same thing?”

  Meredith smiled helplessly and said, “Yes, but it sounds less foolish than saying you’re in love with somebody you’ve known only a few days.”

  Satisfied, Lisa shot to her feet. “Let’s go out and celebrate! Dinner’s on you.”

  “You’re on,” Meredith laughed, already walking toward her closet to change clothes.

  The mail service from Venezuela was much worse than Matt had said it would be. In the following eight weeks, Meredith wrote Matt three or four times a week, but she got only five letters—a fact her father regularly remarked upon with more gravity than satisfaction. Meredith invariably reminded him that the letters she did get were very long—ten or twelve pages. Furthermore, Matt was working twelve-hour days doing hard physical labor, and he couldn’t be expected to write as often as she did. Meredith pointed that out to him too. What she never mentioned was that the last two letters had been much less personal than the preceding ones. Where at first Matt had written about missing her and making plans, he began to write more about the scene at the oil rig and the Venezuelan countryside. But whatever he wrote about, he made it come vividly alive for her. She told herself he was writing about these things not because he was losing interest in her, but because he wanted to keep her own interest in her, but because he wanted to keep her own interest piqued in the country she’d be visiting.

  Trying to keep busy to help the days pass, Meredith read books on pregnancy and child rearing, shopped for baby things, and planned and dreamed. The baby that had not seemed real at first was now making its presence known by causing the periodic bouts of nausea and fatigue that should have occurred earlier, combined with some ferocious headaches that sent Meredith to bed in a dark room. Even so, she bore it with good humor and the absolute conviction that this was a special experience. As the days wore on, she fell into the habit of talking to the baby as if, by placing her hand on her still-flat stomach, it could hear her. “I hope you are having a good time in there,” she teased one day as she lay on her bed, her headache finally fading, “because you are making me sick as a dog, young lady.” In the interest of impartiality, she varied “Young man” with “Young lady,” since she didn’t have the slightest preference.

  By the end of October, Meredith’s four-month pregnancy was thickening her waist, and her father’s regular comments about Matt wanting out of the marriage were beginning to ring with truth. “It’s a damned good thing you didn’t tell anyone but Lisa you married him,” he remarked a few days before Halloween. “You still have options, Meredith, don’t forget that,” he added with rare gentleness. “When this pregnancy starts to show, we’ll tell everyone you’ve gone away to college for the winter semester.”

  “Stop talking like that, dammit!” Meredith exploded, and marched up to her room. She’d decided to make a point to Matt about his lack of writing by cutting way back on her own letters to him. Besides, she was beginning to feel like a lovelorn idiot, writing to him all the time when he couldn’t be bothered to send a postcard.

  Lisa called late that afternoon. In two minutes she sensed Meredith’s strained nerves and assessed the cause. “No letter from Matt today?” she guessed. “And your father is playing his favorite tune, right?”

  “Right,” Meredith said. “It’s been two weeks since letter number five arrived.”

  “Let’s go out,” Lisa announced. “We’ll get all dressed up—that always makes you feel better, and we’ll go somewhere nice.”

  “How about going to Glenmoor for dinner?” Meredith said, executing a plan she’d been toying with for weeks. “And maybe,” she confessed a little grimly, “Jon Sommers will be there. He usually is. You could ask him all about oil drilling, and maybe he’ll bring up Matt.”

  “Okay, fine,” Lisa said, but Meredith knew that Lisa’s opinion of Matt was sinking with each day that no letter arrived.

  Jonathan was in
the lounge with several other men, talking and drinking. When Meredith and Lisa walked in, they caused quite a stir, and it was absurdly easy to wangle an invitation to join the men at their table. For nearly an hour, Meredith sat only a few feet from where she had stood with Matt near the bar four months before, watching as Lisa gave an Academy Award–winning performance that fooled Jonathan into believing she was thinking about switching her major to geology and specializing in oil exploration. Meredith learned more about drilling than she wanted to know, and virtually nothing about Matt.

  Two weeks later Meredith’s doctor wasn’t smiling and confident when he talked to her. She was spotting again, seriously. When she left, she was under instructions to restrict all activities. Meredith wished more than ever before that Matt were there. When she got home, she called Julie just to talk to someone close to him. She’d called Matt’s sister twice before for the same reason, and each time, Julie and her father had heard from Matt that week.

  In bed that night, Meredith lay awake, willing the baby to be all right, and willing Matt to write to her. It had been a month since his last letter. In it, he’d said he was extremely busy and very tired at night. She could understand that, but she couldn’t understand why Matt had time to write to his family and not to her. Meredith laid her hand protectively over her abdomen. “Your daddy,” she whispered to the baby, “is going to get a very stern letter from me about this.”

  She assumed that worked, because Matt drove eight hours to get to a telephone and called her. She was so glad to hear from him, she almost left handprints on the receiver, but he sounded a little abrupt and a little cool. “The cottage on the site isn’t available yet,” he told her. “I’ve found another place here, in a small village. I’ll be able to get there only on weekends though.”