With Child

by Janice Kay Johnson

  His car eased to the curb as his gaze searched for other changes and found them.

  The front blinds had been replaced by drapes. Wind chimes hung from a corner of the front porch. Through an upstairs bedroom window he could see that posters covered the wall.

  Mindy had not only sold the house, she’d already moved. She was gone. He didn’t even know why he was blindsided, but he was. Clearly, her intention was to walk away and never look back.

  He shouldn’t have even minded, but he did. Dean had connected them in a way Quinn had considered indelible. It would appear she didn’t feel the same.

  Familiar anger curled in his stomach. Hell, why should she? She hadn’t known Dean that long. Easy come, easy go. She’d made a nice profit on an eighteen-month commitment. She’d enjoy it more without any anchors to drag her down.

  He drove away with barely a glance back himself.

  Once he got over being pissed, he made a halfhearted effort to find out where she’d gone. Not because he was going to contact her, just to be easy in his own mind. But her name, married or maiden, didn’t pop up anywhere. No telephone, which wasn’t uncommon these days. She was probably using a cell phone. She hadn’t changed her address with the DMV.

  Pride kept him from checking with the lawyer or her mother. Chances were, neither knew where she was anyway. Once the will had been filed and the money was hers, why would she have kept Armstrong informed? And she and her mother didn’t have a real warm, fuzzy relationship. Besides…the choice was hers, he admitted. She knew how to find him.

  That night and plenty of other nights, he escaped churning emotions he didn’t want to identify in his usual way—by going to the gym. A police-department basketball league had started up, and he joined that. But all too many evenings, he went home, tried to read or watch TV and finally, swearing, grabbed his gym bag yet again and went out the door. Loneliness, grief, anger, regret, could all be sweated out like toxins. He lifted weights, hammered down three pointers, swam laps, or ran miles on a treadmill until he was too exhausted to mourn or feel sorry for himself.

  He despised self-pity, and hardly recognized it when it first crept up on him. He’d be shaving in the morning and stop and stare at himself, and he’d think, There’s not a single person in the world who gives a good goddamn about me. The idiotic thing was, he knew it wasn’t true; he had friends. Not as close as Dean, but friends.

  Then he found himself dreading going home. He’d tell Carter to cut loose, then he’d sit back down to do paperwork in the past he’d have put off. If anybody suggested stopping by the tavern, he’d go along even though he wasn’t much of a drinker. He’d watch Seahawks games there on the big screen instead of at home, which he’d once have preferred. Anything but solitude and the inescapable realization that he was living a lonely, loveless life.

  The one thing he didn’t do was ask any women out. He just couldn’t seem to summon any interest. Given his bleak mood, the idea of having sex with a woman he didn’t give a damn about seemed lonelier than jacking off alone under the beat of water in his shower would be.

  In mid-October, he took the ferry across the Sound to Bremerton to have lunch with the Howies. He hadn’t been back in three or four years, and then it had felt like a duty. Beyond a few observations about changes in the neighborhood—new houses, a widened street and sidewalks where they hadn’t been before—he hadn’t connected himself with the house or felt any sense of homecoming.

  This time, he did. He drove the Camaro to please them or himself, he wasn’t sure. After driving off the ferry, he had this sense that it knew the way, like a horse heading for the barn. Every turn was familiar, and felt ingrained in a way the drive home to his existing house never would. And every landscape reminded him of escapades and girls and trouble he and Dean had wriggled out of. He was smiling by the time he pulled up in front of the small house on the quiet street above an inlet of the Sound.

  The Howies had bought this house back in the early fifties; nowadays, they wouldn’t have been able to afford it. All the houses on the street had been modest, although several, he saw, had recently undergone dramatic remodeling with additions that looked out of place. Given the setting and the value of these lots now, every house on this street would be razed or remodeled within a few years.

  Nancy and George both came out to meet him. George walked around the Camaro, stroking its gleaming flanks, pretending to admire the car when Quinn could see that his eyes were damp.

  “Dean was so proud of that car when he bought it!” Nancy’s smile was a little tremulous. “But come in, Brendan! Oh, it’s so good to see you here. Are you sure you can’t stay?”

  He hadn’t been ready to do that, to sleep in his boyhood room and think back to who he’d been. “I work tomorrow. But I wanted to see how you two are doing.” He paused on the doorstep. “It’s been a while.”

  “Too long,” she said, quietly.

  They hadn’t changed a thing inside. Maybe that’s why he didn’t come. It was like time traveling. Except for finding Dean, there wasn’t much about his youth that he wanted to remember. Here, remembering was unavoidable.

  The living room was a little dim, the oak floors mostly covered with dark Oriental rugs. The furniture was mahogany or upholstered in deep forest green, the paintings on the wall landscapes in oils. As a teenager, he’d felt…stifled in this room. Now, for the first time, he realized it was restful.

  But then, he’d felt stifled by the Howies and this house from the minute the social worker had dropped him off. They’d been old to have young teenage boys in the house, and maybe had been old-fashioned even for their age. The jump from squalor and terrified self-sufficiency to a Norman Rockwell perfect slice of Americana had been too jarring for Quinn. The movie The Truman Show had jolted him. Living here had felt like that to him, as if this house and neighborhood and the kind older couple who’d taken him in were unreal. Scripted.

  He’d reacted like the Jim Carrey character, poking and prodding and trying to find the rip in the fabric. When he could, he’d escaped.

  Even though police work wasn’t the best way to see how normal people lived, he’d gotten an idea since that the Howies weren’t that abnormal. They were just nice people who’d held middle-of-the-road jobs and were content with themselves, with unchanging traditions, even with an annual vacation to the same resort on the Oregon coast, taken the same two weeks every summer.

  Then, he’d have said they were oblivious to anything but the surface he let them see. Now, he noticed a sharpness in George’s fading blue eyes that had probably always been there, a perception in Nancy’s memories of him and Dean.

  In the middle of lunch, he said, “You always knew how uncomfortable I felt here, didn’t you?”

  Their smiles were sad. “We kept hoping,” Nancy said. “But you never let yourself trust us.”

  George nodded. “But you did trust Dean. That let us have confidence that you still could care about someone and even have faith in them.”

  “But you’ve never married,” Nancy added.

  Quinn picked up his fork again. “Would you believe I just haven’t met the right woman?”

  His foster mother patted his hand. “If Dean did, you can. Keep looking, Brendan.”

  She’d made his favorite casserole and, to follow it up, blueberry pie, which he’d loved. Eating here with them, at the maple table set in the dining alcove with small-paned windows that looked out on the rocky inlet, the wooded backyards that ran down to it and the docks and small boats—he and Dean had had a twelve-foot skiff with a small, noisy outboard motor—he kept having to shake off disorientation.

  Deliberately, he dragged his gaze from the inlet and settled it purposefully on Nancy’s hand, shaking as she reached to pick up her coffee cup. Seeing his expression, she withdrew her hand quickly.

  “Parkinson’s?” he asked.

  Her face set in stubborn lines. After a moment she surrendered enough to nod. “But I’m fine. Just fine. They’ve got me
on all kinds of medications. You should see me lining up my pills at night to be sure I don’t forget one of them!”

  He’d have been proud and unwilling to admit vulnerability, too, so he only nodded. “You’ll let me know if there’s anything I can do for you?”

  She gave a watery smile. “Thank you, Brendan. You were always a good boy. It’s nice to have you home.”

  He asked casually whether they’d stayed in touch with Mindy.

  “She’s called several times, but not since she moved.” Nancy’s wrinkles deepened. “She said she’d let us know when she was settled, but we haven’t heard from her. I do hope she’s all right.”

  Annoyed afresh that she had worried these nice old people, he didn’t like realizing that a thread of tension underlay his dark mood these last months. Yeah, damn it, he was worried, too. Couldn’t she just drop them all a note that said, “Hey, went to Hollywood to make it as an actress, having fun spending Dean’s money.”

  But he didn’t let her presence hover. She didn’t belong here, wasn’t part of this homecoming. He went down to the bedroom in the basement that he and Dean had shared, and felt a pang when he saw it unchanged, too. He and George walked down the wooden steps to the dock and sat there talking about nothing much.

  George climbed the steps slowly, with a few pauses and apologies for being an old man. Quinn felt like a shit for not being here to see them age, and for not realizing sooner that they were already getting so they needed help.

  He accepted when they invited him to Thanksgiving and was already thinking ahead to Christmas, something he hadn’t done since he’d lived here and felt some of the same anticipation other kids did, even if he would have let someone yank his fingernails out before he would have admitted it.

  When he drove away, Quinn was glad that he’d come. Maybe, after all, his roots weren’t so tangled with Dean’s that they’d died this summer, too.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “WAIT.” MINDY SHOOK her head. Hard. “What did you say?”

  The doctor, a woman in her forties with a kind face and a brisk manner, repeated, “I’m prescribing bed rest. I don’t think it’s necessary to hospitalize you, but…”

  Panic swelled in Mindy’s chest. “I don’t have health insurance.”

  “I know. And I truly think we can keep you and the baby healthy without a lengthy hospital stay. If—” she held up a hand “—and this is a big if, you follow my instructions.”

  “What,” Mindy asked carefully, “do you mean by bed rest?”

  “You won’t have to stay in bed twenty-four hours a day, but I want you there most of the time.” Dr. Gibbs talked about Mindy resting on her left side to prevent compression of a major blood vessel and therefore improving blood flow, about a medication that would lower her blood pressure, about eliminating as much salt from her diet as she could.

  Mindy felt as if she were underwater, seeing someone above the surface moving her mouth, but unable to hear the words. When the doctor’s mouth quit moving, Mindy said, “I don’t understand. I’ve never had high blood pressure. I’m young!”

  “I’m afraid we don’t really know the causes of preeclampsia. There may be genetic influences, or there could be a nutritional or hormonal connection. It is most common in a first pregnancy or in a woman who has had multiple pregnancies.”

  “You’re sure?”

  Her smile was gentle. “Yes. You’ve noticed some of the symptoms yourself. You’ve put on weight suddenly, your ankles are swelling, you’ve been conscious a few times of your vision blurring. What I’m seeing is protein in your urine and blood pressure higher than I like. Your blood pressure should return to normal after delivery. If the baby was more mature, I’d consider inducing labor, but I really think we need to wait a few weeks at least. Now,” her tone became bracing, “I’m referring you for an ultrasound. Here—” she ripped a sheet off a tablet “—is the prescription, which I’d like you to fill immediately.”

  Mindy was still struggling to understand things the doctor had said five minutes ago. “This means I can’t work.”

  Dr. Gibbs’s voice softened. “I’m afraid not. And, while you can certainly get up to go to the bathroom or shower, you shouldn’t be grocery shopping or doing housework. You’re going to need someone to help you. Do you have family?”

  Whatever she said—something about her mother, Mindy thought—seemed to satisfy the doctor, because she was ushered out and found herself standing in the parking lot looking around as if she had no idea what her car looked like.

  She had to go home. No. She had to fill the prescription first. The women’s clinic didn’t have a pharmacy.

  Mindy looked down at the keys in her hand, wondered how they’d gotten there, then wandered down the row of cars until she saw a bumper sticker that had been affixed to her Saab when she’d bought it. Peas on Earth, it said, and showed a small Earth covered with green peas. The bumper sticker had sold her on the car.

  She got in, started it, backed out and then turned onto Rainier as if she knew what she was doing. The grocery store, she decided, with that still logical, collected part of her mind. She could fill the prescription and load up on groceries both. While she could.

  Beneath, hysteria welled. She was in a tiny, windowless room, trapped. She searched for a door, but the walls were seamless.

  No way out.

  Bed rest. How could she just lie in bed for weeks? Her apartment was dank, with mold appearing in corners of the bathroom and in the shower if she didn’t scrub almost daily. She had to houseclean! And grocery shop.

  And if she quit her job now, so suddenly, Bud wouldn’t hire her back after the baby was born. The medical costs were already going to be high. If she had to be hospitalized…And even if she didn’t, she had to eat and pay rent and utilities—she’d go insane without cable TV.

  She pulled into a slot in front of the grocery store, put the gear shift into park, set the emergency brake and felt a sob shake her.

  “Oh, God,” she whispered. What would she do?

  Prescription. Groceries. Stick to the plan, Mindy told herself. She could cry when she got home.

  Somehow she managed to smile at the pharmacy technician, then push her cart through the store loading up on double, triple the amounts of everything she usually bought. Halfway through her shopping, she stopped. Salt. Dr. Gibbs had said she had to cut her salt intake. Dismayed, Mindy looked at the pile in her cart.

  Discarding most of the ready-made food took longer than picking it out had. It also scared her even more. If she wasn’t supposed to cook, but most of the ready-made stuff was high in sodium, what was she supposed to do?

  The doctor had said she would need to have someone to help her. Panic flapped great wings in Mindy’s chest again. She squeezed her eyes shut. No. Finish shopping. She couldn’t break down until she got home.

  By the time she carried the groceries down the concrete steps into her basement apartment, her panic had shifted focus. Dr. Gibbs had sounded confident that the baby was fine, but maybe she wasn’t really. She wouldn’t have ordered an ultrasound unless she had doubts, would she?

  Mindy put away the groceries, then lay down on her bed, on her left side. And cried.

  “WOW, I’M SORRY,” Selene said. “If Carrie hadn’t already moved in, I’d tell her you needed the room, but I can’t kick her out. She’s already paid the rent for this month and everything.”

  “Of course you can’t.” Mindy held the phone to her right ear and stared at the cement block wall. In the living room, it had been drywalled. Here in the bedroom, it was just painted. If she touched it, she would feel the cold and moisture. “I just remembered Deb was moving out, and I thought if you hadn’t found a new roommate—” She stopped. “Really. That’s okay.”

  “But…what will you do?”

  “I don’t know. Um…call my mom, I guess.”

  “I could sleep on the couch,” Selene offered. “You could have my room.”

  “Aren’t you sti
ll seeing Ty?”

  “Sure, but he’d understand,” Selene lied.

  Mindy knew he wouldn’t understand at all. She thought Selene’s boyfriend was a jerk. No, more than a jerk: a little creepy. He tried to keep Selene from spending time with her friends. He’d get mad if she wasn’t home when he thought she would be. And, although he still shared a house with some other guys, he was at Selene’s most of the time. If Mindy could have had her own room, one where she could shut the door, maybe she could have lived there. But she couldn’t take Selene’s bed and then live with Ty’s sulking.

  “No.” She gave a shaky smile her friend couldn’t see. “I love you, Selene. You’re a good friend. But no. I’ll figure something out. I promise.”

  With an almost steady hand, she dialed her mother’s number next.

  “Bed rest?” her mother said a minute later. “Are they kidding?”

  Mindy told her mother what she remembered about preeclampsia. The fact that her blood pressure was high and that she had to get it down, reduce the swelling in her hands and feet. “I’m really scared,” she admitted, “for the baby’s sake.”

  “The doctor wouldn’t have let you go home if she wasn’t sure the baby was fine. You know she’s probably overreacting. And it’s a bit unrealistic to expect you to lie in bed for weeks, isn’t it?”

  “I can’t ignore her!”

  “I didn’t say you should. You can take naps, can’t you? And lie down while you’re watching TV.”

  Mindy closed her eyes. “She told me I shouldn’t even grocery shop. I can’t clean house or cook. Or work.”

  There was silence for a moment. “I suppose I could do your grocery shopping once a week. And if you need money…”

  Mindy took a deep breath and said words she’d sworn would never even enter her mind, never mind be spoken aloud. “Mom, I think I need to come home to stay. Just for a month or two.”

  “Honey, Mark has moved in with me.”

  Who was Mark? Then Mindy remembered—the grocery store manager. Her mother’s latest.