Hope Street (8 page)

She wanted a divorce? He’d give her a divorce. She wanted financial support? Fine—he earned a lot more as a partner in his law firm than she did as a public-school nurse, so alimony wasn’t out of the question. She wanted the house? They could work it out. She couldn’t have his BMW, but everything else was negotiable.

First, though, she had to tell him the truth. Until their divorce was signed and sealed, he was still her husband and he had a right to know. And she wasn’t going to get her damn divorce until she told him.

He drew in a deep breath, squared his shoulders and marched back into the keeping room. When he saw her seated at the table, flickers of gold firelight illuminating her pensive expression and a feast of fruit and cheese arrayed before her, he ex
perienced a sharp tug in his gut—and lower. The hell with the truth. The hell with the divorce. He wanted her.

Just like the first time he’d seen her in college. She’d been linked to some other guy then—and, God help him, she might be linked to some other guy now. But that didn’t change the wanting.

His desire was stronger now than it was then, because now he knew what having her was like. Just minutes ago, he’d had his mouth fused to hers. He’d been drinking from her like a parched nomad who’d just stumbled upon an oasis after two and a half years in the desert. She’d tasted like grapes and coffee and Ellie. Like home. Like love.

She’d wanted him, too, for as long as he’d been kissing her. He shouldn’t have stopped. He should have kept his lips locked on hers and carried her up the stairs to their room. He shouldn’t have given her a chance to think.

Too late. She sat at their intimate little table, a wedge of apple pinched between the thumb and forefinger of one hand, one leg crossed over the other and the flowing black skirt of her dress primly covering her knees.

He shrugged off his disappointment. Now he knew what he wanted—his wife in his arms, in his bed. He had a mission, and he’d figure out how to achieve it. Her purse was upstairs. She’d have to return to the room for that, and for the DVD. He had the room key, so she wouldn’t be able to get into the room without him. Once he had her inside…

He’d make love to her. The hell with her birthday, the movie, their divorce plans. He’d love her, love every inch of her, bring her every kind of pleasure he could think of. And then she’d tell him the truth. She’d never be enable to hide anything from him in bed.

He lowered himself onto the chair across from her and offered a conciliatory smile. “All right,” he said. “Forget about
your rings. Tell me something else about Africa. Something besides the weather and the food.”

She eyed him warily, then took a delicate bite of the apple wedge in her hand. “Can you be more specific?”

“Tell me about your patients,” he asked.

“I worked mostly with children,” she said.

“You work with children at home,” here minded her. “How were these children different from the ones you deal with at the school?”

“They didn’t have iPods,” she said, then chuckled sadly. “Sometimes they didn’t have shoes.”

“Tell me,” Curt said, and realized that he really did want to hear about this—maybe even as much as he wanted to hear why she’d chosen to remove her rings.

Eight months ago

“I
THOUGHT WE’D BE SEEING
all our patients at the clinic,” Ellie said.

“Most of them, yes,” Adrian assured her, helping her climb into the passenger seat of the clinic’s open Jeep before he slid in behind the wheel. “Sometimes we make house calls. The families in the outlying villages don’t always have transportation into town. And it can be helpful to observe the children in their natural environment. Housing, family dynamics—all of that plays into their health. So off we go to visit them in their own homes. Atu and Rose can manage the clinic for a few hours without me hovering over them.”

Ellie glanced over her left shoulder at the back of the Jeep. There was a large black satchel on the floor behind Adrian’s seat. A doctor’s bag. She hadn’t seen one since she was a little girl, in the days when doctors in the United States still made house calls. She remembered when she and her brothers had shared a wretched case of the measles, and Dr. Feldman had come to the house rather than insisting they travel to his office
on an Arctic-cold January day when they were all spiking fevers. Ellie had been enthralled by Dr. Feldman’s bag, the way its top flaps hinged back to reveal its magical contents: stethoscope, otoscope, tongue depressors, diagnostic hammer and sample vials of drugs. She’d seen the same items in his office, but in his bag they seemed more mysterious somehow, more potent. That might have been the moment she thought she should become a doctor. If she did, she could have a bag like Dr. Feldman’s.

That Adrian Wesker owned such a bag intrigued her. Did it signify that Ghana was forty years behind the United States when it came to medical treatment, or simply that Ghana hadn’t jettisoned the practices that had once made doctors seem so special, at least to a nine-year-old girl with a fever and a blotchy red rash?

“How many patients will we be visiting?” she asked as he steered across the dirt lot adjacent to the clinic building and out onto the street.

“At least two. More if time allows. Remember, we won’t just be seeing patients, Ellie. We’ll be checking out their homes and families. We’ll be scrutinizing their contexts.”

The wind blasted them in their roofless vehicle and blew Adrian’s long, wavy hair back from his face. Sunglasses hid his eyes, and she slid her own sunglasses up the bridge of her nose as the morning sun glared through the windshield. The Jeep had to be at least a few decades old. It lacked seat belts, let alone air bags. Adrian wasn’t the most cautious driver she’d ever ridden with, either. She gripped the window frame and held on tight as he careered around turns and zigzagged past cars, bicycles, motor scooters and pedestrians milling through the neighborhood’s busy roads. More than a few of the people clogging the sidewalks waved and shouted a greeting at him. Dr. Wesker was clearly a popular figure in town.

“My fans,” he muttered with mock humility when a couple of dimple-faced children shouted, “Hey, Dr. Wesker! Ya, Doc!” at him, their voices distorted by the wind as he cruised past them.

“Amazing how they recognize you, even with those sunglasses on,” she teased.

He shot her a sly grin. “Celebrity is such a bloody burden, isn’t it? Stick around, Ellie. You’ll have your own fan club soon, too.”

She actually liked that idea. Not that she wanted fans idolizing her, but she’d be thrilled if, after she’d spent six months in Ghana, the children she’d treated would feel she was truly a part of their community, and would remember her fondly once she was gone.

The village shrank behind them, and they found themselves on a roughly paved road that cut through farmland. “That’s cacao,” Adrian told her, gesturing toward the rows of dark green shrubs spreading back from the side of the road. “Chocolate beans.”

She stared at the shrubs in fascination. “I love chocolate.”

“It releases your endorphins, does it?” He smiled. “According to recent studies, chocolate is a hormonal experience. Women are very susceptible to it.”

“I wouldn’t say I’m susceptible,” Ellie argued, feeling as if she had to defend her entire gender against such absurd generalizations. She smiled to assure him she wasn’t outraged.

“You were the one who used the word
love,
” he argued back, his smile as challenging as hers was apologetic.

“Being passionate about chocolate is not the same as being susceptible to it,” she insisted. “You can love something and still say no to it.”

“Only if you are endowed with a willpower mightier than most of us.” He steered onto an even bumpier road. “I have a dreadful time saying no to anything I feel passionate about.”

Ellie was tempted to ask him what he felt passionate about, but she stifled the urge. She’d been in Kumasi only a couple of weeks. She’d eaten dinner with Adrian a few times, assisted him in setting and splinting a five-year-old girl’s fractured ulna, reviewed the clinic’s inventory of supplies and medicines with him and Rose and allowed him to introduce her to a local beer that was dark and heavy and deliciously sour. But she certainly didn’t know him well enough to ask him about his passions.

They drove for nearly an hour under the relentless sun, passing fields of cacao interrupted by groves of trees. Occasionally, a rattly truck drove past them in the opposite direction, or an old car so covered in road dirt and dried mud Ellie couldn’t identify its color or make. Now and then she spotted a field worker bowed over the plants. Broad-winged birds glided above them, puncturing the late-morning peace with loud caws.

Finally, they arrived at their first destination, a small farmhouse built of stucco and wood and roofed with scraggly shingles, set back from the road at the end of a rutted dirt drive. “This was once a prosperous farm,” Adrian told her as he turned off the engine. “Unfortunately, the husband died a year ago and his widow can’t manage the place alone. She’s been searching for a new husband. So far, no luck, in spite of the fact that she owns property. She’s rather stuck here, running things and keeping her children in line. Her youngest has cerebral palsy.”

“Does the child receive any therapy?”

“Not nearly enough. But he gets along. Sometimes I wonder if it’s a good thing he doesn’t have therapists fussing over him. He has to learn to cope. But then I worry that he’s the reason she can’t find a husband. If a man has to take responsibility for some other man’s children, I don’t suppose he wants any defective ones.”

Adrian climbed down from the Jeep and Ellie followed, not bothering to challenge him on his use of the word
defective.
She understood that he was verbalizing the biases of potential husbands for the widow who lived here, not expressing his own views.

Two children barreled out of the house before Adrian and Ellie had reached the screen door, which hung crookedly on rusted hinges, the mesh torn in parts. “Dr. Wesker, Dr. Wesker!” they hooted, their dark faces shiny with excitement and sweat. One of them began boasting about how much his running speed had increased since Adrian’s last visit, and the other grabbed Adrian’s free hand and singsonged that their mother had fixed him a cake. Ellie wondered whether she might have selected Adrian as a prospective husband. Ellie couldn’t imagine him giving up his medical practice to farm cacao in the hinterlands, but she could easily imagine a widowed mother viewing him as a prize catch, even if he was a light-skinned expatriate whose one true love was his clinic.

He wasn’t catchable, though. Rose had warned Ellie of that her first day in Kumasi. Not that Ellie had required the warning. She wasn’t looking for a husband. She already had one, and he’d torn her heart to shreds.

Inside the farmhouse, the air was warm and stagnant, the furniture rudimentary and as in need of repair as the screen door. No curtains draped the windows, and the pallid walls were marked with water stains that indicated the presence of leaks. But the house was clean, and a dense, sweet aroma filled the main room. The cake, Ellie guessed.

The next hour sped by in a blur. With Ellie’s assistance, Adrian examined each of the widow’s five children, spending the most time with the youngest, who was about five and had outgrown his leg brace. Thanks to a bit of tinkering and tam
pering—besides medical supplies, Ellie learned that Adrian carried a few basic carpentry tools in his black bag—Adrian was able to elongate the metal bars so the child could get a few more months’ use out of the brace. While he extended the metal rods and loosened the straps, surrounded by yammering children, he requested that Ellie retreat to the kitchen with the widow and find out how her health was.

She was fine, she told Ellie, even though she looked haggard and her eyes were so heavily framed in shadow she resembled a raccoon. “Really, yes, I am fine. No problems. Nothing wrong with me,” she said, her voice so lilting and her words so rhythmic she sounded as if she were singing rather than speaking.

“Are you taking any vitamins?” Ellie asked. The kitchen was as clean as the living room, and as dismal. Cracked Formica counters rested on splintering shelves and cabinets. The oven would have qualified as an antique back home, and the refrigerator was much too small to hold all the fresh food she and her children needed.

“Vitamins, yes. Yes, I take them.”

“Iron supplements?”

“Oh, sure, that, too.”

Ellie smiled at the woman, whose hair was pulled back under a scarf in a way that emphasized how thin and wan her face was. The whites of her eyes had a yellow tinge to them. Ellie didn’t believe she was taking vitamins or iron. She wondered if Adrian had brought any supplements in his bag.

“Would you let me examine you?” Ellie asked carefully, hoping not to spook the woman. One thing she’d learned within days of her arrival in Kumasi was that the health of children was inextricably linked to the health of their mothers. The mothers here—like mothers everywhere—would gladly sacrifice their
own lives for their children. But whatever sacrifices they made were often passed like weights to their children. A woman might forgo food so her children could eat more, but if she became sick, her children invariably became sick, too.

A woman like this one probably didn’t check her breasts for lumps. She probably hadn’t had a blood test since her youngest was born. If she felt ill, she most likely doctored herself or suffered.

“I’m healthy,” the woman insisted.

Another thing Ellie had learned was that many mothers would prefer not to know if something was wrong with them. If they knew, they’d have to deal with it—perhaps at the expense of their children. Ignorance was better. “Is there anything I can do for you?” Ellie asked, keeping her tone light. “Anything that would make you feel better than you already do?”

“I require a man,” the widow said bluntly.

“That would be nice, wouldn’t it,” Ellie agreed. “It’s hard to run a farm by yourself.”

“Yah, that. And I require a man to let me be a woman.”

Ellie could have interpreted that to mean she longed to let someone else do the farm work so she could spend her days tending to the house and raising her children. But she suspected the widow was talking about sex.

She smiled faintly. What was she supposed to say? She could discuss the mechanics of sex without hesitation. She could discuss pelvic exams and birth control and even ways to achieve physical satisfaction. But love and fear and the deep, gnawing ache of loneliness, the desire to be a woman…No, she didn’t feel comfortable talking about that. Certainly not now, given where she was in her own life.

When was the last time she’d had sex? Two years ago. Before Peter had died. Maybe she wasn’t a woman, either.

She used to love sex. Then her son passed away and she couldn’t bear the thought of it. She couldn’t convince herself she missed it. What she missed was being who she used to be—a normal woman, fully alive, a woman who enjoyed sleeping and waking, working and eating, laughing through bad movies and singing along with whatever song was on the radio…and making love. She missed that.

Sex was the least of it.

“All done in here?” Adrian’s voice wafted through the doorway from the living room.

With his face in full view, not half concealed by his sunglasses, and the sleeves of his thin cotton shirt rolled up, his sheer masculinity startled her. It wasn’t that he was better looking than any other man. It was just that she’d been thinking about sex and whether going without it made a woman less of a woman…and suddenly, there Adrian was, with his silver eyes and his windblown mane and his lean build.

Ellie truly didn’t want sex. But she was still enough of a woman to think about it in the presence of a man like Adrian Wesker.

F
ROM THAT FARM, THEY DROVE
to another, maybe ten kilometers away—Ellie was beginning to get used to thinking in kilometers instead of miles. The family there was marginally more prosperous than the widow, but their three-year-old suffered from chronic ear infections. Adrian painstakingly explained the surgery that would implant tubes in the child’s ears to reduce pressure, but his mother was adamantly opposed to surgery. “You cut open a child and the evil spirits can enter through his skin,” she declared.

“That won’t happen,” Adrian assured her. “When we do surgery, Mrs. Braimah, everything is very clean and sterile. This
is a simple procedure. A surgeon would perform it at the university hospital in Kumasi.”

“There are evil spirits in the city, too,” Mrs. Braimah argued. “The university is full of evil spirits.” Ellie suppressed a laugh. If the universities in Kumasi were anything like the universities at home, she could see why some people might believe they were full of evil spirits. Alcoholic spirits, anyway.

“If you don’t let Enam get the operation,” Adrian said earnestly, “he will continue to have ear infections. He’ll develop a resistance to the antibiotics I’ve presecribed for him. That means the drugs will stop working. He could lose his hearing.”

Mrs. Braimah remained stubborn. “No one will cut open my child.”

“It’s a tiny little cut,” Adrian said. “It’s not big enough for evil spirits to get in.”