Moments In Time (15 page)

13

T
HE
LIGHTS IN THE LIVING ROOM WERE HOT, AND
Maggie raised
her hands to lift what suddenly felt like a heavy veil of hair from her neck. The air felt good as it touched her back.
I should have worn my hair up,
she told herself,
instead of down the way he likes it, just to irritate him.

She resisted the urge to tune back into the conversation. Hilary had apparently asked him about that lag he’d had a few years back, when he couldn’t buy a hit record. It had been a bad time for him, she recalled. He’d been depressed and seriously considered retirement. Realizing he didn’t have too many options other than music had served to depress him even more. He had no education to speak of, had never made a living doing anything else. It had been Rick who’d lit the fire under him then, prodding him to try again, which of course he h
ad done, producing his biggest-
selling album up to that time.

He’d been miserable until he’d completed that record, hanging around the house listlessly, following her and getting underfoot, looking to her to direct him somehow. She had three little ones to keep up with and had just found out she was pregnant with the fourth. It had been unexpected—they’d all somehow been unexpected. None, of course, she recalled ruefully, as unexpect
ed as the first one had been…

B
y the beginning of the second week in June, she knew for certain something was wrong. She was two weeks late— never in her life had she ever fluctuated by more than three days. She knew it was time to pay the piper for the four-day dance in Atlanta. The doctor merely served to confirm her own diagnosis. Her child was due the first week in February.

Numb, she’d returned to her apartment, caught in the emotional crossfire of angrily reproaching them both for their stupid, irresponsible behavior and sheer panic at finding herself in such a predicament.

She reached for the phone a dozen times, each time rehearsing a different opening line, a different conversation, but could not bring herself to dial the number of the hotel in Phoenix where he was staying. How would he react? Would he be angry? Indifferent?
What if,
a tiny anxious voice inside suggested,
he's changed his mind about you? What if he’s met someone else? What will he think about a baby? What if he doesn’t want it? What if
he walks away? What if? What if?
What if?

By two a.m. she had managed to work herself into a state of frenzied confusion. She picked up the phone and dialed the hotel. Rick answered. She could hear a party in full blast.

“Hey, Mags, congratulations. J.D. told us the news. We’re happy for you, baby. As a matter of fact, we’re celebrating the big event right now. And we’ll celebrate again in L.A. and in San Francisco, that is, of course, if J.D. permits us the time to do anything besides—”

“Maggie?” J.D. had abruptly taken the phone from Rick.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“Ah, well, I made the error of telling everyone we’d decided to get married, and it seemed like an excuse for a party, I guess. Somehow everyone ended up back here at my room.” His voice sounded odd. Was he drunk or annoyed that she had intruded into what sounded like a great party?

“You sound like you’ve been hitting the Scotch.” She was
annoyed to find him enjoying himself when she was crazed with panic.

“Not really,” he said somewhat impatiently. “Maggie, hold on. Let me try to redirect these people elsewhere. Give me a few minutes to get everyone out of here, and I’ll call you back.”

She lay in the darkness, the phone beside her on the bed, her hand on the receiver, waiting for it to ring.
Why is it taking him so long,
she wondered,
to kick a few dozen people out of the room?
When the call finally came, shattering the silence, she glanced at the clock on the table before answering. It had taken him almost an hour.

“Why are you up so late tonight, Mags?” he asked, and she pictured him in his hotel room, settled back against the bed pillows, one arm bent behind his head, legs crossed at the ankles on the bed, relaxed and unaware that she was about to drop a heavy bit of news into his unsuspecting lap. Her throat constricted and she began to lose her nerve.

“I needed to talk to you. Why didn’t you call the past two nights? I’ve been worried.” She tried to control her voice, which sounded, even to her ears, a bit shrill.

“No reason to be. It was late by the time we got back here both nights, and I know there’s a difference in the time between here and there. I didn’t want to wake you up in the middle of the night. And besides, I’
ve been a bit distracted…
”

“Distracted? By what?” She tapped the footboard of the bed with her big toe.

He hesitated. “I don’t know that now’s the best time to go into that.”

A fog seemed to settle into her brain, jumbling her senses. Through the loud buzzing inside her head her thoughts scrambled in confusion. What was he hiding from her? Her mouth went dry, and she could not respond.

“Tell me why you called, sweetheart. Is something wrong?”

Ignoring his questions, she pressed him. “When will be the right time?”

“When I get back there.” He sighed impatiently. “Maggie, is there something you wanted to talk about?”

“No.” For the first time, she felt like an unwanted intruder into his life away from her.

“Things okay at work?”

“Yes.”

“Your family?”

“Fine.”

“Then what, baby?” he pleaded with exasperated gentleness.

“Nothing. I’m sorry I called, Jamey. Remind me not to do so again unless there’s a death in the family.”

“Maggie
…
”
he began, obviously alarmed by the snappish, shrewish jolt of her voice.

“We’ll talk about it next week when you’re here.”
When you’re back home and you're the man I know again.

“Ahhh, well, about next week. There’s been a slight change in plans. I’ll be in L.A. a bit longer than we’d scheduled.”

“What does that mean?”

“That means I’ll be back between San Francisco and Toronto the following week. But unfortunately it won’t be for six days, as we’d planned.”

“How long?”

“Two. Maybe three days at the most.”

“Why do you have to stay so long in L.A.?” A tingle of apprehension spread through her.

“There’s something I have to do that’s very important to me” was all the explanation he offered.

Her eyes burned. Everything was starting to fall apart. He had always been so eager to be with her, so miserable when he was away from her. Why, now of all times, when she needed him so desperately, was something else more important to him than being with her? And how dare he be so nonchalant when her life was falling apart.

“That’s all you’re going to tell me?” She could not believe the casual way in which he seemed to brush her off.

“Yes. I don’t want to go into it right now,” he again told
her. “Maggie, I’m tired. Exhausted. I’ve b
arely slept in three weeks…
”

“Let me know when you can fit me in.” She broke into a sweat and slammed the receiver into its cradle.

She knew that he would be upset when he heard the dial tone. She wanted him to be upset. She wanted him to be as crazy as she was. She wanted him to hop the next plane east and come home and tell her it would be all right, that he loved her and would love this child, this tiny being of whose existence he had not yet a clue. Her anger—toward him over his part in her predicament as well as his absence, toward herself for her inability to tell him—had taken on a life of its own and seemed to control her, instilling in her a hostility she did not wish to feel. But it was there and it grew and she had exploded with it.

Why,
she asked herself as she lay alone in the dark,
do words of anger and bitterness come so easily to me now? Why can't I just tell him the truth, that I’m pregnant and terrified and I need him so desperately and that I love him more than anything in this life? Am I so afraid that I’m losing him that I'd push him the rest of the way out the door rather than confront him honestly?

He had called again the next night, gently
solicitous
, but clearly bewildered by her attitude. She knew she’d been flat-out bitchy, and she had cursed the evil hormonal demon that had seemed to take over her mouth and dictated her very words. He’d sounded sad, distant, a note of frustrated resignation in his voice, but he was not coming home. The hazy, unthinkable possibility that maybe he’d found someone else took on the shape of the image of a ghost she’d seen in a bad movie when she was a child, a wisp of smoke that floated in midair without form or substance, and it terrified her.
There's someone els
e in his life now, and he doesn’
t know how to tell me
…

She sat in the chair by the bedroom window, huddled in the darkness and took a few deep breaths, trying to will the trembling inside and the tightness in her chest to stop. In her mind’s eye, she saw herself in a boat speeding out of control
toward the horizon. He stood alone on the shore, shrinking into an ever-smaller speck as she tried frantically to turn the wheel and head back to him, to keep him from fading from view completely, but the boat seemed to be powered by some force beyond her control. And so it continued
to skim across the water on it
s rapid course out to sea, where she was surrounded by a terrible loneliness and an endless fear.

“
L
indy, I don’t know if I can go through with this,” Maggie said, her voice unsteady and tense.

They sat in Lindy’s car, in the parking lot outside the clinic where Maggie had made the arrangements for the abortion to be performed.

“Honey, don’t look at me to talk you out of it or into it. I will be supportive of any decision you make, but I won’t be a party to you making it. I will tell you that I think you are absolutely one hundred percent wrong in not telling J.D. I think he would want to know, Maggie. You could at least wait until he comes back.”

“I doubt he’s coming back. Right now he’s most likely knee-deep in Californian blondes.”

“Maggie, you know that man loves you.” Lindy tried to control her exasperation. Maggie had been an absolute madwoman for the past week and a half.
And they all think I’m the crazy one,
Lindy thought to herself.

“I know that I thought he did,” she said sorrowfully.

“Maggie, he asked you to marry him.”

“And now he’s sorry that he did. He’s changed his mind, Lindy, and he doesn’t know how to tell me.” Maggie’s face was rigid. “He hasn’t called in a week.”

“Well, from what you told me, you were less than gracious the last few times.”

“Lindy, I called him to share the big news, there’s this lou
d party going on in his room…
You know what those parties are like—don’t tell me he was sitting there twiddling his thumbs. Then he tells me he’s passing up on a week back here to do something in L.A.—something he wouldn’t tell me about, some nebulous thing he’s involved with. Does
that sound like a man who’d be receptive to the kind of news I had to give him?”

“Maggie, you always said the traveling around got to him in a big way.”

“Something’s gotten to him in a big way, but I doubt it’s the travel,” grumbled Maggie.

“You can’t really believe there’s someone else, Maggie, there has to be another explanation.” The thought was inconceivable to Lindy, who, though devoid of any real love in her own life, knew the real thing when she saw it. She never doubted for a second that J.D. adored this woman.

“I can’t think of any,” Maggie told her bluntly.

“I can’t see him dumping you, Maggie. I don’t think he’s the type who falls out of love that fast.”

“He fell in fast enough, maybe it passes just as quickly.”

“I still think you should have told him.”

“It would only make things worse. Then he might feel that he has to come back and go through with the wedding even though he’d already decided he didn’t want to marry me. That’s even worse than him leaving me now.”

“You don’t know that he has, Maggie.”

The two women sat and looked at each other for a few moments, then Maggie opened her car door. “Come on. Let’s get this over with.”

The waiting room was brightly painted and filled with plants in hanging baskets in the sunny front window, someone having made a conscious effort to make the place look as cheerful as possible. Maggie checked in with the receptionist and took the clipboard that held the information sheet she was to complete. She sat down and with a shaking hand filled in the blanks. She handed it back to the woman at the desk, who told her there’d be a bit of a wait.

Terrified and heartsick, she sat in a silence so deep she could hear her heart beating, not permitting herself to think of anything—not J.D., not the reason for her presence there—except getting through this day. She glanced around the room at the others who were waiting. A young girl of about fifteen who sat with a woman Maggie suspected was
her mother. On the other side of the room, a woman Maggie’s age, also with a friend, cried softly, her friend’s arm about her shoulder in silent comfort. A woman of forty or so sat staring at a potted plant on the floor a few feet away, her eyes never moving to so much as blink, her face totally devoid of expression.