Paradise (26 page)

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."

Meredith couldn't go, not now, when the doctor wanted to see her every week, and she wasn't supposed to walk around more than a little. She couldn't go and she didn't want to scare Matt by telling him the doctor thought she might be on the verge of losing the baby. On the other hand, she was so angry with him for not writing, and so frightened for the baby, she decided to scare him anyway. "I can't come down," she said. "The doctor wants me to stay home and not move around very much."

"How odd," he shot back. "
Sommers
was down here last week and he told me you and your friend, Lisa, were at
Glenmoor
dazzling all the men in the lounge."

"That was
before
the doctor told me to stay home."

"I see."

"What do you expect me to do," Meredith shot back with rare sarcasm, "hang around here day after day and wait for your occasional letters."

"You might give that a try," he snapped. "By the way, you're not much of a correspondent."

Meredith took that to be a criticism of her letter-writing style, and she was so furious that she almost hung up.

"I gather you don't have anything else to say?"

"Not much."

When they hung up, Matt leaned his hand against the wall beside the phone and closed his eyes, trying to block out the phone call and the agony of what was happening. He'd been gone three months, and Meredith no longer wanted to come to
South America. She hadn't written him in weeks; she was already resuming her old social life and then lying to him about being home in bed. She was only eighteen, he reminded himself bitterly. Why
wouldn't
she want a social life? "Shit!" he whispered in helpless futility, but after a few minutes he straightened with resolve. In a few months things at the drilling site would be under better control, and he'd insist that they give him four days off so that he could fly home and see her. Meredith wanted him and she wanted to be married to him; no matter how few letters she wrote or what she did, he knew in his heart that was still true. He'd fly home, and when they were together, he'd be able to talk her into coming back with him.

Meredith hung up the phone, flung herself across the bed, and cried her eyes out. When he'd told her about the house he'd found, he certainly hadn't tried to make it sound nice, and he hadn't acted like he particularly cared whether she came or not. When she finished, she dried her eyes and wrote him a long letter apologizing for being a "bad correspondent." She apologized for losing her temper and, surrendering all her pride, she told him how much his letters meant to her. She explained in great detail what the doctor had told her.

When she finished, she carried the letter downstairs and left it for Albert to mail. She'd already given up hovering by the mailbox out at the road, waiting for letters from Matt that never came. Albert, who served as butler-chauffeur and maintenance man, walked in right then with a
dustcloth
in his hand. Mrs. Ellis had taken three months off for her first vacation in years, and he'd reluctantly assumed some of her tasks too. "Would you please mail this for me, Albert?" she asked.

"Of course," he said. When she left, Albert took the letter down the hall to Mr. Bancroft's study, unlocked an antique secretary, and tossed that letter on top of all the others, half of which were postmarked from
Venezuela.

Meredith went upstairs to her bedroom and was halfway to the chair at her desk when the hemorrhaging started.

She spent two days in the Bancroft wing of
Cedar
Hills
Hospital
, a wing named after her family in honor of their huge endowments, praying the bleeding wouldn't start again and that Matt would miraculously decide to come home. She wanted her baby and she wanted her husband, and she had a terrible feeling she was losing both.

When Dr.
Arledge
released her from the hospital, it was on condition that she remain in bed for the duration of her pregnancy. As soon as she came home, Meredith wrote Matt a letter that not only informed him she was in danger of losing their baby, but that was, moreover,
meant
to scare him into worrying about her. She was ready to do almost anything to stay on his mind.

Complete
bedrest
seemed to solve the problem of impending miscarriage, but with nothing to do but read or watch television or worry, Meredith had ample time to reflect on painful reality: Matt had obviously found her a convenient bed partner, and now that they were apart, he had found her completely forgettable. She started thinking about the best ways to raise her baby alone.

That was one problem she had worried about needlessly. At the end of her fifth month, in the middle of the night, Meredith hemorrhaged. This time none of the skills known to medical science were able to save the baby girl who Meredith named
Elizabeth in honor of Matt's mother. They nearly failed to save Meredith who remained in critical condition for three days.

For a week after that she lay in bed with tubes running into her veins, listening anxiously for the sound of Matt's long, quick strides in the corridor. Her father had tried to call him, and when he couldn't get through, he'd sent him a telegram.

Matt didn't come. He didn't call.

During her second week in the hospital, however, he answered her telegram with one of his own. It was short, direct and lethal:

a divorce is an excellent idea, get one.

Meredith was so emotionally battered by those eight words that she refused to believe he was capable of sending a telegram like that—not when she was in the hospital. "Lisa," she'd wept hysterically, "he'd have to
hate
me before he'd do this to me, and I haven't done anything to make Matt hate me! He didn't send that telegram—he didn't! He
couldn't!"
She talked Lisa into putting on another performance for the benefit of the staff at
Western Union in order to find out who sent it.
Western Union reluctantly provided the information that the telegram had indeed been sent by Matthew Farrell from
Venezuela and charged to his credit card.

On a cold December day Meredith emerged from the hospital with Lisa walking on one side of her and her father on the other. She looked up at the bright blue sky, and it looked different, alien. The whole world seemed alien.

At her father's insistence, she enrolled for the winter semester at Northwestern and arranged to share a room with Lisa. She did it because they seemed to want her to, but in time, she remembered why it had once meant so much to her. She remembered other things too—like how to smile, and then how to laugh. Her doctor warned her that any future pregnancy would carry an even greater risk to her baby and herself. The thought of being childless had hurt terribly, but somehow she coped with
that, too.

Life had dealt her several major blows, but she had survived them and, in doing so, she found in herself an inner strength she didn't know she possessed.

Her father hired an attorney who handled the divorce. From Matt she heard nothing, but she finally reached the point where she could think of him without pain or animosity. He had obviously married her because she was pregnant and
because he was greedy. When he realized that her father had complete control of her money, he simply had no further use for her. In time, she stopped blaming him. Her reasons for marrying him had not been unselfish either, she had gotten pregnant and been afraid to face the consequences alone. And even though she had thought she loved him, he had never deceived her by claiming to love her—she had deceived
herself
into believing he did. They had married each other for all the wrong reasons, and the marriage had been doomed from the start.

During her junior year she saw Jonathan
Sommers
at
Glenmoor
. He told her his father had liked an idea of Matt's so well that he'd formed a limited partnership with him and put up the additional capital for the venture.

That venture paid off. In the eleven years that followed, a great many more of Matt's ventures also paid off. Articles about him and pictures of him appeared frequently in magazines and newspapers. Meredith saw them, but she was busy with her own career, and it no longer mattered what he did. It mattered to the press though. As year faded into year, the press became increasingly obsessed with his flamboyant corporate successes and his glamorous bedroom playmates, who included several movie stars. To the common man, Matt apparently represented the American Dream of a poor boy making good. To Meredith, he was simply a stranger with whom she had once been intimate. Since she never used his name and only her father and Lisa knew that she had ever been married to him, his widely publicized romances with other women never caused her any personal embarrassment.

Chapter 12

November 1989

Wind whipped up whitecaps and sent them tumbling, frothing onto the sand twenty feet below the rocky ledge where Barbara Walters strolled beside Matthew Farrell. A camera tracked their progress, its dark glass eye observing the pair, framing them against a background of Farrell's palatial
Carmel,
California
, estate on the right, and the turbulent
Pacific Ocean on the left.