Promise Me A Rainbow (38 page)

“I can’t be pregnant,” she repeated. Her heart was pounding and there was a roaring in her ears.

“Catherine, here, lie back.” He made her lie down again. “Take some deep breaths.” He fanned her solicitously with her chart while she tried not to retch.

“Clarkson?” she said after a moment.

“What, Catherine? You’re not going to throw up on me, are you?”

“No . . . no, it’s better.” She sat up again, feeling Clarkson watching her closely, but she was all right now.

“You . . . really think I might be pregnant?”

“Didn’t I say that? At the risk of having you keel over again—yes. This is how things work, Catherine. You lay down on the interstate, sooner or later you get run over by a car. You lay down with a man, sooner or later you get pregnant—particularly if you’re in your prime and you’re using a birth-control method that’s only eighty-five percent effective. Now get your drawers back on. You can call us Monday morning and somebody will tell you what the blood test says, and we’ll go from there.

“Can’t you get the results before Monday?”

“Nope. It’s the weekend. The lab’ll run a pregnancy test that’s a matter of life and death, but not yours.”

“You could say it was a matter of life and death.”

“Catherine, I thought I just heard you say you didn’t have a husband. It’s only until Monday morning. I think you need that long to get used to the possibility. Mary Beth will be in, in a minute.”

Get used to the possibility.
The phrase kept repeating in her mind. How could she get used to the possibility? She couldn’t bear to think about it. It was as if her brain had completely shut down, the same way it had when Jonathan moved out.

She left the doctor’s office in a complete daze, driving the few miles to Wrightsville Beach and parking as she usually did near Johnnie Mercer’s pier. She sat in the car for a moment than got out and walked past the gazebo to the steep bank that led down to the beach. She stood there in the pale winter sunlight, staring out to sea until she could stand the thought of going home again. Alone.

My God, what would Jonathan say? Catherine—his barren, cast-aside wife—pregnant by her first and only lover?

She didn’t think about what Joe might say, because she couldn’t see herself telling him. He already had his family, his beloved Lisa’s children. Given his troubles with Della, the last thing he needed was a bastard love child.

Then there was the matter of her job. She was supposed to help these pregnant girls. Being unmarried and pregnant herself was hardly setting any kind of example. Unfortunately, she had no difficulty seeing herself alone and unemployed.

She was getting used to the possibility, all right. She was behaving as if her pregnancy were a fact when she had two days to wait for the results of her blood test. More than two days.

She sighed. In the event that she was pregnant, she might as well practice what she preached.

She rummaged through her briefcase for a copy of a “dry” diet for the nausea of pregnancy—nothing fried, nothing spicy, no liquids until two hours
after
a meal. If she really was pregnant, the diet would make the nausea better. If she
wasn’t
pregnant, the diet would also make the nausea better. She wasn’t going to prove anything by following it, except that she was somewhat in control of the situation. She had to do
something
to feel less like a victim and more in charge.

But the waiting. How was she going to last until Monday morning? She didn’t feel well enough to keep busy. She looked into the mirror again, not for signs of pregnancy this time but for signs that she was still a reasonably attractive woman. She didn’t see any of those either. No wonder Clarkson had said she looked like hell. She did.

She took a shower and washed her hair. She put on her best flannel nightgown and languished on the couch, spreading the pink-flowered afghan over her knees in much the same way Fritz would have done.

She watched television. She read. She didn’t call Pat. If she called her, she wouldn’t be able to keep from telling her about the possible pregnancy. She knew it would be easier in the long run if she went through the waiting alone. She was daring to hope, and she didn’t want anyone to see her disappointment if Clarkson was wrong.

She picked up the gnomes. Gently smiling Daisy and almost sleeping Eric. She turned them around and around, looking at the daisies and the coin. She was in debt for the gnomes and in debt for a car. But she didn’t regret buying the gnomes.

“Are you responsible for this?” she whispered, gently touching Daisy’s cheek with her fingertip, “Or is it my peeled willow root with the chicken feathers?”

She wanted, this “possibility.” There was no need to pretend otherwise. She wanted it so much that she could only let her mind skirt the prospect in bits and pieces—a consequence here, a potentiality there. This time she couldn’t fantasize about her heart’s desire the way she had in her early quest to become pregnant when she was still married to Jonathan. She didn’t
dare
fantasize. She didn’t dare hope that if life had ruled out the possibility of having Joe, she might somehow still be compensated by having his child.

She closed her eyes. She wanted this baby. Alone or not, employed or not, she wanted it.

She slept. When she awoke,
it was well past midnight. She lay for a moment trying to think what had awakened her. The nausea was still there, but not intensely so. Slowly she became aware of the dull ache in her lower abdomen, an ache that had always signaled the onset of her period. She carefully shifted her position. The ache didn’t go away. She pulled a pillow around her and clutched it tight. The pain wasn’t bad; it was just that perhaps it was significant. She lay very still, as if she could hide in the dark from yet another “possibility.”

She awoke with the sun
streaming into the room. The nausea was still there. And the ache. Both lasted through the day as she lived gingerly around them, expecting the worst.

But nothing happened—nothing new, at any rate. She seemed firmly entrenched in the status quo. All she had to do was wait.

On Sunday morning,
she made her supreme breakfast effort: lightly buttered toast, crisp bacon, a hard-boiled egg, nothing to drink.

It stayed down. She was actually feeling better. Much better, except for a driving need to sleep. All day long she fought it off. She had Sunday night to get through, and she didn’t want to sleep all day and be awake all night.

In the afternoon, she drove out to Wrightsville Beach, over the Route 76 channel bridge and through the deserted downtown. She should have turned at Salisbury Street, parking as she always did in front of the Silver Gull Motel close to Johnnie Mercer’s pier. But she didn’t. It was too cold to walk on the beach today. She continued north, all the way to the dead end at Mason inlet, a route that took her past the D’Amaro Brothers’ construction site. She drove by it slowly. It, too, was windswept and deserted, as desolate-looking as she felt.

She turned the car around at the end of the road, but she didn’t go home. She took the Masonboro Loop to Carolina Beach Road, driving all the way into Carolina Beach. She hardly recognized it anymore. A few of the older houses from the fifties were still there, but the big three-story wooden apartment house that had sat in the middle of everything was gone. She’d loved that place, and now she couldn’t remember the name of it. It had porches on every story—with an ocean view from the top one if she stood on tiptoe. An outside wooden staircase had zigzagged up the side of the building, through all the porches, and right past the double bedroom windows, so that, if she went down them in the early morning, she could see the guests sleeping in their beds. Old men who’d been fishing all night. Soldiers on leave who’d partied too long. Lovers all entwined.

She remembered the wonderful breakfast smells that came from the apartments that housed the more energetic of the early risers—coffee, country ham and bacon, and biscuits. She’d been so happy then, in her halcyon days when time had seemed to stretch without end in this wonderful place of sand and ocean and overpriced souvenir shops. She’d loved the seashell souvenirs, the ashtrays, the wind chimes, and what she supposed now had been the world’s tackiest table-size nightlights. She had been in inlander’s heaven, and all she had to do was enjoy every second of it.

Now the place was filled with condos, the kind Joe hated building, but built anyway.

Another memory surfaced. She’d been fourteen, letting herself bake in the sun while she listened to WAPE, out of Florida, on a battery radio. At least once an hour, they’d played the oldie goldie, “A Summer Place,” and she’d lain on a gritty Army blanket, smelling of cocoa butter and baby oil, amusing herself, as she did even now, by watching the people around her. She’d turned on her side in her search for some small respite from the heat, and she saw a man and a woman sitting very close to each other on the sand. The woman wore a blue cotton dress and a big straw hat, and from time to time the man reached out to touch her. It wasn’t the hungry, privileged touch of the other couples on the beach who were flagrantly “in love.” It was something else, something special. She’d watched them for a long time, and when the woman finally stood up, she’d been quite obviously pregnant.

Catherine had never forgotten them, though the memory now made her wince. It was what she had wanted for herself—tenderness and loving support as she carried the child of the man she loved. The ultimate cruelty was that that kind of caring, in that special circumstance, existed, but that she’d never have it.

She drove back to Wilmington, shutting herself up in her apartment again. Whether or not she was better because of her afternoon drive, she couldn’t say. By early evening it had begun to rain, steady, gray drizzle that sent her already low spirits plummeting. She went to bed early. Perhaps the drive had been a good thing, after all, because she immediately fell asleep.

Her hands shook as she dialed
the number. She took a deep breath so her voice wouldn’t shake as well. She waited while someone found Mary Beth and got her to the phone.

Her heart contracted at the sound of Mary Beth’s cheerful voice.

“Catherine? Sit down, honey. The rabbit died,” she said, using an old euphemism for a positive pregnancy test.

“It . . . died?” Catherine repeated, her voice nearly a whisper. She cleared her throat. “It
died
, Mary Beth?”

“Dead as a doornail. Says right here ‘between six and eight weeks.’ Congratulations.”

Catherine closed her eyes, squeezing the telephone receiver tight. She knew the women in the office were looking at her and she had to get hold of herself. “Mary Beth, you’re sure? There’s no mistake?”

“Catherine, I’m holding the report in my hand.”

“I want to hold it in
my
hand. Mary Beth, I’m coming over there right now.”

Mary Beth laughed. “Catherine—”

“I’m coming, Mary Beth. I want to see it.”

“Okay. Drive carefully, little mother.”

She knew her request
to see the lab report herself was a bit bizarre, but she couldn’t help it. The receptionist was waiting for her when she arrived and immediately sent her back to Mary Beth. The entire staff knew that she had been a former infertility patient, and when she appeared at the nurses’ station outside the examining rooms, they all stopped and gave her a slow round of applause. Catherine smiled, her eyes on Mary Beth and the blue and white computer form she had in her hands.