The Woman Next Door (2 page)

Peter O’Leary was a Jesuit priest. Possessed with a remarkable charisma that was only enhanced by the Roman collar he wore, he easily quieted the crowd. To the bride and groom, he said, “I might’ve worried when you chose a country club wedding over a church one, had I not spent so much time with the two of you these last couple months. If ever a relationship seemed right, this is it.” Leaving the mike, he approached the newlyweds. With a hand on Graham’s shoulder, he lifted his glass. “Love shines from your faces. May it always be so. May you live long, may you give more than you take, may you serve our Lord in wondrous ways.” He paused, let a twinkle enter his eye, and succumbed to the O’Leary in him. “And, yes, may you reproduce well!”

***

Amanda didn’t sleep around. She’d had two lovers before Graham, had dated each for several months and given due thought to time, place, and precautions before shedding her clothes.

With Graham, everything was different. He had suggested they go hiking, which sounded wonderfully adventurous to Amanda, who envisioned
a day trip, only to have Graham show up with sleeping bags, food and drink, and the key to a friend’s cabin, four miles up in the woods.

It never occurred to her to say no. She wasn’t a hiker, hadn’t owned a sleeping bag in her life—at least, not the kind that could insulate a body in the chill of a mountain night, which was the kind Graham had brought. But he was capable and coordinated. He liked explaining things to her and did it well. He had no qualms about asking questions when they got to talking about things she knew more about than he, and then there was his smile. It was relaxed, wholehearted, and wide enough to cut a crease through his beard on either side. All told, being with him was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to her.

The mountain they hiked was lushly green, with clear streams, sweet birdsongs, and breathtaking vistas making it a heady climb from the trailhead on up. He knew where they were going, leading as skillfully as he had on the dance floor, and she put herself in his hands as she had done then.

They didn’t make it to the cabin. They had barely finished lunch when he stretched her out in a sheltered glen just off the path and made love to her, right there, in broad daylight. They were sweaty and dusty and—she thought—tired, but once started, they couldn’t stop. She remembered thinking that if he hadn’t taken the responsibility for birth control, she would have done without. She needed him too badly for caution, felt too whole when he was inside her to care.

***

“My family is incorrigible,” declared Kathryn O’Leary Wood from the mike. Her eyes touched briefly on Megan Donovan, Graham’s childhood sweetheart, first wife, and still a dear family friend, before settling on Graham and Amanda. “This message is from me
and Megan. Amanda, my brother is the best. In addition to being positively gorgeous, he is smart and sensitive and special. It looks to me like you’re all of those things, too.” She paused and smiled. “So we can expect gorgeous
babies
that are smart, sensitive, and special. I wish you and Gray all the happiness in the world.” Her eyes narrowed on the groom, her junior by three years. “As for you, Graham O’Leary this is the very last time I’m doing this for you!”

The applause was long and loud, ebbing only when Amanda’s maid of honor came to the mike. Tall, slim, and shy as she looked over a sea of faces with their wide O’Leary smiles, she said a soft, “I don’t have children, or brothers and sisters like you. But I do have a history with the bride. I know her parents, and would like to thank them now for such a beautiful party.” She lifted her glass to Deborah Carr on one side of the room and William Carr on the other, and waited for the applause to end before speaking again. “I’m Amanda’s oldest friend here. We met in kindergarten and have stayed close all this time. Amanda has been there for me over the years in ways only she and I know. She is the best listener, the clearest thinker, the most loyal confidante. It’s no surprise to me that she’s so good with teenagers. I’ve often envied those kids. Now I envy Graham.”

***

Graham would have envied himself, if that had been possible. He knew what it was like to stand at an altar and look down a flower-strewn aisle toward the back of the crowd at the moment when his bride appeared. What he didn’t know was what it was like to have everything else . . . totally . . . fade away. He wasn’t prepared for that, or for the little catch deep in his chest that actually brought tears to his eyes.

He was that taken with her, felt that privileged to have her. She was smart and cultured and fine—everything he had always admired but never felt that he was, coming from the family he did. For all their differences, though, he and Amanda had yet to have an argument. They liked the same furniture, the same food, the same music. They wanted the same house, the same big family. From his first sight of her back on that Greenwich hillside, he’d had the absurdly sentimental belief that the single, best reason for the demise of his marriage to Megan was that Amanda was waiting for him.

This day, all else had indeed faded. He had seen only her, walking toward him down that grassy path, and when his heart shifted in a way that he knew would be permanent, he let it be.

***

Concluding her toast, Amanda’s maid of honor caught Graham’s eye. “My friend is precious. Take good care of her, please.” She raised her glass. “Here’s to you both. Let the wait have been worth every minute.”

There were sighs and soft words of assent, then a deep-voiced, “Speaking of the wait...” and the inevitable approach of Malcolm O’Leary to the mike. The oldest O’Leary sibling—proprietor, along with the second oldest, James, of their late father’s hardware store and father of five himself—raised his glass. “I have one piece of advice for my handsome brother and his beautiful bride. Go to it, Amanda and Gray. You’re starting late.”

***

Amanda and Graham celebrated their first wedding anniversary by looking at a house. They had seen others before it, but none as large or as handsome, none in as upscale a community, and none that excited them as this one did. The asking price was definitely a
reach. But Graham’s work as a landscape architect had grown enough for him to hire a full-time assistant, and Amanda had just been appointed school psychologist in the same town as the house.

That town was Woodley. Prosperous and pristine, it lay in a cluster of rolling hills in western Connecticut, ninety-some minutes by car from New York, and counted among its fourteen thousand residents half a dozen CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, innumerable lawyers and doctors, and a growing list of the Internet-riche. The population was increasingly young. As new, large homes sprang up on wooded lots, or older residents retired and moved south, the town’s streets were seeing a growing parade of Expeditions.

The house itself, barely ten years old, was the first in a circle of four Victorians that had been built around a wooded cul-de-sac. With its generous yellow body and white trim, wide wraparound porch, quaint picket fence and gaslights, it was as picturesque as its neighbors—and the beauty didn’t end at the front door. The entry hall was open and bright, flanked on either side by living and dining rooms with carved moldings, mahogany built-ins, and high windows. At the back of the house was a large kitchen with granite counters, wood floors, and a glassed-in breakfast area. A winding staircase, replete with window seats at each of two landings, led to four bedrooms on the second floor, one of which was a lavish master suite. As if all that weren’t enough, the real estate agent led them to a pair of rooms over the garage.

“Offices,” Amanda whispered excitedly when the woman turned away to take a cell call.

Graham whispered back, “Could you counsel people here?” “In a minute. Could you draw landscape plans here?” “Big time.” The whispering went on. “Look at the woods. Smell the lilacs. If not here, where? Did you see the bedrooms?”

“They’re
huge.”

“Except for the one right next to ours. It could be a nursery.”

“No, no.” Amanda envisioned something else. “I’d put the cradle in our room and make the little room into a den. It’d be perfect for reading goodnight stories.”

“Then we’ll give Zoe and Emma the room across the hall, and put Tyler and Hal at the end.”

“Not Hal,” Amanda begged. It was a long-standing debate. “Graham, Jr. And if they’re anything like you and your brothers, they’ll be into mischief, so they should be closer.”

“Hal,” Graham insisted, “and I want them farther off. Boys make more noise. Trust me on this.” Slipping an arm around her waist, he drew her lower body close. His eyes grew heavier, the color on his cheekbones warmer, his voice deeper, a whisper. “Diaphragm put away?”

Amanda could barely breathe, the moment was so ripe. “Put away.”

“We’re makin’ a baby?”

“Tonight.” They had deliberately waited the year, so that they could have each other for an uninterrupted time before their lives inevitably changed.

“If this house was ours”—his whisper was more hoarse—“where would you . . . ?”

“In the breakfast nook in the kitchen,” she whispered back. “Then, years from now, we’d look at each other over the heads of the kids and have our little secret. What about you?”

“The backyard. Out in the woods, away from the neighbors. It’ll be like our first time all over again.”

But it wasn’t their first time. They had been married a year, and they had pressing dreams. “This house is perfect, Gray. This
neighborhood
is perfect. Did you see the tree houses and swing sets? These are nice people with kids. Can we afford to live here?” “No. But we will.”

***

They celebrated their second anniversary by seeing Amanda’s gynecologist. They had been making love without benefit of birth control for a year, and no baby had come of it. After months of denial, months of reassuring each other that it was only a matter of time, they were starting to wonder if something was wrong.

After examining Amanda, the doctor pronounced her healthy, then repeated the verdict when Graham joined them. Only when Graham flashed Amanda a broad smile and pulled her close did she allow herself to be relieved. “I was frightened,” she told the doctor, sheepish now that the worst had been denied. “People tell awful stories.”

“Don’t listen.”

“That’s sometimes easier said than done.” The worst storytellers were her sisters-in-law, and what could she do? She couldn’t turn and walk away when they were talking, and it wasn’t as if they spoke from personal experience. Their stories were about friends, or friends of friends. O’Learys didn’t have trouble making babies. Amanda and Graham were an anomaly.

The doctor sat back in his chair, fingers laced over his middle in a fatherly way. “I’ve been at this for more than thirty years, so I know what problems look like. The only one I see here is impatience.”

“Do you blame us?” Graham asked. “Amanda’s thirty-two. I’m thirty-eight.”

“And married two years, you say? Trying for a baby for just one?

That’s not very long.” He glanced at the notes he had scrawled earlier. “I’d wonder if it was stress, but you both seem happy with your work. Yes?”

“Yes,” they both said. It had been another banner year.

“And you enjoy living in Woodley?”

“Very much,” Graham said. “The house is a dream.”

“Same with the neighbors,” Amanda added. “There are six kids, with great parents. There’s an older couple—” She stopped short and gave Graham a stricken look.

He pulled her closer. “June just died,” he told the doctor. “She was diagnosed with cancer and gone six weeks later. She was only sixty.”

Amanda still felt the shock of it. “I barely knew June a year, but I loved her. Everyone did. She was like a mother—
better
than a mother. You could tell her anything. She’d listen and hear and make solutions seem simple. Ben’s lost without her.”

“And what did June say about your getting pregnant?” the doctor asked.

Amanda didn’t deny having discussed it with her. “She said to be patient, that it would happen.”

The doctor nodded. “It will. Truly, you do look fine. Everything is where it should be. Your cycle is regular. We know you’re ovulating.”

“But it’s been a year. The books say—”

“Close the books,” he ordered. “Take your husband home and have fun.”

***

For their third anniversary, Amanda and Graham drove into Manhattan to see a specialist. He was actually their third doctor. The
first had fallen by the wayside when he kept insisting that nothing was wrong—and it wasn’t that Amanda and Graham were convinced that there was, just that they thought a few tests were in order. So they met with the second, a local fertility specialist. He blamed their problem on age.

“Fine,” Graham said, voicing the frustration he and Amanda shared, “so how do we deal with it?”

The man shrugged. “You can’t turn back the clock.”

Amanda reworded the question. “How do you treat . . . older couples who want to have kids?”

Graham gawked at her. “Older couples? We average out at thirty-six. That’s not old.”

She held up a hand, bidding him to let the doctor answer.

“There are definitely things you can do,” the man said. “There’s AI. There’s IUI and ICSI. If all else fails, there’s IVF.”

“Translate,” Graham ordered.

“Yes, please,” Amanda added.

“Haven’t you read up on this yet?” the doctor asked. “Most couples in your situation would have done research.”

Amanda was taken aback. “The last doctor we saw kept saying nothing was wrong. He told us just to keep on doing what we were doing and not to worry about special procedures.”

“Do you want a baby, or don’t you?” It was less question than statement, and wasn’t spoken harshly, but it had that effect.

Graham stood. “This isn’t a good match.”

Amanda agreed. They needed someone who was understanding, not judgmental.

The doctor shrugged. “Go to ten others, and you’ll hear the same thing. The options are artificial insemination, intrauterine insemination, intracytoplasmic sperm injection, and in vitro fertilization.
The procedures get more expensive as you progress from one to the next. Likewise, you get older and less apt to conceive.”