The Woman Next Door (3 page)

When Graham caught Amanda’s eye and hitched his chin toward the door, she was by his side in a flash, which was how they found themselves in New York on their third anniversary. Seeming empathetic and resourceful, this newest doctor started with a battery of tests, some of which, for the first time, were on Graham. When the immediate results showed nothing amiss, he gave them a pile of reading matter and a folder filled with instructions and charts. Assuring them that he didn’t expect any surprises from the results of the remaining tests, he sent them home with a regimen that had Amanda identifying her fertile periods by charting her body temperature, and Graham maximizing his sperm count by allowing at least two days to pass between ejaculations.

They joked about it during the drive back to Woodley but their laughter held an edge. Inevitably, making love wasn’t as carefree as it used to be. Increasingly, the goal of making a baby was coming before pleasure. With that goal unrealized month after month, their uneasiness grew.

***

They spent their fourth anniversary quietly. Amanda was recovering from minor surgery performed by yet another doctor. This one was female, and ran a fertility clinic thirty minutes south of Woodley. She was in her forties, mother to three children under the age of six, and disgusted with colleagues of hers who blamed things they couldn’t diagnose on emotions, as finally the doctor in Manhattan had done. This one insisted that they call her by her first name—Emily—and not only asked questions none of the others had, but did different tests. That was how she noticed a small
blockage in one of Amanda’s tubes, and while she wasn’t sure that it was severe enough to be causing the problem, she advised a precautionary cleanup.

Amanda and Graham readily agreed. By now they had hoped to have three children—Tyler, Emma, and Hal—born in three consecutive years. As things stood, the house that they loved for family space was starting to feel too large and much too still. And though they tried not to obsess about it, there were times when each wondered whether children would ever come.

There was no lovemaking on this fourth anniversary. Amanda was still too tender for that, and even without the surgery, the timing wouldn’t have been right for sex. So it was a morning for gentle exchanges. Graham brought her breakfast in bed and gave her a pair of heart-shaped earrings; she told him she loved him and gave him a book on exotic shrubs. Then he went off to work.

Indeed, work was the good news on their fourth anniversary. O’Leary Landscape Design flourished. Graham now rented a suite of rooms in the center of Woodley to house two full-time assistants and a business manager. He was given preference for the best materials in the three largest nurseries in western Connecticut, had ongoing relationships with tree farms in Washington and Oregon, and shrub farms in the Carolinas. He kept two of Will’s crews busy planting on a regular basis.

For her part, Amanda had been named coordinating psychologist for the Woodley school system, which gave her the power to bring a slightly antiquated system into the modern day. That meant getting to know students in nonthreatening situations such as leadership seminars, lunch groups, and community service programs. It meant opening the door to her office, allowing for five-minute sessions as well as forty-five-minute ones, and communicating
with students by e-mail, if that was the only way they could handle a psychologist. It meant working with consulting psychologists on difficult cases and with lawyers on matters of confidentiality. It meant forming and training a crisis team.

So she and Graham had their house, their jobs, their neighborhood, and their love. The only thing that would have enhanced their fourth anniversary celebration was a child.

***

Two months shy of their fifth anniversary, with Amanda feeling more like an egg-producing robot than a woman, she and Graham met for lunch. They talked about work, about the weather, about sandwich choices. They didn’t talk about what Amanda had done that morning—which was to have an ultrasound that had measured her egg follicles—or the afternoon’s activity—which would entail Graham producing fresh sperm and Amanda being artificially inseminated. They had already failed the procedure once. This was their second of three possible tries.

A short time later that day, Amanda lay alone in a sterile clinic room. Graham had done his part and gone back to work. Emily had poked her head in with a greeting on her way down the hall. After what seemed an interminable wait, a technician Amanda didn’t know entered the room. Amanda figured she couldn’t have been more than twenty-one, and “technician” was the proper word. The girl had neither social skills nor personal warmth, and Amanda was too nervous to make more than a brief attempt at conversation. When that attempt got no response, she simply stared at the ceiling while the girl injected Graham’s sperm. Once that was done, she was left alone.

Amanda knew the drill. She would lie there for twenty minutes with her pelvis tipped up to give the sperm a nudge in the right direction.
Then she would dress, go home, and live with her heart in her mouth for the next ten days, wondering if this time it would take.

But today, lying there alone with Graham’s silent sperm, Amanda felt a pang in her chest. She wanted to think it was a mystical something telling her that a baby was at that instant starting its nine-month intrauterine life, but she knew better. This pang came from fear.

Graham O’Leary shoveled dirt with a vengeance, pushing himself until his muscles ached, because he needed the exertion. He was filled with nervous energy that had no place to go. This was Tuesday. That made it D-day. Amanda would either get her period or miss it. He hoped desperately that she would miss it, and only in part from wanting a child. The other part had to do with their marriage. They were feeling the strain of failing to conceive. A wall was growing between them. They weren’t close the way they used to be. He could feel that she was pulling away.

For Graham, it was déjà vu.

Grunting at the unfairness of that, he heaved an overloaded spadeful of dirt from the hole, but when he lowered the shovel again and pushed in hard, he hit rock. Swearing angrily, he straightened. Sometimes it seemed that rock was all he found. Forget the historic bit about stone walls marking one man’s land from the next. He would bet that those walls were built just to get the damn rocks out of the fields!
Put ’em over near the other guy’s land,
he imagined the old-timers saying. Only they’d missed a few.

Annoyed, he bent, worked his shovel under the rock, levered it up, and hauled it out. Clear of that impediment, he tossed spadefuls of dirt after it, one after the other in a steady rhythm.

“Hey.”

Oh, yeah, he knew what pulling away looked like. He had seen it in Megan, building slowly, mysteriously, reaching a point where he had no idea what she was thinking. With Amanda, he knew the
cause of the problem, but that didn’t make it easier to take. They used to be on the same wavelength on everything. Not anymore.

Grunting again as he dug deeper, he remembered the tiff they’d had the week before when he had tossed out the idea that she might be more relaxed, and therefore more apt to conceive, if she cut back on the hours she spent at school. She didn’t have to be the head of a dozen different programs, he had said in what he thought was a gentle tone. Others could do their part. That would allow her to come home early one or two afternoons each week; she could read, cook, watch
Oprah.

She had gone
ballistic
over that. He wasn’t suggesting it again.

“Gray.”

Gritting his teeth, he hauled out another rock. Okay, so he was working longer hours, too. But he wasn’t the one whose body had to provide a hospitable environment for a child to take root. Not that he would even breathe that thought. She would take it as criticism. Lately, she misinterpreted lots of what he said.

“Hey, you.”

She’d actually had the gall to accuse him of being absent for the second artificial insemination—like the thing could have been done without his sperm. Okay, so he’d gone back to work after producing it. Hell, she had told him to leave. Of course, now she was claiming that what she’d
said
was that he didn’t have to stay if he was uncomfortable.

“Graham!”

His head flew up. His brother Will was squatting at the edge of the hole. “Hey. I thought you left.” The crew worked from seven to three. It was nearly five.

“I came back. What are you doing?”

Planting his shovel in the dirt, Graham brushed spikes of wet hair back with an arm. “Providing a hospitable environment for
this tree,” he said with a glance at the monster in question. It was a thirty-foot paper birch that would be the focal point of the patio he’d designed. Not just any tree would do. It had taken him a while to find the right one. “The hole is crucial. It has to be plenty wide and plenty deep.”

“I know,” Will replied. “That’s why I have a backhoe coming tomorrow morning.”

“Yeah, well, I felt like getting the exercise,” Graham said offhandedly and went back to it.

“Heard from Amanda yet?”

“Nah.”

“You said she’d call as soon as she knew.”

“Well then, I guess she doesn’t know yet,” Graham said, but he was pissed. They hadn’t talked since he had left the house early that morning. If she’d gotten her period, she was keeping it to herself. His phone was right there in his pocket, silent as stone.

“Did you call her?” Will asked.

“No,” Graham said, pedantic now. “I called yesterday afternoon. She said I was pressuring her.”

“Moody, huh?”

He sputtered out a laugh and tossed up another shovelful of dirt. “They say it’s the Clomid. But hey, it’s not easy for me either, and I’m not taking the stuff.” Under his breath, he muttered, “Talk about feeling like a eunuch.”

“No cause for that,” Will said. “You haven’t lost it. You have an audience, y’know.”

Graham paused, pushed his arm over his brow again, shot his brother a wry look. “Yup.” He went back to digging.

“Pretty lady.”

“Her husband’s an Internet wizard. They’re barely thirty and have more money than they know what to do with. So he plays
with computers, and she watches the men who work on her lawn. It’s pretty pathetic, if you ask me.”

“I’d call it flattering.”

Graham shot him another look. “You talk with her, then.”

“Can’t do. I gotta get home. Mikey and Jake have Little League. I’m coach for the day.” He pushed himself up. “Don’t stay much longer, okay? Leave something for the machine.”

Still Graham dug for a while more, if only to bury the idea of Little League under another big mound of dirt. By then his muscles were shot. Tossing the shovel out first, he hoisted himself out of the hole and made for his truck, a dark green pickup with the company logo in white on the side. He took a long drink of water from a jug in back, doused the end of a towel, and did what he could to mop sweat and clean up. A short time later, he pushed his arms into a chambray shirt and set off for home.

***

“Your move,” said Jordie Cotter from the edge of the deepest armchair in the office. He was fifteen and as sandy-haired as his three younger siblings, which Amanda knew not because she kept detailed files on every student, but because the Cotters lived two doors away from Graham and her. In fact, she had no file on Jordie at all. He wouldn’t be in her office playing checkers with her if he thought he was being counseled. For the record, he was here to discuss his community service requirement, since she headed the program. This was the third time he’d come, though. There was a message in that.

Grateful to be distracted from thinking about the baby that was or wasn’t, Amanda studied the checkerboard. There were five black pieces, four of them kinged, and three reds, all single. The reds were hers, which meant she was definitely losing.

“I don’t have many choices,” she said.

“Make your move.”

Picking the lesser of the evils, Amanda moved in a way that she figured would sacrifice only one piece. When Jordie jumped two, she sucked in a breath. “I didn’t see that coming.”

He didn’t smile, didn’t pump a fist in the air. He simply said again, “Your turn.”

She studied her options. When she looked up at the boy, he was somber.

“Do it,” he challenged. When she did, he jumped her last checker to win the game and sat back in his chair. Still, though, there was no sense of victory. Rather, he asked, “Did you let me win on purpose?”

“Why would I do that?”

He shrugged and looked away. He was a handsome boy, despite the gangliness that said he was still growing into his limbs. But his T-shirt and jeans were several notches above sloppy, his hair was clean and trimmed, and he didn’t have acne, not that many students here did. In affluent towns like Woodley dermatologists did as well as orthodontists.

“You want to be liked,” he answered without looking at her. “It helps if you lose.”

Amanda drew in a deep breath. “Well, I do know how that is. I used to do it in school sometimes—you know, deliberately blow an exam so that I wouldn’t look like a geek.”

“I wouldn’t do that,” Jordie said.

Amanda didn’t believe him. Oh, maybe it wasn’t the geek factor. With Jordie, there were other possibilities, not the least of which was the tension she knew existed at home. But something was definitely going on with the boy. His grades had taken a dive at midterm, and the expression he had taken to wearing around school was the sullen one he wore now.

His eyes met hers. They were dark and wary. “Did my mom say anything to you?”

“About the grades? No. And she doesn’t know we’ve talked.”

“We haven’t talked. Not like,
talked.”
He glanced at the checkerboard. “This isn’t talking. It’s just better than doing homework.”

Amanda touched her heart. “Ach. That hurts.”

“Isn’t that why you have things to do here? To make kids want to come?”

“They’re called icebreakers.”

He snorted. “Like Harry Potter?” he said with a glance at the book on her desk.