The Woman Next Door (37 page)

“The night is dark,” he said on a note of intrigue. “If there’s a moon, it’s hidden behind clouds, but we can’t see even those, since there’s no moon, so how do you know what’s up there at all?”

“There are no stars,” Amanda put in from her car. “That’s the tip-off.”

“Right. But there are lights down here. The Langes are all in. Georgia home, too?”

“Maybe permanently.”

“And the Cotters. Subdued. No dancing shadows in the windows. No kids bouncing around. Think they’ll be okay?”

“I don’t know. It depends on Karen and Lee. She says they’ll be fine. She says Lee won’t fight the divorce, and rightly he shouldn’t. As evidence of infidelity goes, she has him cold. He’s moved in with his pregnant lover.”

“At least she isn’t Gretchen, speaking of whom, the house is dark.”

“Wait,” Amanda advised as her car inched forward, “wait . . . there. At the back of the living room. There’s the light. What
does
she do in the library so late?”

“She studies,” Graham said.

“Like French?”

“Like lots of stuff. She’s taking correspondence courses to get a college degree.”

Amanda stepped on the brake. That was a new take on the books on the table, and a nice one. “How do you know that?” she asked.

Graham’s voice came back clearly. “She told me.”

“Why didn’t she tell
me
?” Amanda asked. What had Gretchen done instead? She had tried to hide the books.

“She feels intimidated by you. Come on, Mandy Don’t get in a huff.”

“I’m not upset. Well, maybe a little. I mean, if she wants to be friends, why hide something like that?”

“You wouldn’t. But she isn’t as confident as you,” he said as he turned into the driveway.

Amanda pulled in beside him. By the time she was out of the car, she had let go of the irritation that had surged briefly. Jealousy had no place in her relationship with Graham. He was loyal. He loved her. She had no cause for suspicion of anyone, and that included Gretchen.

But they hadn’t been in the house for more than five minutes when the telephone rang. Amanda’s first thought was that Dorothy had taken a turn for the worse after their visit. Judging from the look of alarm on Graham’s face, he was thinking the same thing.

He snatched up the phone. “Yes?”

Amanda watched him, waiting for clues as he listened to the voice on the other end. He shot her a quick glance, but the look of alarm remained.

“When?” he asked tersely. Then, “Are you sure?”

When threads of a high-pitched voice reached her, Amanda’s heart began to pound. If her own words to her mother-in-law had caused a setback—or worse, sparked another stroke, a stronger one
this time—she would never forgive herself. Graham, she thought with fear, might not either.

“I’ll be right there,” he said and hung up the phone. “Gretchen’s bleeding,” he told Amanda. “She thinks she’s losing the baby.”

For a minute, Amanda did absolutely nothing. It took her that long to switch gears. Gretchen. Calling Graham.

But no, she cautioned in the next heartbeat. Not calling Graham. Calling this house and talking with Graham because he’d been the one to answer the phone. Just as he’d been the one who had worked with her and earned her trust, so that she had felt comfortable enough to confide in him about things like taking correspondence courses. Just as he’d been the one to show kindness, when Amanda and the other women had failed.

“We have to help her,” he said. “We’re right here, and we don’t have kids that need watching. She trusts us. She has no one else.”

Having let go of her suspicion, Amanda responded with friendship. “We’ll take my car,” she said, handing him her keys as she went back out the door. Counting on Graham to bring the car close, she hurried across the street. Gretchen was already at the side door, her pallor accentuated by the gaslight there.

Her voice was thin and tremulous. “I was fine. I was really fine. Then I stood up, and I felt a pain, and then there was blood.”

Putting an arm around her waist, Amanda guided her toward the approaching car. “Did you call the doctor?”

“He told me to get to the hospital. I hate to bother you. You have other things to think about. But I didn’t know who else to call.”

“Is there pain now?”

“Contractions,” she said in a higher voice, “but it’s too early. The baby’s too little.” While Graham backed the car up, she clutched Amanda’s arm and said in an urgent whisper, “Graham isn’t the father.
There was never,
ever
anything romantic between us. He’s been a friend, but that’s all. I was just angry, so I didn’t say.”

“I know.” Amanda opened the back door.

“It wasn’t Russ or Lee, either. I wouldn’t do that to any of you.” Clutching her middle, she closed her eyes.

Amanda held up a hand to stay Graham, who was out of the car, wanting to help. When Gretchen began to breathe more calmly, they guided her into the car. Without forethought, Amanda followed her in and sat close by her side, giving her a hand to squeeze with each pain.

Graham drove quickly. There was only one hospital in the area. It was the one that he and Amanda knew intimately, the one that housed the fertility clinic. The thought of that alone was enough to trigger a jumping in Amanda’s stomach. Determinedly, she focused on Gretchen.

“I won’t lose the baby, will I?” Gretchen whispered at one point.

“Not if we can help it.”

A minute later, she asked, “It can live at seven and a half months, can’t it?”

“Definitely,” Amanda said.

“But it’ll be small. What if it isn’t fully formed? What if there’s brain damage? Or lung damage?”

“Don’t think those things,” Amanda begged, though she had thought them all herself and not so long ago. She hadn’t been pregnant. But she had imagined being pregnant. Even imagining it, she had worried. So she knew what Gretchen was feeling.

“Why’s it coming early?” Gretchen whispered. “Is something wrong?”

Amanda reassured her as best she could, though it was certainly a case of the blind leading the blind. “The baby may just be impatient.”
She tried to think of other benign possibilities. “Or ready. Maybe you miscalculated.” That didn’t explain the blood.

“I didn’t. I know when I conceived.” She sat back against the seat and whispered, “I’ve lost so much. I can’t lose this.”

“Here we are,” Graham announced. Turning into the hospital lot, he drove straight to the emergency entrance.

Suddenly there were attendants opening the door, helping Gretchen out, settling her into a wheelchair. Her obstetrician—he was Amanda’s own, though not her fertility specialist—was there, too, holding her shoulder, telling her that she would be fine.

Pushed to the side in the rush of medical assistance, Amanda felt a deep yearning. When Graham materialized beside her, she met his gaze. They didn’t say a word, though the message was there.
It should be us, damn it. It should be us.

***

Gretchen gave herself up into the hands of her doctor. She had trusted him from the first, largely because he exuded confidence, and he did now, too, even in spite of the bleeding. Confidence, however, didn’t mean he didn’t act quickly. She was admitted and prepped. She was wheeled into an operating room and given a spinal. They performed a cesarean section, which was just as well, since, lacking a partner, she had forgone Lamaze courses and would have been hard put to know how to breathe.

A sheet blocked her view of what was happening, but her obstetrician stood tall above it, and she watched his eyes. They were calm and competent, concerned for perhaps a minute or two, though that might have been Gretchen’s imagination. Soon enough there was a smile in those eyes, and the unmistakable sound of a baby’s cry.

“You have a boy, Gretchen,” the doctor announced, “and he sure looks healthy to me. He sounds it, too. Listen to the little guy go.”

Gretchen thought that
waaaa-waaaa
was the most beautiful sound she had ever heard. Not knowing whether to laugh or cry herself, she did both, which meant that when they brought the baby to her, she could barely see him through her tears. But she saw enough. She saw a screwed-up little face, a tiny body, spindly arms and legs with the appropriate numbers of fingers and toes. Then they whisked him away, explaining that they wanted him examined, cleaned, and warmed in an incubator until they determined if there were any side effects of his premature arrival.

She wanted to ask what those might be. First, though, now that he was in good hands, she wanted to know if she would live.

“Live?” her obstetrician asked with a mischievous look in his eyes. “I haven’t lost a patient yet to a little run-of-the-mill hemorrhaging. It’s stopped. We’ll just sew you up now. Live? You’ll live long and well with that boy.”

Gretchen liked the sound of that. Closing her eyes, feeling a tugging at her body but little pain, she let herself relax.

***

Amanda and Graham were at the window of the special-care nursery when Gretchen’s baby arrived. It was swathed in blankets. The nurse held him up and mouthed the words. Amanda felt goose bumps and caught in a breath. “A boy. That’s
so nice.”

Holding her hand in the pocket of his jeans, Graham gave it a squeeze. “You’d say the same thing if it were a girl.”

But Amanda was enthralled. “Look at him. He’s so tiny.” “Is he okay?” Graham asked the nurse, who, given her salt-and-pepper hair and the ease with which she held the baby, was no doubt experienced at lip-reading, too.

With a reassuring thumbs-up, she carried him to the pediatrician waiting at the rear of the room.

Amanda watched until the doctor blocked her view of the baby. Then she looked at the other preemies. Babies born at this hospital with serious problems would have been transferred to larger hospitals, which meant that the ones left were small but healthy. She saw a pink cap, a blue cap, a trio of yellow ribbons. One incubator had a sign that read
TIMOTHY
. Another had a stuffed rabbit perched on the top.

“So,” Graham asked, “who did he look like?”

“Not you,” Amanda replied. “I’ve pictured your baby in my mind a million times. I’ve seen other O’Leary babies. This isn’t one.”

“Maybe he resembles Gretchen.”

“Nuh-uh. O’Leary genes are dominant. O’Leary babies have a certain look.”

“This one’s just a preemie.”

Amanda glanced up at him. He was either testing her, or teasing her. “Who do you think he looks like?” she asked.

“Ben.”

She chuckled. “Mm. Both bald.”

They were quiet for a while. Gradually the excitement of the night—the exhilaration of a new birth—faded. Amanda didn’t have to look at Graham to know that he was feeling it, too. Standing there at the nursery window, knowing that they should have been looking at
their
baby by now, she felt the return of emptiness. She wondered if Graham was feeling that also—wondered if he was looking out at those babies in their incubators and thinking that some woman had managed to carry and bear each one. She wondered if Graham was thinking that he had married a dud of a woman. She wondered—

She caught herself midway, headed into the same old trap. Wondering
was dangerous enough. Wondering, and then imagining, had gotten her in big trouble before. She couldn’t just wonder. She couldn’t just imagine. She had to
know.

“What’re you feeling?” she asked quietly.

He was silent for a minute. Then he put his hands in his back pockets. “Envy.”

That was honest. She felt it, too. “What else?”

“Determination.” His jaw showed it. “If we try once more, just once more, it has to work.” His profile was strong—yes, determined. When he turned his eyes on her, though, they held something else. “Dread,” he added. “Not a pretty word. But it’s the truth. I’m not looking forward to starting it all up again. I don’t want to lose what we’ve had the past few days.”

“Hey, you two,” called a gentle voice. It was Emily, their fertility specialist, coming toward them down the hall.

Amanda smiled in greeting, but didn’t say anything. Neither did Graham.

Emily cocked her head toward the nursery. “Is this an attempt to get psyched up again?”

“No,” Amanda said. “A neighbor’s baby’s in there. Are there any of yours?”

Emily pointed at the middle of the room. “Those three, the ones with the yellow ribbons tied to the handles. They’re IVF triplets, two sisters and a brother. They’re very small, but they’re well.” Turning away from the babies, Emily braced a shoulder against the nursery glass. “The downside of your problem is that we don’t know its cause. The upside is that because we don’t, there’s lots we can try. The simplest is to up the dosage of Clomid.”

Amanda wasn’t wild about that idea. The lower dosage had made her hot, bloated, and moody, and according to the tests, the Clomid
had worked. She had produced plenty of eggs. They just hadn’t taken to being fertilized.

Besides, an increased dose of Clomid raised the risk of overstimulation of the ovaries and the development of ovarian cysts. She would have to be closely monitored for that, meaning near-daily tests at the clinic. Should a large cyst develop, it would have to be surgically removed.

“We can stick with Clomid and add an injection of HCG,” Emily proposed. “That would be done on the fifteenth or sixteenth day of your cycle. It would trigger ovulation.”

“Ovulation isn’t my problem,” Amanda said.

“No, but this would coordinate the release of the eggs from their follicles. Consolidate the firepower, so to speak. Or we can do multiple inseminations—artificially inseminate you daily or bi-daily Or we can try Humegon, either alone or with HCG.”

Amanda shuddered at the thought. Humegon had to be injected. It was awkward and painful. Moreover, since it caused a decrease in progesterone levels, progesterone injections had to follow the Humegon ones, all of which would precede the HCG shot. The whole thing was unpleasant. The side effects were reputed to be as bad as, if not worse than, the other.

“We can try IUI,” Emily suggested, “or go directly to IVF. My point is that you do have options.”

Amanda didn’t want options. She wanted a baby. Glancing at Graham, she saw that he did, too.