The Woman Next Door (38 page)

“I want you guys back in,” Emily said. “What do you say?”

Graham didn’t say a word. His eyes held Amanda’s, seeming to say that he would go along with whatever she decided. More, they seemed to say that he was in it for the long haul. That gave her a measure of confidence.

She smiled at him, released a breath, then smiled at Emily. “I’ve had my break. I’m ready.”

***

Gretchen barely slept. She was too excited to sleep, and also too uncomfortable as the anesthesia wore off, but she would only take the mildest painkiller. She didn’t want to be doped up. She wanted to be out of bed as soon as possible and down the hall with her baby. She was all he had. If he was struggling in any way, she wanted to be there with him.

When she asked, they said he was fine. A nurse even wheeled him into her room, and she was allowed to hold him, but only for a short time. Her milk hadn’t come in, and he wasn’t ready to nurse. After wailing lustily at birth, he dozed peacefully.

But he was breathing. She looked closely for that. She touched his mouth, touched his nose and his cheeks, and felt their warmth. She whispered a kiss over the soft spot that pulsed at the top of his head. She laid a light hand on his little chest and felt its movement. She touched his palm and felt his tiny fingers close around hers.

He had yellowed some, which they said was normal for a preemie. He didn’t have a lick of hair, and she couldn’t see the color of his eyes. But he was surely the most beautiful baby she had ever seen. Holding him brought tears to her eyes and a rush of such emotion that it startled her at first.

“That’s what motherhood’s about,” Amanda said when she stopped by at noon with a balloon bouquet. “At least, that’s what I’m told. Have you decided on a name?”

“Not yet.” She had chosen a name for a girl, but not a boy. She kept putting that off, thinking that maybe things would change and there would be a man to name the baby after. “I keep coming back to Benjamin. But if I did that, Ben’s sons would go berserk.”

“You do what you want,” Amanda urged.

Gretchen loved her for that, as well as for coming to visit. It couldn’t be easy for either Graham or her. “Do you hate coming here?”

“No. I love babies. Coming here reminds me how much.”

“You’ll have a baby. You’re a good person.”

“Those two things aren’t always connected,” Amanda advised, then tipped up her chin. “But we will. Somehow, we will. To quote Graham quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson, Adopt the pace of nature. Her secret is patience.’”

Gretchen let the words sink in. They were soothing. “You’ll have a baby,” she repeated.

“Well, you have yours. I told Georgia and Russ. They were excited. Is there anyone else you’d like me to tell?”

“No. There’s no one.” Her eyes shifted to the door and her heart skipped a beat. Oliver Deeds stood there, holding a vase of roses.

Gretchen didn’t want Oliver there. He was a reminder that Ben was dead, and that Ben’s sons—technically her stepsons, absurd as it was—would be perfectly happy to put her out of the house and on the street with nothing on her back but the clothes she had worn when she’d first met Ben. She had a baby now. Somehow, she didn’t think that would make a difference. They were a hard-hearted lot, these men who had been so close to her kindhearted Ben.

Amanda touched her arm and said a quiet, “I have to run.”

Gretchen felt a moment of panic. “Don’t. Please stay.”

“I wish I could, but I have to get back to school. Is there anything you need?”

Gretchen shook her head. “Thanks for the balloons.”

“No thanks needed,” Amanda said, adding with the intimacy of a close friend, “I’ll give you a call later.”

Gretchen nodded in gratitude, feeling tears in her eyes and a warmth deep inside. She had wanted a friend. She couldn’t do better than Amanda.

But Amanda was suddenly gone, and Oliver remained, the lawyer from head to toe in his dark suit and his tense look. He took a step into the room. “The balloons are pretty. It was nice of her to bring them.”

Gretchen brushed the tears from her cheeks.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Just fine. Amanda and Graham got me here last night.”

“I know. I stopped at the house to see you this morning. Russell Lange saw me standing at the door and told me. You should have called.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“They said you had a cesarean section.”

“Many women do. I can still take care of myself. And my baby.”

Oliver looked away brooding. When he looked back, a swatch of hair fell over his brow. “I saw him. They held him up. He’s a handsome guy.”

Gretchen remained silent.

“Listen,” he began, but she found her voice and interrupted.

“He’s my baby,” she told him. “I have plenty of money. I can take care of him. If David and Alan want to cause trouble because I have a baby, I’ll fight them. You can tell them that.”

“They won’t cause trouble. I won’t let them.”

“I don’t need your help, either,” she said, because she couldn’t count on him. He was there one minute, gone the next. True friends weren’t that way.

“Gretchen, I want to explain.”

She held his gaze. “There’s nothing to explain.”

“I didn’t abandon you. But you were a client. I shouldn’t have done what I did. It was unethical.”

Unethical? He was calling their baby
unethical?
He was calling the warmth he’d shown her—the gentleness and the caring, the
passion
—unethical? If that was the kind of man he was, she didn’t want any part of him.

Her face must have shown it. Either that, or he just didn’t care. He glanced at the vase he held, frowned, and came forward only enough to put it on the tray table. Then he returned to the door. She was thinking that he was going to leave just like that, without
another word, in which case she would ring for the nurse and get rid of his flowers, when he turned.

“Have you decided on a name?” he asked.

“Yes.” She did it that very minute. “Benjamin.”

“That’s a big name for such a little boy.”

Benji wasn’t. She would call him Benji. He might never know Gretchen’s Ben, but he would be raised in the security of a home that the man had provided. Amanda was right. Alan and David didn’t count. Gretchen could do what she wanted to do. She was her own woman. And she had friends now. She didn’t need Oliver. For the first time in her life, she had friends of her own.

***

Graham refused to think about Emily, the fertility clinic, pills, bloating, moods, or masturbation. He refused to think about making a baby. For the first time, he understood what friends of his meant who waited long years to have kids so that they could have their wives to themselves. Sure, it was selfish. But what man didn’t like being the sole center of a woman’s world? Graham sure did. He liked having dinner with Amanda, and went out of his way to come home from work with plenty of time to spare beforehand. He liked watching her make dinner. He liked helping her with it.

He liked doing things with her, period. She was beautiful; he was proud to be seen with her. She was intelligent; he liked hearing about her work, which she shared more now that they were talking again. And she asked about his, wanting to know the kinds of details she hadn’t in a while.

He loved the closeness. This was what would remain long after their children were grown and out of the house. When he thought about growing old, he saw Amanda and him on the porch of their
dream vacation house. They might be sitting in rockers, or on the wide wood steps. They would be enjoying the soft sounds and the sunset. In time, they would go walking by the water’s edge and pause to look for shooting stars.

They had lost this closeness for a while. He loved having it back. With Emily breathing down their necks, the trick would be making sure they didn’t lose it again.

***

Amanda didn’t want to think about Emily and the clinic, about pills, charts, calendars, and bated breath any more than Graham did, and the time of the year helped with that. With less than a month left of school, she was busier than ever, meeting with parents and students. Add faculty meetings, and community service assignments, and talks to rising seniors—and wanting to be home by four so that she had all the time in the world for Graham—and she had little time to think about this next fertility round.

Dorothy went home from the hospital on Thursday, and Amanda strongly felt that they should visit her. Graham argued against it, preferring to let his mother stew for a while, but Amanda refused to let him become estranged from his family, so she dragged him along.

And then there was Gretchen. They drove her home from the hospital on Saturday, with the baby strapped neatly in the infant carrier that Gretchen had bought months before, and Amanda should have kept an emotional distance. She should have, because being around a new baby was an addictive thing. The smells alone—from the new wooden crib, from baby powder and lotion and baby wipes—made her ache with wanting.

She should have kept her distance, but she couldn’t. She was
drawn to the baby, in part because Gretchen wasn’t much more experienced with one than she was, which made them co-conspirators of a sort—though the fact that he had been born six weeks early and was tiny would have given the most experienced parent qualms. Amanda took her turn changing diapers. She helped give Benji his first bath, and rocked him to sleep when Gretchen faded. But she wasn’t the only one drawn here. Russ came by. Georgia stayed for hours. The neighborhood children rang the bell, wanting to look at the new baby. Even Karen was curious.

“I keep looking for resemblances,” she reasoned, seeming to need an excuse for standing there with Amanda at the side of the crib.

Amanda didn’t see any need for excuses. Karen was a caring person at heart. A seasoned mother, she would take pleasure watching a newborn—any newborn.

In fact, Karen was calmer than she had been in months. With Lee out of the house, her anger had ebbed, and without the anger, she was becoming the kind of woman Amanda remembered. Determined to make an independent life for herself and the children, she had booked a cottage on Martha’s Vineyard for the week after school got out. Amanda thought it an incredibly brave thing to do.

Studying the baby now, Amanda said, “I don’t see any resemblances.”

“So if it isn’t one of our men, who is it?” Karen asked.

***

Amanda had her theory, but she was waiting for Gretchen to feel comfortable enough to confide in her. It happened in a roundabout way. Amanda was there one evening the next week when Oliver Deeds dropped by again. If Gretchen’s refusal to see him hadn’t
been a giveaway that their relationship was more than a professional one, the way he looked at the baby certainly was.

Graham saw it, too. He was holding Benji when Oliver appeared at the door. Having come from work, the lawyer looked the part, except for his eyes. Sad was one word for them. Uneasy was another, defenseless a third.

It was the first time Oliver had seen the baby close up. He tried to look past Amanda for Gretchen, tried to look for a place to put the gifts he’d brought, tried to look at the floor or the stairs or the door, but his eyes kept returning to the infant.

“Want to hold him?” Graham asked, and Amanda quickly relieved Oliver of his bundles. Before he could say no—before he could say much of anything—the small blanketed bundle was placed in his arms.

Oliver blushed. “I—I’ve never held a baby before,” he said, but his arms took the right shape, and if the baby sensed a novice, he didn’t let on. His tiny eyes were closed, his skin silky. “I thought they’d keep him at the hospital longer, being early and all.”

“They checked everything out,” Amanda said. “He was healthy, so they thought he’d be better off here.”

“But he’s so small,” Oliver said. When the baby opened his eyes, he whispered a nervous, “Can he see me?”

“Only vaguely. Mostly he sees shapes.”

The baby pursed his lips and batted a fist in their general direction.

“He’ll be a thumb sucker,” Graham said.

“So was I,” Oliver remarked. He looked up quickly, reddening all the more, but he didn’t attempt to qualify the statement. His focus returned to the baby. “He doesn’t weigh very much.”

“Five pounds, eight ounces,” said Gretchen from the stairs.

They all looked around.

There was a moment’s silence. Then Oliver spoke, his voice proud: “He’s very handsome.”

Gretchen nodded but stayed where she was with her weight against the banister.

“Does he eat well?”

She nodded again.

“Are you nursing him?”

“Yes. I need him now.” She sent Amanda a look that held both demand and plea.

Gently Amanda took the baby from Oliver and carried him to Gretchen, who went up the stairs without another word.

Oliver’s eyes followed. Amanda couldn’t help but see the yearning there. She had seen the same thing too many times in Graham’s eyes not to know what it meant. She was trying to think of the most tactful way to raise the issue, when Graham said a blunt, “Where’ve you been all these months?”

To his credit, Oliver didn’t try to deny it. “In the dark,” he replied, his eyes back to being sad. “I didn’t know she was pregnant until the art was vandalized.”

“So you just. . . did it and disappeared?”

Oliver frowned. His Adam’s apple moved above the neat knot of a tie that might have been gray, green, brown, or something in between. “It wasn’t as simple as that.”

“How not?”

“She was Ben’s wife. She was a new widow. She was lonely and vulnerable. She was a client. I wasn’t supposed to be drawn to her.”

“But you were,” Amanda said, feeling as peeved as Graham. The issue of Oliver’s identity had been such a major concern in the last few weeks. If he had come forward sooner, he might have saved the neighborhood a lot of grief.

“I thought what we had was mutual,” he said in his own defense.

“I thought that if I backed off, and she took the initiative, it wouldn’t be so bad. But she didn’t call me either.”

“She wouldn’t have,” Graham put in. “She isn’t self-confident when it comes to members of the opposite sex.”