“It’s almost in season,” he says with a shrug. “I thought you might like it.”
“Thanks,” she murmurs, setting both the bag and the flowers on the counter of the kitchenette. Riddled with unaccustomed uncertainty, she wonders if she should put the melon into the refrigerator and the flowers in a vase. The gestures seem somehow inappropriate, in light of the grave undercurrent in the room.
“This is just how I pictured it,” he comments, and she turns to see him looking around, walking around, seemingly inspecting the place. “Crown moldings and all.”
She nods again, wishing she could find her voice, and something worthwhile to say.
“Are you going to stay here when the baby comes?” he asks unexpectedly. “I mean . . . do you have room?”
“Yes.”
He looks as though he’s waiting for her to elaborate.
What else can she possibly tell him? That she’ll buy a cradle, then a crib, then a toddler bed, and keep them beside her in the apartment’s lone bedroom? That someday, with luck, she’ll be able to afford a bigger place, and private school, and all that lies ahead?
“There’s something you should know.” Tom sits, uninvited, on her couch. He pats the cushion beside him. “Come sit with me. Okay?”
She does. Her pregnancy-enhanced senses drink in the familiar smell of him. Not cologne, exactly, but the clean, woodsy scent of soap or shampoo, a scent that is uniquely his . . . a scent she realizes she’s been subconsciously craving for weeks.
“You should know why my marriage ended,” he tells her.
She throws up her hands, instinctively fending off an unwelcome onslaught of information.
He captures her hands gently in his, squeezing them. “Look, I wouldn’t be telling you this if it wasn’t relevant.”
“None of this is relevant,” she tells him, but she doesn’t sound convincing, even to her own ears.
“My wife didn’t want kids, Peyton. I love them. It’s that simple.”
Peyton merely gapes at him, pretending to wonder what that has to do with anything.
“I should have known from the start. But I was crazy about her. Or maybe just crazy.” He gives a humorless laugh.
She should slip her hands out of his, but she can’t seem to bring herself to pull away. It’s been so long since she’s had human contact like this.
But it isn’t just that. It’s
him
. She’s drawn to him. She can’t help it.
“Amy was never good with my nieces and nephews—I have eleven of them—but I thought she’d change,” Tom goes on. “All my friends kept telling me her biological clock would start ticking eventually, and she’d want a baby after all. Of course that didn’t happen. People don’t change.”
“No, they don’t.” Peyton thinks of Jeff, and Scott, even Gil. Of the reasons none of them is right for her.
But Tom isn’t, either,
she reminds herself. He could have been, if things were different. . . .
“Why are you telling me this?” she asks abruptly, pulling her hands from his grasp at last.
He takes a deep breath. “I know this sounds corny. I can’t even believe I’m telling you this. But I felt something for you from the first time I saw you that day in the park, even before we ever met. I took one look at you and it was like I knew there was going to be something—”
“In the park?” she cuts in, her mind reeling. “We didn’t meet in the park. We met in the Korean grocery. Remember? On Saint Patrick’s Day.”
“But that wasn’t the first time I saw you,” he says without flinching. “I noticed you around the neighborhood before. I even knew where you lived. I saw you coming out of this building a couple of times. Once you must have been Christmas shopping . . . you had all these bags and it was snowing and I kept thinking I should run up and help you open the door . . . but I didn’t.”
Oh God. She remembers that day. Remembers her weighted arms, and blowing snow, and being in a festive, carefree mood anyway. Carefree . . . and blissfully unaware that she was being watched.
Unsettling as that realization may be, Peyton can’t deny that she still feels something for Tom.
Nor can she help asking, “Why didn’t you? Help me, I mean.”
“I just never got up the courage to go up and start talking to you out of the blue. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not the kind of guy who has a problem talking to women. But there was something . . . I don’t know . . . different about you. You just struck me as sophisticated, and independent, and I guess I didn’t think you’d be interested. Until that night I saw you in the Korean grocery.”
The night she fell apart because she didn’t have enough money to indulge her watermelon craving.
So what he’s saying is that he glimpsed her vulnerability, and he took advantage of it?
“I figured it was fate that we were both there at that hour. Like fate throwing you right in my path, saying, ‘go ahead and do it already! Talk to her!’ So I did. But you thought I was a lunatic preying on innocent women,” he goes on with a grin.
“No, I didn’t. Wait . . . were you in Tequila Moon one afternoon, watching me?” she demands suddenly, remembering. “After that night?”
He averts his gaze. “Probably.”
A chill slips down her spine.
“Oh, hell,” he says abruptly, looking up at her. “Yes, I was there. It’s one of my favorite restaurants. I saw you, and I was going to come over. I kept trying to catch your eye, but you were busy with your friend, so—”
“Allison,” she tells him. “She’s the one who—”
“Disappeared? I’ve been wondering about her.” He’s holding her hands again, without her even realizing it until his fingers are wrapped comfortingly around hers. “I’ve been trying to reach you, to see how you are, and if you’d heard anything. I kept leaving messages, but . . . you never called me back.”
“No,” she agrees, looking him in the eye. “I never called you back.”
“You’re probably wondering why I can’t take a hint, huh?”
She smiles faintly. “Probably.”
“I figured you’d lost interest, but there was this part of me that thought I should give it one more shot. That’s why I hung out tonight, waiting, hoping I’d see you. And I did.”
“You sure did.” She slides a glance down at her protruding stomach, knowing what a shock that must have been.
“Well, at least now I know why you were avoiding me,” he says, following her gaze. “But when I got home and thought it through . . . about what you said about the baby’s father . . . well, I couldn’t go to sleep tonight without letting you know that I’m game to go forward. If you are.”
“Go . . . forward?”
“I love kids,” he says simply.
Maybe it’s only because she feels so damned defenseless now, after everything that’s happened . . .
But it doesn’t matter why. She only knows that he’s reaching out, and she doesn’t want to push him away.
You don’t want to . . . but you have to. You have to be strong.
She shakes her head, pulling her hands away from his and clenching them in her lap. “I can’t do this now, Tom. There’s just too much that I have to—I can’t be in a relationship.”
She doesn’t dare look at him.
Just leave me alone,
she beseeches silently, waiting for his response.
Can’t you see that I’m overwhelmed? Can’t you see that this isn’t the right timing?
“I understand why you can’t be in a relationship,” he says at last. “But can you have a friend? Because that’s fine with me, too. I just want to be in your life. I care about you. I want to help you. I can be your friend. Like Gil.”
Startled that he somehow remembered the name, she looks up to see if he’s being sarcastic.
But all she finds is a smile so warmly genuine that she can’t say no.
“Sure,” Peyton tells him, knowing Rita is absolutely going to kill her when she hears about this, “you can be my friend.”
The storm has passed. For now.
Thunder rumbles as the clouds roll to the east, carrying the violent weather away.
A night bird calls in the distance and is answered by its mate. Crickets have begun to chirp once again; mosquitos rise once more from the swampy edge of the pond to buzz annoyingly in their thirst for human blood, oblivious of the feast they might have had minutes ago.
Stupid creatures.
Stupid, stupid girl.
Did she truly think she was deserved a precious, innocent baby
now?
Did she honestly believe she was capable of raising a child single-handedly while picking up the pieces of her shattered marriage?
It no longer matters what Derry Cordell believed.
The height of the storm lasted no more than five minutes—just long enough to provide protective noise and screening for the completion of the macabre task, should anyone have happened along.
Nobody did. Of course not. The playground is deserted at midnight, especially in weather like this.
It’s time to go home, with a quick stop in Co-op City along the way, just to make sure there are no traces. Derry’s keys were retrieved as a brilliant afterthought, along with her identification. Even if she’s eventually found, nobody will realize who she is for a long, long time . . . if ever.
Rhiannon
.
It’s like our own special code word. . . . We use it for everything. At least, I still do.
With luck, Derry used it as the password to her computer screen name.
Time to go find out.
A gentle rain is falling now, washing away any traces of blood and brain matter that exploded from the axe-inflicted gaping skull wound.
Dewy droplets patter softly onto the cedar chips beneath the playground equipment and plop into the pond, radiating small rings across the black surface wherever they land.
In time, the expanding circles will meet the deeper ripples that still emanate from the depths of the pond, where the concrete-weighted tarp carried its human remains to rest in a turbid grave.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The building on a narrow side street east of Little Italy is as dilapidated as they come: crumbling concrete steps, broken security buzzer, cracked windowpanes. The smell of old boiled vegetables, cooking grease, and body fluids permeates the vestibule.
It was ostensibly built as a tenement before the turn of the century, and hasn’t changed drastically since. This isn’t a place anybody in their right mind would want to live, but of course, the people who live here have little choice. They’re grateful to have a roof over their heads, the chance to work for a living, the opportunity for their children to get an education and make something of themselves someday.
If
they have children.
Those who don’t—because they can’t—have no hope of changing their childless state. Fancy fertility specialists are out of the question for the uninsured; adoption is well out of their reach.
Somebody has to help people like Hamal Khatir and his wife Khadijah realize their dream.
Somebody has to give these otherwise worthy people the precious gift too many take for granted, and don’t deserve.
Somebody will.
Even if this is the last thing I feel capable of doing after what happened last night.
But there was no choice about that. It had to be done.
In some ways, it was far easier than snuffing out the lives of women who realize exactly what’s happening to them; women who are still in their prime; women who fight back. Women who don’t even have the promise of eternal salvation to carry them through the final bitter struggle to live on after having given life.
In many ways, though, this was far, far more difficult. There was no struggle. It was over swiftly, silently. A noble human life, snuffed out in an instant.
But it must be seen, quite simply, as yet another unexpected obstacle, another unexpected person who had to be eliminated. Any other viewpoint only perpetuates a frightening sense that this is uncharted territory, that things are careening out of control.
Did you get carried away, so caught up in doing good that you forgot to tread carefully?
Are too many people now involved? Would it have been better to see through one complete cycle at a time, rather than simultaneously dealing with two donors?
Perhaps.
Perhaps the mistake was in playing the game too close to home, as well as trying to juggle so many lives all at once.
And now you’ve gone and ended one that was purely devoted to goodness and God.
Surely one who lived such a long and exemplary life welcomed a fast, painless death and the prospect of a glorious afterlife. In some ways, maybe it was a blessing bestowed upon the most worthy person of all.
Yes, and in other ways, it was cold-blooded murder.
But dwelling on that won’t help, nor will it change anything.
It’s over. Nobody will ever know.
And the first donor has also been eliminated, the baby safely placed in her new mother’s arms.
Mary and Javier Nueves will be good parents.
It’s time now to attend to the urgent business at hand, to designate another deserving pair of recipients.
The apartment is on the third floor, at the end of an unlit hallway. Here, there is no hint of the warm morning sun that shines just beyond these walls. It might as well be the dead of night, but for the cacophony of domestic life that emanates from every door along the way: children playing, adults arguing, televisions blasting, babies crying.
The Khatirs’ door opens on the first knock. The couple stand together to greet their anticipated guest. The man’s gaze is blatantly hopeful; the woman’s is averted, yet her wringing hands betray her fervent aspirations.
“Come in, Mrs. Calabrone.” Hamal Khatir graciously opens the door wide for the stranger who holds his future in her hands, the stranger who miraculously promised a newborn infant by early October.
“You’re measuring exactly right for thirty weeks,” Dr. Lombardo tells Peyton, removing his latex gloves with two snaps. “How are you feeling?”
“Hungry.”
“Well, that’s a good sign.” Still seated, he rolls his stool up to the head of the examining table. “Most women do have a hearty appetite at this stage of the game.”
“I’m kind of hungry myself. Do you want me to order Chinese food?” Nancy asks dryly, accepting the clipboard the doctor hands her.
“Chinese food? At this hour of the morning? God, no.” Peyton cringes. “I guess Rita didn’t tell you that’s my latest aversion.”
“No, she must have forgotten to mention that. Sorry. She did say that you’re having leg cramps, though. Perfectly normal. Right, Doctor?” Nancy asks belatedly.
“Glad to know I’m still in charge,” he says, clearing his throat. “Yes, leg cramps at this stage are perfectly normal,
Doctor.
I mean,
Nurse.
”
He isn’t entirely teasing.
And this isn’t the first time Peyton has noticed that he isn’t always thrilled with Nancy’s chummy, take-charge attitude. Clearly, the obstetrician is the boss, and he wants that to be abundantly clear not just to his patients, but to his longtime nurse.
“Trust me, Peyton, if anybody knows his stuff, it’s Dr. Lombardo,” Nancy says in obvious response. “He’s the best in the business, hands-down.”
Good save,
Peyton thinks, amused by the nurse’s quick effort to stroke her boss’s ego.
“Any questions?” he asks Peyton, who turns her attention back to him and finds herself making an immediate effort not to find his dark eyes positively mesmerizing.
“Just one that I can think of. Do you think I’m having a boy or a girl?”
“I
know
you are.”
It takes her a moment to get the joke. “Oh!” She laughs. Good looks, tender bedside manner, and a sense of humor to boot. Maybe she should have him deliver the baby after all.
But then, Rita is just as proficient. More so, perhaps, as a woman and mother. And she’s become a friend.
I’ll stick with her,
Peyton concludes.
“Let’s see . . .” Dr. Lombardo has taken her chart back from Nancy and is flipping through it. “We did an ultrasound back in April.”
“Right. It was too early to tell.”
He nods. “I’ll try to find a reason to schedule another one at your next appointment, but I should tell you insurance companies frown on our ordering unnecessary testing.”
“So I guess they think gender-determination is unnecessary.”
“Pretty much,” he agrees. “But with luck, we’ll come up with some not too serious reason to do the test and be able to tell you if you’ve got a little Joey or Josephine in there.”
Peyton wants to tell him not to bother. There’s something vaguely—all right, boldly—unethical about creating a mythical symptom to justify a test. Her level of respect for Dr. Lombardo has just gone down a few notches.
But before she can speak up, Nancy is saying, “Just think of all the pink or blue you’ll be able to go out and buy after the ultrasound!”
“As long as you know that even if we give you the likely gender, the test isn’t definitive like an amnio would have been,” Dr. Lombardo injects.
“I know.” Peyton still has no regrets about not having the invasive amniocentesis he suggested way back in her first trimester. If she ever lost the baby, she . . . well, she just couldn’t go on. An icy fist of dread constricts her heart at the mere thought of miscarriage.
“I can understand your wanting to know what you’re having.” Dr. Lombardo smiles that empathetic smile of his, the one that makes Peyton feel as though he’s somehow been in her shoes. “The majority of my patients choose to try and find out. But you’ll be pleased with a healthy baby, no matter what it is. Right?”
“Of course!”
“Just making sure. Some women I see have their hearts set on one or the other.”
Peyton thinks of Wanda, who desperately wants a girl. But of course that can be attributed to the baby’s father, who already has sons of his own.
“Have you signed up for a childbirth education class yet?” Dr. Lombardo is asking. “And did you designate a labor coach?”
A labor coach.
Allison.
Even now, it stings.
“I’m going to have Rita do the delivery at home,” she reminds him. “As long as there are still no potential complications by that time.”
“We hope there won’t be, but I’ll be standing by. And you should still have a labor coach in attendance.”
Peyton nods. She knew this was coming eventually, but she can’t bring herself to replace Allison yet. Anyway, whom would she choose? Whom would she want at her side during the most intimate, meaningful moments of her life?
Mary hands over her gurgling baby girl to Javier, who manages to smile down at Dawn even as he tells his wife, “I can’t believe you’re doing this.”
“I have to.” Mary picks up her good black purse, the one she carries to church on Sundays and to her weekly confession. “I’ve been telling you for days now that I have to do this, and that I’m doing this today.”
Javier looks away in stone-faced silence.
“You know Father Roberto is the only person I would ever dare to tell, Javier.”
“I know that, but . . . why do you have to tell anyone at all?”
“This isn’t telling. It’s confessing. He’s the only person I would trust with something like this. You know that.”
“He might go to the police.”
“He can’t,” Mary reminds him with a certainty she doesn’t feel. “Priests aren’t allowed to—”
“He might convince you to go to the police, then.”
“He’ll guide me, Javier. He can guide us both. Why can’t you see that?”
“Why can’t you see what you’re doing to us? We have everything we ever wanted, Mary. And now you’re going to throw it all away. Please don’t do this.”
For a long moment, they stare at each other.
Then she tucks her black purse under her arm and walks unsteadily toward the door.
Well aware that Dr. Lombardo is still waiting for an answer to his question about a labor coach, Peyton finds her thoughts careening down a too-familiar path, one that meanders maddeningly to no clear destination.
Beth Somerset would be the logical choice, if she weren’t terrified of flying. Peyton’s mother has never been on a plane in her life. She did halfheartedly offer to take a train up to New York when the baby comes.
She was relieved when Peyton told her there were no direct rail routes to the city from Kansas, that such a trip would probably take days and cost a small fortune.
“I’ll bring the baby down to visit as soon as it’s safe to travel, Mom,” she promised.
So her mother is out as a labor coach, as are her friends at work. Though everyone but Tara has been vocally supportive, Peyton has no desire to blur the line between her personal and professional lives.
That leaves her friends from the support group—of whom petulant Tisha is out of the question, and Wanda is the closest. But her due date is in a few weeks. By the time Peyton reaches hers in October, Wanda will be far too busy with her own baby to drop everything and rush to assist in childbirth.
“I’ll find somebody to ask,” she assures Dr. Lombardo.
But there’s nobody to ask.
Nobody except perhaps Gil.
Or Tom.
Gil would do it in a heartbeat. And he’s been through the delivery room experience twice before.
Tom never has, but he’s offered, more than once, to be with her when the time comes.
“I’d be happy to do it if you need me,” Nancy reminds her now. She, too, has offered before.
“Thanks, that’s sweet of you,” she murmurs. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
Peyton can’t help but feel as though the person she chooses should be somebody very close. Somebody she trusts implicitly to be there for her, no matter what.
Somebody like . . .
Tom.
But asking him to be her labor coach might lead him on to think that they have some kind of future together.
The telephone extension on the wall behind the doctor rings suddenly.
“Excuse me,” he says to Peyton, and reaches up to answer it.
“I’m meeting Rita for an early lunch in an hour,” Nancy says, leaning chummily against the examining table. “Do you want to stick around and come with us? We’re just going over to the diner on Forty-second. It’s fast and cheap.”
“I’d love to, but I really can’t. I’ve got to get back to the office. Tell Rita I said hi, though.”
“I’m sure she’d love to see you in person.”