The Woman Next Door (11 page)

If Amanda were Catholic, Dorothy might have felt differently. Barring that, having an O’Leary baby would help. But it was easier said than done.

Feeling weary and weak, Amanda went through the darkened hall into the living room and dropped into the nearest sofa. It was a deep, cushiony one, different from the tailored pieces her mother favored, and when she and Graham had been furniture shopping, she had fallen in love with it on sight. His love for it had been more physical; he had gone from sofa to sofa, plopping down, sitting this way and that to assure a generous fit; but the outcome had been total agreement on their parts.

She sank back now as he had then and let the cushions envelop her. She didn’t turn on a light; the darkness pillowed her mind as the sofa did her body. She was as brain-tired as she was bone-tired. She wanted Graham. She just wasn’t sure she wanted everything that went with him right now.

When she heard the kitchen door open, she told herself to be grateful that her husband cared enough to come down from his office when she returned.

“Mandy?”
he called.

“In here.”

She heard his muted footfall on the adobe tiles in the kitchen, then the hardwood of the hall. They stopped at the living room arch. Had she looked back, she knew she would have seen no more than a handful of inches between the top of that arch and the top of his head. She had watched him there before, had watched from the very sofa she sat in now. She had watched him approach with a hunger in his eyes that translated to sex right here on the Oriental rug. They had made love in most every room in this house. Not lately though. Lately, they did it in bed, every forty-eight hours on the days when she was ovulating and most likely to conceive.

Now she didn’t look back, didn’t move an inch.

“Are you okay?” he asked with such welcome gentleness that her eyes filled with tears.

“Uh-huh.”

“Want some tea?”

“No. Thanks.” Rolling her head on the cushion, she extended a hand. She didn’t want to argue. She loved Graham.

Seeming to appreciate the gesture, he closed the distance, took her hand, and brought it to his mouth as he sank into the sofa by her side. His lips were warm against her fingers.

“Were you working?” she asked, nestling in, feeling his warmth envelop her.

He tucked her hand to his heart and stretched out his legs. “I tried. I wasn’t inspired. So I took a walk. I just got back and saw your car.”

“I didn’t see you.” She should have passed him when she’d been driving down the street.

“I was in the woods. Went right through the graveyard. Didn’t see any ghosts.”

They had a running joke about those woods, which began behind the Tannenwalds’ and stretched for acres through conservation land. The area wasn’t only lush with hemlock and fir, oak, maple, birch, and every imaginable kind of moss and fern. It was also rich in history, starting with gravestones so old that the markings on them were nearly indecipherable. That led Amanda and Graham to provide their own comical and often irreverent embellishments, for which they told each other that the ghosts of those good folks would be after them one day, hence the joke.

There had been houses in those woods once, too, and the unknowing hiker could easily tumble into an old stone cellar hole. Worse, a foolhardy one might try to climb the only structure that remained erect, a tower built of the same rough fieldstone that formed low walls through the woods. It stood forty feet high. Each of its four sides tapered from a width of twelve feet at the bottom to five at the top. The stairs that had once filled the inside were gone, leaving a dark receptacle for wind-blown leaves in various stages of decomposition, though neither of those things discouraged climbers. The outside walls, slanting in, were rife with toeholds.

The tower had as many stories woven around it—dead animals inside, dead
people
inside—as the gravestones had jokes, though none was based on fact. No one quite knew whether it had been built by Native Americans or by early settlers. Nor could anyone say for sure that it was haunted. All they knew was that those who managed to climb up couldn’t climb down. It happened again and again, and not only to children. Rescue teams had to bring in ladders to help adults down as often as not. Worse, for each climb made, for each
rescue
made, the stones grew more shaky. A recent minor earthquake had dislodged a few, making what remained more precarious than ever, but there was nothing to be done.

Whenever the town manager suggested razing the tower, the citizenry inevitably made such an uproar that the issue was tabled. The general sentiment was that if there were ghosts, this was their rightful spot.

Amanda gave the smallest smile now at Graham’s attempt at humor. “You took your chances walking through there at night.”

“No more than you took walking into that school. Is it settled?”

“Quinn’s punishment, yes. His problems, no. He has them, Gray. That wasn’t a happy kid I saw sitting there tonight. I told the parents I’d like to talk with him. I told them I’d even meet with him somewhere away from school. No one would know that we weren’t discussing a peer leadership issue.”

“They refused?”

“Totally.”

“That’s frustrating for you.”

“Yes.”

He pulled her even closer with a sure arm around her back, and she felt herself falling in love all over again—in love with the largeness of him, the warmth, the way he smelled, the way he knew what she needed. In that single instant, there was no tension between them. There was nothing of the world to put them at odds.

“You sound tired,” he said softly.

“I am.”

“Sometimes I think it’s me.”

“What do you mean?”

“That you don’t want to talk to me.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You could have called this afternoon. I was waiting.” His voice remained soft, but the words were pointed. “You’re not the only one with an investment in this, you know.”

She angled away so that she could look up, bracing her hand on
his ribs now, but his features were dim. “Investment. That’s such an impersonal word.”

Angling farther way, he met her gaze. “It’s become that. Something impersonal. A project. I never expected it to go on so long. We should have had a baby by now. I don’t understand why we don’t.”

That quickly, they were back where they had been earlier. Now, though, she was more tired and more defensive. She had struck out with Quinn’s parents. She feared doing the same thing with Graham. “It’s not like we haven’t tried to find out,” she cried softly. “What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to get pregnant,” he said. “Didn’t they say anything during the last try?”

“Like what?” Amanda asked, turning to face him head-on. “I would have told you if they’d said something. It was a totally positive, totally routine procedure. They measured my egg follicles by ultrasound and said the time was right. Everything looked
good,
they said.”

Pushing up, Graham went to the window. After a minute of staring into the dark, he returned, this time to the opposite sofa. With six feet of Oriental carpet and a large, square coffee table between them, he sat forward with his elbows on his knees. “I only asked, Amanda. I’m feeling frustrated.”

“You didn’t ask. You accused.”

“No. I did not. If you heard that, it’s your problem.”

“It’s
our
problem,” she said. Turning her head away, she closed her eyes. She didn’t want to think. About
anything.

“What’s next?” he asked.

She didn’t answer. The thought of starting another cycle—another round of Clomid, another month of BBT charts, dipsticks, and breath-holding—turned her stomach.

“They said it might take three tries at artificial insemination for it to work,” Graham said, sounding as though he were trying to get a grip by reasoning aloud. “We have one try left. There’s still ICSI or IVF.”

On another night, Amanda could have described each of the last two procedures in detail. She and Graham had become experts on the choices. Right now, though, she couldn’t bear to even think the words behind the acronyms.

“No,” she said softly.

“No, what? No to the third try?”

Amanda couldn’t move. Her limbs were leaden, her heart heavy, her voice thin. “No to all three.”

There was a long pause, then an alarmed, “No to all three? What in the hell does that mean?”

She opened her eyes, trying to think what it meant, but the only words that came were, “I’m tired.”

“Of this? Of me?”

“Of
me.
Of my life like this.”

“You’re giving up?”

“No. Taking a break. I need a rest.”

“
Now?
Geez, Amanda, we can’t stop now!”

“For one month, Graham. One month. It won’t matter in the overall scheme. Maybe it’ll help. Like when you’re trying to lose weight, you follow a diet so closely that your body shuts down. If you break the diet for a day or two, eat totally different things, it can jolt your system enough to get it to start losing weight again.”

“Since when do you know about diets?”

“Since I’ve been on Clomid and gained eight pounds.”

“Where?”

“Nowhere now. I lost them. But I had to work at it.”

“Did Emily okay that?”

“No. It was no big thing. I just watched what I ate.”

“Amanda, you’re either under a doctor’s care or you aren’t. You should have told her.”

Amanda folded her arms. “Fine. I’ll tell her tomorrow, but if you think that’s why I haven’t conceived, you’re out in left field. By the way, Gretchen
is
pregnant. Karen went over there and asked. I wasn’t wrong. I know what I saw.”

He didn’t respond.

“We were trying to figure out who the father could be.”

Graham remained silent.

“I can’t see your face,” Amanda said. “Are you shocked? Dismayed? Worried?”

“Worried? About what?”

“That someone may think it’s yours.”

“What are you talking about?”

“She’s seven months pregnant. That means she conceived last October. You were working with her then.”

“I did her landscape plan.”

“You were in her house.”

There was silence, then a low, “I don’t believe what you’re suggesting.”

Angry that he didn’t just come out and deny it, she said, “If the shoe fits ...”

He was off the sofa in a flash. “I’m going to forget you said that,” he told her on his way to the door. “I’m going to forget it and forgive it, because I can almost understand why it came out. You grew up in a house where parents cheated. That was your mother speaking just now.”

“Gretchen’s pregnant,” Amanda repeated, on a roll and unable to
stop. “She didn’t do it on her own. So where’d the baby come from?”

“I have no idea. I don’t know who she sees. I don’t watch what she does.”

“She doesn’t date.”

“How do you know? She could be seeing someone in town.”

“She’s home every night.”

“So? Babies are conceived in daylight.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I do, but you don’t have to
date
to conceive. It could happen in five minutes in a hallway somewhere—a hit-and-run accident—a spur-of-the-moment fit of passion.”

“Precisely.”

An icy silence came from the archway. It was followed by an angry, “You don’t know anything, Amanda. You don’t know what Gretchen wants or who wants her. For all you know, that’s Ben’s baby. For all you know, he banked his sperm. For all
you
know,
she
had artificial insemination and it took.” He walked off.

***

Amanda didn’t move. The minute the silence settled in, she heard the echo of her words and knew that Graham was right. That had been her mother speaking. Amanda had grown up with accusations, and most had been valid. Both of her parents had had any number of lovers, taken in retaliation for the other’s infidelity. To this day, Amanda didn’t know who had been the first to stray. At least, she didn’t know the truth of it. She had heard arguments aplenty, as though every indiscretion that followed could be explained by that first affair.

Had she been a therapist working with her parents, she would
have recommended that they divorce. When trust was so eroded as to be unsalvageable, there was no hope for love.

But she hadn’t been her parents’ therapist. She had been their daughter, feeling the pain of each new battle.

Now, here she was, accusing her own husband of infidelity when she didn’t have cause. Graham was one of the most loyal people she had ever known. Indeed, it was one of the things that had drawn her to him. In his entire life, he’d had one relationship before her. It had been long and monogamous. That was the O’Leary way—and another selling point for Graham. His siblings were as solid as they came, free and generous in outward shows of affection, genuine in their caring. Not a single one had been divorced except Graham, and that was no blemish on his record. Amanda knew the circumstances of his marriage to Megan. Megan was the girl next door; they had been childhood friends; he had been faithful the whole time they were married. He would have been married to her still if she hadn’t backed out.

Even knowing this, Amanda had never questioned Graham’s love for her. It was lust that concerned her. She knew his needs. She had been their object, though not lately. Lately, what they did in bed was deliberate and prescribed. There was no spontaneity, no carefree passion.

And across the street was Gretchen Tannenwald—alone now, definitely a man’s lady, and looking like Megan in ways that Graham and Amanda had often joked about.

Joked about. With Gretchen pregnant, Amanda wondered whether the joke was on her.

Immediately she chided herself. That was definitely her mother thinking. But how to stop those thoughts?

Wondering where Graham was, she went into the kitchen. He
wasn’t there, or in the bedroom upstairs. She even checked what was supposed to have been the children’s rooms, but they were empty.

Part of her wanted to go out looking. He was probably in his office.

The other part needed to protect herself from his coldness. Entering the small den beside the bedroom, she stretched out on the sofa, pulled an afghan up to her chin, closed her eyes, and shut down her mind. She breathed deeply, inhaling and exhaling in the kind of even rhythm she hadn’t felt all day. In time, there on the sofa, she fell asleep.