Garden of Lies (24 page)

waiting to tip. Then Rachel felt shock. Nothing was happening. Jesus Christ. Petrakis was just

standing there, mouth open, feet planted wide apart, swaying slightly, like a drunk in a detox

ward seeing spiders and snakes.

Then everything seemed to happen at once. Petrakis shouting something unintelligible at the

nurses. David lunging forward, taking charge, hands cupping to guide forth a dark scrunched

head, then in a slippery rush of blood and amniotic fluid, a tiny pink body flopping at the end of a

bright turquoise cord. A boy.

Rachel rushed to take him from David while he clamped the cord, balancing the blood-streaked

bundle in her hands, its matchstick arms flailing, shriveled monkey face working into a squall as

she suctioned him. Everything around her seemed to fade. She saw only the miracle of this new

life, feeling as if a bright, hot band had fastened about her heart. Perfect. Precious. More precious

than anything in the world.

My baby too. How could I bear not to have this?

Then she looked up.

Something was dreadfully wrong. The mother bleeding. A torrent of blood gushing between

her legs, spattering the table, the sterilized instruments neatly laid out on the Mayo stand, and

forming a crimson pool on the floor.

“Nurse!” Rachel heard a deep voice shout. “Open up the lines! Start those two units of A

positive.
Stat.”

David. He was ramming a fist between the patient’s legs, into all that blood, suddenly,

shockingly.
Dear God, what is he doing?

Then Rachel understood.

And she rushed in, pressing down on an abdomen that felt like tapioca pudding, pushing hard,

helping David massage the uterus, trying to force it to contract.

“Get me some Ergometrine,” he snapped over his shoulder at Vicki. “And, for God’s sake,

nurse, more blood on that line or I’m going to lose her. BP’s down to eighty. She’s looking

shocky.”

[135] “I don’t feel anything!” Rachel heard herself cry. “She’s not contracting.”

“Damn it. I’m not going to lose her.” David’s green eyes above his mask flashed at her, so

brilliant she felt blinded for an instant. Her heart leapt in response, her hands kneaded harder.

“Contract, damn it.
Contract
,” she muttered.

Then she felt it, tiny ripples, a tightening, oh Jesus, yes,
yes.

“That’s it,” she panted. “Good girl. Keep it up.” Her mask felt wet. She was crying, she

realized.

The bleeding was slowing. Now stopping. David looked up, met Rachel’s gaze. His eyes were

bright with triumph, a dark stain like a rising moon on the forehead of his surgical cap. He

withdrew his fist, and she saw that his arm was covered in blood all the way to the elbow.

He reached up with bloody fingers, tore his mask off. He was grinning. Rachel felt as if she’d

been lifted off the floor several feet, then dropped down again. The room spinning, her stomach

up where her heart should have been.

“Oh, fuck it,” he said, hugging her to him.

Rachel watched David strip off his bloody gloves, tossing them into the scrub-room bin. Words

came to mind, none of them large enough to contain all she was feeling.

I saw you in there,
she wanted to say,
how you fought. And I saw the way you looked after you

knew you’d won. No one who looked that way could ever truly want to destroy a life.

“I couldn’t believe it,” she said lamely.

“What?”

“Petrakis. Doing nothing.”

She stepped around to help him untie his scrubs, mostly brown now with splotches of drying

blood. She couldn’t see his face, but she could feel the knotted tenseness in his shoulders.

“The man signed his own death warrant today. Too many people saw. Even Donaldson won’t

be able to ignore this.”

But Rachel didn’t want to hear about Petrakis, or Donaldson, that popcorn-headed

administrator.

“David,” she said softly. “I’ve missed you.”

He turned, and suddenly he was looking at her, really
looking
[136] at her as if she were the

only thing that existed. She saw something bright flare in his eyes. Relief.

“Not here,” he said in a low voice, taking her by the wrist, gripping it hard. “Too many people

around. Let me buy you a cup of coffee.”

Two floors down in the elevator, then the cafeteria, a sea of faces, steamy smells. She saved

their seats while David stood in line, returning with a laden tray.

“I brought you a sandwich,” he said. “You look as if you haven’t eaten all week.”

As a matter of fact, David, I haven’t. They call it morning sickness, but it’s really morning,

afternoon, and night sickness.

She shrugged. “Too busy, I guess. You know how it is.”

“Shit, yes. What I’d give for a decent meal and a night of uninterrupted rest.”

“That was some job you did on that girl up there.”

“I only wish Petrakis had been sober enough to see it,” he said and laughed bitterly.

“To hell with Petrakis. You were good. And you didn’t panic. If I were in that girl’s place, I

would be thanking G—” She stopped herself. Heat rose into her face, searing, hot tears in her

eyes.
No, damn it, you’re not going to cry. No one is supposed to feel sorry for you.

She reached for the tea she had asked for instead of coffee—coffee was bad for the baby—but

David caught her hand first, pressing it between both of his. Dear God, what she’d longed for, so

simple a thing, yet oh how wonderful, him touching her. Now, there was no stopping the tears.

“Rachel. God. I’ve missed you too. I can’t believe how stupid we were, arguing like that. I feel

like such a shit.”

Then why didn’t you call? Why did you avoid me? Making me feel like a goddamn leper.

No, no. She wanted to shut off that angry voice inside her.

“I’m sorry too,” she said. “I shouldn’t have dropped it on you like that. Telling you I wanted to

keep the baby before we’d even talked it over. But let’s forget all that. Can we start over? Right

now? Here?”

Tell me you love me. Please. That you’ll at least keep an open mind about the baby until I’ve

explained how we can make it work.

[137] He squeezed her hand more tightly, almost hurting. He was smiling now, wearing the

same look of triumph he’d had in the OR.

“I knew you’d come around. Christ, Rachel, there’s nothing I want more. And it’ll be that way

again. Soon as we get this thing taken care of.”

“What do you mean, David?”

He was looking at her as if he couldn’t believe she’d asked. “Why, the abortion.”

Rachel felt as if she were sinking into a deep well, black water closing over her head, shutting

off the air. And cold. So cold she was starting to feel numb. She tried to imagine herself going

through with it, having the abortion. Easy in a way, only a little piece of her. And she could tell

herself,
See? That wasn’t so bad.
And the next time someone wanted a chunk of her soul it would

be that much easier to give in, because there would be that much less of her to fight. Until in the

end, there would be nothing left of her. Nothing that counted.

No. She wouldn’t. She couldn’t.

Rachel rose, out of her blackness, getting to her feet, pushing her chair back. And in the hard

light she looked down at David, and saw what he was.

“What is it? What are you looking at me like that for?” He laughed nervously, a good-looking

man in a yellow double-knit pullover with a tiny alligator sewn over the right breast, and a silver

I.D. bracelet loose about his left wrist. A man with the sour look of betrayal dawning in his

handsome face.

“I just thought you were someone I could count on,” she said. “I guess I was wrong.”

Then she was walking very fast, bumping against tables, chairs, blinded by her tears, aware

only of a loud noise in her head, and an awful pain in her heart.

Chapter 5

David Sloane pushed out through the hospital’s heavy plate-glass door, ducking his head as

hard rain pelted him in the face. He jerked up the collar of his camelhair overcoat, hunching his

shoulders, cursing his bad luck as he struck out toward Flatbush Avenue and the subway.

It was really coming down, dammit, and he hadn’t thought to bring an umbrella, much less a

raincoat. And forget about getting a cab, on a night like this, and in this part of Brooklyn. He was

stuck with riding home soaked, alongside the dregs of the IRT.

David had a queasy feeling in the pit of his stomach. He found himself wondering if his luck—

the scholarships, high marks, elections to journals, Class Councils, honor societies all through

Princeton, top ten percent of his class at Columbia, the internship and now chief residency—

might somehow be turning, just a little here and there around the edges, to shit.

Not that anything really awful had happened yet. But it had been ages since he’d felt this

spooked about anything. And after all those years of working his ass off, just as he was almost set

to get out there and make himself a bundle, he could not afford any bad shit coming down on

him. Christalmighty, not now.

And it all began last week with her, didn’t it? Miss Riverside Drive, Miss Kiss-My-Ass Jew

Princess.

The bitch.

Stalking out of the cafeteria as if the whole thing were his fault. Stupid, stupid female. But he’d

have dealt with it. Only she had to go off the deep end. Crazy talk, about having the baby.

He’d thought she was different. But now he realized she was no better than those others after

all, every coed, nurse, lab technician he’d ever screwed. Which one of them had ever been

thinking about [139] him when they were spreading their legs? Shit, a diamond ring for the third

finger of their left hand was all they cared about.

But Rachel, he’d thought, was smarter than that. A woman with brains who knew how to fuck.

That rare and tantalizing creature—an ice princess with legs just itching to be spread. He’d seen

that in her first off, not that she herself had the remotest idea. He had an intuitive sense about

women, like a smell, and right away he’d sniffed it, her whole sexual history laid bare—the high

school Romeos who’d whispered love clichés in her ear while fumbling with her bra hooks, the

Haverford preppies whose entire lexicon of sexual expertise you could stuff in a condom, and

maybe a funny uncle tucked in somewhere, copping a feel when he thought no one would notice.

Not a virgin, but the next closest thing—a woman without a clue how to use what was between

her legs because no one had ever shown her how. A woman so frozen, the right touch would set

off a flood like spring melt off a mountain. A woman ripe for the plucking.

Yet there was something else about her, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. A hard

nugget at the center of that pampered innocence like an uncut diamond. She had a coolness that

had sized him up and found him not good enough, like those girls with long tanned legs in tennis

shorts sipping ice tea out on the porch of whatever resort he happened to be busting his hump at

that particular summer—Spring Lake, Sea Girt, Deal—daughters of rich daddies shelling out big

bucks for their tennis lessons, along with the occasional fuck on the side if the instructor

happened to be cute. Their eyes would flick over him when he picked up their empty glasses with

lipstick marks like pink kisses around the rims, then move past, reducing him to a speck in the

dark mirrors of their sunglasses, while they went on talking as if he weren’t there—bitching about

the food, their tennis game, the lack of interesting guys.

David, ducking out of the rain to buy a newspaper at the hole-in-the-wall candy store halfway

to the subway, found himself remembering Amanda Waring. One of the tanned honey-blond

bitches flocked on the porch at Spring Lake. After observing the restless way she crossed and

uncrossed her legs whenever a good-looking man was around, and the hard, frantic energy with

which she drove balls across the net out on the tennis court, he’d made it a point to catch her eye,

and hold it.
A lady in need of a good lay,
he had thought.

[140] By that summer, with a year of Princeton under his belt, David knew a few things he

hadn’t before. Like how to dress so no one would guess you were a hardluck Polack from Jersey,

trying to impress the rich folk. He’d packed only some faded Levi’s that clung to him like a

second skin, a pair of scuffed Docksiders, two plain white shirts and a cashmere crewneck one of

the rich kids had carelessly left behind last summer. So when he was out of his busboy uniform,

he could have passed as one of them.

Amanda must have thought so ... at least for a little while,
David thought with a sweet acid

taste in his mouth, as he palmed his quarter in change and glanced briefly at the headlines:

ASTRONAUTS LAND SAFELY AFTER MOON ORBIT. But he was not in the least tempted to read on.

He remembered a big gazebo out on the lawn behind the main building. A lot of the kids hung

out there at night, smoking and getting drunk on half-pints of Jack Daniel’s and Southern

Comfort. David had gone there a few times, and one night Amanda invited him to sit next to her.

When the bottle was passed to him he only pretended to drink—good Christ, he had more than