The Magnificent M.D. (13 page)

“Six months max,” Hayley said, as much to remind herself as to tell Donna.

“Where is he, by the way?” her friend asked.

“He had a house call to make or he would be here.”

“I was afraid to mention it. I thought maybe he'd find our simple pleasures a little too simple,” Donna said.

“Oh, no. Not at all,” she lied. She didn't want anyone else in town to know how Sam felt about New Hope. She wanted them to accept him and for Sam to feel welcome and needed. That way he'd have time to change his mind and stay forever. Sure he would. “He just hasn't had time yet for anything but getting the office in shape. Last night
after we saw you he delivered a baby.” She yawned as a blanket of fatigue settled over her. Her eyelids were heavy, her body felt like she'd been run through a roller. “I'm tired. I've got enough clams. I think I'll go home.”

“Why don't you bring your clams and come over tonight for a clambake. And bring Sam, if he's free,” Donna suggested. “If he doesn't have another baby to deliver.”

“I'll see,” she said cautiously. She hated to guarantee that Sam would appear anywhere.

When she got home, Sam was in the kitchen pouring himself a cup of coffee that he'd brewed himself. Looking and acting as if he belonged there. She set her bucket on the floor and for one magic moment she imagined what it would be like if he did live there. If he was there for her. In her kitchen and in her heart. If he could walk to work. If she could help him out at the office and he could help her out at the house. The lines in his forehead would disappear. He'd laugh with her, make love with her and they'd raise a family in this house as she was meant to do.

Her heart skipped a beat. She forced herself to blank out such treacherous thoughts. They would only lead to heartbreak. She'd already made one disastrous marriage. She wasn't about to try again. Not with Sam, not with anybody. As if he'd want to. He could hardly wait to get out of New Hope and back to where he belonged.

She made herself forget she'd ever made love to him or slept with him all night. She told herself to think of him as a guest. Or as a doctor. Anything but what he was—the man she'd been in love with ever since she could remember.

He was wearing jeans, his hair was standing on end, and his eyes were bleary. He was still the best-looking man she'd ever seen. She wanted to throw herself in his arms,
run her hands through his hair and kiss him. But she didn't; she just stood there looking at him.

“Coffee?” he asked, getting up to take a cup from her cupboard as if he was the host and she was the guest.

S
he nodded and opened the door to the patio and wandered outside. After several weeks of rain and clouds, she wanted to see some sun, feel it soak into her bones. After crying more tears than she ever had in one night, she was ready to dry out. Sam filled her cup, added cream and sugar and followed her outside where he set both cups on the glass-topped table on the brick terrace.

“Thank you, I need that,” she said, feeling secretly pleased and encouraged by such a simple thing—he'd remembered how she liked her coffee. She couldn't help it. She'd given herself to him heart and soul last night and she was desperate for a sign that it was as special for him as for her. So far she couldn't tell.

“Get an early start?” he asked, sitting across the table from her and stirring his coffee.

“Very early. You were still asleep.”

He nodded. If she didn't know better she would have
thought the tight lines at the corner of his mouth indicated his annoyance, that he minded her leaving so early, before he woke up. But that couldn't be. That was wishful thinking. This was Sam Prentice, consummate loner. Surely he was accustomed to waking up alone. Just as she was. The difference was, she didn't want to.

“Did you make your house call? How was the baby?” she asked.

“Baby's doing fine. Actively nursing. Content. Mother seemed a little anemic, I gave her some iron supplements. I also called the ambulance and sent them both to Portland to be checked out.

“I had a talk with the old man. He was about to kick them out. I didn't like his attitude, frankly.”

“Toward you?” she said.

“Toward me, toward his daughter and toward his granddaughter,” he said.

“Where will they go?”

“To Ms. Maudie's boarding house. Still in operation, as you said. And luckily she has room.”

“But…but…how will Shawnee afford to stay there, and what will become of her and her baby?”

“Her rates are very reasonable,” he said. Hayley knew who was going to pay. It was Sam. Sam who was also going to pay for the ambulance. Sam, who'd hated to swallow his pride and accept charity himself for years, was now in a position to give it. She hoped Shawnee was more gracious than Sam had been when he'd been on the receiving end. She remembered how he'd flatly turned down offers of clothing and even free lunches at school, saying he didn't need anything or anybody. He preferred to wear old threadbare shirts and go hungry to accepting charity.

“What will become of them, I don't know,” he continued. “Shawnee will need some help to get on her feet.
Maybe from the baby's father. For the present they'll be clean and fed and comfortable. And the old man is out of the picture. He wants nothing to do with them. And I was able to settle an old score.” Sam shifted in his chair. “It seems my father cheated him out of some money during a card game some years ago.”

“He could be lying,” Hayley suggested.

“He could be, but I paid him off, anyway. And then some. Enough for a ticket out of town, if that's what he wants. Or if he stays he's not to harass his daughter.”

“Or his granddaughter,” she added, wishing she'd been there to see the baby. “How did the baby look today?”

“Good. She'll bring her in to the office next week when they get back so you can see her.” He gave Hayley a half smile and stretched his legs out in front of him. Hayley tilted her head back against the wrought-iron chair back and looked at the puffy clouds that floated in the blue sky above.

“Guess what she named the baby,” he said.

“Don't tell me she named her Sam.”

“Nope. Hayley.”

“She named her after me? I don't believe it.” Her eyes widened, and she felt a rush of pride and envy. The surge of emotion caught her by surprise. The girl had named her baby after her. That was sweet, but no reason to get all teary-eyed. There were other reasons to get teary-eyed. One good reason was that Sam seemed to have forgotten what had happened between them last night.

“She appreciated what you did for her,” Sam said.

“You delivered her baby. I didn't do anything,” she insisted.

“You did a lot. I couldn't have done it without you. You had all the right instincts. That'll come in handy someday. When you have your own baby.” He said it so
casually. As if it was a foregone conclusion that she would have a baby someday. When it was her conclusion that she wouldn't.

“You wouldn't say that if you knew…” she said, and then wished she'd kept her mouth shut.

“But I
don't
know.”

There was a long silence while she debated whether she should tell him at all or how much she should tell him if she did. She didn't want to tell him anything. On the other hand she felt an overwhelming compulsion to tell him everything. Like a rolling stone that was gathering momentum. Every time he spoke, every time he looked at her with his dark, all-knowing, all-seeing eyes she wanted to open her mouth and let it all out.

“It's a long story,” she said hesitantly.

“I'm not going anywhere,” he said, crossing his arms behind his head.

She took a deep breath. “I wanted to have children. I always wanted to have children.”

“I remember,” he said. “You vowed you were going to live right here in this house one day with your own family. That's what you said.”

She nodded. “And I remember you made fun of my lack of serious goals in life. You didn't think I was ambitious enough. You said I was a throwback to another era. A June Cleaver. You thought since I was good at math, I ought to be an astronaut.”

He laughed. The first time she'd heard him laugh since…forever. Lines etched themselves at the corners of his eyes. She had to force herself to stay in her chair. She wanted to jump up and throw her arms around him. To congratulate him for showing he was human. But he wouldn't like that.

“Did I say that?” he asked. “I was full of myself, wasn't I?”

“You knew you weren't going to stay here. You said you were going to get the hell out of town and become a doctor or a lawyer and be respectable and make a lot of money. And you did it.”

“Well, at least you came back, and you've got the house you wanted,” he said.

She nodded. “Yes, but…”

“No baby,” he said.

“No baby and no husband,” she said, keeping her voice as level as she could when inside, her stomach was churning. She hated admitting she'd made such a terrible error in judgment in choosing a husband. She wanted Sam to admire her, not feel sorry for her, but after she told this story, he would have only pity for her. Now that she'd gone this far, as much as she didn't want to, she had to tell the whole story. The story she'd kept to herself all these years. It was like a dormant volcano whose time had come to erupt.

“Despite my modest ambitions, Sam, it seems like I'm not destined to have it all, after all,” she said gazing off wistfully across the lawn to the badminton court. “The man I married wasn't interested in living in the ‘boondocks,' as he called New Hope. Although he was an environmentalist, he really was a city person. And of course he couldn't really do his environmental work here. So we lived in Portland where he could be most effective in the organization. I understood that. I was involved in it, too. It was certainly worth my giving up my dream of coming back here to save the…the…whatever the cause was we were working on at the time.” She leaned forward in her chair and gazed earnestly into Sam's eyes. “I believed in
him. And the work we were all doing. It wasn't a sacrifice.”

“So what was the problem?” Sam asked, regarding her with all the sympathy he would have for a patient whose history he was taking in order to make a diagnosis. She already knew what the diagnosis would be. A major case of immaturity complicated by a lack of direction.

She took a deep breath. There was no need to go any further. She'd unburdened her soul enough. And Sam was only being polite, leaning forward slightly in his chair, fixing his gaze on her face, the way he'd do with any patient.

But she wasn't his patient. She was the woman he'd made love to the night before. Instead of shrugging it off, she blurted, “There was no problem—until I got pregnant. At least I didn't think there was a problem.” Now that she'd started, she couldn't stop. Couldn't stop until the whole story came out. “I realized later how wrong I'd been. I'd assumed he wanted a baby. He didn't. He'd assumed I was on the pill. I wasn't. He said children would interfere with our work. He thought I knew that. We wouldn't be able to take chances, chain ourselves to trees and so forth. He was right.

“He said it was stupid of me to have assumed… He was right again. It
was
stupid. It seemed we never had time to talk about anything personal. It was always the cause of the moment—the old-growth redwood trees, the smoggy air, the polluted water, the endangered field mice. Never us. But that's no excuse for my making such a colossal mistake, such a total error in judgment.”

“What happened?” he asked.

She paused and gazed off across the lawn toward the badminton court. “I lost the baby.” She struggled to keep the tears at bay. To keep secure the high, impenetrable
wall around her emotions that she'd constructed there three years ago. And succeeded, just barely.

“Why, what happened?”

“I don't know why. Why does anyone miscarry in the first trimester? Just one of those things. They said it could have been stress or it just wasn't meant to be. And then I got a divorce.”

She didn't look at Sam but she felt his eyes on her, felt the sympathy emanating from him, just as surely as she felt the warmth of the sun on her bare arms. She wanted to let it soak in, to let it warm her skin as well as her heart. But she was afraid. Afraid he wouldn't understand.

She prayed he wouldn't ask for any details. She hoped he'd leave her a little self-respect. She didn't want to talk about the night it happened. The night she lost the baby.

“I mean what happened that night?”

“That night?” He
would
have to ask. Might as well get it over with, once and for all. So she plunged in. “I was home alone, having terrible back pains, bleeding like crazy. I called Todd but he was at a city council meeting waiting his turn to speak on saving the whales and couldn't leave. I finally called 911. An ambulance came and took me to the hospital. I…I lost the baby, that's all. No one knows why. They patched me up, did a D and C and released me the next day. That was the end of that. And that was the end of my marriage.” She was proud of the way she'd told the story, so calmly and so dispassionately. She was surprised how telling it to Sam was easier than she'd imagined. She felt a profound sense of relief. After bottling it up all this time, it was finally over.

“You still want a baby, don't you?” he asked, his gaze never leaving her face.

“It's a little late. I'm thirty-five.”

“I know how old you are,” he said brusquely. “Women are having babies in their forties, you know.”

“It helps to be married.”

“It's not too late for that, either,” he said.

“I'll keep that in mind,” she said, and stood to pick up their empty coffee cups. Her head was pounding. She was exhausted from this conversation. Which was too one-sided to be called a conversation. A confession was more like it. Sam had an answer for everything. He always did. But there was no answer for the fact that she was no closer to achieving her dream of raising her own children here in this house in New Hope than she had been at high school graduation. No closer to having kids who'd run around the garden, play in the playhouse or swing from the rubber tire.

She had to get away from Sam. If she stayed another minute in his company she would blurt out something about last night. She would ask him if it meant anything to him. Something totally inappropriate. But he followed her into the kitchen.

“Get any clams?” he asked.

“A lot. A whole bucket. And so did Donna. By the way, they invited me and you and the clams over for dinner tonight.”

“Are you sure they want me?”

“Of course.” She paused at the kitchen door. “The most famous delinquent that ever lived in New Hope returns a successful surgeon, who out of the goodness of his heart agrees to treat the local denizens until they find another country doc. They think you're fascinating.”

“Fascinating,” he repeated with a sardonic smile as he walked to the kitchen door and trapped her in the room by bracing his hands against the door frame. “Do
you
think I'm fascinating, too?” he asked, his eyes narrowed, his
mouth only a few dangerous inches from hers. Oh, Lord, this was not what she wanted. She wanted answers not action. She wanted to know how he felt about her, if he thought he could get away with making love to her at night and act as though nothing happened the next day. He was so close she felt his breath on her cheek. So close she could smell his hair and his skin. So close she wanted…she wanted…she wanted him to kiss her again. To get lost in the ecstasy of his kiss, feel his arms around her, his body pressed against hers, his heart beating in time to hers.

“Yes, I think you're fascinating,” she admitted reluctantly, her eyes looking anywhere but into his. “Is that all you want to know?” she asked.

“No. I want to know why you left me this morning. No good-morning, no goodbye. Not even a goodbye kiss. You used to have better manners.”

“I didn't want to wake you. You'd had a hard night,” she said as a flush crept up her neck and flooded her face.

“Is that what you call it?” he asked, a wry smile tugging at his lips. “I call it an incredible night.” He brushed his lips across hers, teasing her, testing her. She was badly afraid she'd fail any test he gave her. But she had to pass this test or drop it now.