First Sight (36 page)

“I was in Taiwan a couple of months ago. But I never drink the local water when I travel, and I’m careful what I eat. I didn’t pick up something disgusting, did I?” He laughed, and she could hear that he didn’t sound worried, which was a relief.

“No, you didn’t. Stop worrying. Take it easy. Watch what you eat for the next few days. And come in tomorrow, if you have time.” He sounded almost casual about it now, which greatly relieved her mind.

“What time?” She couldn’t cancel her appointments for that afternoon, but she was willing to the following day. She wanted to hear what he had to say.

“How does ten o’clock work for you?”

“That’ll work.” She could make her New York calls from home, and come into the office late after her appointment at the doctor.

“See you then. Just don’t go out for sushi tonight,” he teased her.

“Don’t worry, Brad, I won’t. I’ll see you tomorrow at ten.” She sounded businesslike and unconcerned, which was not how she felt at all.

She hung up, and didn’t have time to think about it after that. She had two appointments back-to-back, one with a design consultant she wanted to hire, and the other to look over ads for the winter line. They were always working six to nine months ahead. And by the time she thought of her conversation with her doctor again, she was on her way home. Whatever Brad Friedman had seen in her tests couldn’t have been too serious, or she felt sure he would have insisted she come in that afternoon. She mentioned it to Jean-Charles that night. It was already the following morning for him.

“Did he say what was elevated?” he asked, sounding concerned.

“No, he didn’t. He just told me to come in tomorrow.”

“You might have an infection, or an allergy. I don’t know why he didn’t tell you on the phone.” He was annoyed about the delay, and sounded worried.

“Doctors are always weird here about things like that. They never want to give you test results on the phone.”

“I want you to call me as soon as you talk to him. And if he makes it confusing, I’ll talk to him myself. It sounds like he’s just trying to make himself important. I agree with you, if it was serious, I think he’d have had you come in right away.” She was glad that Jean-Charles agreed with her, and she felt better after talking to him, and slept soundly that night.

Timmie was up early in the morning, made her New York calls, and had a cup of tea. Her stomach still felt somewhat delicate after the food poisoning, so all she had was a piece of toast for breakfast, skipped the yogurt, and got to Brad Friedman’s office, after crawling through traffic, at ten-fifteen. The nurse took her into his office immediately. They never made her wait to see him. Even if he was busy, they put her in his private office. At the doctor’s office, just as everywhere else, she was treated like a VIP. And she didn’t have long to wait to see him. He walked into the room five minutes after she sat down. She was beginning to feel nervous again. What if it really was something serious, and he had only been trying to reassure her until he could get her in to give her the bad news in person, whatever it was.

“How are you feeling?” he asked breezily. He was a health nut, played a lot of tennis, had a second wife who was twenty years younger than he was, and he had three young kids.

“I’m fine,” Timmie said, feeling anxious and looking suspicious. “Never mind how I feel. Why don’t you tell me how I am.” He could see that she was worried.

“I wanted to ask you a few questions, which is why I had you come in. I haven’t seen you in a while, and things change in people’s lives, sometimes pretty radically. I assume that you’re still single, you haven’t advised us otherwise.”

“What does that have to do with anything? Shit, have I picked up an STD?” It probably would have been Zack in that case, if it was one of those slow-cooking silent ones. She couldn’t imagine that Jean-Charles would have given her an STD, although she had slept with him far more recently.

“No STDs. We checked for those too. What kind of relationship are you in at the moment?” he asked, watching her more carefully.

“Oh my God … AIDS or HIV?” He smiled and shook his head at that one. He had done an AIDS test on her, and didn’t have the results yet, but he wasn’t worried about that with her either. At her age, such as he knew her, she wasn’t in a high-risk category for HIV. “No, we picked up something else, that came as a surprise to me, and may be a surprise to you. Or you may have forgotten to mention it to me. My lab tech is a little overzealous, she’d run prostate tests on women, and pregnancy tests on ninety-year-olds. I didn’t ask her to, but when I asked her to order a complete blood panel on you in the emergency room, she must have checked off every box on the form. The level I mentioned to you that ran high was your HCG level, which was a little bit startling to me. So we ran a pregnancy test on your blood and urine. You came back positive on both, Timmie. Maybe you knew that already, but I wanted to get you in and discuss it with you, to see which way you’re planning to go on this.”

“You
what
?” Timmie stared at him in disbelief. “Wait, run that by me again. I’m pregnant? Are you kidding?” She couldn’t be … but she could. She trusted him. They hadn’t used condoms. They’d made love more than she ever had in her life. They’d had sex several times each day and night. She just didn’t seriously think that she could get pregnant anymore at her age. She had said as much to Jean-Charles, and he didn’t seem to think it was likely either. People had a hard enough time getting pregnant, at her age, she figured it would have taken a lot of effort, hormone support, and state-of-the-art assistance. Apparently that was not the case. It truly hadn’t occurred to her that she’d get pregnant on her own, just making love with Jean-Charles, like people half their age.

“Do you still get your period regularly?” He didn’t seem upset about it one way or the other. But that was because it wasn’t happening to him. She was so shocked by what he had just told her, she had no idea what to think. She had no reaction to it at all, other than to be totally stunned.

“No, I don’t. They’re irregular, but I still get it. Maybe it’s a mistake. Maybe you got someone else’s tests confused with mine,” she said, looking hopeful.

“No, it’s not a mistake. And your elevated HCG levels say that your body is supporting the pregnancy, at least for now. How pregnant do you think you are?”

“I have no idea.” She had slept with Jean-Charles in February, March, and April. And it was now early May. “At most slightly less than three months, at the least just about a month.” She hadn’t seen Jean-Charles now in nearly a month.

“My guess is that you’re closer to a month, or six weeks the way we figure it from LMP.” He was speaking jargon to her and she was feeling crazy. This couldn’t be happening to her. And what would Jean-Charles say? She loved the idea, in theory, but the reality of a baby at this point in their relationship might be something else. He might not be pleased at all. And she had no idea what she felt. She was still too stunned to sort it out, although a part of her was thrilled, and she told herself that was insane. They weren’t married, they lived six thousand miles apart, he was still living with his wife, and she was forty-eight years old.

“I think if you were more pregnant than that, you’d have noticed the signs by now. You’ve been pregnant before.” He knew about her son. He had been her doctor when Mark died, and Derek left.

“Do you think that’s why I got so sick?” She looked utterly amazed.

“Maybe. It probably was just bad sushi, but maybe you were more sensitive to it, and got sicker, because you’re pregnant.” She still couldn’t absorb the words. “My question to you is what you want to do about it. I don’t know how serious you are about the father. If this isn’t a pregnancy you want to keep, you should probably opt for a termination now.” Pregnancy. Termination. HCG. LMP. The words were flying around her head like birds. “You should see your gynecologist and make a decision fairly soon, particularly if you think you might be two months pregnant. I’d rather see you deal with it within the next month, and I’m sure so would you. Is this someone you’re serious about?”

“Very,” Timmie answered. “But he’s fifty-seven years old, lives in Paris, and we’ve only been going out for three months, if that. Not quite.” Not to mention the fact, which she didn’t tell Brad Friedman, that Jean-Charles was still living with his wife, and wasn’t due to move out for another month. Although admittedly, this might speed him along. Or blow him right out the door of her life. She was not entirely sure which. This was a lot to ask of any man, even Jean-Charles. “And my gynecologist just retired,” she added, as though that made a difference, which it didn’t. She didn’t know what to think or say.

“I can give you a couple of names. That’s not a problem,” he said, looking sympathetic. “I don’t know how you’d feel about having a baby at your age. Genetically, and physically, it could be fairly high risk. There are tests to handle the genetic issues, amnio and CVS. It’s hard to assess the physical risk of a delivery at your age, but there are a number of women who do it these days. Some doctors now consider normal childbearing years up to fifty. I have other patients who’ve done it, and even sought it out. And you’re in very good health. I don’t think it would be a problem for you, as long as you cover your bases on the genetics. But you’re also a very busy woman, with a major career. I figured that maybe something like this wasn’t what you had in mind. I take it you didn’t use condoms, or did it slip?”

“No, we didn’t use any. He’d had a recent AIDS test for an insurance policy, and so had I.” She had had one eight weeks after the last time she’d had sex with Zack, just to be sure. She had done it as a routine thing, and told Jean-Charles she had. And even though she had talked about a baby with him, she hadn’t expected this to happen, or at least not yet. “I feel a little stupid at my age, calling a guy and telling him I’m pregnant.”

“How do you think he’ll react?” Brad looked sympathetic as he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said pensively. “We’re crazy about each other. But his situation is complicated. He has kids, he lives in France, and he’s getting a divorce. He has a lot on his plate.”

“So do you,” he said, and she nodded. She did, undeniably, and she hadn’t expected to have a baby on it as well. She needed time to sort this out. And she wasn’t going to tell Jean-Charles just yet. She needed time to digest it herself first.

Brad wrote down some names on a piece of paper and handed it to her. They were the names of three gynecologists he recommended, and he suggested to her that she see one of them soon, and that she make up her mind, either to go ahead with it and get prenatal care, or terminate the pregnancy if she decided not to proceed. He made the decision sound a lot easier than it was.

“Thank you,” she said, slipping the piece of paper into her purse, and then she looked across the desk at him again. “Did you find anything else?”

“No.” He smiled kindly at her. “Everything else was fine. I thought maybe this would be enough.”

“Yeah,” she said quietly, “it is.” In fact, it was a lot. It was huge.

“Let me know what you decide.”

“I will,” she promised, and then left his office, feeling sad. This was such shit luck. It should have been something wonderful, and there was no question that she loved Jean-Charles, but this was an enormous burden to put on a relationship that was barely three months old. Even she knew that. But maybe God had other plans. It was amazing how that worked sometimes.

She called Jade from the car, and did something she never did. She told her she was sick and going home to bed. In fact, she was thinking of doing just that. She just wanted to crawl into her cave to think. It was Friday, and she was going out to the beach. Jade told her to take it easy, and she hoped she’d feel better by Monday. She was in good spirits herself, as she had a date with her architect friend lined up for the weekend.

Timmie had just hung up after calling her office, when Jean-Charles called on her cell phone in the car. He wanted to know what the doctor had said, what the tests had shown, and what part of her blood panel had been elevated. She listened to him with tears in her eyes, and held her breath. She hated lying to him, but she just wasn’t ready to tell him the truth. She truly needed time to think and make her own decision. This was a major event in her life. And what if he didn’t stick around, or never left his wife? Suddenly that mattered more than ever.

“It turned out it was just something silly,” she lied. “The tests showed that I had some kind of allergy or something. He thinks I was allergic to the fish I ate. And aside from that, it was probably rotten. He thinks I have a stomach infection, and put me on antibiotics.”

“I thought it was something like that. How stupid of him not to tell you on the phone. He was just trying to make himself important. I can’t tell you how it annoys me when doctors do that.” Jean-Charles sounded very official as he said it.

“Yeah, me too,” she said, as tears rolled slowly down her cheeks.

“Are you all right, my darling? You sound funny. What kind of antibiotic did he put you on?”

She hesitated for a moment, not sure which one to say, and then took a wild guess. “Erythromycin. I’m allergic to most of the others.”

“That might upset your stomach again. I wouldn’t have made that choice.” Probably Brad Friedman wouldn’t have either, but she had no idea which one he’d use for a stomach infection. “Be sure to tell him, if it gives you a problem. Don’t be afraid to call him over the weekend, particularly since he worried you for nothing.” She wouldn’t exactly call it nothing. And she was sure Jean-Charles wouldn’t either. She loved him so much, and suddenly all she wanted was his baby. But she had to be intelligent about this and make the right decision. She was about to impact everybody’s life. Hers, his, a baby’s, even his other kids from his current marriage. And that was part of the problem. However much she loved him, his marriage was in fact still current, and he was married to and living with someone else. She had to take all of that into account. “Are you on your way to the office?” He sounded in good spirits, but she suspected he might not have been if he had just heard the news. She wondered just how much it would have upset him.