Suddenly (35 page)

“You bought her a robe?” Charlie echoed.

Peter hadn’t meant to say it, hadn’t even realized he’d blurted it out until Charlie had caught him on it, but he wasn’t backing down. “I sure did. It’s about time someone in this town showed a little kindness to the woman. And respect. She does a job here. She keeps the books for a whole bunch of our businesses. You didn’t know that, did you.” It was a statement that Charlie’s surprised look upheld. “Well, she does. And you didn’t know it because no one wants to admit to it. How did you think she supports herself? She sure doesn’t come from money.”

Charlie sputtered out a laugh, but it was on the feeble side. And Peter wasn’t stopping. He was on a roll.

“So maybe it’s time we acknowledge that in her own quiet way Kate Ann Murther does a service for this town. We could start by showing a little sympathy for the state she’s in. She’s paralyzed. She’ll never walk again. So here’s this frightened woman, who’s totally alone in the world—who isn’t old at all but hasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of finding a man, especially now—and she’s facing a future in a wheelchair. How’s she going to get into her house? How’s she going to get around it, once she’s inside? How’s she going to get in and out of the shower? How’s she going to get in town to buy food? Do you have
any idea
the panic she’s feeling lying there in that bed all day asking herself these questions over and over again?”

“You sound like you’re running for office,” Charlie said, sounding mildly put off.

Peter threw up a hand. “Christ, it’s common decency. The woman has lived a pathetic life to date, and now she faces one that’s even worse. What would you do in her situation?”

“Probably go out back and put a gun to my head.”

“Yeah,” Peter breathed. The word hung in the air. “Well. One of my friends did something along that line, and she did it because the people around her—including me—didn’t care enough to take her life’s worries seriously.” His voice was rising again. “I’m not letting that happen again.”

Charlie patted the air. “Okay. Okay. I believe you.”

“You’d better. Because as far as I’m concerned, sticking up for Kate Ann Murther isn’t something a loser does. It shows character! And compassion! And you can tell Duke to tell his sister-in-law that if she wants to keep her job, she’d better make sure that Kate Ann Murther has the best possible care. I’ll be watching!”

“Okay.
Geez, Pete, calm down.” He looked around uncomfortably. “So. Are you having Thanksgiving dinner with us, or are you flying the coop?”

“I’ll be here.” Peter had a brainstorm. “And I’m bringing Kate Ann. It’ll be good for her to be out of the hospital and with people for a few hours.”

Charlie gaped at him for a minute. Then, with a look in his eyes that said he feared for his brother’s sanity but wasn’t about to get him going again, he said, “Whatever you say, Pete. Whatever you say.”

Angie slid onto the seat by the window and fastened her seat belt. Beside her, on the aisle, Ben did the same. She caught his eye. He caught her hand.

“Nice weekend,” he said softly.

“Mmmm.”

“Like old times?”

She thought about that. “A little. But better. I wish we had another day.”

He nodded and studied their hands.

“You’re not looking forward to going back, are you?” she asked. She had been aware of his reluctance for hours. It was flattering. And exciting. But unsettling.

He shrugged. “I have mixed feelings.”

When he fell silent she said, “Go on. You have to tell me about them.” That was the promise they had made to each other, and not in the heat of passion, though there had been plenty of that.

“This has been a special time,” he said. “I’m worried that when we get back it’ll all just…pffft, be gone and I’ll be right back in the same old rut.”

“If you know the rut’s there, you should be able to do something to avoid it.”

“I should. Only for the life of me, I don’t know what to do. How do you fight boredom in a place where there isn’t a whole lot to do?”

“I’ll plan to be home more.”

“So we’ll both be bored.” He looked at her then. “I don’t mean that as an insult, Angie, but think about it. Tucker is Tucker. We can talk for hours, and make love, and have candlelight dinners, but after a while, Tucker is still Tucker. There’s only so much we can do there.”

“Then we’ll go away more.”

“Enough to fill the gap?”

“We could do it once a month,” she urged. She wasn’t letting him give up. Not after the weekend they’d had. Not after the progress they’d made. “We could plan ahead, plan to go somewhere we both wanted to go or do something we both wanted to do. The anticipation would be worth millions.”

But he was shaking his head. “Maybe boredom is the wrong word. I need to be with people. Different kinds of people. Interesting kinds of people. Tucker just doesn’t have those kinds.” His tone sagged, as though what had been holding it up had simply dropped away, leaving the raw truth. “I miss New York.”

“We’ll be back there with our families for Thanksgiving.”

“That’s not what I mean. I mean for work.”

Angie knew that. She had been feeling the undercurrent of it longer than she cared to think. Longer than she had been
willing
to think. She had chosen to ignore it because it wasn’t what she wanted to hear.

“There’s something about being where the action is,” he tried to explain. “Fax machines are great, and E-mail, and conference calls, and Federal Express, but those don’t put me where it’s at.”

A flight attendant passed, closing overhead bins and checking seat belts. Ben waited until she moved on, then said softly, “When you were in med school and doing your residency, we were in the city, so I had all that. Same when Dougie was born. Then we moved to Tucker, and I lost it.”

Angie felt a thudding deep inside. “Are you saying you want to move back to the city?”

He looked up the aisle forlorny. “I’m saying I miss it. And if there were any way we could arrange it, yes, I’d move back.” He shot her a quick glance before deflecting his gaze to her hand. He brushed her wedding band. “But there’s your practice.”

The thudding inside her picked up. After two months in which certain basic aspects of her life had been turned upside down, another loomed.

“Your career isn’t portable like mine is,” Ben reasoned, playing devil’s advocate to his own thoughts. “You’re established in Tucker. You know the people. You
like
the people.”

“Don’t you?” she asked in dismay.

“Yes. Definitely. They are really nice people. They’re kind. They’re friendly. Once they get to know you, they’d give you the shirt off their back.”

He grew still when the flight attendant started talking about emergency measures.

Angie leaned closer. “It’s more than just the people. It’s the way of life. It’s the ease. The slower pace. The peacefulness.”

“If I could have those things
and
intellectual stimulation, I’d be in heaven.”

“Maybe there’s another solution. Montpelier’s not far away. Could you tie up with a newspaper there?”

He shot her a telling look. “The
Gazette
isn’t exactly the
Times
.”

“What about teaching? You could go to UVM, or Bennington, or Dartmouth. There’d be plenty of intellectual stimulation at any of those places.”

“Maybe,” he admitted, though skeptically. “If they’d want a cartoonist on their staff.”

“Not any old cartoonist. A prize-winning political cartoonist. You’re tops in your field. If they don’t want an entire course devoted to it, what about a series of seminars? You could coordinate with an art department. Or better still, with political science.”

“Maybe,” he said again.

The flight attendant had taken her seat. The plane pushed back from the jetway.

“What if I were to commute to New York?” he asked.

Her mind buzzed. Three-hundred and thirty-some miles. Five hours without traffic, upward of seven hours with. “Uh…”

The plane moved forward.

“What if I spent three days a week there?”

She swallowed. Three days a week when she wouldn’t see him at all? A bachelor pad in New York? Evenings doing God only knew what with God only knew who? “Sounds kind of like a separation,” she said uneasily.

He looked her in the eye and spoke with the quiet assurance that she had always loved. “That’s not what I mean at all. Especially after this weekend. All I’m doing is trying to think up ways to preserve your practice, my mental health, and our marriage at the same time. Three days a week might do it. Three days every
other
week might do it. Three days once a
month
might do it. I won’t know until I try.”

She wanted to say that it wouldn’t work, that it would break up their marriage for sure. Except that many husbands traveled on business. Their wives got used to it. And it wasn’t as if she’d be doing nothing the whole time he was away.

Besides, she knew he was restless. That was what Nora Eaton had been about—that, and a frustration that Angie had turned a deaf ear to. But she wanted to think she could learn from her mistakes. She wanted to think she could grow.

So, rational creature that she was, she said, “I could live with three days once a month.”

The plane bounced over a seam in the tarmac and rolled on.

“Would you join me for a couple of days before and after?” Ben asked.

“I could.” Rational creature that she was, she went a step beyond. “Or I could look for a job closer to the city.”

Ben stared at her. “You’d consider doing that?”

“If it was the only way this would work.”

“You’d leave Tucker?”

“You left New York for me once.”

The pilot announced that they were second in line for takeoff.

“That was different, Angie. I can work anywhere. You—you have a successful practice in Tucker. You’d have to start over.”

“Not completely. I’d have you. And my skills and my reputation. And Dougie, for as little or as long as he isn’t at school.” She smirked. “I’d also have my mother, and my brother and his wife and their five kids, and your mother, and your sister and her significant other, and your aunt Tillie.”

“On second thought,” Ben hedged, only half in jest.

“Why don’t I look,” Angie suggested. “I’ll put out feelers to doctors I know in the New York area. If there’s an opening in a small hospital in one of the suburbs, or with a group in the country north of the city, it might be interesting.”

“You’d really do that?”

The plane turned onto the runway and waited.

Angie thought about it. “A pediatrician’s practice is, by definition, transient. Children grow up and move on. New ones come along.”

“But you love your families.”

“Yes. And I’d love others just as well.” She had the confidence to know that others would love her, too. “If I could find a comfortable setting and a group of doctors I respect, I could move.”

“What about Paige? And Peter?”

“I’d miss them. Like you’ve missed the guys from the
Times
. But you’ve kept in touch. So I’d keep in touch with Paige and Peter. They could visit us. We could keep the house in Tucker and use it as a ski place. Or a weekend retreat.”

“What about Doug?”

The plane started forward.

Angie’s first impulse was to say that he would simply enroll in the school system wherever they were. Then she thought of all that had happened that fall. “He’s doing well at Mount Court. If he wanted to stay, I’d let him.”

“Even if we were a distance?”

“We didn’t see him this weekend, and we’ve survived.”

The plane picked up speed. She sat back in her seat.

“Do you
want
to move?” Ben asked.

She turned her head on the headrest. “No. But I do want you, and if moving is what it’ll take to keep you, so be it.”

The plane went faster. The front wheels left the ground, then the rear ones, and as it climbed steadily into the air, Angie wondered at her calmness.

She guessed it had something to do with the way Ben had laced his fingers through hers.

F
OLLOWING THE ANNUAL GRIEF OF HER BIRTHDAY
, Paige always liked Thanksgiving. Over the years she had taken to spending the day with friends in Tucker, a group of twenty, give or take, all transplants like her. They were an eclectic surrogate family, diverse in age and background. Each brought unique talents to Tucker and a unique contribution to Thanksgiving dinner.

The festivities, which were held at a different house each year, began with hors d’oeuvres at one in the afternoon and ended with dessert at ten at night. In between, while a fire roared in the hearth, they came as close to capturing the feeling of going over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house as most families ever came.

Nonny was a bona fide member of the group, having attended enough of its Thanksgivings to know to bring along doubles of her pecan pie and leave her potato stuffing at home.

Sami, who was just starting to walk along furniture, was the center of attention this year. Paige had bought her a sweet denim jumper with a soft print blouse and matching tights. Between that, and the bow in her dark hair, and her sober face that lit brightly when she smiled, she was precious. The other children fought over who would play with her.

Paige had been half hoping Noah would join them, but he had gone to Santa Fe to see his folks while Sara visited her mother in San Francisco. And it was for the best, Paige knew. She had seen him nearly every day since her birthday. Either he caught up with her at the hospital after dropping the Mount Court group there to work or he came by at night. Several times he had slept with her—crept in after Nonny had gone upstairs and crept out at dawn—and as guilty as Paige felt, she couldn’t turn him away. Being in his arms felt too good.

That was why this Thanksgiving breather was important. So much had changed in Paige’s life that fall. She needed a reminder that some things, like Thanksgiving with the aliens of Tucker, as they called themselves, would be there long after Noah Perrine left.

Snow started to fall on Thanksgiving night and continued into the morning. Paige forged her way through it to get to the office. She and Peter were the only ones around, what with Angie and Ben in New York and Cynthia home in Boulder, and though the schools were out for the holiday, colds, allergies, and flus took no vacation at all.

She worked a long day, stopped at the hospital to visit with Jill, and went home feeling bushed. She decided that it had to do with the festivities the day before and the letdown the morning after.

She wondered if Noah had had a festive day, wondered if he had felt any of the same letdown. She doubted it. He hadn’t called—not that he had said he would, but she had thought that if he was thinking of her at all, he would have picked up the phone. Clearly he was home with his family and in his element. No matter how much he claimed to be a man of all seasons, she knew him well enough to know that he adored New Mexico. The letdown for him would be returning to Tucker.

Sami was feeling something or other, too, because she pushed away far more of the supper that Paige put on her high chair tray than she ate. She even pushed her bottle away. She didn’t want to bounce in the swing that hung from the ceiling in a corner of the kitchen. She didn’t want to roll a ball to Paige. All she wanted to do was to be held, which Paige did gladly. When the phone rang at eight-thirty—not Noah, though Paige’s pulse had been skipping—with an emergency call, she rushed to the hospital to treat a four-year-old whose leg had been spattered with boiling water, then rushed home.

Sami remained fretful. By the time Paige put her in her crib, her nose was starting to run. Paige wasn’t surprised when she awoke in the middle of the night warm and sweaty. Children caught colds from other children. It was inevitable, and important in terms of building up immunities. It was also heartbreaking. Sami was small and helpless. She didn’t understand why she felt lousy, and no amount of explaining on Paige’s part made sense.

Paige bathed her and gave her baby Tylenol, then sat with her on the rocker humming the lullabies Nonny used to sing. Sami dozed and woke up crying. Paige wiped her face with a damp cloth. She gave her a bottle of apple juice, of which Sami drank barely half. She changed her sleeper and combed her hair. Then she sat with her in the rocker again, thinking that for all its wonders, modern medicine had yet to do much for the common cold.

It was a long night. For the first time, Paige understood the frustration her patient-parents had been talking of all these years when their children were sick and there was no way to help. “They’ll sound worse than they are,” Paige always told them, just as she told herself now. “Keep them as comfortable as you can. Encourage liquids. Definitely do not panic.” And last, “Make sure that you get enough sleep yourself. A run-down parent is no good at all.”

Paige barely slept. When Sami was awake, she rocked her to lull her to sleep, and once she was sleeping, she didn’t want to risk waking her by transferring her to her crib. Shortly before dawn, exhausted, she carried Sami down to her own bed, but she had barely dropped off to sleep when Nonny ran in, alarmed when she hadn’t found Sami in her crib.

“Paige Pfeiffer,” she cried, taking Sami in her arms, “this child might easily have crawled to the edge of the bed and tumbled right off!”

“She wasn’t moving far,” Paige murmured groggily. “She doesn’t feel well. Be an angel and give her more Tylenol. And wake me in an hour? Please? It’s my Saturday in the office.”

A shower revived her somewhat an hour later, but by the time she had finished up at the office and was heading home, she was beat. She napped with Sami in the afternoon, while Nonny took a walk in the snow, then went out for a run while Nonny stayed inside with Sami.

Inevitably she thought of her birthday and having run through the snow to Mount Court. There was no point in that now. There probably hadn’t been a point in it then, except that she had needed a boost. Noah had certainly given her that.

Okay. So she could use a boost now—just a little one—the kind that came with a call from a friend to say that he was thinking of her. There was such a message when she got home, but it was from Daniel Miller. One of the newer aliens of Tucker, a computer whiz somewhere around her age, he wanted to say how much he had enjoyed Thanksgiving and that he would be going to an art exhibit at Bennington the following weekend and would like to take her, if she was free.

The fact that he had left the entire message with Nonny made a statement about the prospect of their ever being anything more than friends.

Paige spent the rest of the afternoon and evening as she had the one before, holding Sami. Fortunately, her temperature was down. The initial rawness of her cold had settled into a steady drip, and while Paige was relieved, and grateful when Sami fell into a sound sleep in her crib, she couldn’t deny the special feeling that came when a child was sick and clung. A sick child was the ultimate in dependency. The parent with multiple children, all making demands on her, might dread that. Paige did not.

Neither had Mara. “I’m a way station in their lives,” she had written about being a foster mother:

Once Sami was asleep, Paige felt oddly lost. There was plenty to do that she didn’t feel like doing. She played Scrabble with Nonny, but it didn’t satisfy her the way holding Sami had, and it didn’t keep her mind from wandering to the phone.

She turned in early and fell asleep quickly, though not deeply. Each sound Sami made—a cough, a tiny cry—came through the monitor and brought her awake. She checked upstairs from time to time, but the child was cool and sleeping.

She had just returned to her room after one such check when she heard a rapping on her bedroom window. Her eyes flew there and found Noah’s face. Not bothering with a light, she opened the window and helped him climb inside.

“What are you doing here?” she cried, delighted in spite the start he had given her. “You’re not supposed to be back until tomorrow night!”

He tossed aside his coat, taking her in his arms, said against her hair, “I wanted to hold you,” which he did, tightly, for a long minute before easing her back. In the darkness he studied her face, feature by feature, as though searching for a change that the few days apart might have brought. “How was your Thanksgiving?”

Paige had to struggle to think back that far. No man had ever cut short his vacation to be with her. No man had ever taken to stealing in her bedroom window. No man had ever held her with arms that trembled or touched her face with eyes whose hunger lanced the dark. No man had ever made her feel so full.

“It was okay,” she managed to say, though her thoughts clung to all these things that made Noah unique. “Yours?”

“Nice. For a day. Then I got restless.” He kissed her, then smiled down apologetically, then kissed her again. This time when he smiled there was a question in his eyes.

Paige answered it by pulling up the hem of his sweater. While he pulled it over his head, she started unbuttoning his shirt, and while he pulled it off, she kissed his chest. By the time she was ready to move on, his trousers were open. She slipped her hands inside and held him while she sought his mouth.

“I missed you,” she whispered, and felt his response in her hands. He drew away from her only long enough to toss aside the rest of his clothes and her nightgown, then tumbled her back to the bed.

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. His mouth was eloquent without a word, with his hands and body echoing all it said, and when he drew her up off the bed and settled her onto a magnificent erection, she felt beautifully and thoroughly complete.

He held her, one arm around her hips, one arm around her back, perfectly still. In her ear, in a faintly ragged breath, he whispered, “I was dreaming of this all the way home. Had a five-hour hard-on. Hope the flight attendant didn’t notice.”

Paige laughed. She ran her fingers through the hair on his chest, over the wall of muscle that was so comfortably broad. “You are a corrupter,” she whispered. “I wasn’t thinking about this at all.”

“Not at all?”

“Not at all.” It wasn’t sex she’d been thinking of, but the completion. When she was with Noah, she felt content.

“There goes my ego.”

But nothing else. He was huge inside her. She closed her eyes to more intently savor the pleasure.

He pulled her close again and drew in a long, shaky breath against her brow. “I love it when you do that.”

“Do what?”

“Tell me that you feel good that way.”

She coiled her arms around his neck and held on tightly.

“I love you,” he whispered.

Her heart caught. “Me too.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

His body tensed. “Christ,” she heard him murmur seconds before he pushed her back, and while her hips rose to meet him, he drove into her again and again.

It was a while later, after they had dozed in each other’s arms and woken softly, that he said, “Did you mean it?”

She didn’t pretend ignorance. She had never before told a man that she loved him. She hadn’t even thought it about Noah until he’d said the words himself, and then the meaning of everything she’d been feeling seemed to congeal. “Yes. Did you?”

“Yes.” He paused. “It’s kinda nice.”

“And kinda scary.”

“
Lots
scary.” He settled her more comfortably against him and drew up the quilt. In a quiet voice he said, “Something exciting happened while I was home. An old friend of mine is president of the Board of Trustees of a prep school there, my alma mater. He said that the Head has just announced that he’s leaving.”

Which meant that Noah would be applying for the job. And he’d get it. Which meant he would be moving to Santa Fe. Just when she’d fallen in love. It wasn’t fair.

“The job isn’t automatically mine,” he cautioned. “There’ll be a formal search, but everyone involved knows me and my family, and the fact that I’m an alumnus of the school is a plus.”

“Is it a good school?” she asked against his chest.

“Not good. Great. Great reputation, great student body, great alumni support, great endowment.”

“Everything Mount Court doesn’t have.”

“You could say. It’d be a feather in my cap.”

She nodded against him.

“You could come with me,” he suggested.

“Me? Oh, no. My life is here.”

“You could move it there.”

To
New Mexico?
“But I like it here.”

“You say you love me,” he said in the simplistic way men had of doing, as though love conquered all, as though love
forgave
all, as though love condoned the creation of havoc.

She was suddenly miffed. “Love is only one part of my life. The entire rest of it is here in Vermont.”

“What if we were to get married?”

She took in a breath the wrong way and began to cough. When she had recovered, she pushed herself up so that she could see his face. It was a futile move. Between half-lidded eyes and the dark, she couldn’t see much, which was nearly as unfair as his request. “Marriage has never been in my game plan.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s bad.”

“It was for you before.”

“That was then, this is now. You and Liv are worlds apart.” He took her chin in his hand. “Either you’re very cynical, or very frightened. Which is it?”

“Neither,” she said, then, “Both,” then, “Hell,” and sank down on his chest. Seconds later, when the baby monitor emitted a distinct cry, she bobbed back up. “Sami’s been sick.” She found her nightgown and, pulling it over her head, left the room.

Sami was only half-awake. She was congested, whimpering as she stood against the bars of the crib scrubbing at her nose and eyes with her fist. Paige lifted her out and held her close. “Shhhh, shhhh, Mommy’s here,” she crooned. “Is my little girl not feeling great?”