James Grippando - Beyond Suspicion

She shook her head. “The first time I examined this proof, I was sure I saw a human shadow. Then I looked at it again tonight and I wasn’t so sure. You just confirmed it for me. I’m seeing things that aren’t even there.” She chuckled mirthlessly and said, “I really must be freaking out.”

“What happened to us is enough to push anyone to the edge.”

She moved closer, as if telling him to hold her. He took her in his arms and said, “Everything’s going to be okay.”

“You promise?”

“Everyone has fears. The imagination can run away with you.”

“Tell me about it.”

“It’ll pass. Believe me. We’ll be fine.”

“I know. Tonight’s just been especially tough. The whole day, really.”

“What happened?”

“It’s just that…”

“What?”

“After this horrible thing happened in our own house, I’d managed to convince myself that God had something really good in store for us. That’s why it hit me pretty hard today when I found out I wasn’t pregnant.”

“Good things are in store for us. There are so many options we haven’t even talked about yet. Fertility drugs, even artificial insemination, if you want.”

She smiled weakly.

“What?” he asked.

“An absurd image just flashed into my head. You sitting all by yourself in the back room of some doctor’s office, flipping through the pages of a dirty magazine…”

“It’s not like that at all.”

“Oh, really, stud? How do you think they collect their specimen?”

“I dunno. I just always assumed that’s why nurses wear rubber gloves.”

“Perv,” she said as she pushed him away playfully.

He pulled her back into his arms. “Come here, you.”

She settled into his embrace, put her head against his shoulder, and said, “A baby. What a thought.”

“ Our baby. Even more amazing.”

“You ready for this?”

“Heck, no. You?”

“Of course not.”

“Perfect,” he said. “Why should we be different from everyone else?”

She flashed a wan smile, her voice seeming to trail off in the distance. “If only we were just a little bit more like everyone else.”

Jack wasn’t sure how to answer that, so he kept holding her. After a minute or two, she started to rock gently in his arms. It was barely audible, but she was humming the lullaby, “Hush, Little Baby.” In his head Jack was following along and enjoying the melody, until she stopped suddenly in midverse. It was a cold and abrupt ending, like hopes and dreams interrupted. He waited for her to continue, but she didn’t.

They stayed wrapped in each other’s arms, saying not another word, neither of them wanting to be the first to let go.

•

In the morning Jack went jogging. He pushed it farther than his normal run, following the tree-lined path along Old Cutler Road all the way to Coco Plum, an exclusive waterfront community. The leafy canopy of century-old banyans extended from one side of the road to the other, a tunnel Miami-style. Salty smells of the bay rode in on a gentle east wind. Traffic was sparse, but by the morning rush hour a seemingly endless stream of BMWs, Jaguars, and Mercedes-Benz convertibles would connect this wealthy suburb to the office towers in downtown Miami. Certain American-made SUVs were acceptable in this neighborhood, but only if they were big enough to fill two parking spaces at The Shops of Bal Harbour and were used primarily to drive the future Prada-totin’, Gucci-lovin’ generation to and from private schools.

Jack was approaching the four-mile mark of his run and feeling the pull of a restless night. He and Cindy had gone back to bed around three A.M. Their talk had put his worries about Jessie and his letter to the state attorney on the back burner, but Jack’s thoughts of his mother were percolating to the surface.

The only thing he knew for certain about his mother was that he’d never known her. Everything else had come secondhand from his father and, much later in his life, Abuela. Jack’s mother was born Ana Maria Fuentes in Havana and grew up in Bejucal, a nearby town. She left Cuba as a teenager in 1961, under a program called Pedro Pan (Spanish for “Peter Pan”), a humanitarian effort that was started by an Irish Catholic priest and that enabled thousands of anxious Cuban parents to spirit away their children to America after Castro took over. Ana Maria was eventually linked up with an uncle in Tampa, and Abuela had every intention of joining them just as soon as she had the chance. Unfortunately, that chance didn’t come for almost forty years, when Abuela was finally able to get a visa to visit her dying brother. For Ana Maria, that meant making a new life for herself without her mother. She worked menial jobs to learn English, and moved to Miami, where she met Harry Swyteck, a handsome young college student who happened to be home on summer break. From the old photographs Jack had seen, it was obvious the boy was totally smitten. Jack was born eleven months after they were married. His mother died while he was in the nursery. Doctors weren’t as quick to diagnose pre-eclampsia in the 1960s as they are today, or at least they weren’t as accountable for their screwups.

It hadn’t dawned on Jack until the homestretch of his morning jog, but maybe that was the reason he’d jumped into Jessie’s case.

He wondered what his mother would think now, her son duped by a respected doctor and a woman who’d only pretended to be misdiagnosed. He knew too little about her to hazard a guess. His father had remarried before Jack was out of diapers. Agnes, Jack’s stepmother, was a good woman with a weakness for gin martinis and an irrational hatred for a woman she feared Jack’s father would never stop loving-his first wife, Jack’s mother. She went ballistic each time a letter from Abuela arrived from Cuba, and many of them Jack never saw, thanks to her. “Dysfunctional” was the politically correct label that experts might have placed on the Swyteck family. Jack tended to think of it as a royal freak show. But he could still laugh about some things. He was a half-Cuban boy raised in a completely Anglo home with virtually no link to Cuban culture. That alone guaranteed him a lifelong parade of comedic moments. People formed certain impressions about the Anglo Jack, only to do a complete one-eighty upon hearing that he was half-Hispanic. Take his Spanish, for example. Jack was proud of his heritage, but it was with some reluctance that he shared his Cuban roots with anyone impressed by the way this presumed gringo named Swyteck could speak Spanish. It was a conversation he’d had at least a thousand times:

“Wow, Jack, your Spanish is really good.”

“My mother was Cuban.”

“Wow, Jack, your Spanish really sucks.”

It was all how you looked at it.

Jack finished the run and showered long before his normal breakfast hour. The commute from his mother-in-law’s house was a little farther than his usual drive, but he still arrived before his secretary. Jack stood outside the double-door entrance, fumbling for the master key, as the elevator opened behind him. He glanced over his shoulder, then did a double take.

“Good morning,” said Dr. Marsh.

Jack turned but didn’t answer. He hadn’t seen the doctor since the last elevator ride, when he and Jessie had held hands. Marsh came forward but didn’t offer Jack his hand.

“I said good morning, Mr. Swyteck.”

“Oh, it’s you, Dr. Marsh. I didn’t recognize you without your girlfriend.”

“I thought we should talk.”

Jack gave him a quick once-over and said, “Come in.”

He opened the door and flipped on the lights. Dr. Marsh followed him through the small reception area to the main conference room. They sat on opposite sides of the smoked-glass table top.