Diane Chamberlain - The Lies We Told

Sitting in the rocker, I imagined the Baby Craft furniture in the room. It would fit perfectly and still leave space for the mural on one wall. I rested my hands on my stomach. “What do you think, little one? Mammals? A Noah’s ark kind of thing? Or fish? Birds?” I’m dreaming, I thought. How long had it been since I’d let myself dream?

“You’re a rarity,” Adam had told me early on, when we were still new to each other and everything about our relationship seemed to sparkle. “Part doctor, part dreamer. A scientist and a romantic, all in one endearing package.” Oh, how right he’d been, and what an uneasy blend of traits that could be at times. I could see myself as a stay-at-home mom like so many of my neighbors, my life filled easily and completely with the needs of my children. Yet I loved the challenge of my work. I knew I would find a way to do both. My plan for the next five months was to keep working, stopping as close to my delivery as possible as long as everything went well with my pregnancy. Sixteen weeks. I was going to be fine.

The streets of our neighborhood were deserted as I walked Chauncey before bed. The full moon was veiled by thin gray clouds and a fine mist fell, weaving itself into my hair. It had been a wet August. As we walked beneath a streetlamp, I saw Chauncey’s fur glow with tiny damp droplets. The houses were set far apart on the winding, sidewalkless streets, and they were a mix of styles. Brick colonials, like ours, and cedar-sided contemporaries. Woods divided one lot from another, and the trees hugged the road between the houses. Usually Adam was with us for this late-night outing, and walking through the darkness in our perfectly safe neighborhood still sent a shiver through me. Chauncey was a big dog, though. A hundred pounds. Some mix of Swiss Mountain dog and German shepherd, perhaps. He was dark and fierce looking with the personality of a lamb. He was wonderful with kids, and that had been the most important criterion when we found him at the SPCA three years earlier. We hadn’t realized then that the wait for those kids would be this long.

The pain was so subtle at first that another woman might not have noticed it. But I’d felt that pain before, the fist closing ever so slowly, sneakily around my uterus.

I stopped in front of a long stretch of fir trees. “Oh, no,” I whispered. “No. Go away.”

Chauncey looked up at me and I pressed my hand to my mouth, all of my being tuned to that barely perceptible pain.

Was it gone? I focused hard. Maybe I’d imagined it. Maybe just a twinge from the walk? Maybe some stomach thing?

Chauncey leaned against my leg and I rested my hand on top of his broad head. I thought of walking home very slowly, but my feet were glued to the road. There it was again. The sly, sneaky fist.

My fingers shook as I reached for my BlackBerry where it was attached to my waistband. If the surgery was over, Adam would pick up. But when I lifted the phone, it was my sister’s number I dialed.

“DO YOU EVEN KNOW HOW MANY OF THE MEN AT THIS conference you’ve slept with?” Dorothea looked around the massive hotel restaurant and Rebecca followed her gaze with annoyance.

“What?” she said. “Dot, you’re so full of it. I’ve slept with exactly one. Brent.”

She could see Brent, sandy haired and tan, sitting with a group of people at a table not far from where she and Dorothea were eating dinner. He looked like an aging beach bum, though she knew his coppery skin was from the sun in Peru, where he’d been working in a village devastated by a mudslide and not from lazy days on the beach. She’d known him for years. Her stomach didn’t exactly flip with desire at the sight of him, but she felt the sort of warmth you’d feel when you caught a glimpse of a good friend.

“I don’t mean this week.” The end of Dorothea’s long gray braid brushed precariously close to her plate. “I mean, of the couple hundred men at this conference, how many have you slept with over the years?”

“Is that a serious question?” Rebecca rubbed her bare arms. She’d worked out for nearly an hour in the hotel’s health club that morning and her muscles had the tight achiness she relished. “Why on earth do you care?” She was crazy about Dorothea Ludlow, but the woman could be such a snark.

“I’m just curious. Your libido’s always amazed me. You’re like a well that’s impossible to fill.”

The truth was, Rebecca would have to stop and think. She’d have to look at the roster for the Disaster Aid conference, one she’d attended here in San Diego every year for the past ten, and she’d have to struggle to remember who among the attendees she’d slept with. Probably no more than one at each conference. Although there was that one year when she slept with the pediatrician from California as well as that incredibly hot E. R. doc from Guatemala, but that was at least ten years ago, when she was in her late twenties and her moral code had been no match for her sexual appetite. Then there had been at least four or five guys she’d slept with when their paths crossed in the field. The thought was actually a little disgusting to her. Maybe she should reconsider Brent’s surprise proposal of the night before.

“Brent asked me to marry him last night,” she said. “The man’s nuts.”

Dorothea raised her eyebrows. “He wants to pin you down,” she said.

Brent knew what Rebecca was like. He knew she wasn’t the sort of woman you could wrap up in a tidy package and park in a humdrum medical practice and he’d never ask that of her. He shared her need to live on the edge. They’d scuba dived with sharks in Florida. Learned to parachute in jump school. Trained together for a half marathon. Hard to find a guy who could keep up with her like that. But marriage? What was the point?

“I told him no way,” she said.

Dorothea toyed with her stir-fried vegetables. “You think you know what you want, babe,” she said, “but you only know what you think you want.”

Rebecca scowled. “What the hell does that mean?”

Dorothea shrugged, and Rebecca knew she’d get no answer from her. She knew Dorothea better than anyone. She knew that when she was snippy, it was the pain of her loneliness coming out. Since Louisa, her partner of thirty years, died last year, Dorothea’s usual prickliness had taken on a whole new dimension. But it was her ornery nature that had led Dot to create Doctors International Disaster Aid twenty years ago, when people told her it was too ambitious an idea for one woman to take on. Her stubbornness and passion had made DIDA the respected organization it was today. The work was unglamorous, unprofitable and sometimes unsafe, but it was so very necessary. During the past few years, Rebecca had become one of DIDA’s few full-time physicians, Dorothea’s right hand in the field. Rebecca had met her at a fund-raiser in Chapel Hill, and Dot had recognized the seedling of passion in her, the fearlessness and the longing to do something truly meaningful with her medical skills. Dot had exploited those qualities with vigor. She became Rebecca’s best friend. Mentor. Mother. At a small gathering at the home Dorothea shared with Louisa, she introduced Rebecca to her partner, who immediately understood what Dorothea was plotting. Louisa pulled Rebecca into the pantry, out of earshot of the other guests. “Dot’s seducing you, Rebecca,” she said.

Rebecca’s eyes flew open. “What?”

“She’s nearly sixty years old,” Louisa said. “She’s been talking for years about finding someone who’ll eventually take over the leadership of DIDA.”

“She hardly knows me,” Rebecca had said.

“Dot reads people,” Louisa said. “She knew just by looking at you that you were the one.”