Always You (12 page)

“Eureka,” he said. Chiara’s head whipped toward the monitor. Using his keyboard controls, the technician used little white crosses to point out specific areas on the sonogram to John and Chiara. “This is the gestational sac, and right here you can clearly see your baby. That flutter there, that’s the heartbeat.”

The technician moved his highlighting crosses all over the baby, taking measurements and readings from all angles. Chiara’s muscles stiff from holding John’s hand so tightly, and just when she thought she couldn’t stand one more second of silence, the technician said, “Everything looks really good.”

Chiara let out a long, loud sigh of relief. John scrubbed his free hand over his face, letting it rest over his mouth, his eyes closed. By the light of the sonogram, Chiara studied his face, and through a haze of her own tears, she caught the telltale quiver in his chin. He composed himself quickly and brought her hand to his lips, kissing it warmly.

“Here’s a photo or two.” The technician tore off a long strip of black and white photos of the baby and handed them to John.

“Can you tell if it’s a boy or a girl?” he asked.

The technician grinned. “Ordinarily, I’d say it’s too early, but your babe’s giving me a clear view of the goods. If you really want to know, I can tell you.”

John, his eyelashes moist with unshed tears, looked down at Chiara. “I’d like to know. I can’t have this guy know and me not know.”

“It’s a boy,” Chiara said.

“You saw that on the sonogram?” John wrinkled his nose. “The baby’s got my father’s big ol’ Charlie Brown head and I recognize an arm, but I didn’t see anything that would indicate that this baby is a boy.”

“I just know it’s a boy,” Chiara said.

John looked at the technician. “Well, is she right?”

“Always trust the mother’s instincts,” he said. He set the transducer in its cradle and used a handful of paper toweling to clean Chiara’s belly. “Congratulations, you two. I’m going to go over these pictures with the OB on call, but she’ll probably want to keep you overnight just as a precaution. She’ll be in soon to talk to you,” he said before excusing himself from the room.

John helped Chiara sit up. She finally relaxed her cramped fingers and saw that she’d been holding John’s hand so tightly her nails had cut into his skin, drawing crescents of blood. “I’m so sorry,” she said, dabbing at the tiny spots with the hem of her gown. “I guess I don’t know my own strength.”

“I know it,” he said tenderly. “I’ve relied on it for most of my life.”

Her voice broke as she said, “I don’t feel very strong right now.”

“Here.” He gathered her into his arms. “Take some of mine. Take all you need. If you’re not up to it tonight, I can tell Detective Vincent that you’ll give him his statement tomorrow.”

“I want to do it tonight, get it over with,” she said into his chest. “I’m not even sure what I can tell him. It all happened so fast. I unlocked the door, everything was dark, I went into the kitchen, and some guy grabbed me. He choked me.”

“Was he white or black?” John asked.

“I don’t know. He wore a hood.”

“Did you see his eyes?”

“Not well, but well enough to gouge them.” She enjoyed a flash of satisfaction, remembering how he’d cried out. “His eyes were blue,” she recalled. After a long moment of thought, she said, “I saw a little bit of his skin in the eyeholes. He was white.”

“See, you remember more than you think. The more you can tell the police, the better the chances are of catching him before he does this to someone else.”

“He won’t.” She pulled out of John’s embrace to look into his face. “I was attacked because of that chip.”

John said nothing. He used both hands to smooth her hair from her face. “You’re on vacation now, right?”

She nodded.

“I think I’ll take some time, too,” John said. “It’s gonna take a few days to get your place cleaned up and packed and to figure out what was stolen.”

“Nothing was stolen,” she said.

“How do you know?”

“Because
I
was attacked.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Ordinary burglars don’t completely disembowel sofas. They don’t gut chairs and mattresses and saw the legs off tables and chairs.” She lowered her voice, even though they were still alone. “He was looking for the
chip
. He went through everything in my apartment. I was gone for nine days. He had plenty of time to do it. He didn’t ransack the place in one night. He was there tonight looking for me because he didn’t find what he was looking for in my apartment.” She clutched John’s shirtfront, her hands trembling. “He searched
me
for it.”

John stubbornly clung to his disbelief. “Chiara, look—”

She searched his eyes for a flicker of agreement. “Someone sent that man after me. You know that, don’t you? I had four hundred dollars in my wallet, and he left it there on the floor,” she insisted. “He ignored the Cartier earrings you gave me. This was no ordinary robbery. That man walked away from four hundred dollars and diamond earrings because he was looking for something even more valuable. If he’d found it, he could have had four hundred thousand dollars by the end of the day. You know why I was attacked. And you have to know that you’re not safe, either.”

John offered no argument, not when what she said was exactly what he was now thinking. “We’re packing you up and getting the hell out of Chicago,” he resolved.

* * *

Chiara gave her statement to the detective, and John was impressed with her skill at answering questions without actually answering them.

“Can you think of anyone who would attack you, Miss Winters?” the detective asked.

“No one I can name,” Chiara replied, staring him dead in the eye.

The detective didn’t press her, though his eyebrow twitched at her response. He thanked her for her time and gave her his card, in the event that she thought of something he hadn’t covered during his exhaustive questioning. When he left, John closed the door behind him and felt as weary as Chiara looked.

With all their official business taken care of for the time being, John took over Chiara’s care. He’d arranged for her to have a private room in the hospital, one of the luxury rooms typically reserved for ailing celebrities and politicians. With its television console, walk-in closet and full-sized bed, it was more like a hotel room than a hospital room, though it still contained all the standard medical equipment.

Eager to finally take a shower, Chiara did so while John ordered dinner from a service that handled deliveries from area restaurants. He turned down her bed and fluffed her pillows before knocking on the bathroom door.

“Baby, can I wash your back for you?” he called through the door.

“Please,” Chiara said, the drumming of the water almost drowning out her voice.

When John entered the steam-filled chamber, his shirt instantly adhered to him. He quickly removed his clothing and joined her in the shower stall. Too late he tried to mask his horror at the sight of her water slickened body. An ugly, purplish-blue blotch was blooming above her buttocks, and smaller versions were taking shape on her hips and upper thighs. Her upper arms bore deep finger marks, and horrible blotchy bruises marred her forearms and shoulders. The fresh red bruises on her throat made John clamp his jaw in anger.

“Son-of-a-bitch,” he spat.

“It’s that bad?” she asked him.

John felt more helpless than he had as a kid when he’d been the one on the receiving end of a beating. “I should have—”

“Don’t say it,” she ordered. “If you’d been there, he might have done worse. He might have been armed. He would have used a weapon on you.”

“Emmitt Grayson is going to pay for this,” John promised. He took the soap from her and briskly lathered his hands. Gently, he slicked the lather over Chiara’s body, careful not to cause her any more pain.

“It’s been a day, huh?” Chiara turned to face him.

John’s hands moved over her upper arms. “It’s been a day, baby.” She pressed her body into his, and he was able to shove his anger far enough away to devote the proper attention to Chiara. She allowed him to wash and rinse her from head to toe, and then bundle her into a thick white towel. She was so tired, so bone weary from living through the longest day of her life, she fell asleep in John’s arms as he carried her to the bed.

John tucked her under the covers and watched her as she slept. “I love you,” he whispered. “And I’ll kill the next man who tries to lay a hand on you.”

“Do you remember the first time you married me?” John asked.

Chiara, propped up on a nest of pillows with the white sheets pulled up to her underarms, toyed with a plump strawberry tomato she’d plucked from the salad that had arrived late the night before, when she was asleep. “I remember how the gold band you gave me turned my finger green.”

“Come on,” John pleaded, smiling softly as he tucked his right arm under his pillow and turned onto his back to look up at her. “What did you expect? I was on a fixed income back then.”

Chiara touched the tomato to her lip, though she had no appetite for it. She gazed at the man lying beside her. The bed sheet only half covered him, leaving him exposed from the waist up. She knew his beautiful brown body perhaps better than she knew her own. She had studied the patterns of the crisp, dark hair arranged on him, had traced each cut of muscle and followed tendons and veins. She knew every secret of his man’s body, which was probably why it was so easy for her to see through him, to the rail-thin third-grader he’d been the first time she’d agreed to be his wife.

On one of the brightest, hottest Sundays, they’d skipped church, as usual, to go to the ruins and 7-Eleven. John had spent six quarters on the gumball machines outside the store, hoping to get a plastic capsule containing a tiny yo-yo. He’d received five gumballs, all yellow, and a gold-plated tin ring with a glittery white plastic stone.

John had shared his gum with her, and as they’d walked back to the ruins, Chiara had blown a bubble bigger than her head. John had popped it, leaving her with a full beard and mustache made of gum. He’d stood there, holding the ring out to Chiara on the palm of his hand, and he’d said, “Do you want to get married to me?”

At nine years old, Chiara hadn’t had anything better to do. “Okay.” She’d shrugged indifferently. She’d slipped the ring onto her index finger and tightened it by pinching the rounded ends together.

They’d run back to the ruins to ask Cady, who’d been reading a Kitty Kincaid romance novel under a tree, to perform the ceremony. As she thought back on it, Chiara realized that she should have been suspicious of Cady’s instant agreement. Cady was sixteen, and her eager participation in their games had never bided well before.

After delivering a speech that left Chiara and John squirming in the hot sun, their tightly clasped palms adhering with sweat, Cady had pronounced them husband and wife. John had balked at Cady’s directive to kiss the bride. Cady, reenacting the plot of the romance novel she was reading, assigned Kyla the task of kidnapping the new bride.

Kyla swooped down, grabbed Chiara by the waist and carried her off to the highest platform of the tallest slide. John revealed a side of himself that the Winters girls had never seen. Standing on the steep, wrought iron steps of the slide, he literally fought an uphill battle to rescue his little wife—no small feat with Cady acting as guard. John had gotten so angry and so upset by his inability to rescue Chiara that Cady and Kyla had taken pity on him and freed her of their own accord.

Chiara had consoled her husband and later, exacted her own revenge by gluing together the last twenty pages of several of Cady’s unread romance novels.

“Cady still complains about the books I ruined,” Chiara said. “But at least she never tortured my husband again.”

“Torture,” John scoffed. “That defines the nature of the second time we were married.”

“Excuse me?” Chiara said, taking offense.

“It wasn’t torture being married to you.” He laid a warm hand on her abdomen. “It was torture for my mother.”

“She was ridiculous,” Chiara recalled. “It was a tenth-grade sociology project, and she acted like we were being told to worship Satan.”

John rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling. Sociology had been one of his least favorite classes during his sophomore year of high school, but it had satisfied one of his elective requirements, and Chiara had been in the class, too. When Mr. Collins had begun a segment on marriage and family, the boys in the class had almost openly rebelled at the thought of being assigned a wife, occupation, economic and education level, and worst of all—a baby.

Mr. Collins had pulled names from two hats to pair up the couples. He’d groaned out loud along with the rest of the class when he’d randomly matched Chiara Winters to John Mahoney. “I guess this is meant to be,” he’d laughed as he’d given them cards bearing their vital information: John, a college-educated accountant, would be married to Chiara, a college-educated, stay-at-home mother of one.

Chiara had sulked at her so-called occupation.

“You don’t have to do anything,” John had told her. “I’m the man. I do all the work.”

“Stay-at-home mothers do everything!” Chiara had railed right there in class. “They do all the cooking, the housekeeping, the laundry and the grocery shopping. They have to go to the post office and the bank, and they have to take the kids to the doctor and the dentist. Stay-at-home moms don’t get to do anything fun!”

“You’ve given this quite a bit of thought, Chiara,” Mr. Collins had said. “Some of the finer points of this assignment won’t be lost on you.”

“I wouldn’t be a stay-at-home mother if you paid me,” Chiara had said. “Actually, I’d only do it
if
you paid me, and even then, you’d better be paying me a lot.”

“John?” Mr. Collins had said. “It appears that you and your new wife are already having your first major conflict. She wants a career. She doesn’t want to take care of the home and family. How would you go about resolving this?”

John had been at a complete loss. “I could mow the lawn,” he’d offered.

For Chiara, the assignment had quickly worsened when she and John received their baby. The doll was computerized and programmed to be fed, changed, to cry inconsolably and laugh, all unpredictably. As the stay-at-home half of the assignment, Chiara had been responsible for most of the baby’s care. When she met John at school the morning after her first night with the baby, John had considered divorce proceedings.

Chiara’s hair, a wavy fall of black normally kept in a neat ponytail, looked as though she’d combed it with her feet. The big, wide eyes that had always sparkled with mischief were heavy-lidded, with dark circles beneath them. She’d never been a fancy dresser, but she’d always looked nice, but as she handed the baby over to John, he saw that she was wearing sweatpants and an old T-shirt with one black sock and one blue one.

“This thing cried all night,” she’d told him. “When it finished crying, it started peeing, and when it finished peeing, it started pooping. Have you ever tried to change electronic poop?” she’d demanded. “The computer times you. If you don’t change the diaper fast enough, the crying just gets louder and louder.”

“It can’t have been that bad,” John had said, trying not to laugh at her. “It’s just a robot.” Then he’d made the biggest mistake of all in trying to give the baby back to her. “I have P.E. first period,” he’d said. “I can’t take the baby with me.”

“I’M TAKING THE DAY OFF!”
Chiara had hollered through clenched teeth. “I don’t want to see you or your baby until tomorrow morning!”

And with that, John had become a single father.

Chiara had taken pity on him through the day, helping him in spite of herself with an electronic diaper change during lunch and a feeding during eighth period homeroom. But she’d flat out refused to take the baby home with her that night.

“I have a science test tomorrow, and I need to study,” she’d said.

So John had taken the baby home. He’d immediately smuggled the baby up to his room. Everything had gone fine until midnight, when the baby began to cry. John had tried feeding it, burping it, changing it and reprogramming it, all to no avail. As the baby’s pre-programmed distress grew, so did its volume. Almadine, her black hair tightly rolled in tiny pink curlers that matched her Pepto-Bismol pink pajamas, had burst into John’s bedroom to find him pacing with the baby on his shoulder, religiously counting off the number of gentle pats to the baby’s sensory pad needed to quiet it.

Sensory pads were located all over the baby to monitor the frequency and intensity of the contact it received. When Almadine got over her initial shock and discovered that the baby was fake, she grabbed its ankles and tore it from John’s shoulder. The next morning, she’d taken the baby to school to confront Mr. Collins about his “reckless” assignment, which she believed would only encourage teenagers to engage in premarital sex.

Almadine had refused to believe Mr. Collin’s contention that the computer baby was the surest deterrent to teen pregnancy he’d ever encountered, and that his assignment was meant to teach his students lessons in compromise and problem solving.

In the end, John had been able to carry on with the assignment because Chiara had agreed to be the full-time evening caregiver for the baby, which Mr. Collins determined showed signs of abuse equal to two fractured hip sockets—damage John knew had been caused by his mother’s rough handling.

Now, as John took her barely touched salad from her lap and set it on her bed table, Chiara looked him in the eye and said, “I’m sorry I wasn’t more flexible during our second marriage.”

“You know what they say,” John smiled. “The third time’s the charm.”

“Oh, you think so?” Chiara grinned.

“I know so.” John might have elaborated had a soft knock not sounded on the door.

He hopped out of bed and into his trousers. Even though it was six in the morning, a member of the hospital staff would have just entered after knocking. The fact that the visitor remained out in the corridor gave John cause for concern.

“Who is it?” he called, pitching his voice lower and adding a touch of menace.

“It’s me,” came a muffled voice that made Chiara’s heart leap. “Now open the frickin’ door, Mahofro.”

* * *

John was still buttoning his shirt when Cady Winters-Bailey entered the room. With a practiced flourish she swept off her wool cape, tossed it toward John—who caught it with his face—and went directly to Chiara’s bedside. Chiara pulled the sheets up higher as Cady sat down and lightly embraced her. When she pulled away, she said nothing as she studied Chiara’s face. Chiara grew increasingly uncomfortable. It was never a good thing to be under Cady’s laser-like scrutiny.

“Nice digs,” Cady finally said, shifting her eyes to take in the room.

“You’d be amazed at how the doors just fly open here when you mention Dr. Keren Bailey,” John said, seating himself on Chiara’s opposite side.

“That was mighty impressive at the door,” Cady told John. “You sounded just like Samuel L. Jackson.”

Chiara ignored her sister’s jibe. “Keren got this room for me?”

“Keren donated a lot of money to this hospital when they started renovating the pediatric oncology ward six months ago,” John said. “The admitting department became very accommodating when I told them that you were Dr. Bailey’s sister-in-law.”

“How did you know about Keren’s donation?” Chiara asked.

“Cady told me at Niema’s christening in July.”

Chiara dropped her gaze to the control panel on the inside of her bed rail. “Oh.”

“You were in South Korea,” John said gently. “That deal took twice as long as you expected it to, remember?”

“Yeah,” Chiara sighed. “Right.” If she weren’t already sore enough, she might have kicked herself. John had attended more of her family’s functions and special events than she had, and the weight of her neglect started her eyes watering. “I’m the worst sister in the world.” The words quivered from her lips as tears rolled over her lashes. “I’ve missed all the kids’ christenings, most of their birthdays—”

“You give really good gifts, though,” Cady said. “The twins love the Malaysian moon kites you gave them for Christmas.”

Grinding tears from her uninjured eye with the heel of her hand, Chiara went on as if she hadn’t been interrupted. “—I’ve missed all the big holidays—”

Cady took her hand and gave it a sisterly squeeze. “It gives us a chance to talk about you behind your back.”

Chiara sobbed openly, the heat of her tears making the battered side of her face ache. “I get beat up and you abandon your children to fly here to be with me at a moment’s notice. I don’t deserve your generosity, Cady.”

“First of all, I didn’t abandon my children.” Cady’s big ponytail of curls bounced as she crossed her arms over the chest of her baggy black sweater. “They’re with their father, thank you. Besides, I didn’t come all the way to Chicago to see you. When John told me that someone attacked you, I came up to make sure that you didn’t kill the other guy.”

Chiara chuckled in spite of her misery.

“You’re a scrapper, you always have been,” Cady said. “Whoever jumped you is lucky he caught you off guard.” She took Chiara’s chin and tilted her face toward the recessed light mounted above the headboard. “Remember the time Randy Cates said that you and John were like ‘Rudy’ and ‘Buuud’ from
The Cosby Show
? The bus driver had to pull over to get you off him. You tore him up.”

“I guess I’m not as tough now as I was when I was ten,” Chiara sniffled.

“You’re still plenty tough,” Cady assured her. “Pregnancy can make you feel vulnerable, at least in the early stages. How far along are you?”

Chiara’s eyes went wide and her mouth dropped open. She whirled on John. “You told her?”

“I haven’t told anyone,” John protested. “You’re the one who’s been telling everybody. First Emmitt Grayson—”

“To save our jobs!”

“—and then Mr. Petrie,” John finished.

“It slipped out!”

“No one told me,” Cady said, settling the argument before it got much louder. “I figured it out on my own. It’s pretty obvious, actually. You’re about three months or so?”

Chiara threw her hands up in surrender. “How the hell could you tell? Did you read my chart or something before you came in?”

Cady pinched back a self-satisfied grin. “I read
you
.”

“How’s that?”

“You were very quiet and withdrawn at Christmas, and I assumed that it was because of Zhou. But then I noticed that that you were acting like a big ol’ crybaby. You cried when you saw Claire Elizabeth kiss the stuffed doll you gave her, you cried when you saw Tits McFloozie kiss Troy under the mistletoe—”