Garden of Lies (22 page)

pregnant, about six weeks I’d say, but we’ll run a urine test to be sure.

“David?” she called to him softly over the pattering of the water in the old enamel sink. She

sank down on a chair, not bothering to put her pants on, just pulling her shirt down over her

knees. “I’m pregnant.”

He twisted his head around, looking at her as if she’d told a [122] bad joke, his mouth crooking

at the corner as if he wasn’t sure whether to laugh or sneer.

“Rachel, that’s not funny, not even to joke about,” he said, smiling now.

“I’m not joking.” The words seemed to rise, not from her throat, but from the aching hollow of

her stomach.

She watched his face grow dark, remote. Why was he looking at her like that, as if
she’d

spoiled everything, as if she was somehow attacking him?

“Christ, Rachel. Are you sure?” He caught himself, hitting the heel of his hand against his

forehead. “Dammit, of course you are. You’re a doctor. How on earth could you have let

something like this happen?”

You.
Not “we.” Like it was all her fault.

“I wasn’t exactly playing solitaire when it happened,” she snapped.

Two quick strides, trailing splotches of water on the floor from his dripping hands, and he was

in front of her, leaning toward her, palms smacking down on the table. Anger flashed in his green

eyes.

“Holy Christ, Rachel. You’re not one of those kids we see, sixteen, illiterate, knocked up

because they’re too dumb to know what birth control is. You told me you were using a

diaphragm. Just now, I thought ... shit, that’s why I didn’t, inside you, because I was too hot to

wait for you to put your goddamn
diaphragm
in.”

His eyes had a queer flat look that made the blood in her veins turn to ice water. She felt his

anger humming and crackling in the air like electricity seeking a ground.

She stared at his hands. She couldn’t look at him. His fingers were splayed against the knotty

pine tabletop, the fine golden hair below his knuckles glistening with jewel-like droplets.

Damn him. The bastard.

Rachel took a deep breath, struggling to subdue her hurt and her anger. “I
was
using the

diaphragm. They’re not infallible, as you know. Maybe I took it out too soon. Or put it in too late.

Or maybe little green men from Mars poked holes in it when I wasn’t looking. Dammit, how

should I know how it happened?”

She looked up and saw his face now was very still and cold.

“Maybe you do know. Maybe it wasn’t such an accident.”

[123] Rachel felt, more than heard, his words—like ice in the pit of her stomach.
Oh God. Did

he really say that?

No, he couldn’t really believe that. Not really. He must know she’d never do a thing like that.

She wanted to hit him, shatter that expression of cool disdain.

Then suddenly the anger went out of her, and she felt deflated, flat and empty. “Look, let’s not

do this. Getting angry won’t help. It’s no one’s fault. It just happened.”

David straightened, driving the fingers of both hands through his thick sandy hair, and exhaled

as if relieved. “You’re right. I’m sorry. No sense getting all worked up. It’s not as if any real

harm was done.”

“What do you mean?”

He looked at her as if she were a child, and not a very bright one. “An abortion. You’ll have

one, of course. I’ll arrange it.”

Shrinking away from him in her mind, Rachel felt as if she were standing at one end of a long

tunnel, seeing David as a dark speck silhouetted at the other end. She felt a vast distance between

them, certain as she sat here in the safety of her snug kitchen that if she stretched her arm out to

touch him, it would meet only cool darkness.

David, mistaking her silence for acquiescence, was smiling now, walking around behind her to

knead her shoulders, his touch sure and deft.

“Look, I know what’s eating you,” he continued. “Those girls, the ones who come in all cut up

from some back-street butcher with a coat hanger. It won’t be anything like that. I have a friend,

from med school. He’s in private practice now. OB-GYN. He owes me a few favors. It’ll be done

right. Safe. Easy as pulling a tooth.”

She pulled away, and turned to stare at him, a rushing sound in her ears.

Rachel thought of the baby inside her, its warm glow, and how she’d already begun imagining

what it would look like, how she would feel holding it in her arms. She’d thought, too, of the

cozy house she and David would live in, the room they would decorate as a nursery.

And she wouldn’t have to give up medicine, she had told herself. [124] Maybe a few months’

leave, and then with David’s help, and Mama’s, and a nursemaid, she could still do her residency.

But now he was telling her to get rid of it, her
child,
as if it were something nasty that had to be

scraped from the bottom of her shoe.

Rachel shot to her feet, bumping the table with her hip. She heard a crash. She looked down

through tears at the starburst of white crystals and broken china that had been the sugar bowl.

“No,” she said, amazed at how steady her voice was. “I won’t have an abortion.”

“Then you—”

“That’s right I’m having this baby.”

He stared at her, an instant of blank disbelief, then his handsome face began to harden, his

emerald eyes narrow.

“You’d be throwing away your career,” he said coldly. “For a clump of cells. What are you,

six, eight weeks? A clump of cells no bigger than your thumbnail then. Something we studied

under our microscopes in embryology, way back in pre-med. Or have you forgotten?

Romanticizing it doesn’t change the biological facts.”

“You bastard.” She wanted to slug him, punch his handsome, smug face as hard as she could.

“You cold bastard.”

“Did you expect me to marry you, was that part of the fantasy, too?”

“No,” she said, her voice breaking. “I just thought you’d care.” She stared at him, a tall

stranger poised against the pans that hung from hooks on the brick wall behind him. She was

trying to remember why she had ever thought she loved him.

He turned away, showing his profile, like a Roman emperor on a coin. “I care,” he said, each

word separate and exquisitely wrought. “I care about being a doctor, and I care about you. But I

won’t make any excuses. I never promised you anything in the beginning, and I won’t now. If

you have this baby, Rachel, you’ll have it alone.”

Rachel stared at the shattered bowl on the floor. Whole one minute, broken beyond repair the

next.

She felt slightly nauseated, dazed by his coldness. The thought of what they’d done on this

table a few minutes ago now seemed dirty, humiliating, a locker-room joke.

[125] And an even worse joke was that even now, in spite of all he’d said, she longed for him

to take her in his arms, and make the pain go away. Pain like dull knives hacking at her insides,

making her struggle to breathe.

“Go away,” she told him. “Just go.”

“Guess what?”

Kay blew in through the front door, plump arms laden with Balducci bags, her round face

flushed with excitement.

“What?” Rachel asked, curled on the couch amidst crumpled Kleenexes, feeling even worse

than she had last night with David.

Rachel watched Kay plop the bags onto the pine hall table. Delicious spicy, smoky smells

drifted toward her. Only now they made her stomach heave.

If this is because of some guy, Rachel thought, he must really be something. Kay, the original

yenta, the Sherlock Holmes of Jewish mothers, still hadn’t picked up on the fact that Rachel was

lying here in the dark at two in the afternoon when she should have been at the hospital.

“I quit!” Kay threw off her coat, and did a clackety dance in her Dr. Scholl clogs across the

bare strip of floor. In her white uniform and gold-rim glasses, her hair crinkling in a dark cloud

about her round face, she looked like a demented Orphan Annie.

“No more Valium overdoses,” Kay jabbered on. “No more breast implants. No more nose jobs.

No more Barbra Streisands who think they can look like Grace Kelly.” She gave a little hop to

keep from tripping over the telephone cord, stretched across the floor. “Rachel, would you

believe, today this woman, this
kvetch,
comes hopping into the ER. Sprained her toe, now get

this, on the escalator at Saks, and while she’s whining and bitching, a kid with multiple stab

wounds is practically bleeding to death not five feet away. I don’t know what happened,

something in me just snapped. I told her she should take her dear little toe back to Saks and get a

refund. Then I went outside for some air, and I got to thinking about Abbie Steiner. Remember

her? She bailed out last summer and went to a Red Cross hospital in Vietnam. I got a letter from

her. Boy, do they need help over there, nurses, doctors—like, desperately. And I’m [126] sick of

making noises about this war, and not doing anything, so I decided—” She stopped, her round

face puckering in sudden concern. “Hey, Rachel, you all right, you sick or something? What are

you doing home now? I thought you were on call.”

“It’s a long story.”

Rachel winced as Kay raised the blinds open, harsh winter sunlight stabbing her eyes. “Please,

not that much. A little lower. I like it dark. No, I’m not sick, just a little bit pregnant. Kay, you

can’t be serious.”

Dumb question, she thought. When it came to good causes, Kay was nothing if not serious.

Rachel remembered the nurses’ walkout that first summer of her Bellevue clerkship. When

Rachel had tried to wrangle her way through the picket line, Kay, a frizzy-haired munchkin with

the bellow of a longshoreman, had buttonholed her, winning her over with an impassioned

outpouring about how it was mostly the patients who suffered when the nurses were short-staffed

and underpaid. She was so intrigued that she’d invited Kay for a cup of coffee later. They’d been

friends ever since.

Kay flopped onto the sofa beside her. “As serious as a Richard Nixon is about trying to run for

President again.”

“Jesus, Kay. I can’t believe you actually quit Lenox Hill. Just like that. And Vietnam? It’s too

much.”

“I know.” Kay gave a gravelly laugh that didn’t quite hide an edge of unease. “No place for a

lady to be caught in torn underwear, as my dear ma would say. But think of it, Rachel. My God, a

chance to
do
something besides sit, clucking over what a rotten waste it all is.”

Rachel smiled. “Somehow, I just can’t quite picture you ever sitting and clucking.”

“My mother, God forbid, when she finds out about this, she’ll go to Washington, harangue

Johnson and every member of Congress to stop me.”

“Oh, Kay.” Rachel rested her head against Kay’s shoulder, letting her tears spill out. “I think

you’re crazy. And brave. And I don’t know how the hell I’m going to get through this without

you.”

And for an insane instant, she thought:
I
wish I were going, too. So far away from this mess I’m

in.

[127] Then Kay was hugging her, crying a little too. “You’ve told him then?”

Rachel nodded. She had fallen into an exhausted sleep last night before Kay got home, and this

morning Kay was gone by time she’d dragged herself out of bed.

“He wants me to have an abortion.”

“Is that what you want?”

“No.” Rachel buried her face in her hands, the pain of last night coming back acutely. “But it’s

so damn complicated. Without David, how would I manage? Give up everything I’ve worked for?

And if I don’t, how fair is that, having a baby when I’ll hardly be around?”

Kay shrugged. “Who said life was fair?”

“The crazy thing is, even knowing how hard it would be, I still want it. And for all the wrong

reasons. I can’t bear the thought of someone scraping it out of me. And I want to see it, see if it

looks like me. But the big thing is, it’s already a part of me. I feel changed by it. I can never be

the same again. Kay, tell me, are those good enough reasons?”

Kay stood up, moving across the room, reaching for the packet of Salems that sat on the

bamboo bookcase. She lit one, jetting the smoke out through her nose.

She gave a harsh little laugh. “Who’s to say? Did you ask for your parents? Did I? My mother,

you could eat off her kitchen floor, but she hated to cook for her family. She would push her

vacuum cleaner to the North Pole and back, but try getting her to sit down for an hour and play a

game of Gin Rummy with me or one of my brothers. Yet in her own meshuggene way, I know

she loved us. The way I figure it, when you’re a kid, you take what you can get from whatever

parents you’re stuck with, and be glad for it.” She looked at the cigarette between her fingers as if

surprised to see it there, her wide, generous face falling. “I gave them up last week. Six whole

days without a smoke, and now look at me. Jesus. Maybe I ought to take up vacuuming like Ma.”

Rachel thought of Sylvie then. Did wanting this baby have something to do with Mama? All

those years she’d watched Mama gazing sadly at the empty cradle in the nursery? Now there

would finally be a baby to fill that cradle. A baby they would both love.