Just Desserts (19 page)

The camera zoomed in for a close-up of the perky young reporter.

“Look at her!” Michie croaked. “She's actually flirting with him!”

“He's famous,” Hayley said. “When he's famous it doesn't matter if he's old enough to be your grandfather.”

“Think she'd be working it quite so hard if Stiles managed the produce department at ShopRite?”

“Or worked with Lou at the dry cleaner?”

“I can see it now,” Michie said. “Old man Dennison from the gas station thinking he had a chance with Trish or Keisha.”

“Wash your mouth out,” Hayley said through her laughter. “That's downright obscene!”

On screen the perky reporter was wrapping things up. “Tommy Stiles and the After Life will be appearing Thursday in Atlantic City. There are still a few tickets available but you'd better hurry! Tommy's newest CD,
Best of the Best
, is available now—”

Click.

“So much for free publicity.” Hayley sighed. “I'd better get back to work.”

Michie sneezed three times in a row. “I'd better get back to writing my will.”

“Put me down for your Coach shoulder bag.”

“Not funny,” Michie said, laughing through her coughing/sneezing fit. “You'll be sorry when I leave you my kids instead.”

“Speaking of your kids, I'll pick Jackie up after school and get him to the allergist,” she said as she raced back downstairs to the kitchen.

“Bring him back when he's twenty-one and I'll toss in my vintage collection of Tupperware lids.”

Talk about an incentive.

Manhattan—Upper East Side

“I'm going downstairs in search of the
Times
and a cup of tea,” John said as Jane settled into the narrow bed. “If I can find a cup of your favorite Earl Grey—”

Jane shook her head. “Water only, love. The tests…”

He nodded his great leonine head. “But there must be something that would help pass the time more quickly for you.”

“Just hurry back,” she said in a rush of love and longing that would fell a younger woman. “Your company is all I want.”

She meant it. His presence in her life was sustenance for body and soul.

This three-day visit to Memorial Sloan-Kettering had been John's idea. She already had her diagnosis. She understood that the only measures available to her were palliative in nature, not curative. She had accepted the fact that her time was limited.

John, however, had not. He had called in a favor from a colleague here at MSK who had scheduled two full days of tests followed by an interdisciplinary evaluation and treatment recommendation.

She envied John his ability to transcend facts and cleave to hope but she was a realist. She had seen the preliminary reports on her condition and the outcome seemed inevitable and relatively imminent. Two years, the doctors had agreed. Two years could be enough if you lived them an hour at a time.

John would come to accept this on his own terms. Sooner than later, she hoped, but acceptance would provide its own comfort.

She wasn't a fanciful woman. Interpersonal relationships were terra incognita to her. She believed in what could be calibrated, analyzed, dissected into its component parts so the structure could be understood.

People defied her scientific training. They ignored what was there right in front of them and chose to believe what they saw only with their heart.

For the first time in her life she wished she could be one of them.

“Dr. Maitland.” One of the residents appeared in her doorway. She wore her stethoscope like a diamond necklace. “I'm Dr. Tomarchio. I wanted to let you know they'll be doing some preliminary blood work later so you might want to stay close by.”

“I didn't realize I had a choice in the matter.” She said it lightly but the hint of irony was unavoidable.

The young doctor smiled. “You're a patient, not a prisoner. You're more than free to roam.”

“I'll keep that in mind.”

They chatted a few moments longer, then Dr. Tomarchio moved on to her next patient.

She glanced around the spacious, airy room but saw nothing beyond the fact that John wasn't there. Every minute with him was precious beyond reason. Every minute without him felt like an eternity.

A large flat-screen television hung from the wall. She reached for the remote control device on the bedside table and pressed the power button.

“…This is Channel Seven Eyewitness News with…The News4 chopper is over the scene…Watch CBS for Katie Couric's interview tonight with the president of Venezuela…Bravo brings you…This is CNN…Tommy Stiles and the After Life will be appearing Thursday in Atlantic City. There are still a few tickets available but you'd better hurry! Tommy's newest CD,
Best of the Best
, is available now…”

He was older, of course. There were lines on his face that hadn't been there that long-ago night, but he still had the same smile.

How strange that across the years it was his smile that she remembered. Not the eyes, although they were mirrored in both her daughter's and her granddaughter's faces, but that wide and guileless smile that had touched her heart for a weekend all those years ago.

Princeton, New Jersey—Early Spring, 1970

The phone rang at three minutes after noon.

Jane had just settled behind her desk to eat a cup of yogurt while she prepared for her lecture. Earth Day was on the horizon, a new concept that was being met with much cynical comment among her peers, and she had been dismayed by the lack of enthusiasm and information among the general population. Granted, the horrific images from places like the Mekong Delta and Da Nang that filled the news each night created an urgency that the supporters of Earth Day had been unable to match, but she hoped to at least capture a few hearts and minds in the weeks ahead for their cause.

Unfortunately, until Hallmark acknowledged Earth Day with a series of greeting cards, universal acceptance was unlikely.

“Dr. Maitland, this is Dr. Woodruff's office calling. We have the results of your pregnancy test.”

She had forgotten. That seemed impossible even to Jane but she had been so busy that the test had slipped her mind.

“Negative, of course,” she said. She was a forty-year-old woman. Early menopause ran in her family.

The long silence should have told her something, but she lived her life among academics and sailors, neither of whom were known for a facility with emotional nuance. Long silences were lost on her.

“The test was positive,” Dr. Woodruff's nurse said. “You'll need to make an appointment to see the doctor for a prenatal workup as soon as possible.”

The nurse continued to talk but Jane couldn't hear the words through the roar of the ocean inside her head. She must have made the necessary noises because the next thing she knew she was out from behind her desk, running flat out down the musty hallway, past her astonished colleagues, her equally astonished students, out the front door, down the stairs, and up Nassau Street until she couldn't run anymore.

Everywhere she turned she saw a familiar face, someone who knew her or knew of her. Someone who would judge her in ways she wasn't willing to be judged. She needed clarity. She needed distance.

The world was changing. In the not-too-distant future an unmarried professional woman would be able to have a child without facing the censure of a critical world, but not yet. Her life, her future, hung in the balance.

She drove down the shore that afternoon. Proximity to the ocean made it easier to think.

She knew it was ridiculous, the sort of thing a much younger and less experienced woman would do, but she stayed in the same beachfront motel where she had stayed with the young man who was the father of her child. She had met him in a pub near the university. A group of her colleagues had thrown a bash to celebrate someone's marriage or baby or dissertation and Tommy Stiles and three other young men were the bar band that night.

The professor/student dynamic was a classic one. How many of her friends had stumbled into relationships with students young enough to be their children. It had always struck Jane as an abuse of privilege and she kept the lines clearly drawn and inviolable. Besides, she preferred to socialize with people whose frames of reference included Eisenhower, Truman, and FDR.

But this young man was not a student. He was a musician. The world of academe meant nothing to him. Her doctorates, her research grants, her published works, were all but invisible. When he took the stage the world around her stopped spinning. The clamor and conversation in the room ceased.

“I hear they've signed a contract with Epic,” one of her colleagues said during a break. “We'll be able to say we saw them when.”

For all that she was a scientist who believed only in that which was quantifiable, there was no denying the stardust that surrounded those local kids.

Especially Tom Stiles. The blue-collar high school dropout was on the verge of something wonderful. One of those once-in-a-lifetime opportunities that change a person's life forever.

She told him how transcendent his music was. He told her he wanted to live by the ocean one day. The conversation extended past last call, into the parking lot, then all the way down the shore in the first light of morning.

But this time there were no long walks on the beach listening as he spun his dreams out for her to admire, no interludes of pleasure as she taught him things he would one day thank her for.

That weekend she slept and she cried. Her entire life had been turned upside down with the words
you're pregnant
. Her direction. Her plans. Her future. Everything had changed. For two long days and nights she searched for answers that only the years would provide.

“Nice weekend?” her TA asked when she returned to her office Monday morning.

“Informative,” she said with a quick smile. After all the tears and all the hours spent trying to see through the fog of surprise and wonder, she realized that there was only one thing she knew for sure.

She was going to have this baby.

Everything else would simply have to fall into place behind that.

Now

And for a little while it had.

Jane leaned back against her hospital pillows and closed her eyes.

She wasn't one to indulge in looking back. Nostalgia was history bathed in sentiment and sentiment tended to soften edges, to cast flattering light into the places where darkness lived.

He was barely twenty years old. He had his whole life ahead of him. He was standing on the cusp of something huge, the type of fame most people only dreamed about, and even Jane could see he had the talent to back up the promise. They had shared a weekend together and she had been old enough and wise enough to understand that was enough.

Jane wasn't known for her insight into the human condition but she knew at a visceral level that, young as he was, Tom Stiles would do what he perceived as the “right thing” for her and the baby and that choice might cost him his future. She was an established professional woman whose position in the world was secure. She had money enough to sustain herself and her child. She would let Tom Stiles follow his destiny and wish him Godspeed.

And so she never told him.

She had misgivings on the day of Hayley's birth and filled in his name on the birth certificate but soon changed it back to
Father: Unknown
. The world had continued to change around her and by the time Hayley was a toddler, nobody in her world batted an eye at the middle-aged professor with the baby girl with the beautiful blue-green eyes.

Except for a brief burst of adolescent anger, Hayley had accepted the story that she was the result of AI via an anonymous sperm donor. Everyone did. The story fit right in with Jane's ascetic lifestyle and her commitment to the pursuit of science. There was no reason to question what sounded so right.

For over thirty years Jane had believed she was home free until a doctor in Mumbai discovered that she had metastatic stage IV breast cancer and the genetic component suddenly took on great significance. Hayley and Lizzie deserved to know their complete genetic profile. The options in medical care were changing almost on a daily basis. The amount of family medical history a person brought to the table made a huge difference in both diagnosis and course of treatment. She could no longer deny those two beloved women half of their history.

“I found the
Atlantic Monthly
,
Time
,
Newsweek
, and
U.S. News and World Report
.” Her beloved John strode into the room with all the confidence and hope of a man who had always believed happiness was his birthright. “I intend to sneak back down later for a fresh copy of
People
. We can pretend the last patient left it behind.”