Separate Beds (29 page)

He suffered an agony of helplessness, driving through the night with his thumb brushing against the back of her hand in silent communication to which she did not respond. Their hands lay upon her narrow lap, the back of Clay's resting lightly against her now fully round stomach. He thought of the pain children bear at their parents' expense and hoped his child need never suffer what Catherine now suffered.

At home he helped her with her coat, then watched as she listlessly mounted the steps.

“Catherine, what can I do? Can I fix you something?”

She had stopped, as if she didn't know where she was. He came behind her, his hands in his pockets, wishing she would say, “Make me some cocoa, rub my back, put on some music, hold me . . .” But she shut him out instead, insulated within her carefully guarded solitariness.

“No, there's nothing. I'm very tired, Clay. I just want to go to bed.” She walked upstairs with rigid back, directly to the bedroom, and closed the door upon the comfort he sought to offer.

He stood in the middle of the living room looking at nothing for a long time. He shut his eyes. His Adam's apple bobbed up and down convulsively. He pictured Ada, then Catherine's face as she'd looked at her mother's still figure. He sat down on the edge of the davenport with his face in his hands. He did not know how much time had passed before he sighed, rose, and made a phone call to his father. He made up his bed on the davenport and wearily took off his trousers and shirt, but when the light was out he went instead to stand before the sliding glass door, staring out at the ebony night.

He needed the woman upstairs as badly right now as she needed him.

A faint, muffled sound intruded itself into the bruised night, bringing him to turn from the window. He strained to listen and it came again, high, distant, like the wind behind walls—hurt wind, wailing wind—and he knew what it was before he felt his way up the stairs in the dark. He paused at her bedroom door and listened. He laid his palm against the wood, then his forehead too. When he could stand it no longer, he found the doorknob and soundlessly turned it. In the dimness, he made out the blur of the pale blue bedspread, padded silently across to lean and explore it with his hands. He felt her curled beneath the covers, clutching them over her head. He ran his hands along the snail-shaped form, the pity in his heart a choking thing while her high keening came muffled from the womb she had crawled back into. He pulled gently at the covers but she only clung to them the tighter.

“Catherine,” he began, but found his throat clotted with emotion.

She gripped the guardian covers fiercely until at last he ebbed them from her fingers to reveal her curled with her head covered with both arms, her elbows tucked between her knees. Gently he lifted the blankets and lay down behind her, then covered them both up again. He tried to pull her into his arms but she only huddled tighter, wailing in that solitary, high syllable that made Clay's eyes sting.

His voice quavered as he whispered, “Cat, oh, Cat, let me help you.”

He found her fists clenched in her hair and eased them away, running a palm along her arm, then pressing his chest upon her curved back until he could bear it no longer. Bracing himself on an elbow, he leaned over the curled ball of her, brushing back her hair, assuring her throatily, “I'm here, Cat, I'm here. Don't go through this all alone.”

“Mamaaaaaa . . .” she wailed pitifully into the dark, “Mamaaaaa . . .”

“Please, Cat, please,” Clay begged, running his hand down her arm to find her hands fiercely knotted between her knees.

“Mama,” she wailed again.

He felt her body quaking and sought to calm her by cradling her as best he could with one arm along her thigh, cupping a knee and pulling her back against him.

“Darling, it's Clay. Please don't do this. Let me help you . . . let me hold you, please. Turn around, Cat, just turn around. I'm here.”

“Mama, I didn't mean to,” she quailed in that same childlike voice that frightened Clay so terribly. He stroked her hair, her shoulder, braced up and rested his cheek on the back of her head, waiting for some sign that she understood.

“Please, Catherine . . . I . . . don't shut me out.”

He felt the first soundless spasm, the first sob that was not yet a sob, and gently, gently, pulled at her shoulder, turning her toward him until, like a broken spring, she unwound all at once and burrowed into his arms, while painful sobs wrenched from her throat.

“Hold me, Clay, hold me, hold me,” she begged, clinging like a drowning person while her hot tears scalded his neck. Her grip was like iron while she quaked wretchedly and cried into him.

“Catherine, oh, God, I'm so sorry,” he said throatily into her hair.

“Mama, mama, it's all my fault.”

“No, Cat, no,” he murmured, clasping her to him all the more closely, as if to pull her within his very body that he might absorb her pain. “It's not your fault,” he soothed, kissing the top of her head while she babbled and cried and blamed herself. All the pent-up tears that Catherine had so long refused to shed for herself came rushing out for her mother while she clung to Clay with arms and hands that could not hold tightly enough. He cradled the back of her head, pulling her cheek against the silken hair of his chest, rocking at times, lost in pity, aching with the feeling of her heaving stomach pressed at last to his, but for the wrong reason. She muttered unintelligible sounds, broken by sobs which Clay welcomed, knowing they were the cure of her.

“It's all my f-fault, all my faul . . .”

He forced her mouth hard against his chest to stop the words. He swallowed convulsively before he could speak.

“No, Cat, you can't blame yourself. I won't let you.”

“B-but it's t-true. It's because I'm pre-pregnant. I should've kn-known he wa-wanted the money . . . ba-bad enough. I hate him, I h-hate him. Why did he do it . . . Hold me, Clay . . . I had to get away fr-from him. I had to, but to get a-away I had to b-be those things he c-called me, but I d-didn't care, I didn't care. You're so warm . . . They never hugged m-me, never k-kissed me. I was good, I was al-w-ways good, just that one t-time with you, but he sh-shouldn't take it out on her.”

Clay's heart thundered at her pitiful outpouring. She babbled on, almost mindlessly.

“I shouldn't have le-left her. I should have stayed, b-but it was s-so awful there when St-Steve left. He was the only one who ever—”

A deep sob broke from Catherine and she clung more desperately to Clay. Now he softly encouraged her, knowing she must say these things.

“Who ever what?”

“Who ever l-loved me. Not even M-Mama could, but I n-never understood wh-why. They never took me pl-places or bought me th-things like other kids got, or played with m-me. Uncle Fr-Frank used to kiss me and I'd pretend he w-was Daddy. Steve loved me, but af-after he was gone there was nobody and I used to pr-pretend I had a baby who'd love me. I thought if only I had a b-baby I'd never be lonely.”

She stopped then, having discovered this truth at last.

Clay squeezed his eyes shut hard. Her heart was hammering against his, her arms clinging tenaciously to his neck. Pity and compassion and the overwhelming need to heal her welled high in Clay. He was deluged by the desire to protect, fulfill, calm her, and to provide the missing years of love that could never be made up for. He fought against tears, holding her long and hard against his body, unable to hold her long enough, hard enough, pressing her so fiercely that at last he opened his legs to let one of hers in, high against him. And hers opened and his knee found shelter against her too. They clung that way, sharing a new bond of warmth and comfort until, pressed between them, the baby objected to all that crowding and moved restlessly within Catherine. A wild exhilaration lifted Clay's stomach, as if he'd just reached the downhill slope of a roller coaster. And everything—the horror Catherine had suffered this day, the first feel of his child's movement in her belly, her own desperate cry for love—made his motions somehow right as his hands skimmed over her body, up her back, down her side, down her warm buttock and leg that lay over his hip. And even as Catherine cried against his chest, Clay found the hollow behind her knee and pulled her more securely into her nestling place. He ran his hand again up her hip, up her side, finding her breast and cradling it, and the side of her stomach with his forearm. She was warm and reaching and unresisting against him, and he whispered raspily against her ear, “Cat, oh, Cat, why did you wait so long? Why did it take all this?”

With a hand, he commanded the back of her head and lowered his mouth into her salt-kiss. Her mouth opened wide and took him in, and it ceased to matter that it was only in desperation she turned to him. It ceased to matter that she might later feel he took advantage of her in her weakness. His hand, warm and soft and seeking, trailed, unchecked, from her full breast to the hard, taut stomach that protruded because of him. He fondled it searchingly, awed by its solidness, by the thought of the life it carried. And as if the baby heard its father's pleas, it moved within. Clay lay stock-still then, stunned, with his palm conforming to the shape of Catherine's flesh, willing the child to move once more. And when it had, and he'd again known the feel of it, Clay reached unhesitatingly to pull Catherine's wide gown up and run his hands over the bare, firm skin beneath. He skimmed his palm again and again over the warm curve of her belly, discovering things that his body had caused in hers: the protruding navel, the engorged breasts, the widened, enlarged nipples, and—yet again—the fluttery motion of life beneath his hand. How often he had wondered. How often he had thought it his right to explore these changes of his making. How often she, too, had longed to share them but had steeled herself against him, shielded in an armor of assumed remoteness.

But what had started out as a journey of pity and compassion became one of sensuality as Clay's caressing hand moved lower, touching the crisp hair that couched the spot where Catherine's burden thrust itself sharply outward from her body. Wordlessly he slipped his hand between her thighs, covering her, swollen there, with the length of his long, closed fingers, pressing gently upward, feeling her pulse throbbing there, learning her. Thoughts of her sexuality, her pregnancy, what he knew he could not do, made him curiously callow in his exploration of her. He moved his hand once more to her stomach.

“Oh, Cat,” he whispered, “your stomach's so hard. Does it hurt?”

She moved her head to answer no, amazed by his naíveté.

“I felt the baby move,” he whispered almost reverently, yet his breath was warm and labored on her skin. “It moved right there under my hand.” He spread his fingers over her stomach again, as if in invitation, but when nothing happened his hand again sought the intimate world between her legs.

And Catherine closed her eyes and let him . . . let him . . . let him, drifting in a myriad of emotions she'd held at bay so long, thinking to her child, It's your father.

And the father's hand filled itself with the mother's body that readied itself for their baby's birth.

“It's too late, Clay,” she murmured once.

“I know.” But he kissed the hard, warm orb of her stomach anyway, then lay his face in the juncture of her legs as if he must, unable to solace himself and her any other way. The child kicked against his ear.

Catherine was drawn painfully back to reality from the secure place in which she'd allowed herself to drift. The thrum of her heart in odd spots in her body told her she had let Clay go too far to pull away from him unhurt when the time came.

“Stop, Clay,” she said in a loving whisper.

“I'm only touching, that's all.”

“Stop, it's not right.”

“I won't go any further. Just let me touch you,” he murmured.

“No, stop,” she insisted, stiffening.

“Don't pull away . . . come here.”

But now she resisted even more, having come fully to her senses.

He moved and tried to take her in his arms, then asked, “Why do you pull away all of a sudden?”

“Because it doesn't seem right with my mother lying in that hospital.”

“I don't believe you. A minute ago you had forgotten all about your mother, hadn't you? Why did you really turn away?”

She didn't know.

Very gently he said, “Catherine, I'm not your father. I won't call you names and make you feel guilty afterward. It's not because of your mother that you turn away, it's because of your father, isn't it?”

She only shivered.

“If you keep pulling away now, he'll have beaten you just as surely as he beat her, only the marks he leaves on you won't go away like hers will, don't you see that?”

“It's my fault he beat her up, because once before I gave in to you. And now here I am again . . . I . . . you . . .” But she stopped, confused, afraid.

“He's making an emotional cripple out of you. Can't you see it, Catherine?”

“I'm not! I'm not! I feel things, I want things, I need things, just like everybody else!”

“Then why don't you let yourself show it?”

“I j-just did.”

“But look what it took,” he said in a pained whisper.

“Get your hands off me,” she quavered. She was crying again but he would not allow her to roll away from him. “Why? What are you afraid of, Catherine?”

“I'm not afraid!” But her voice caught in her throat even as she said it.

He held her flat on her back, silently willing her to admit what it was that had held her emotionally sterile for too long, afraid that what he was doing might backfire and hurt her more.

“Of those names?”

He held her prisoner while her mind raced backward to ugly, unwanted memories which would not set her free. Clay's breath on her face brought her careening back to the present, to this man whom she loved and was so afraid of loving, of losing.

“I-I'm not,” she choked, while Clay felt her pulse pounding against him in places where he held her down. The muscles in her forearms tensed beneath his hands as she repeated, “I'm not, I'm not—”

He eased his hold, prompting softly, “What aren't you? Say it, say it, and be free of it. What?” She ceased struggling against him, and when he had freed her arms she flung one across her eyes and sobbed behind it. With infinite tenderness he touched her breasts, her stomach, the swollen world between her legs again, whispering urgently, “What aren't you, Catherine? Say it, say it.”