Paige didn’t know what to say. She couldn’t grasp a future without Angie. From her first conception of the practice, Angie had played a vital role. “But…what will you do?”
“I called a friend in Manhattan. He knows of two slots for pediatricians—both slightly upstate, but within easy commuting distance. I may look into them.” She paused, expectant in a skeptical sort of way. “What do you think?”
Paige was having trouble thinking, what with her world tipping over again, but she tried. “I think, uh, I think that you can’t possibly go, because we need you here, but if that’s what’s necessary to save your marriage, you’ll have to.” Angie leaving? Sami being adopted by strangers?
Her stomach was a single large knot.
“Nothing’s definite,” Angie said. “I may hate both positions, and Ben may decide to work out of Montpelier, or teach in Hanover, or even commute to New York. But if he wants to go, I can’t say no. He tried here. For ten years he did, for my sake, and we all know what happened. So now I’m trying to listen to what he’s saying. He’s a smart guy. He knew his son. Dougie may only be fourteen, but he’s happy at Mount Court. He could either stay at school here or come with us if we move—not that I love the idea of his staying, any more than I love his boarding now. My heart still rebels. My mind sees the merit in it. Dougie needs to breathe. If the values I’ve spent fourteen years instilling in him haven’t taken by now, they never will.” She took a quick breath. “I’m trying to look realistically at the future. I haven’t done that before.” She searched Paige’s face. “Say something.”
“I can’t. You’ve always known what was best for you.”
“No. I thought I did. I thought that what was best for me was automatically best for Ben and Doug, but I was wrong. What’s best for me is intricately tied up with what’s best for them. They’re individuals with individual needs. If I can’t help satisfy their needs, then satisfying my own becomes meaningless. My happiness is contingent on theirs, which isn’t to say,” she added wryly, “that I’ve become subservient. I won’t go anywhere unless I find something that will give me professional pleasure, and Ben agrees with that. But I can’t be calling the shots all the time anymore. Some of the time. Not all.”
Paige wrapped her arms around Angie.
“Mara missed it,” Angie mused. “She wanted happiness, and it eluded her. We couldn’t understand that, because we saw so much success in her life, only she saw what we didn’t. She saw how easy it was to confuse success for happiness. She saw the potential for more. I want to realize it.”
Paige held on tight.
After a minute Angie asked, “Are you all right?”
Paige let out a shaky breath. “They found a family for Sami.”
“Oh, Lord.” Angie drew back. “Are they taking her now?”
“Not yet. But soon.” Paige started to tremble. “I have to leave now.”
“Where are you going? Let me come.”
“No. I need time. I have to think.”
“Can I talk with you later?”
Paige nodded. At least she thought she did, but she wasn’t sure if the directions she was giving to her body were being carried out. She felt uncoordinated, her steps uneven as she returned to her office. She dropped her purse twice before finally getting a grip on it, couldn’t seem to fit her keys into the ignition of her car, and when she got on the road, she drove for five minutes before looking through the dwindling daylight and wondering where she was headed.
It was with a determined effort that she finally got her bearings. Ten minutes later she drove under Mount Court’s curved wrought-iron arch. One minute after that, she pulled up in front of the Administration Building. Noah’s secretary wasn’t at her desk, so she went right to his door. He was inside, engrossed in a set of spreadsheets. The cuffs of his white shirt had been turned back, the neck button undone, and his tie loosened. He looked like a man who didn’t need an interruption.
She stood at the door, feeling guilty that she had come. Noah had his share of problems with Mount Court. He didn’t deserve her problems, too.
But he had said that he loved her. And, given the devastation she was feeling, no one else would do.
He looked up in surprise and came out of his chair. “Paige. I didn’t know you were coming.” He approached her, frowning. “You look pale.” He drew her into the room and closed the door.
“I’m sorry to bother you. I know you’re busy—”
“Don’t apologize. Never apologize.”
“It’s been a god-awful afternoon, like everything’s unraveling. Angie is talking about moving away, and the adoption agency found a family for Sami.” She looked up at him, letting her eyes say all she couldn’t put into words.
He rubbed her arms lightly.
“It probably won’t happen until after the holidays, but then they’ll take her away from me. She’ll have two real parents and four siblings. And a nice house, I guess. Joan said they seem like good people.” She was suddenly appalled. “But four kids? She won’t get much attention in a family of seven. She’ll just be another kid to wear the hand-me-downs of the ones that came before her. And the family is just moving to Vermont, which means that they don’t know people here. They don’t have an established support network. And if he’s taking a new job, who’s to say the job won’t fall through? Or that he won’t decide he hates it and move somewhere else? Sami can’t be moving around all the time. She needs to be able to settle in one place and stay there.”
“Did you tell Joan that?” Noah asked.
“No. She took me off guard. I couldn’t say much of anything.”
“Certainly not that you want to keep Sami yourself.”
Paige saw the dare in his eyes. She broke away and went to the window. Beyond it, the campus was covered with snow. The occasional student passed by wearing the wool overcoat that was the covering de rigueur for the winter semester, but otherwise the scene was as bleak as her view of the future.
“It isn’t fair,” she said, burying her hands in the pockets of her own wool topcoat. “I didn’t ask for Sami, but suddenly there she was, and I owed it to Mara to take her. So now, just when I’ve gotten used to having her, they find a family. Why didn’t they find one right away? Why did it have to take three months? I mean, it’s not fair to Sami, either. If she were an infant, three months might not be crucial, as long as there was someone to hold her and hug her. But she’s no infant, and it isn’t just any old someone who’s been holding her and hugging her. It’s me. It’s Nonny. It’s you.” Of course, he would be leaving, too. And Angie. And even Nonny, if Sami left. It wasn’t fair.
“I hate change,” she cried. “I’ve always hated change. Most of all, I hate change that happens after you’ve adapted to the change that you didn’t want in the first place.”
Noah came to lean against the wall where the window ended. In a low voice he said, “I don’t think change is the real issue here.”
“It’s definitely one of them,” Paige insisted. “For the first three years of my life my parents dragged me around wherever they went. I never had my own room, never had my own friends, never had much more by way of constancy than a teddy bear, and even that got lost in one of the moves. Finally Nonny put her foot down and took me in. It was another three years before I was willing to spend even a single night away from her house. Stability happens to be very important to me.”
Noah crossed his arms over his chest. “The real issue here,” he went on as though she hadn’t spoken, “is what you want in life. I don’t believe—not for one minute—that you took Sami in only because you felt you owed it to Mara. To do something as momentous as that—and to continue doing it, even when it meant that you had to go through all the red tape of being approved as a foster parent—demanded something else. Somewhere deep inside, you liked the thought of having Sami with you. Maybe it was to fill the void that Mara’s death left, maybe it was to satisfy your own maternal instincts—”
“I don
’t have maternal instincts.”
“You sure as hell do,” he argued, “You may hide behind your profession and call it doctoring, but make no mistake, you mother your patients. You mother Jill. You mother Sara. And you damn well mother Sami. Maternal instincts are as natural to you as doctoring.”
“But—”
“It’s not just that you’ve gotten used to having Sami. She isn’t just a habit. You love her. Face it, Paige. You do.”
“Of course I love her,” Paige admitted. “How could I help but love her? She’s a darling child—”
“No, no,” he interrupted with a wave, “we’re not talking love in the general sense here. You love her like a mother loves her child. You take pride in her accomplishments. You worry when she’s sick. You look forward to coming home from work and seeing her. You give her time that you’d otherwise give to yourself, and you don’t think twice about it, because that’s what mothers do.”
“She’s been a novelty for me,” Paige reasoned. “I’ve never had a child around the house before.”
“And you like it. Admit it.”
“She’s such a good child.”
“And you like having her around,” he challenged.
“Okay.” She couldn’t see bickering the point. “I like having her around.”
“Only you run into trouble when you think of formalizing the relationship. Just like you run into trouble when you think of formalizing our relationship. You shy away from making formal commitments. So where does that leave you?” he asked. “Ultimately it leaves you alone. Sami will go either to this family or another one. Nonny will go back to her own apartment. I’ll go to Santa Fe, and that’ll be that.”
Paige could picture it. Those very images had been hovering at the periphery of her awareness since Joan had called. No. Longer. They had been hovering since she realized she loved Noah.
His arms were at his sides now, his voice sheathed in steel and reminiscent of the man she had first locked horns with three months before. “Your life will be just as it was before Mara died,” he said, “only it won’t be as nice as you remembered it being, because you’ll be coming home every day to an empty house. You’ll be eating dinner alone. You’ll be sitting on that love seat of yours, reading Mara’s letters for the umpteenth time, and you’ll be wondering what Sami is doing, or Nonny, or me. Only we’ll all be gone, and there will be no way you’ll be able to get us back. So, on top of everything else, you’ll be feeling regret. Your nights will be lonely as hell.”
“Why are you saying all this?” she cried. She had come for comfort, not torment.
He didn’t answer, simply stood with his arms limp, but something about the way he was looking at her caused a tugging inside. His glasses reflected the lights in the room. Behind them, she could swear she saw tears.
More gently he said, “I sometimes see my life that way, busy all day and barren at night. So now I’m looking forty-four in the eye, and I’m wondering where I go from here. I’m thinking that I came to this town expecting nothing. And now suddenly there’s something. It’s out there waiting to be grabbed, and even if I go for it, it might slip right through my hands. So I’m in the same quandary as you.”
She went to him and slid a hand in his. “You aren’t just talking about us, are you?”
He shook his head.
“This job?”
He thought for a minute, pursed his lips, shrugged. “I can’t separate the two. Does Mount Court excite me because when I go out of an afternoon I know there’s a chance I’ll bump into you down by the gym, or at the hospital? Is the challenge more meaningful because I can look forward to telling you about it at night?” He looked perplexed. “I didn’t ask for this, either, Paige. I didn’t want entanglements. I came here expecting to stay for a year and then be gone. Sara and I had a lot to work out, still do. The last thing I needed—wanted—was to fall in love with a married woman.”
She was bemused. “I’m not married.”
“You are. To the town. To your practice. To the conviction that things were better before.” He gave her a sad smile and rapped her hand against his thigh. “You came to me for comfort because you’re confused. Well, hell, I’m confused, too. I can’t tell you what to do about Sami. It’s something only you can decide.” His phone rang. “All I know is that you’d better decide quick. I’m no expert in the workings of adoption agencies, but my guess is that once things get moving they may be hard to stop. By the time you make your call, it could be too late. You could lose Sami by default.”
And him, Paige thought. She could lose him, too, if she didn’t take a stand soon. But there were so many issues involved. Her simple life was totally muddled.
The phone rang again.
“One way or the other,” he said in his softest voice yet, “make a decision. Soon. Before the window closes.” He released her hand and went to the phone.
Mara had written about that window, about opportunities here and gone, and Noah was right. The call was hers. Either she went for a new life or she returned to the old. One held everything she knew and trusted, the other was filled with unknowns. The old and trusted was safe and secure, and the new—who knew if it would work?
Needing to think through it all, she turned to leave.
“Wait,” Noah called, frowning into the phone. “Dr. Pfeiffer is here,” he told whoever was on the other end. “We’ll be right over.” He hung up and reached for his jacket. “Julie Engel is at the infirmary. She passed out in the library. The nurse doesn’t like some of the answers she’s getting.”
Paige grabbed on Julie’s problems as an escape from her own. “Like what?” she asked as they hurried out of his office. She was thinking of drugs. The rigid set of Noah’s jaw was consistent with that.
“Like this isn’t the first time she’s passed out,” he said. “Like she’s been feeling sick for the past week. Mainly in the mornings.”
Paige didn’t like the sound of that, either. Not drugs. Sex.
Noah held the door and followed her out. Under his breath, as they strode along, he murmured, “This is not what I need. Not now. Not when things are finally starting to look good here. In the whole month of November, the discipinary problems were petty things—closely missed curfews, a few skipped classes, one boy smoking in the bathroom, and it wasn’t even pot. We’re making progress, at least I thought we were.” He made a sound. “I might have known it would be Julie.”
Deirdre and Alicia were in the small outer room of the infirmary. They moved in on Paige the instant she and Noah entered.
“She just fainted dead away.”
“Flat out on the floor.”
“We got her here as fast as we could.”
“I told her to see the nurse last week.”
“She’s been eating next to nothing.”
“Maybe it’s the flu.”
Paige stopped only long enough to put a comforting hand on each girl’s shoulder. “I’ll take a look. You both sit and relax.”
Julie was lying on the examining table, fully dressed. She had an arm over her eyes.
Paige removed the arm. “How do you feel?”
Julie shot an uneasy glance at Noah, who stood by the door. “I’m okay. I just passed out.”
“People don’t ‘just’ pass out. There’s always a reason for it.” She felt Julie’s forehead, but it was comfortably cool. She found the pulse at her wrist. “I understand this isn’t the first time it’s happened.”
“I was just dizzy the other times.”
“There’s always a reason for dizziness, too. And for morning sickness.”
“I said I was sick a few mornings ago,” Julie grumbled. “I didn’t say I had morning sickness.”
Her pulse was fine. “When was your last period?”
Julie darted another glance at Noah. “Does he have to be in here?”
“The answer,” Noah said, “concerns me and this school.”
Julie gave a high laugh. “Like you were the one wh
o did it?”
Paige caught Noah’s eye and motioned toward the waiting room. “We won’t be a minute.” Noah looked disgusted, but he left. Paige turned back to Julie. “Last period?”
Julie rolled her eyes. “How am I supposed to know? I don’t keep track on a calendar.”
Paige remained patient. “Was it within the last week?”
“No.”
“Within the last two weeks?”
“No.”
“Within the last month?”
Julie was slower in answering and then begrudging. “No.”
“Within the last two months?”
The look Julie gave her was answer enough.
“Ok-ay,” Paige said, helping her sit up. “I think we’ll take a ride to my office. I can examine you there.”
“I’m all right. Really.”
Paige looked her in the eye. “Are you on the pill?”
“Where would I get birth control? My dad would kill me if he ever got a bill for it.”
Which pretty much ruled out a diaphragm, too. “Are you sexually active?”
Julie squirmed. “That’s an embarrassing question.”
“Not for an attractive and often provocative young woman. Let me rephrase it. Are you a virgin?”
“No.”
“Have you been with a man within the last three months?”
“I don’t keep score.”
“Julie.”
She looked away. “Yes, not that it concerns you any.”
“It concerns me a lot,” Paige said, helping her off the table. “It concerns me because, while I don’t approve of sexual activity among girls your age, even more I don’t approve of unsafe sex. You can get birth control without sending a bill to your father. You can get it at my office, or at any clinic. And you can refuse to have sex with a guy unless he’s willing to use something.”
“Well, if he doesn’t happen to have it with him, what do I say?”
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