Close to Her Heart

by C. J. Carmichael

Dani and Adrian eventually ordered food, which they ate with little enjoyment. Adrian didn’t finish the bottle of red. But he came close. He didn’t mention the boutique hotel again, and Dani didn’t dare remind him of the idea. Her news had been a real mood-buster. She got that.

  She saw now how totally naïve she’d been to hope that on some level Adrian might see the baby as good news.

  He’d made it pretty clear that he’d prefer the problem to just—disappear. And he’d be even more determined for her to have an abortion if he knew there was a chance the child had Downs.

  So easy for him to say. But to him the abortion was an abstract procedure. He wouldn’t have to book time off work, submit his body for the surgery—and feel the loss of the life that was currently inside her.

  Tears dripped down to her eggs Florentine. Adrian didn’t notice. He was on his phone, scrolling through emails or something.

  She could imagine how Miriam and Eliot would react if they were here, witnessing this scene. They’d be so angry on her behalf. And they’d wonder why she wasn’t angry, too.

  But how could she be, when it was easy to see Adrian’s side? He was right when he said keeping the baby didn’t make sense for her from a career or financial viewpoint. Normally she was a logical person. So she understood where he was coming from.

  Yet, every instinct in her body was urging her to protect and nurture the little life within. At age thirty-four this wasn’t necessarily her last chance to have a baby. However fertility rates in women dropped sharply after thirty-five, so it might be.

  After Adrian paid the bill, he accompanied her outside, where a gentle drizzle had them lingering under the awning to say their goodbyes. Adrian took her hands. “We need to talk about this some more. But first I want you to think. Life is good for you—for us—right now. All of that will change if you decide to keep this baby.”

  This baby. Not our baby.

  “Fair enough. But I’d like you to try and see this from my point of view. It’s easy to tell someone to have an abortion. But actually doing it…?”

  “That would be hard. I understand. But sometimes doing the right thing is hard.” He swallowed, then squeezed her hands. “Very hard.”

  Dani thought of the barn cats at the Circle C, how sometimes they’d given birth to unexpected litters and her father had taken the unwanted kittens down to Serendipity Creek. How she and her sisters had cried. Her mother, too, turning her back so she wouldn’t see.

  But Dani had.

  It was one thing to say you believed in a woman’s right to choose. She did believe that. As had her mother, and the minister at their church. But when the choice was yours to make, then it got personal.

  “Let’s have dinner on Wednesday,” Adrian said. “Your place. I’ll order Thai food, if that’s okay.”

  She nodded. If the conversation had gone differently, she would have told him that she had a doctor’s appointment on Wednesday afternoon and invited him to come with her.

  As it was, she didn’t.

  *

  Dani was so nervous the day of her doctor’s appointment, she could hardly eat. She’d been lucky enough to have only brief periods of nausea so far in her pregnancy, so she didn’t blame hormones. This was all nerves.

  She had a class to teach in the morning, her Intro to Psych class. It was held in an auditorium-style lecture hall holding hundreds of students, one of whom was her niece, Portia. Mattie’s daughters were both beautiful and petite like their mother. While Wren was the more studious of the two, and in this way so much more similar to Dani, for some reason she had always had a closer connection to Portia who was sweet and loved fashion and boys more than she seemed to care for books.

  Dani knew that while her sister had encouraged her daughters to move away from their home at Bishop Stables near Big Arm, Montana, to go to college, she’d hoped that they would both pick the University of Washington where they would have each other—and their Aunt Dani—for moral support.

  But Wren had chosen to go her own way, moving to Boulder where she attended the University of Colorado. Besides being academically inclined, Wren was also the more self-sufficient of the twins, something Dani didn’t think Mattie had appreciated until after the twins had left home.

  And maybe that was why Dani felt a stronger connection to Portia. Portia needed people and she liked being around family. She also sort of hero-worshipped Dani, always commenting on how much she liked the clothes her aunt wore, the Volvo coup she drove, her elegant condo. Portia went so far as to copy the way Dani styled her hair and applied her make-up.

  The first time Portia had been in her luxury condo she’d exclaimed, “I feel like I’m in a movie!”

  Before Christmas, when Portia’s parents had first decided to split up, Portia had gone through a rough patch. She’d spent too much time partying and hanging out with the wrong friends. Her grades had suffered, too. But over the holidays, she’d had good visits with both of her parents, and had come back to college a more mature young woman.

  Dani had been relieved when she stopped hanging out with the party animals and began focusing more on her studies.

  She also seemed to have a new guy in her life, and often sat beside him in class. A tall, skinny, dark-haired boy named Austin Bradshaw. The kid’s hair was always in his eyes but he had a disarmingly nice smile. Dani could only name a handful of her students, but she knew Austin. He had the best grades in the class.

  He was also, she understood from Portia, a novice rodeo competitor. This summer he planned to earn money on the circuit, riding bulls and bareback broncos. Dani had been meaning to invite the two of them for dinner one night. But the pregnancy had derailed her in more ways than one. She really needed to be a better aunt.

  After class, Dani waved at her niece, indicating that she wanted to talk. This was a lot easier to do now that Portia no longer to chose to sit in the far back rows. Portia said a few words to Austin, who nodded then took off. Portia waited until the stream of students leaving the hall had ebbed before making her way down to the lectern where Dani was slipping her notes back into her briefcase.

  Dani gave her niece a hug. “I’m sorry I didn’t call you this Sunday. It’s been a while since we’ve had one of our dinners.”

  “That’s okay. I went over to Austin’s. He lives with his dad and they’re both really good cooks.”

  “You and Austin seem to be getting along well.”

  Portia’s cheeks pinkened. “Yeah. Though sometimes I wonder if he likes my dad more than me. He knows more about Dad’s years in the rodeo than I do.”

  Wes Bishop had been a rodeo cowboy when Mattie met him, and he’d remained one throughout their almost twenty years of marriage. There was no doubt all the travel and time apart had put a strain on their marriage and had led to its ultimate break-down.

  But Dani felt that the two of them were at their core incompatible, both wanting something different out of life. It seemed like they were in the process now of working that out. She hoped they would both end up happier—and not hurt Portia or Wren too much in the process.

  “Have you talked to your sister and mom lately?”

  “Wren is good. With Mom it’s hard to tell. She and dad, well…you know.”

  Dani felt a twinge of guilt. Sage had gone to visit Mattie when her marital problems first started. She should try to take a trip out to Montana, as well. But given what was going on in her life, she just couldn’t see how to make it work. Perhaps the best she could at this time was make sure Portia was doing okay.

  “Would you and Austin like come over to my place for dinner this coming Sunday?”

  “Thanks, I’d love that. Not sure about Austin. He has a big paper due on Monday.”

  “Well, if he finishes early, let me know. I’d be happy to see him, too. Sunday around six o’clock?”

  “Thanks!” Portia gave her a farewell hug and Dani wondered if she’d noticed her aunt’s thickening waistline. She—and the rest of the family—would soo
n have to be told soon.

  But first, Dani had to put in a few hours at the lab. Then go to her doctor’s appointment.

  Normally, Dani loved the hours she spent with Dr. Jenna Dayton at the Early Childhood Cognition Lab. She and Jenna had met at a conference three years ago. Jenna was about eight years older, a freckled, golden-haired woman with an incredible ability to focus intently on whatever subject was at hand.

  She and Jenna had several long conversations at the conference, and about a week later Jenna had expressed interest in having Dani move to Seattle and join her research team. It had taken a while to organize the new job, but eventually it all came together. Dani was thrilled at the chance to live again in the city she’d enjoyed so much in her undergrad years. More importantly Jenna’s offer gave her the chance to focus on research she found fascinating: studying fairness and how the concept developed in preschool children and then played out in academic success later in life.

  Dani and Jenna were looking for answers to questions like: At what age did a child develop a concept of fairness? Was a sense of fair play innate to humans? Or did children have to be socialized to perceive it? And did the ability to perceive and care about fairness have any impact on later academic success?

  Their biggest challenge at this early stage of research was designing tests for children who were too young to communicate by means of language.

  But this challenge was also what made the work so interesting.

  The hours after lunch flew by for Dani, and she might have missed her doctor’s appointment if she hadn’t set her phone to give her a thirty minute reminder. She closed down her laptop and put away her papers. “I have an appointment,” she told Jenna, working across the hall in her neat-as-a-pin office.

  Jenna gave a distracted nod. “See you tomorrow,” she mumbled.

  Outside the day was moody, hinting at rain but not quite delivering it. Dani hurried to the clinic where she’d had her ultrasound last Friday and where her obstetrician, Gwen Fong, had her office.

  This would be her third appointment with the doctor, and compared to this one the first two had been a breeze. She’d been lucky to have a relatively easy first trimester, with only fatigue and occasional nausea to deal with. From her conversations in the waiting room, she knew other women were not so fortunate.

  But it seemed fate had caught up to her at last.

  What would Dr. Fong have to say about that ultrasound? Now that she was about to find out, Dani wondered if she had the courage to deal with what lay ahead.

  The first part of her appointment went fine. She was measured and weighed. Her blood pressure looked good, all was progressing as normal. Then Dr. Fong came into the room and took a seat in the chair next to the examining table upon which Dani was sitting.

  Dr. Fong was barely five feet tall, with an apple-shaped body, round face, tiny pointed chin, and kind brown eyes. Those eyes met Dani’s directly as she lowered her voice and said, “About your ultrasound…”

  Dani realized she was holding her breath. She let out the air wishing she had a hand to cling to other than her own.

  She missed the first couple of sentences the doctor said. “Pardon me?”

  Patiently the doctor went over the facts again. “Your screen test results suggest you’re at risk of having a baby with Down Syndrome. What happens next is up to you.”

  “M-my choices?”

  “You can choose to undergo diagnostic testing, to find out for sure. There are three options here.” The doctor opened a file and pulled out a brochure. “Here. You might want to follow along with this while I explain.”

  She pointed to a heading Amniocentesis.

  “This is a procedure that tests the amniotic fluid surrounding the fetus.”

  Dani had read about this in her pregnancy books. Another purpose of the amniocentesis was to predict the sex of the baby. She wished that was her primary concern right now. But the test, as she recalled, carried risks. “What’s the chance that an amniocentesis could result in miscarriage?”

  “It isn’t trivial,” Dr. Wong admitted. “About one in every two hundred.”

  “So if I take the test, I could lose a perfectly healthy baby?”

  “That is possible, unfortunately.” Dr. Fong flipped the page of the brochure and pointed to a new heading. “However the other two screening tests carry even higher risks. Chorionic villus sampling—where we take cells from your placenta to analyze the fetal chromosomes—has about a doubled risk of miscarriage compared to the amniocentesis. While percutaneous umbilical blood sampling—where blood from a vein in the umbilical cord is examined for chromosomal defects—is even riskier. I wouldn’t recommend we do that unless the test from the amniocentesis was unclear.”

  The information washed over Dani like words spoken in a foreign language. She stared at the headings in the brochure and tried to focus. “How much time do I have to decide?”

  “The sooner the better. In case you decide not to carry the baby to term.”

  The word “abortion,” though unspoken, hung in the air between them. Dani wished she had someone who loved her sitting in that empty chair, someone to help her weigh the pros and the cons.

  “What would you do if you were in my position?”

  Dr. Fong leaned back on her stool. “I don’t have to speculate. I was in your situation, three years ago when I was pregnant with my second child.”

  Suddenly the barrier between doctor and patient slipped away and in that instant Dani felt they were two women talking heart to heart. “So you had an abnormal ultrasound, too?”

  Dr. Fong nodded.

  “And you—?”

  “Opted to have an amniocentesis. In our case the results were negative. We had a perfectly healthy little boy. I wish I could guarantee you the same outcome. But I can’t.”

  “No. I understand.” She hesitated. “What would you have done if the result was positive for Downs?”

  “I can’t tell you. My husband thought we should terminate for the sake of our first child. But I—I really can’t say what we would have decided if we had been faced with that scenario.”

  Dr. Fong got up from the stool and made some entries on the computer at the corner of the examining room. As she typed, she still managed to speak. “Go home and discuss this with your family. You can call the office with your decision about whether to take the tests. Don’t rush your decision, but if you could get back to us within a few days, that would be good.”

  *

  “Your new client is in reception. I’ve put a thermos of coffee in the small conference room, as well as pitcher of ice water.” Paige Blythe unearthed a small notebook from beneath a mound of papers on Eliot’s desk. She was looking very spring-like today in a floral dress accessorized with dangling tangerine-colored earrings. It was the sort of outfit only a woman in her twenties, like Paige, could get away with.

  His assistant’s temperament matched the cheery colors she was wearing. She was also well organized, efficient and had the special talent of always knowing where Eliot misplaced things. In the three years they’d worked together, she’d managed to become invaluable to him, and he accepted the notebook gratefully. He’d tried attending meetings with just his i-Pad, but found the electronic tablet created a barrier between him and his clients. Real paper and pens were friendlier.

  “Thanks, Paige.” Quickly he flipped to where he’d jotted down information from his initial phone call with this client. Lizbeth Greenway, married in the state of Washington eight years to Nick Greenway. No children. Currently separated from spouse and looking to initiate divorce proceedings. Both spouses worked at Allez—an on-line service designed to be a one-stop destination for working parents, offering everything from diaper services to “build a playground in your backyard” kits. The firm had recently gone public and based on market cap was currently worth about twenty million.

  Successful, jointly-owned companies tended to make for messy divorces, Eliot reflected as he made his way to the
reception area. But as soon as he saw Lizbeth Greenway get up from the chocolate brown leather chair to shake his hand, he realized the case was going to be even more complicated than he’d thought.

  Lizbeth Greenway was pregnant.

  Her baby bump was small, but clearly outlined by the stretchy tunic top she was wearing over skinny jeans and fashionable heels.

  This reminded him of Dani, and for a second he lost his composure. He hadn’t spoken to her since her lunch date with Adrian on Sunday. He knew that secretly she’d hoped Adrian would be thrilled about the baby. Thrilled enough to ask her to marry him.

  But if that had happened, Eliot figured Dani would have called him and Miriam to share the good news.

  So it probably hadn’t happened that way. And Eliot felt guilty about being happy that it hadn’t.

  “Eliot Gilmore?”

  Quickly he recharged his smile and held out a hand. “Nice to meet you, Lizbeth.” They’d already agreed to skip formalities in their initial phone conversation. “My assistant Paige has set things up for us in one of the small meeting rooms.” He gestured to the open door that led out of reception, then waited for her to precede him. “Turn left, and it’s the first door on your right.”

  He followed her into the conference room, almost shutting the door, but leaving a one inch gap. Being alone with female clients in closed rooms was something he avoided.

  Especially beautiful, young ones. Even if they were pregnant.

  He placed Lizbeth in her mid-thirties. She had wavy auburn hair, a wide mouth that probably looked lovely when she smiled and deeply set brown eyes, which were currently shimmering with moisture.

  These tears were as yet unshed. But by her blotchy skin and puffy eyes he could tell she’d done a lot of crying lately.

  “Beautiful sunny morning, isn’t it?” The window was south-facing and the room was bright as a result. The light caught the colors of the oil painting on the far wall, bringing out the shades of blue, gray and white in the ocean scene. On the small, circular table was the promised thermos of coffee, a tray with sugar and cream, coffee mugs and spoons, as well as the pitcher of water and tall crystal glasses. Tucked in amid all this was a box of tissues.