Becca's Baby

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  “Have you ever known me not to be patient with her?” he asked slowly, deliberately, all the while sorting through myriad possibilities to explain this strange phone call. This strange night.

  “No,” Randi conceded. “It’s just…she’s upset, Will. I’ve never seen her like this.”

  He could have cheerfully strangled his sister. “Is there someone else?” He choked out the question. Becca had certainly had her share of male admirers over the years.

  And he’d never felt the least bit threatened by any of them.

  “Of course not,” Randi said, her voice sympathetic. “You know Becca’s only interested in you.”

  Yeah. He did know.

  “I can’t say anything more, Will. This is Becca’s to tell.”

  “Come on, Randi,” Will muttered. “At least give me a hint.”

  “She’ll be there soon, so I’m going to go. Just be nice, okay?”

  Confused, with traces of fear still clouding his thoughts, Will gave up. “Sure.”

  “I love you.”

  “Love you, too,” he answered automatically. He hung up the phone and ran downstairs to wait for his wife. Whatever her problem was, they’d deal with it together.

  THE KITCHEN LOOKED exactly as it had when she’d left that morning, startling her with its sameness when her life had changed so completely.

  Will was standing at the door when she came in from the garage. She walked straight into his arms. Held on.

  “I was worried about you,” he said, his words muffled against her ear.

  “I know.”

  He smelled good, familiar, a combination of the shampoo they used and his musky aftershave. He was still in his suit.

  “What’s wrong, Bec?” he asked gently. He pulled back to look at her. “What’s wrong?”

  Becca met his gaze bravely for a second and then broke away. She’d gained a little strength from Randi. Was a little clearer about this whole mess. She just hadn’t come to grips with any of it yet.

  “Let’s go into the other room,” she said. Will tried to keep hold of her hand, but Becca, pretending not to notice, slipped away from him. In their windowed sitting room, she took her usual seat on the leather sofa, staring out the glass to the desert behind their house.

  Will sat beside her, taking her hand again as he turned toward her.

  “Tell me.”

  “I went to the doctor today,” she started, and realized her mistake immediately. His eyes filled with horror. And fear.

  Becca’s heart cried for him. For both of them. Her being ill might have been better news.

  “Randi said you weren’t sick,” he said. His lips were thinned, his face grim.

  “I’m not.” She took a deep breath. Forced herself to look at him. “Will, I’m pregnant.”

  She’d have given anything to spare him the shock, the fear, the trapped feeling she’d been experiencing on and off for most of the past week. And to spare him the heartache of what was to come. But the child was his, too. He had a right to know.

  And she needed him. She wouldn’t make it through this without him.

  Emotions crossed his face so quickly she had a hard time keeping up with them. She recognized shock, which she’d expected. But the happiness…

  “Did you say pregnant?” he asked, his voice filled with disbelief. His whole body seemed to be smiling as he anticipated her answer, awaited her confirmation.

  No, Will, don’t do this to yourself. This isn’t good news.

  Becca nodded.

  “We’re pregnant?” He scooped her right up off the couch, swinging around in circles, laughing with pure unadulterated happiness.

  Becca gave a small knowing smile. A shrug. Reality was going to set in. And with it the terrible weight of depression, of panic, that she’d been fighting all day.

  Looking up at the man she adored, the man she’d spare pain at any cost, she was surprised to see tears of joy matting his lashes. Will never cried. In the twenty years they’d been married, she’d never once seen him cry. Not even during all those disappointments. He took one after another with a strong back and dry eyes. Becca had shed enough tears for both of them.

  “We’re pregnant!” he suddenly hollered at the top of his voice.

  Becca started to cry again. And waited for his reaction. He’d catch up with her soon enough.

  And somehow they were going to support each other when it happened.

  “You told Randi?” he asked, gazing down at her as he still held her in his arms.

  Becca nodded and continued to wait. Surely he was going to see the pitfalls. The difficulties of even attempting to have a baby at their age. She’d already known—and then discovered the problems were worse than she’d thought when the doctor had described them all in exhaustive detail. Randi had shown concern, too, even before Becca had told her what the doctor had said.

  But Will didn’t seem to understand. Not yet, anyway.

  “Have you told anyone else?” Will asked. He finally set her down, but didn’t let go of her. Taking both her hands in his, he swung them, looking down at her belly. “We have to call your mother. And mine, too.”

  Will’s parents and three brothers, as well as Randi, all lived in Shelter Valley.

  She didn’t think they should call anyone.

  She wouldn’t even have told Randi if she’d had any other choice, if she’d been capable of pulling herself together without help.

  Will frowned. Their clasped hands lay still against their thighs. “You aren’t with me here,” he said. “What’s wrong, Becca? Is…is there something wrong with the baby?”

  Becca shook her head. “We’re forty-two years old, Will,” she said softly, looking up at him through teary eyes as she attempted, gently, to help him along. “The risk of birth defects is so much higher now, at my age—it’s scary.” She shook her head. “And we’re far too old to be coping with midnight feedings and chasing a toddler around the house.”

  “We’ll manage,” he said just as gently, his voice coaxing. “Others have done it.”

  Pointing at the glass walls surrounding them, Becca tried again. “This house isn’t meant for a child, Will. It’s accidents waiting to happen. And our careers aren’t conducive to child-rearing, either. We’re out late more nights than not.”

  “The house can be made baby-proof, Bec. We just never had reason to worry about it before now. And if it can’t, we’ll move. A house is a small thing.”

  “And is your job or mine a small thing? The dean of a top university unable to meet his social obligations because he was home changing diapers?”

  Will frowned. “You’re looking for problems, Becca,” he said. “Sure, we’re going to have adjustments to make, and no, it’s not all going to be easy, but certainly our baby will be worth every effort.”

  Becca wished he wouldn’t make this so hard. Wished he wouldn’t give her even a glimmer of hope when she knew deep inside that there was none at all.

  “The doctor’s concerned about my blood pressure. It’s too high.”

  “We’ll watch it closely,” he said, nodding.

  If only it was that easy.

  “There’s the risk of a weak placenta, which could not only cause me to lose the child but would then probably lead to hemorrhaging, as well, which puts my life further at risk.”

  His jaw tight, Will dropped her hands.

  “And like I said, the chance of birth defects in pregnancies over forty is much higher, and for a first pregnancy all the risks multiply.” This, she thought, was perhaps the most compelling argument of all. The greatest fear.

  The words came pouring out of her, almost verbatim from her telephone conversation with Dr. Hall. Becca wished for a return of the numbness she’d felt during her meeting with the doctor. It was far preferable to the weight of depression pulling her down now.

  “I could develop kidney or bladder problems, and chances of a severe hormonal imbalance are greater.”

  Will’s expression
was impassive.

  “All that aside, how fair is it to bring a child into the world whose parents will be retiring before he starts college?”

  “Do we have any other choice?” he asked, but the question was clearly rhetorical.

  Muscles in his jaw worked. Nothing else about him moved.

  Swallowing, Becca knew that a day she’d thought couldn’t get any worse just had.

  “Dr. Hall says that I’m high-risk, Will. She assumes we’re going to terminate the pregnancy.”

  The words sounded worse out loud than they did in her head. Worse in her own home than they had in Randi’s.

  “Did you tell her that?” His eyes were like stones, flat and hard.

  “Of course not! I didn’t do anything but listen. This was all her idea.” Which made it so much worse. A medical professional had just told her she shouldn’t give birth to her baby.

  “Then we’ll go to another doctor. And I thought your doctor’s name was Anderson.”

  “It is,” she said. Her head hurt. Her face hurt. Her whole body hurt. “I went to a woman’s clinic in Tucson today.”

  Still frowning, immobile, Will asked, “Why’d you do that?”

  As if it really mattered.

  “I wanted the anonymity.”

  “Why?”

  She didn’t know why. She’d just somehow felt that if she’d gone to her own doctor in Phoenix, a doctor who knew her, the answer could have been even harder to take. Not that going somewhere else had done any good on that score.

  Or had it?

  Becca didn’t know where the thought had come from, but was there another reason she’d chosen to go to Tucson, a place where no one knew her? Had she maybe, in the back of her mind, chosen the clinic because she knew they did abortions?

  Sick to her stomach, Becca sank to the couch.

  She didn’t want to terminate her pregnancy. She honestly, soul-deep, didn’t want to do that.

  But she didn’t want to be pregnant, either. Not at forty-two. Not with all the risks. To her. To the baby.

  Pregnancy at twenty-two or at thirty-two was wonderful. At forty-two it was petrifying. She was middle-aged. Fighting high blood pressure.

  People her age didn’t have babies. They had grand-babies.

  Will joined her on the couch. Took her hands again. “Talk to me, Becca,” he pleaded softly.

  His eyes, when she met them, glowed with the love she’d taken for granted since she’d been in junior high. It gave her the strength to be honest with him.

  “I don’t want to have a baby,” she whispered.

  Giving her hands a little squeeze, Will smiled gently. “Of course you do. You love babies. This is our dream come true, Bec.”

  “No, Will, not anymore.” She stopped briefly when she saw the remoteness that came over his face. But she had to continue. “I’m too old. I’m scared to death, afraid of the risks.”

  Understanding, love, lit his eyes again. “I’ll be right here with you every step of the way,” he tried again earnestly. “Together we can do anything.”

  “No, we can’t.” She shook her head. “We couldn’t make a baby twenty years ago, and we can’t make one now. The chances of Down Syndrome, of other defects…” Her voice trailed off.

  He sat back, stared at her almost as if he’d never seen her before. “You aren’t actually suggesting that we do what that quack doctor recommended, are you?”

  Dr. Hall was not a quack. But Will knew that. He knew Becca would never have gone to a doctor who wasn’t completely and properly certified.

  “She didn’t recommend an abortion, Will, she just assumed it was the only course to take. And—” Becca paused “—I’m thinking about it.” The last words were whispered, and ended in tears. She hated herself. Hated her body and its aging. Hated a fate that was so cruel it granted her life’s wish when it was too late to let the seed bear fruit. This was far worse than never having been pregnant at all.

  Will didn’t say a word. He wouldn’t look at her, either. His face was that of a stranger. Because she’d known him all her life, he’d never been a stranger to her. She got scared all over again.

  “I don’t know what else to do.” She sniffled, thought about getting up to find a tissue.

  “I can’t stop you, of course,” Will said, his voice devoid not only of warmth but of any familiarity at all. “But I would at least ask that, before you do anything, you get another opinion. Preferably from your own doctor, because she knows you, knows your history.”

  “Okay.” She nodded through her tears. And then said, “Thanks,” when Will handed her the box of tissues from the end table.

  Heading toward the door, he turned back. “You’ll call tomorrow?”

  Beyond speech, Becca nodded—watched as her husband walked out of the room. And felt as if he’d just walked out of her life.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE NAYLOR WOMEN, Becca’s sisters and mother, met at the Valley Diner for lunch the following Wednesday. Without Becca.

  “What’s up with her, Ma?” Betty, the oldest, asked when Sari delivered Becca’s apologies.

  Smiling to herself, Sari listened while her mother assured her two eldest sisters that Becca was extremely busy with her new city-council position. In a flowered circa-1945 dress, cinched in tight at the waist, Rose Naylor held court—as charming and as self-involved as usual. It hardly mattered that she didn’t know what she was talking about. After years of not being heard, Becca had stopped telling her mother any details about her life, and Rose, being Rose, didn’t realize that.

  Becca was in Phoenix. But she’d rather skillfully avoided telling Sari why she was there.

  “Is Mayor Smith still giving her a hard time about the money for Save the Youth?” Janice asked, frowning.

  “I’m sure he is,” Rose said. Shoulders back and chest held high, showing off beautifully the vintage cameo brooch she wore, Rose sounded like quite the authority. “You know, that boy never did have a thought for himself. His old granddad leads him around by the nose. Always has.”

  Sari could have told them that Becca had left George Smith, Jr., in the dust two weeks ago, that she’d already located two possible funding sources. But she didn’t. She was the baby in the family. Nobody had ever listened to her. Except Becca.

  Betty and Janice nodded in unison. At forty-five and forty-six, the women were both striking to look at, with the big brown eyes and chocolate-colored hair all four Naylor girls had been born with. Sari had always thought Betty and Janice were more like twins than merely sisters. Each seemed to know what the other was thinking. They had the long Naylor legs, too, though Janice had never lost the weight she’d gained with her third child.

  Taking a notebook from her purse, Betty looked around the table expectantly. “We might as well go ahead, even though Becca isn’t here,” she said. “We have a schedule to keep if we’re to get this finished in time for Becca’s Fourth of July celebration. So, what did everyone find out?”

  “Samuel Montford never actually earned a college degree,” Janice reported, pulling a folded sheaf of papers from her purse.

  “Sure he did,” Rose interjected. “He had several of them. They’re still hanging in the student-union building at the university.”

  “That’s what I thought, too,” Janice said, leaning forward as she met each of their gazes in turn, her eyes wide with surprise. “But they were all honorary. He was a student at Harvard, some say he wanted to be a professor, but then his father died and he had to take over managing the family fortune.”

  “How old was he?” Sari asked. She couldn’t explain her unusual interest in this project they’d all taken on for Becca, researching Shelter Valley’s founder for the dedication ceremony of Samuel Montford’s statue in the town square on the Fourth of July.

  “He’d just turned twenty.”

  Everyone knew that Samuel Montford had settled Shelter Valley in the early 1870s, and they knew a few other facts—for instance, that Montford Un
iversity’s famous code of ethics was the result of values he’d learned while living with various Southwestern tribes. But much of the man’s life had been kept private until now, a hundred and fifty years later.

  Becca, who loved Shelter Valley more than just about anyone did, was setting out to fix that. She’d lobbied for the monument made in Montford’s likeness, and held fund-raisers for almost five years to commission the statue. She was also chairing the committee in charge of this year’s Independence Day celebration.

  Becca believed that by preserving the town’s heritage, they could preserve the town’s character, even though the world was growing so much smaller—and Shelter Valley so much bigger—with the advent of all the new communication technology over the past ten years.

  As usual, the rest of the Naylor women were right beside her.

  “He was originally from Boston, as we all know,” Janice continued. Her assignment had been the early years of Montford’s life. She’d found much of her information in the newly released journals, but had been corresponding with some descendants she’d located in Boston, as well.

  “He moved to the Arizona territories in the late 1860s,” Sari said. “He was only twenty-four at the time.” Her assignment had been the later years.

  “He had several offspring,” Rose piped up. “And he was married when he settled in Shelter Valley. Did he bring his wife with him from the East?” She was in charge of the descendants. She’d visited a family history center in Phoenix and discovered a lot of information in their archives.

  “No.” Janice frowned. “That part’s really sad.”

  “He came out here alone with kids?” Betty asked. Sari couldn’t tell if her eldest sister was impressed by that possibility or thought the man was out of his mind.

  Shaking her head, Janice was solemn. “He fell in love with a black woman who was the housekeeper for one of his scholarly acquaintances from Harvard. He married her, too.”

  “White men usually didn’t do that in those days,” Rose told them, as if they didn’t all know that segregation was alive and well in the mid-1800s.