Warm Hearts

by Barbara Delinsky

  In greater part, though, her light spirits were due to Brendan. For the first time in her life, she had an ally. He was someone to talk with and play with. He’d proven himself capable of listening and offering compassion and advice. He’d even taken on her mother—something that they’d laughed about afterward but that had meant the world to her. A little help, a breather once in a while—that was all she asked. And Brendan seemed more than willing to provide it. He’d told her to use him. She didn’t even have to feel guilty when she did it.

  So, life seemed a little easier. The knowledge that she’d be talking to Brendan, then seeing him later in the week was the touchstone she needed when those little frustrations piled up. And they did that.

  When he phoned on Monday night and asked about her day, she readily told him about her mother’s call. “The phone rang at seven o’clock this morning, Brendan. That’s six o’clock her time, and mother’s never been a naturally early riser. She was probably counting the hours all weekend.”

  “What did she have to say?” Brendan asked. He had a good idea what the answer was, but he wasn’t about to offer a guess when he knew that Caroline needed to let off steam by relating it all herself. Besides, he took pleasure in hearing her voice.

  “She wanted to know where we went this weekend, what we did and what time we got back.”

  “Did you tell her?”

  “I told her what time we got back.”

  “She wasn’t satisfied with just that, was she?”

  “No. I kind of fudged the rest.”

  “You could have told her the truth.”

  “Are you kidding? And open up a whole other can of worms?”

  Brendan chuckled. “She doesn’t actually think you’re still a virgin, does she?”

  “She pretends I am. I told her that particular truth quite bluntly years ago, but she chose not to hear, and it’s occurred to me since that I’d be wise not to press the point. Do you have any idea what would have happened if I’d told her what we really did this weekend?”

  “What?”

  “AIDS. She would have gone on and on about AIDS.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Oh, yes. She would have asked how well I really knew you and did I know whether you’d had many women before me and was I positively certain you weren’t bisexual and giving me something that could well be fatal.”

  “Damn good thing I ruled it out at the start,” he mumbled in a Lord-help-us tone. “Has she done that sort of thing before?”

  “She’s made general statements about every other sexually transmitted disease. She tells me about so-and-so who contracted such-and-such, and she babbles on for such a long time that I know there’s a direct message in there for me.”

  “She must have known you were sleeping with Ben.”

  “She tried not to.”

  “Did she like him?”

  “Like him?” Caroline echoed tongue-in-cheek. “How could she like him? She never got past the point of wondering whether he was a spy infiltrating the diplomatic corps on behalf of the KGB.”

  Brendan didn’t want to think what the woman would say when she learned that he dealt with terrorism. “She really is an alarmist, isn’t she?”

  “Oh, yes. What bothers me most, I think, is that she should trust me to know what I’m doing and she doesn’t.” Caroline took a deep breath. She’d been annoyed all day by the call from her mother, but somehow, after telling Brendan about it, she felt better. Unburdened. A tiny smile played at the corners of her mouth. “By the way, she said that you had a nice voice.”

  “She did?” he asked, pleased with that.

  “Uh-huh. She said that it was compelling in a gentle way—then she went on to warn me to be careful because men with low, charming voices weren’t always to be trusted. She said that I should be on my guard, that you might try to con me into something.”

  He heard the smile in her voice. “Are you? On your guard, that is?”

  “Sure am,” she said, but the softness of her tone hinted that she wasn’t terribly worried. She trusted him, which was one of the reasons why, when he called on Tuesday night and again asked about her day, she found herself telling him about Paul Valente.

  She was disturbed by the meeting she’d had with Paul that day. Without mentioning names, she briefly filled Brendan in on the situation between Paul and his wife. “He canceled their appointment last week, and this week he came in alone to say that she’d left him. He was really down. I was a little surprised.”

  “That he was so upset?”

  “No, no. I knew he’d be upset. I just didn’t think he’d express it as openly as he did. Other than isolated minutes before or after a session, I’ve always counseled them together. He comes across very differently when he’s with his wife. Alone, he’s a more sympathetic character.”

  “It sounds like he got to you today.”

  “Yes. I feel really bad. He doesn’t want this separation. He wants to work things out.”

  “Is there any chance of that?”

  “Not unless he can somehow convince his wife to sit down and talk, but since communication has never been their strong suit as a couple, the chances of that are slim.”

  Brendan knew what she wasn’t saying. He could hear it in her discouraged tone. “I think you’re blaming yourself for not being able to do more.”

  “Yes,” she said quietly.

  “I’m sure you did what you could.”

  “It wasn’t enough. You know,” she went on plaintively, “it wouldn’t be so bad if he’d have come to me and said that they were separating but that it was the best thing, that he felt relieved because they were really making each other miserable. In a situation like that, I’ve failed but I haven’t. I can tell myself that therapy served a purpose in clarifying their relationship for them. I can look back on it as a last-ditch effort to save something that in the end neither partner cared enough to save. That might have been true for the wife in this case, but not for her husband. He does love her.”

  “So you feel that you’ve personally failed him,” Brendan concluded with compassion. “But the burden of responsibility wasn’t totally yours, Caroline. The fellow’s wife failed him, because she reneged on certain vows she’d once made. She was the one who gave up on the marriage, not you.”

  His words soothed her. The plaintive quality had left her voice. “But maybe I could have prevented it,” Caroline argued more calmly, then tacked on a bewildered “somehow.”

  “You tried your best, didn’t you?”

  “I thought I did at the time.”

  “Isn’t that the bottom line?” he asked softly, then raised his voice a notch. “Hey, I know exactly what you’re feeling. When I was a prosecutor in the D.A.’s office, there was many a case I lost despite weeks and weeks of preparation. I could be totally convinced, I mean convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt, that a person was guilty of the crime for which he was being tried, but if that jury found him not guilty, there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.”

  “Did you ever question your own competence?”

  “All the time. After I lost a case like that, I’d sit down and review everything. There was learning value in it. Sometimes something would come to me in hindsight—something I’d done or hadn’t done that could have been pivotal. When I first started, I made some mistakes. But as time went on, the problem was more often in the evidence itself. In other words, the case as I’d been handed it was not quite strong enough to win that conviction.” He paused for the briefest of breaths. “Maybe the analogy fits here. Maybe the case you were given by this couple just wasn’t strong enough. Certainly, if you tried your best, no one can find fault. The fact that the husband came in to see you today shows that he doesn’t hold you responsible for the separation.”

  Caroline was feeling better because he did have a point. “If you were in his situation, Brendan, what would you feel? Would you be angry at me?”

  Brendan tried to answer as honestly as
possible. He respected Caroline too much to do any differently, and he wanted her respect, as well. Telling her only what he thought she wanted to hear would be counterproductive in that sense.

  “Yes, I’d be angry, but only at first. I’d need to blame someone, and you’d be there. But when I stopped to think rationally, the anger would fade. I’d realize that I couldn’t blame you for something you didn’t create. Hell, you don’t enter the picture of a relationship until it’s in a shambles. Through the course of therapy, you can point out what’s wrong, which I presume you did in this case. You can make suggestions for improving things, which I presume you did, also. You can even try to put those suggestions into effect during your sessions, but when you have only one hour a week to do it—” he exhaled a loud breath “—the odds have to be against you in those tough cases.”

  “It doesn’t seem fair,” Caroline concluded quietly.

  “Life isn’t, that way.”

  Those words were to echo in her mind the next day. When she spoke with Brendan on Wednesday night, she was particularly discouraged. “Karen called this morning in a panic. Her doctor has ordered her to bed until the baby is born.”

  “To bed? What happened?”

  “She started bleeding. It doesn’t have to do with the baby directly, but if she stays on her feet she’s apt to bring on premature labor.”

  “When is she due?”

  “That’s one of the problems. The doctor says that she has another eight weeks to go, but she’s convinced she conceived a month earlier. I’d almost agree with her. She’s huge. She’s been so uncomfortable for so long that we’ve been expecting the baby momentarily.”

  “Don’t they have tests to determine that kind of thing?” he asked. He wished he knew more about the subject. Unfortunately, he was a virgin when it came to pregnancy and babies—not that he wasn’t eager to learn, but eagerness alone couldn’t provide the facts with which to offer Caroline comfort.

  Caroline was every bit as naive. “Your asking me is like the blind leading the blind. I asked Karen the same question. She said something about an ultrasound test—that produces a picture of the baby. From the size of the skull they can tell the stage of gestation but only working up to a certain point in the pregnancy, after which it determines nothing more than the size of that particular baby. Anyway,” she said with a sigh, “Karen didn’t think to have the test done in time.”

  “Oh. Poor kid.”

  “The baby?”

  “Karen. It won’t help if she panics now.”

  “That’s what I told her, too. But she really is distraught. She was planning to work right up to the end. Now she’ll have to miss that many more weeks. She’s convinced that she’s blown a partnership.”

  “Nah. I can’t believe that.”

  “Me, neither, but she does.”

  That he could believe. “Firms foster that kind of paranoia. They hold partnerships as the be-all and end-all, the carrot dangling in front of the associates’ noses. You don’t bring in enough cases, you don’t get a partnership. You don’t bill enough hours, you don’t get a partnership. You alienate one of the partners, you don’t get a partnership. They seem to think it increases productivity, when in the end it only fosters resentment and ill will.”

  “You sound happy to be away from it.”

  “Very. Large firms today are more like businesses than the professional institutions they used to be. Let me tell you, if Karen’s firm denies or even withholds her partnership simply because of maternity matters, she could sue them for discrimination.”

  “What a pain.”

  “Mmm. If her firm does that, she’d be just as well free of it.”

  “The problem is that she doesn’t want to be free of it. She’s worked so hard to get where she is, and when it came to this pregnancy, she desperately wanted everything to work out. To have something like this happen … something she has no control over … she feels thwarted and very frustrated … I feel so bad for her, Brendan!”

  “I know you do,” he said gently, then added, “Hey, maybe you could visit her this weekend. That would probably calm her down … or perk her up … or whatever she needs by then.”

  Caroline had thought of that. It had been one of the first things to come to mind after Karen had told her the problem, and she’d barely kept herself from blurting out the offer. But she’d held her tongue. She didn’t want to go to Karen’s for the weekend. Not this weekend.

  “I could do that,” she said quietly.

  Brendan heard her hesitance and, regardless of its cause, was pleased. He didn’t want her spending the weekend with her sister. He wanted her spending the weekend with him.

  Still, he knew that she’d be torn.

  On the other hand, there was one way to satisfy them both. “How about I drive you up there?” he asked, then went quickly on. The plan was formulating fast, and he liked it. “Philly isn’t so far. We could leave early Saturday morning, which would give you plenty of time to visit with Karen and Dan. After that we could drive just a little farther to one of those special inns you have in your book and spend the night, then return to see Karen again on Sunday before we head back here.”

  It was a super idea, if he did say so himself, and he couldn’t help but smile in a self-satisfied, smugly male sort of way. But the smile faded quickly as it occurred to him that there was possibly one small flaw to his plan.

  Caroline might not be ready to introduce him to her sister.

  “Actually,” he rushed on in the hope of compensating for that flaw, “I have friends in Philly myself. If you preferred, I could drop you at your sister’s Saturday and pick you up there on Sunday. My friends have been nagging me to visit for months, so if you’d rather be alone with Karen, I would certainly understand.”

  “Brendan—”

  “It wouldn’t be any kind of a problem for me. And that’s the truth.”

  “I liked your first idea better,” Caroline said.

  He paused for a single heartbeat. “The one about the inn?”

  “Yes.”

  “Really?”

  “Uh-huh. If you’re sure you wouldn’t mind.”

  “Mind? Of course I wouldn’t mind! After what I’ve been going through here and what I’m bound to find piled up on my desk when I return, I’ll look forward to the break!”

  * * *

  Brendan’s meetings on Thursday were scheduled through to four o’clock in the afternoon. He’d warned Caroline that they might run late, and if that were the case, he’d have to take a later flight home. She had fully reconciled herself to simply seeing him on Friday after work. After all, she reasoned, that was how two good friends who just happened to be lovers would handle a brief separation. There didn’t have to be any late-night reunion. They were both far too level-headed for that.

  Caroline began the evening at her own place. She’d come home earlier than usual, a fact that she didn’t stop to analyze, other than to tell herself she could as easily do paperwork at her kitchen table as at her office desk. That reasoning became moot, though, when the phone started to ring.

  Her mother called, all in a stir about Karen’s problems, but Caroline was able to fudge the facts enough to make her feel better. When, soon after that, Carl called in alarm because Madeline had suggested to him that Karen might not make it through childbirth, Caroline was able to set his brotherly heart—which she was pleased to see still functioned—to rest. She then called Karen herself and was relieved to hear her sounding a little calmer. Karen asked if she’d come to visit. Without a word about Brendan, Caroline said she’d try.

  When the phone lay quiet at last, she returned to her work. She was determined to catch up on every last bit of paperwork so that if she did get to Pennsylvania for the weekend she could do so with a clear conscience.

  Good intentions notwithstanding, she didn’t do much catching up. She did a lot of looking at her watch and glancing across the courtyard and wondering whether Brendan had made the six-o’cl
ock flight or had had to reschedule. When Timothy, who lived in the apartment beneath Connie, came up to borrow laundry detergent, she welcomed the momentary diversion. She did not welcome it, though, when Ben called a few minutes later to ask if she was ready to see him. She couldn’t believe the man’s gall.

  After calmly telling Ben what he could do with his ego, she decided that she’d had enough of the telephone for one night. Turning on the answering machine, she went to sit at the window. She felt odd, filled with a sense of anticipation that was new to her. Anticipation … and restlessness. She got up, wandered around the loft, returned to kneel on the window seat … only to repeat the circle ten minutes later.

  Then inspiration struck. Slipping into a pair of sandals, she grabbed her key and Brendan’s and crossed the courtyard to his building. She hadn’t picked up his mail that day when she’d come home from work; it hadn’t made sense, since he would be returning himself. But she did it now, brought it upstairs, then opened the windows and turned on the fan to move the air in the loft a bit.

  Standing in the middle of the room, she looked around and sighed. She’d done what she’d set out to do. There was no reason why she shouldn’t return to her own place.

  Except that she’d be bored and restless there.

  She felt better here.

  It was the change of scenery, she told herself. For the past three nights she hadn’t budged from her apartment. It was nice to be out. The fact that Brendan’s apartment was hotter than her own didn’t matter. She really did feel better here.

  For several minutes she stood where she was, smiled, then sighed. She tacked loose wisps of hair into her barrette. She smiled again. She wiped the beads of sweat that dotted her nose. She sighed again. Then, nonchalantly, she scanned the apartment.

  His cleaning service had been in while he’d been away, she decided, because the place was spotless. She smacked her lips together and let out a small, idle hum. So she couldn’t waste a little time by cleaning.

  Strolling casually toward the refrigerator, she pulled the door open and looked around. But no, she couldn’t cook dinner. She had no idea what time Brendan would be arriving or whether he’d have already eaten, and anyway, she’d already eaten. Besides, it was hot. Not to mention that the contents of the refrigerator consisted of a carton of cottage cheese, a bottle of ketchup, a pitcher of orange juice, a half-empty box of glazed donuts that were probably stale and a sealed package of bologna. True, his freezer, like hers, was filled with frozen dinners, but she couldn’t prepare him one of those.