Another Man's Child

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  Lisa was thrilled about the changes in her body, evidence of the baby growing inside her. She’d tried to set up a dinner date alone with her father, needing to gloat over her progress with the only other family member who cared to hear about it, but Oliver was unusually busy, unable even to meet her for lunch. She’d had to satisfy herself with a shared coffee break at Yale the afternoon after Thanksgiving, and then only because she’d shown up at his office unannounced.

  She was no longer on call at the hospital, agreeing with Debbie Crutchfield that it would be much healthier for her baby if she got her full night’s rest. Nevertheless, she missed the excitement of administering emergency aid.

  And then there was Marcus. The man made her happier—and sadder—than she’d ever been in her life. He also infuriated her, frustrated her and sometimes just plain made her laugh. He’d become a mother hen, watching her every move, denying her even the simple privilege of rinsing the dishes with him, insisting, instead, that she sit at the table while he did the task himself. He monitored every bite she ate, which meant her occasional hamburger and french-fry binges had to happen during the workday when she was usually too rushed to savor them. And he locked the doors and turned off the lights at nine-thirty every night to ensure she got her sleep.

  She hated the unnecessary inactivity he was forcing on her, but she loved the attention he was giving her, or rather, giving her pregnancy. If only he’d be as attentive to her other needs. Because each night, after he saw her settled into bed, he went back downstairs to the office to work, sometimes not coming to bed until the early hours of the morning. Many nights Lisa lay there alone, awake, waiting for him to finally join her, her body taut with need, wanting nothing more than to feel her lover’s arms around her, his body hard and demanding inside hers.

  But she waited in vain. Marcus always eventually climbed in beside her, but he never took her in his arms. Other than the chaste kisses he gave her when he left her in the morning and returned home at night, he didn’t touch her at all.

  In the old days she’d have talked to him about it, just as she’d have argued with him about most of the constraints he was putting on her activities. Now she was just so damn grateful that he was taking any interest at all that she kept her dissatisfaction to herself. She was afraid to rock the boat, afraid that she’d push him right out the door again. And that the next time he wouldn’t be back.

  She missed his friendship most of all.

  Lisa stumbled getting up from the kitchen table the night after Thanksgiving. Marcus’s arms shot out, catching her against him, and her senses flamed. She wanted him so desperately she was almost embarrassed by her need. Rather than stifling her desires, pregnancy seemed to have heightened them. The instant hardening of Marcus’s body told her in no uncertain terms that he still wanted her, too.

  Acting purely on instinct, Lisa moved against him, silently inviting him to make love to her. It had been so long.

  He pushed her away.

  “I have work to do,” he said, retreating to the office.

  Only the fact that he’d left the dishes for her to rinse told her she hadn’t just imagined his shudder of desire. For some reason, Marcus was denying himself something he wanted as badly as she did. He’d had to run away to stop himself for taking her up on her unspoken invitation. But the knowledge did little to ease the ache inside her.

  “WHEN’S YOUR NEXT doctor’s appointment?” Marcus asked the following night over dinner. They were at their favorite pizza parlor, sharing a cheeseless pizza, because Marcus said cheese had too much fat.

  Lisa froze, her slice of pizza six inches from her mouth. “Why?” she asked, remembering his reaction the last time she’d had an appointment.

  “I think I ought to accompany you.”

  Excitement spun through her. “You’re sure?” she asked him. They’d had a wonderful day aboard the Sara, although it was too cold to take her out for a sail—and too dangerous, according to Marcus, for Lisa. They’d spent the day bundled up in sweaters and jeans, picnicking and playing cards in the cabin down below, almost as if nothing had ever come between them.

  He nodded. “There’re a couple of things I want to ask her.”

  “I have my end-of-first-trimester check on Thursday morning at ten,” she said, too relieved to further question his change of heart. But the moment pointed out to her just how far from each other she and Marcus had strayed, that she was so giddy over so mundane a thing. The question was, had they become so adept at hiding from each other that they’d lost their closeness forever, or were they finally on their way home?

  “I’ll meet you at your office. We can walk up together.” His blue eyes met her brown ones and he actually smiled at her.

  For the first time in a long time, Lisa allowed herself to believe in their future.

  “HOW MUCH REST is enough?”

  Lisa lay on the examining table and bit the sides of her cheeks to hold back her smile. Marcus had been grilling Debbie Crutchfield ever since she’d entered the examining room.

  Debbie exchanged a glance with Lisa, hiding her grin behind the clipboard she took a sudden interest in. “Everyone’s different, Marcus,” she said, obviously used to the vagaries of expectant fatherhood. “Lisa’s body will tell her when she needs to rest. I suggest you lay off those books a little. Having a baby is a completely natural process. Just let nature do its job.”

  “Books?” Lisa asked. What books?

  Marcus looked a little sheepish. “I’m going a little overboard, huh?” he asked the doctor.

  “What books?” Lisa asked again. Debbie slid Lisa’s top up almost to her breasts and stretched a tape measure across the slight mound of Lisa’s stomach.

  “I assumed you and Marcus had bought out the local bookstore with all the questions he’s been asking,” Debbie said, stretching the tape across Lisa’s stomach at another angle.

  “My secretary picked up a couple for me,” Marcus admitted.

  Lisa grinned up at him then. He was reading books about pregnancy. “You told Marge?” she asked.

  “A few weeks ago,” he replied absently, his eyes on what the doctor was doing. “What’s the purpose of that?”

  “We monitor the baby’s growth by the growth of Lisa’s stomach.” Debbie went on to explain to Marcus the different ways they’d be keeping track of Lisa’s condition throughout her pregnancy, while Lisa lay between them, a spectator at her own party.

  She stared at her husband, wondering if she was reading too much into his announcement to Marge, into his willingness to be a father, at least publicly. Was she only lying to herself by believing that his reading all those books pointed to a more private commitment? Happiness bubbled up inside her, in spite of her warnings to herself to wait and see. Happiness and a relief so powerful she felt light-headed as she lay there, grinning from ear to ear.

  “What about intercourse?”

  Lisa’s grin vanished and she felt herself turn ten shades of red. She was a doctor, too, for God’s sake. Couldn’t he have saved that question for her?

  “What about it?” Debbie asked, her hand hovering over Lisa’s exposed belly.

  “I was under the impression it might be slightly, uh, risky.”

  Lisa wanted to pull the paper on the examining table up over her head.

  “Not normally. I would think the risk of dying of frustration would be the more serious one,” Debbie said, smiling. She was obviously used to such questions, unlike Lisa who didn’t discuss sex much on the pediatrics ward.

  Marcus looked down at Lisa, his eyes sizzling with a heat she hadn’t seen there in weeks. “Good.”

  Is that why he hasn’t touched me in all these weeks? He’s been worried about the baby?

  “Are you taking your vitamins?” Debbie asked Lisa.

  Lisa nodded, struggling to pay attention to what the doctor was saying. All she could think about was getting her husband alone.

  “And how’s the morning sickness?”

 
; “Better. The soda crackers helped.”

  Debbie pulled a pair of double stethoscopes from her pocket. “By the size of things I suspect we might just get to hear this determined character today,” she said.

  “Really?” Lisa popped up.

  “Lie still and we’ll see,” Debbie said, pushing gently against Lisa’s shoulders until she was flat on the table again.

  Lisa barely felt the chill of the stethoscope against her stomach as she studied the concentrated look on the doctor’s face, waiting while Debbie listened for the baby’s heartbeat. She held her breath, afraid the sound of her breathing would drown out the fainter sound Debbie was seeking.

  The doctor froze suddenly, holding the stethoscope just to the left of Lisa’s belly button. “Don’t move. It’s right here,” she said, sounding excited. “Here, Marcus, let’s put your mind at ease. You come listen first.” She held out the other set of earpieces.

  Lisa looked over at Marcus, impatient for him to hear their miracle, to share with him the most exciting moment of their lives. Hoping to see her favorite smile lighting his features, warming his serious blue eyes, she was shocked at the brief glimpse she caught of his face before he turned, and without a word walked out of the room, closing the door behind him with a definitive click. Her new, oh-so-foolish hopes shriveled and died right there in the examining room, to be replaced by the fear that had become too common a companion these past months. Fear for herself, for her baby, but most of all, fear for Marcus. Was he never going to allow himself the happiness she was trying so desperately to give him?

  At Debbie’s urging she listened to the faint steady beat of her baby’s heart, but rather than the elation she’d expected to feel, she felt only despair. What had she done? Dear God, what had she done?

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  LISA GOT THROUGH the rest of the doctor’s appointment as people usually get through a crisis, simply because she had no other choice. She made some inane excuse for Marcus, something about his being embarrassed showing emotion in front of people, and while she was sure Debbie didn’t buy it, the woman was too kind to say so. And while she listened to Debbie’s orders for more exercise and vegetables over the coming month, her mind was on Marcus, on the depth of despair she knew that frozen look of his hid, on whether or not he’d be waiting for her on the other side of the door—or anywhere.

  She almost wished he’d just leave her and get it over with. The thought panicked her, devastated her, but she honestly didn’t know how much longer she could go on walking on eggs, afraid to upset the fragile peace under which they’d been going about their days, wondering when he might reach his threshold of endurance and walk out on her again.

  She held her breath as she left the examining room, hoping Marcus would be waiting for her, ready to tell her he’d just become so overwrought with joy that he’d needed a moment to compose himself. Or that he’d had an instant of panic as it finally hit home what a mammoth responsibility they’d undertaken by bringing a new life into the world. Anything. She’d accept anything. As long as he was waiting there.

  He wasn’t waiting outside the door. Bracing herself for whatever the next hours might hold, Lisa said goodbye to Debbie, avoiding the pity she knew she’d find in the doctor’s eyes, and took the elevator back downstairs to her office, telling herself to hold it together at least until she got home. She’d think about Marcus then. Just let her get home.

  He was waiting for her in her office, his overcoat already on, but unbuttoned. He looked so solid and male and dependable. Relief flooded through her in that first second when she saw him standing there, but one glance at his face, and the knot in her stomach returned, tightening painfully.

  “Can you leave?” he asked, his jaw clenched with the effort it was taking him to contain whatever emotions were roiling within him.

  Lisa nodded, collected her keys and slipped into her winter coat. Picking up the phone to call her receptionist, she cleared her calendar for the day, with orders to send any emergencies to the pediatrician on call, and followed her husband’s forbidding back out to the parking lot, where they climbed into their respective cars.

  She drove home dry-eyed, a cloud of dread pervading her, and pulled the Mercedes into the garage beside Marcus’s Ferrari, closing the automatic garage door behind her. She felt trapped as she sat there, not wanting to follow him into the house, not wanting to find out how bad things really were. And she was trapped by her own body, too, by the life growing within her from which there was no escape. Trapped by the dreams that made this child so essential to her happiness.

  He was sitting in the middle of the velvet brocade couch in the formal living room, his overcoat tossed carelessly over the back of the matching Queen Anne chair. The coat frightened her. It was unlike Marcus to leave anything lying around.

  Unless he was planning to go out again.

  He stared up at the portrait of his father that hung over the fireplace. His face was no longer a frozen mask. He looked sad, defeated. Lisa felt physically ill, watching him.

  She’d done this to him.

  He reached out his arm to her as soon as he noticed her standing there. “Come. Sit with me,” he said, helping her off with her coat.

  He didn’t sound like Marcus at all, lacking the pride, the self-assurance, that had first attracted her to him all those years ago, when he’d informed her that day outside her new sorority house that he’d carry in the rest of her boxes.

  She thought of those few crucial seconds in Beth’s examining room and wished there was some way she could undo them. She’d meant to give her husband back his dreams. Instead, she’d taken away his selfrespect.

  “I’m sorry.” The words weren’t enough, not nearly enough, but she meant them with all her heart.

  Marcus slid his hand-beneath hers, curling his fingers around her palm. “No, I’m sorry, Lis. I’m sorry I can’t give you the children you need but—”

  “No, Marcus,” she interrupted, needing to make him understand once and for all. “You can’t take responsibility for what happened. You can’t keep blaming yourself for the negligence you suffered as a child. I don’t blame you. I don’t love you any less for it. Your sterility is something that happened to both of us, equally, just as if our house burned down, or we lost all of our money on Wall Street. It was just a piece of bad luck.”

  His jaw clenched, and Lisa wished she could know what he was thinking.

  “—but I’m sorrier still for what I’m about to say,” he continued as if she’d never interrupted him.

  Lisa went cold at his words, her hand still locked with his.

  “I love you, Lisa, far more than anyone or anything else in my life. And I’ll stand beside you until the day I die, as long as that’s where you want me to be.”

  “Always, Marcus. I want you there always,” she said, running her free hand along his cheek. How she loved this man!

  He pulled away from her caress. “Let me finish,” he said, then paused, as if composing himself.

  She sat still, the silence agonizing while she waited for him to go on.

  “We can’t keep skirting around each other, Lis. I don’t want hiding from each other to be our way of life.” He took his hand from hers.

  “Neither do I. You don’t know how much I’ve missed sharing your thoughts.”

  She needed to touch him, but wasn’t going to make the mistake twice. He was talking about bridging the silences between them, yet he’d never seemed farther away.

  “I understand, you know. I know why you enlisted Beth’s help, and I’ve long since forgiven you for what you did, though I’m not even sure that it required forgiveness, that your going to Beth was in any way wrong. I just know I’m okay with it now. I want you to have your baby, Lisa. I want you to be happy.”

  Tears pooled in Lisa’s eyes for the first time that day. There was more. She heard it coming. And she wasn’t ready for it. She didn’t want to know.

  “But I cannot, and never will be, a fat
her to that child.”

  No! Lisa sat silently beside him, holding back sobs with every ounce of strength she had left.

  “I can’t have you expecting it of me, Lis, or hoping that someday I’ll change my mind. You’d only be setting yourself up for disappointment, and it wouldn’t be fair to either of us, or to your child.”

  He sounded more like himself, in control again. And it was that more than anything that convinced Lisa he meant what he said.

  “Do you want me to leave?” she asked.

  “Not unless you want to. Our marriage can continue just as it always has.”

  “You’re saying you want us to live together, all three of us, only one of us gets ignored by another one of us all his life?” She was incredulous.

  Marcus was silent, staring straight ahead, obviously digesting her words. Surely he’d see how unfair that was, how deplorable to bring up a child that way. Surely he’d—

  “I won’t ignore the child, Lisa, any more than I’d ignore anybody living in our household. I just can’t be a father to it. I can’t rejoice in the little things parents get happy about. I can’t take pride in the child’s accomplishments. They aren’t mine to take pride in.

  “I went to your doctor’s appointment today because of you, because I want to know everything you’re going through, because I want to help keep you safe and healthy—not because of the baby.”

  Lisa couldn’t stand it “You’re cheating yourself out of so much, Marcus. It’s like you’re punishing yourself for your sterility, denying yourself a joy you’ve wanted all your life. You could have listened to that heartbeat this morning. You would have felt the wonder. I know you would have, if you’d only given yourself a chance.”

  Marcus stood up, walking over to stand with his back to the fireplace, to the portrait of his stern-faced father. Lisa was frightened by how much the two of them looked alike at that moment.

  “I’ve discovered something these past few months, Lis. First, I was presumptuous enough to think I was doing what was best for you by making plans to move to Chicago. And then you had yourself inseminated, partially because you thought you knew better than I what was best for me. But the truth is, we were both doing each other a grave injustice, taking away each other’s basic rights to decide for ourselves. Only you know what’s best for you, honey, and if you think having your baby and having me, too, is your best shot at happiness, then I’m behind you one hundred percent. But I have to do what’s best for me, too, and that’s to accept that some things will never be. I can’t claim what isn’t mine. I can’t spend the rest of my life pretending. Not even for you.”