At the hospital, the route to the intensive care nursery was all too familiar. They knew the suiting-up routine by now, and once gowned and masked, they were admitted to the unit where Dob was one of many preemies.
They found him awake in his plastic Isolette.
"Hi, Dob," Derek said gently, as he always did. "Hi there, fella." Dob wriggled in response to Derek's voice.
"See that? He knows you," the nurse said, smiling in satisfaction.
Eve leaned anxiously over the baby. She tried to ignore the noises coming from the monitors, the screens that told their tales of the preemies' health. A loud beeping noise startled her. A nurse rushed over, saying, "There, there, my little man, you've just rolled over on one of these wires and set it off. Let's move you a bit."
"Are you sure he's okay?" Eve asked anxiously. She hated to see him moved. The needles attaching the wires and tubes to his arms and legs looked so uncomfortable, though she'd been assured they weren't.
"He's fine. I believe it's time to turn him so he'll be more comfortable.
Derek slid his arm around Eve. "We'll come back first thing in the morning. Okay?" He knew she didn't like watching as the baby was manipulated this way and that. She was always concerned that he was hurting.
Eve nodded and allowed Derek to guide her out of the room. She removed her gown and mask in silence.
"He looks good, Eve," Derek said as they left the hospital. "He's gaining weight, and he's better every day." Dob was better; the doctor said so.
"I don't know," Eve said. "He still looks pretty sick." She was thinking that Dob needed machinery and medicine to survive, and if he made it, then what? Would he be normal? Have developmental issues? Was his life going to have the quality that Eve had been so sure of when everything had looked optimistic, before Kelly's accident, before Dob had been born too early? Would it have been better to have had the abortion?
She was silent on the way home. So many questions, and so few answers. And too much time to think it over.
"Eve," Derek said as from a distance, and she realized that he'd pulled into the driveway and that the garage door was going up. He pulled the car inside, and she turned to him mutely. If there was anyone else in the world who would understand her doubts and fears, it was Derek. She needed to know that he had them too.
Before she knew what was happening, her arms were around his neck and she was sobbing into his shoulder, tears dissolving into the impeccable navy-blue silk of his tie. He was murmuring "hush" and brushing her hair back behind her ear.
His fingers soothed her, stroked delicately at her hair, traced the jaw line between ear and chin, until she stopped sobbing and the tears ran silently down her cheeks. "It's going to be all right," he said.
She shook her head. "Nothing has been right about any of this," she said despairingly as she pulled away.
He placed a gentle finger across her lips. "Shh," he said. "We're in this together. I haven't forgotten that you were there for me in my darkest hour," he said, his voice no more than a whisper. "You made sure no harm came to my child. Do you know how grateful I am to you for that?"
"I don't understand."
"If you had listened to me, Eve, I'd be alone now. Without Dob. Without you. I didn't know what that would mean at the time. I thought that without Kelly my world had ended. I loved her so much and felt so sad that I hadn't been the kind of husband I should have been. You showed me that my life could go on, and I can never thank you enough. And so, darling Eve, I will take care of you now."
He dropped a kiss on Eve's right temple. "We're going to get through this," he told her firmly. And he meant those words as he had never meant anything in his life.
* * *
"Get her away from home, from the hospital and from all the reminders of what she considers her failure," Dr. Perry said, running a hand through his white hair until it stood on end like ruffled feathers.
"Her father lives in Wrayville," Derek said. "Eve could go there."
"Good. Send her. Don't let her visit the baby in the hospital for—oh, let's say at least a week."
"She'll worry," Derek said with certainty. "She'll see this as banishment."
Dr. Perry shot Derek an incisive look. He nodded his head. "She might. But she needs time to pull herself together in a place where she won't be seeing Dob three times a day. She's tearing herself apart with this insistence on going in to see him so often when there's really nothing she can do to help."
Derek had a sudden thought. "If you'll talk Eve into it, I can take her to the mountains. I have a cabin there. Aunt May could come with us, even Eve's father if he would like, and his friend Nell, and it would be a support group for her. All the people who love her gathered around, and she would feel that love and concern. We can be in touch with the hospital and with Dr. Ellisor by telephone every day, and we could be back in the city in a couple of hours if necessary."
"Dob is doing well, according to his pediatrician and neonatologist. He may be well enough to go home at the end of the week. As for Eve, don't worry. I'll talk her into this mountain vacation of yours." The doctor regarded Derek thoughtfully. "It sounds like the best medicine in the world for both of you," he said.
* * *
"I wish your father could have come," Derek said conversationally as he skillfully steered around a huge pothole in the road near Linville in the Great Smoky Mountains. "Your friend Doug assures me that your dad harbors no hard feelings over your pregnancy these days."
"Mmm," Eve said listlessly, staring out at the bone-bare winter branches flailing at the scudding gray sky. Her hands lay inert in her lap, like two fallen birds. The sight of her usually animated hands lying so still tugged at Derek's heartstrings.
"I'd like to know your father," Derek went on. "Worked in a textile mill most of his life, did he?"
"Mmm," Eve said again. Each revolution of the car's wheels took her away from Dob, as if she wouldn't be leaving him for good soon enough, and now it would be a whole week before she'd see him again.
Dr. Perry had been adamant. Eve would not be allowed to see Dob, so why not let Louise pack her bag? Why not let Derek bundle her into the car and take her on this trip into some wintry mountain wilderness? At the last minute, Aunt May came down with a cold and couldn't go, but Eve suspected that it was less the cold's fault than the fault of Derek's cabin, which didn't have a TV and where Aunt May would miss the upcoming kidney transplant on Love of Hope.
Damn, why won't she talk to me? Derek despaired, gripping the wheel tightly in his hands. He turned onto the deeply rutted road that wound up the mountain to the cabin, hoping that his neighbor had followed Derek's directions to open the place up.
Smoke snaked upward from the high stone chimney, Derek noticed with satisfaction when they reached the clearing. "Good old Farley," he said to Eve. "He's never let me down yet. Look, he's got a fire lit for us." He eased his car to a stop next to a stack of fresh firewood.
"Come on," he said to Eve, assisting her unresisting figure from the Corvette. "Aunt May made me promise to make sure you ate something hot as soon as we got here. Are you hungry?"
Eve regarded the gray cedar-shingled structure and shook her head. "Not at all." The place was big enough—huge, in fact. The Langs always did everything on a grand scale. A mountain cabin, Derek had told her, but the place would house three or four families from Cotton Mill Hill.
"What's wrong? Don't you like it?" Derek looked genuinely disturbed.
"It's—it's lovely," she said.
At the door, Derek dug a key out of his jacket pocket. Eve stared down at the flagstone porch beneath her boots. Little pockets of snow nestled in the corners. Fresh snow covered the sloping front yard. Beyond, she saw leafless trees and a bank of evergreens. There were no close neighbors.
"Here we are," Derek said, ushering her inside. He flipped a light switch.
He set her bag on the bottom step of a sturdy staircase and rubbed his hands together.
"Now for somethi
ng hot," he said, raising his eyebrows inquiringly. He smelled of the cold, of the outdoors, of wood smoke from the chimney.
"I really don't—"
"I promised Aunt May," he said. He slid an arm around her shoulders and drew her through the hall, through a large dining room, into a huge kitchen.
"Tea would be nice," she said when she realized that he wasn't going to give up until she ate or drank something.
"Milk?"
"It doesn't matter."
"Milk, then. That's the way my grandmother always drank her tea. Must have been the English influence. Did I ever tell you my grandmother was English?"
Eve sat on a cane-bottom straight chair that Derek pulled up to the kitchen table for her.
"I forgot to take your coat!" When she didn't stand up, he lifted her hands from her lap and pulled her to her feet. He unfastened the buttons for her and slipped the coat off her shoulders.
As he brewed the tea, a glance over his shoulder told him that Eve's face was pinched and white. She barely looked up when he set the cup in front of her.
"Go on, try it," he encouraged with a friendly smile. He had to keep up the conversation. They couldn't just sit here staring at each other. He couldn't allow her to drag him down into the emotional depths where she was; it was his job to keep her mind off Dob any way he could. And so he talked, asking her questions, but not too forcefully; telling her bits and pieces about himself, but not too intrusively.
It worked, if only a little. She favored him with a bleak half smile once, exposing her quirky bicuspid, and he almost fell out of his chair in relief. He had been telling her about a prank he and some buddies had pulled back in his high school days; they had unfurled a roll of pink toilet paper all over the red maple trees in the neighborhood fuddy-duddy's yard. He supposed that her view of him—the ultraconservative Derek Lang—didn't jibe with the picture he was painting for her. But the tiny smile made him hope that somewhere inside was the Eve he had known, the Eve he loved.
He carried her suitcase upstairs and showed her the room she would occupy; it was a cozy guest room rustically decorated in frilled unbleached muslin curtains and an antique pine canopy bed with a comforter covered in red-and-white striped ticking. The floors were bare oak, and an immense fireplace banked with glowing embers dominated one wall. Framed embroidery decorated the walls. It had its own bathroom and a beautiful mountain view.
"Don't forget that the bathtub faucet handles are reversed; the cold one is the hot-water faucet, and the one labeled hot is really the cold. The plumbing here leaves a lot to be desired. Anyway, is everything okay?"
"Um-hmm," Eve said listlessly, staring out the window at the snow. It was so white, so quiet, so peaceful. A peaceful, quiet place. She wanted to lie down and sleep for a long, long time.
She felt Derek's strong hands on her shoulders. He turned her around to face him, and his eyes searched hers. "Well, then, I'll leave you alone for your nap."
She nodded, staring at the face that she now knew so well. Derek had become part of her life, and soon she would have to say goodbye. Thank God she no longer felt anything. Thank God she was numb. Because if she felt anything, if she allowed herself to feel, she would only hurt inside.
Eve crawled into bed and burrowed deep into the thick down comforter. She didn't bother to take off her clothes or put on her nightgown. She didn't even think about it, because she was beyond thought.
All she wanted to do was sleep. And sleep. And sleep.
Chapter 12
Derek looked in on Eve once before he went to his own room that evening. He saw that she was sleeping peacefully and stole away without waking her. He reminded himself that she was not only suffering in Dob's behalf, but she was also still recovering from a difficult childbirth.
He awakened early in the morning before she did. He knew this because he lay in bed, listening for sounds of her moving about. But he heard none, so he got up and showered and shaved, wondering if she were listening for sounds of him.
"Good morning," he said when she appeared in the kitchen. She'd slept for fourteen hours.
"Good morning," she replied, not smiling. She'd regained her figure since having the baby, although her breasts were fuller, rounder. Her stomach was flat, and as always, she looked neat and precise. She'd swept her hair into a neat ponytail. The nape of her neck beneath it appeared white and vulnerable.
"I'm putting together breakfast for us," he told her cheerfully. "Not as good as Louise makes, of course, but I'm pretty good at whipping pancakes together from a mix. How many can you eat?"
He was looking at her expectantly. Eve shrugged and shook her head. "I don't know."
"If I can eat six, you can surely manage three, don't you think? I've got Vermont maple syrup. I dug an unopened tin out of the pantry. Kelly had a thing for real maple syrup ordered from Vermont."
"You came here often with Kelly?"
A spark of interest. That was good. It didn't hurt to talk about Kelly the way it had in the beginning, when the very utterance of her name felt like a dagger piercing his heart.
"Yes, especially in the first days of our marriage. She loved the mountains."
"Did she," Eve said, but it wasn't a question. It was more of an observation.
"Look, do you think you could set the table? You'll have to find the plates and cups and silver yourself, because I'm not sure where everything is. I haven't been here in a couple of years."
Obediently, Eve moved to the cupboards, opening and closing them as she tracked down the requisite supplies.
She didn't feel Kelly in this house at all; everything here seemed so impersonal. "Kelly didn't choose these dishes," she said when she was setting them on the woven place mats. They were brown and yellow and chipped.
"Those are left over from when I was a boy. They're pretty old, I guess, and probably came from the local pottery, which tried to make a go of it and failed. This place wasn't Kelly's and mine, you know. It belonged to my parents."
"But you don't come here? Why not?"
"Before Kelly's miscarriage we spent most weekends here, but afterward we didn't enjoy it anymore." He wondered if he should be talking about this; perhaps, considering Dob's premature birth, miscarriage was an uncomfortable topic for Eve. But that sad time in his and Kelly's life had happened long ago. These days he thought of Kelly and everything concerning her with a strong feeling of loving nostalgia. Eve had been right about that, too; time was a great healer.
"Oh" was all Eve said. The topic was closed, so maybe she didn't like to be reminded. He'd have to feel his way carefully and not tread ground that would make Eve retreat even further into herself. Since her father and then Aunt May couldn't come, he would have to be her support group. He was well aware that one person could hardly take the place of two others, but he intended to try.
Eve managed to eat two pancakes and to sip canned grapefruit juice, but Derek couldn't persuade her to eat any of the sausage links he had prepared.
When he was through cleaning up the kitchen, he went into the living room and found Eve sitting on a rocking chair by the window, staring out. She rocked slowly to and fro. In the white north light from the window, her skin shone so translucent that he saw a tracery of blue veins at her temples.
"What shall we do today?" he asked her, rubbing his hands together.
"I don't care," she said politely, and then returned her attention to the outdoor scene. She wanted only to sit here and rock and watch the snow, avoiding all thought.
It would be easy to become exasperated, he said to himself. He turned abruptly and sat down on the floor in front of the coffee table where someone had long ago started piecing a dusty jigsaw puzzle together. The mindless fitting of the pieces would require no creativity or thought. He would work on the puzzle, pointless as it seemed, because he could talk to Eve while he did it. He didn't know what would get through to her, only that he had to keep talking and trying.
And so he talked about his boyhood and asked q
uestions about her childhood as he worked on the puzzle picture of a red covered bridge.
Eve responded when he asked her about her Greek heritage. He asked her about Tarpon Springs, and she told him about her vacations there. She even ventured information about her grandmother's recipe for honey cake, and he told her she should teach Aunt May how to make it. For some reason, Eve seemed to shrink inside herself at the suggestion. Just when he thought he had established a connection between the two of them, she fell strangely silent again, answering him with monosyllables and staring out the window.
That night after she had gone to bed, he stepped out on the front porch and stared at the silver-white sickle of a moon holding the sky in the curve of its arms. Something skittered through the underbrush, and he tried to think what kind of animal would be abroad on a night like this when the ground was covered with snow and the air so cold.
He would like to bring Dob here. He could imagine his son following him into the woods, his old binoculars slung around the boy's neck, and he'd enjoy pointing out the different birds to Dob, who would love bird-watching as much as he, Derek, had loved it when he was a kid. At night they'd figure out the constellations together. They'd camp out, too, beyond the clearing. Derek wondered if his old tent was still usable. He'd have to get it out and see. And there would be family picnics in the summers, with cold fried chicken and deviled eggs and ripe red tomatoes from the mountaineers' gardens. He and Dob and Eve.
But that was in the future. First Eve would have to snap out of this depression. Why wouldn't she talk to him? There was nothing to do, he thought unhappily, but keep at it.
But the second day was like the first, and the third like the second. The only times Eve ever rallied was when he called the hospital for the daily progress report. He put the phone on speaker mode, and she listened with much interest, asking questions and commenting. Afterward she always sank into lethargy again. She slept for such long periods of time that secretly he worried that she was physically sick as well as mentally exhausted.
Ever Since Eve (The Keeping Secrets Series, Book 1) Page 15