She went back to reading her advertisement-zine.
Brandon just sat and blinked for a moment. He was so out of his element here.
Luckily, he didn’t get to dwell on it much further. The round little nurse popped her head out and called for Delilah again. This time Lilah grabbed his hand and pulled him along after her, through the heavy wooden door and into the inner sanctum of the obstetrician’s office.
They were led into an office rather than an exam room, a fact that seemed to surprise Delilah, even though Brandon was pretty sure she’d said she liked this doctor and had seen her before. When the door closed behind them, leaving them alone on the guest side of the desk to wait again, he asked her about it.
“Well, I haven’t been in here since my very first visit a few years ago. You know, the doctor likes to meet you face to face before they see you in a paper gown.”
“Is this the first time you’ve seen her for pregnancy?”
Delilah nodded.
“Well, maybe that’s it.”
He wasn’t afforded time to ponder that as the door opened behind them and the doctor breezed around to sit on the other side of the desk. “Good afternoon, Delilah.”
It was almost as though the two women were friends.
Quickly, Delilah introduced them, “This is Brandon. He’s the baby’s father.” She squeezed his hand, making him far happier than just that simple gesture should have.
“So,” Dr. Bower leaned forward, her elbows on the desk. “If you don’t mind my asking, was this pregnancy intentional?”
Quickly Delilah shook her head, and Brandon decided to let her do all the talking unless she specifically asked him for something. He had no clue what to do here. He was feeling more and more like a fish flopping on the shore gasping for oxygen.
The doctor nodded in return. “And how did you realize you were pregnant?”
“My stomach was bothering me.”
“And that’s all?” The black pen flew over the open page of the chart, but the writing looked more like Sanscrit to him.
“No, I took a pregnancy test.”
The doctor asked what kind and when and Delilah explained that, too. At long last the doctor quit asking and started talking. “Your pregnancy test here didn’t show a positive result.”
Brandon perked up his ears at that. He frowned.
Dr. Bowen kept going. “The test you mentioned doesn’t actually test for HCG like ours do . . .”
Brandon lost the thread there. She could have rattled off any three letters and he would have had to smile and nod. Eventually it came back around to the possibility that Delilah had caught the pregnancy very early. If that were true then an ultrasound would determine how far along Delilah was.
Then the doctor mentioned two other very disturbing possibilities. One, the baby had died. The office test was negative because the baby had stopped growing since Delilah took her home test a week ago. Two, Delilah had never been pregnant. The doctor didn’t like the new tests because, although it was rare, they did sometimes yield false positives. The ultrasound should give them the answers.
Delilah gripped his hand a little tighter as they headed for the exam room. He was allowed in with her even though there was barely room after the bed, the tech’s chair and the cart with all the wands and paddles.
They waited what seemed another eternity for the tech to show up. Then they watched the gray screen with avid interest although the tech would tell them nothing at all. Finally, they were escorted yet again back to the doctor’s office for more waiting.
This wasn’t turning out how he’d expected. He’d thought they’d go home with a picture of a little white blot that they would coo over and start thinking about naming. He’d wondered if he might get the chance to see the pulse of a tiny heartbeat on screen that online postings described as mesmerizing.
Delilah looked like she was in shock. He wanted to comfort her, but he was in a bit of shock, too. He told himself the doctor would come in and tell them that it was all good. She’d give them a due date and they could start planning.
But he hadn’t seen a little white blot on the ultrasound. He’d seen lots of movies where the tech pointed and said, ‘there’s your baby’ and the couple just stared, hopelessly in love with their child. But this tech hadn’t said anything. She about refused to say anything, her manner very clear that she did not want to be bothered by their petty questions. He and Delilah shrugged at each other more than once. It didn’t seem she had any better skill than he did at reading the patchy black and white screen. But still he searched for his little blot and came up empty.
He didn’t question his commitment to this child. It was. And that was all he had needed. Until now. Now that confidence had been undermined and he needed confirmation.
The doctor breezed in again, planting herself behind the big mahogany desk. She looked at each of them and folded her hands. Brandon could see it coming and was grateful that she got right to the point. “I’m sorry.” She shook her head. “There’s no pregnancy.”
Still, he was dumbfounded. Delilah wasn’t pregnant? His world was shifting on its axis . . . again. He listened numbly to suggestions that Delilah start her birth control pills again. That they not try to get pregnant again until they’d thought about it for a few months. Then, if they decided to try in earnest, they should make an appointment.
The sounds of conversation were as distinguishable and as meaningful to him as the noise of a brook babbling by. With his head under the water.
Slowly, together, they gathered themselves and made their way silently and solemnly out of the office and down into the parking structure. This time Delilah was too preoccupied to be concerned about earthquakes. She seemed as shell-shocked as he was. For thirty minutes they fought traffic to his place, neither of them saying a word.
Brandon’s brain turned over and over. He figured he should be happy. He was no longer having an unplanned kid with a woman who never confessed about why she tried to take his memories but not his wallet. But he wasn’t happy about it.
He wondered if Delilah had faked the whole thing. He wondered if he even knew her well enough to know if she was the kind of woman who would do that. But he’d seen the test stick. It had read positive. There was no doubt about it, they checked the key three or four times each, because they were both so surprised. Besides, if she had faked it, then The Academy had been giving their Oscars to the wrong women for the past several years. Brandon just didn’t see how Delilah could fake the catatonic stare that was on her face right now.
He took in a deep breath. If the baby had died and Delilah was miscarrying that might have made more sense, but the doctor was quite certain that Delilah had never been pregnant at all. It seemed to him the doctor was the only one who was certain of anything.
Brandon drove straight to his house—part of the ‘not thinking’ thing. When he parked in his driveway, they climbed out, both on shaky legs. Numbly, Delilah followed him inside. No, there was no way she had faked this. Somewhere low in his gut Brandon began to feel really bad for her. She wanted this baby. This was a chance to fix what had gone so tragically wrong the first time. She looked to be in the early stages of grief. When she was standing in front of his couch, her legs buckled and she fell to where she was sitting on it. Her back was ramrod straight, her eyes wide and confused. Her voice was shallow. “I’m sorry. I thought I was pregnant.”
Immediately, he was beside her, drawn by the intense gravitational pull he always felt when she was near. His arms draped her shoulders and he held her in a loose hug. “It’s okay. I understand.”
It seemed to be all he could say, even though it was nowhere near enough. Nowhere near what she needed, and he knew it.
Still Delilah shook her head. “I had morning sickness. That test was positive.”
Again he whispered something to soothe her and himself.
She spoke disjointedly several more times. Things he didn’t quite understand. Things meant to tell
him she wasn’t trying to trick him. Words that said she was sorry, when he didn’t think she needed to be. Only he didn’t know how to tell her that she didn’t have to prove it to him. He believed her, even as he believed she lied to him repeatedly about other things.
Much later, with their arms still around each other, still in the same places on the couch, did he feel some of the rigid tension in her begin to ease. It seemed as her muscles let go of their need to hold everything in, so did her mouth. She expressed how much she wanted this baby in a river of painful and sometimes garbled phrases. The crazy thing was he understood every word.
“Me, too.” He knew it was true.
“It’s okay if you’re relieved. I won’t hold it against you.” Her neck finally lost the last of its strength and her head rolled against his shoulder, and at last some of the cold they shared began to recede.
“I’m not really relieved. I was surprised about it, but I was excited. I was looking forward to this baby.”
He could see in her eyes that she believed him. Her smile lasted a moment before it broke to accompany the tears that had started a slow trek down her face. “I just wanted a second chance. After I lost my last baby. I was so happy.”
Her words again started coming out in fragments and phrases, thoughts and feelings that were sometimes discordant but needing to be released. He waited through all of it, cataloging the new information and re-playing the old as she told him more of the story about David and Juliet. How her sister held her own pregnancy over Delilah’s head. How Delilah lost that same baby trying to save her sister. Her words all ran into and over each other. Brandon understood them all. Delilah made sense to him in a way he hadn’t known before.
He rocked her back and forth as he would have soothed their baby, and talked to her until the words didn’t come anymore. At last he carried her back to his bedroom, thinking that there was great irony in the fact that they couldn’t make love. She’d been off her birth control pills for over a week because they’d thought she was pregnant. He didn’t have any condoms because she’d been on the pill.
So, once again, he laid her on his bed with no thought of sex. She let him help pull off her shoes and skirt before sliding under the covers as though she could hide from the world there. Clearly, she couldn’t. So Brandon stripped down to his underwear and climbed in beside her. Turning her to face him, and to maybe face some of what had happened, he wrapped his arms around her, enjoying the heat of her skin against his.
At last his brain stopped churning and he fell into a thankfully dreamless sleep.
Chapter 34
Delilah stood over her kitchen counter, bite by bite drowning her sorrows in bakery items. The baking—as well as the eating—was cathartic. There may be no baby, but there was plenty of flour smattered around and drips of chocolate smeared here and there.
For a moment, she thought this was what her kitchen should look like—like she’d been baking with a small child. She forced herself to take another bite.
“Delilah!” Tristan burst through her door, putting her about a millisecond away from needing a Heimlich maneuver. He scared her out of her wits and her depression. If only for a moment.
“What?” She turned to face him, her beer in one hand and a gooey brownie in the other.
Tristan came screeching to a stop, wildly eyeing the food she held. “You shouldn’t be drinking!”
“I’m not pregnant.” Her voice sounded monotone to her own ears. Brandon had gotten up and gone to work. He’d kissed her and said more than his usual good-bye, but still he was out the door and she was once again left at his place alone. She called a cab instead of her brother to get her home because she hadn’t been ready to face Tristan yet. But clearly that had been a waste of money. In the end, all it had meant was that she’d managed to shower while the brownies baked and get halfway through her beer before he burst in.
“You’re sure?” He blinked and frowned over her combination of foods, but Delilah stared back at him. Waiting.
“Yes, I’m sure. The doctor said.” Like she’d be standing here drinking a beer if she wasn’t one hundred percent certain.
“Oh.” She saw now that he held slips of paper in his fist, yellow like the store receipts, but why he was once again bringing her receipts from Blessed Be was beyond her. She really didn’t have the brain power for more than her brownies and beer.
So to keep him from thinking she’d miscarried again, she told him just the basics. “Actually, it was just a stomach flu. And a bad test. I was never pregnant at all.”
“Oh, Li.” His shoulders sagged, losing all the urgent energy he’d possessed when he entered. “I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah, me too.” She tipped her beer at him in a small salute then took a big drink. She didn’t even have to work tonight. She would have welcomed a shift to help take her mind off things. It seemed there would be no such luck.
“Is that your first beer?” His shoulders took back some of the tension they’d lost at her announcement. His eyes revealed concern and she could practically see his brain working backwards and thinking about the cooking sherry.
“Yes, big brother, it is.” She took another big swig.
“Lilah, this is important.” He sat down at her table, practically pulling her into the hard wooden seat next to him. She wanted to say ‘ouch’ but he was talking before she had the chance. “This is the receipt for the birch bark sticks, that big order that we thought was Brandon . . .”
He pushed the paper towards her, but she refused to look at it. Maybe it was the beer but her mind was on another issue. “You know, Yasmin has a thing for you.”
Glory be, it worked. He was totally sidetracked. “What are you talking about?”
“Yasmin, your attractive assistant. She totally has the hots for you.” Delilah smiled and took another drink of the beer.
Tristan grabbed the bottle out of her hand and set it out of reach. “Clearly, you’re drunk.”
“No!” Of course, at that moment she hiccupped just a little. But Tristan saw. Oh, well, the bottle had been nearly empty so she’d pretty much already drunk the whole thing. She hadn’t lied, it was her first. But she was such a cheap date. “Look, that has nothing to do with now. Drunk or sober I can see that Yasmin’s got it going on for you. That morning that Becky what’s-her-face was in—”
“Becky Scarborough.”
“Yeah, exactly.” Delilah about laughed. “That look on your face, the fact that you know her last name, had Yasmin practically growling.”
Tristan frowned, clearly totally clueless. But she could see he was piecing some memories into a bigger picture. Good.
Delilah got serious. “I’m just telling you because you work together and it seemed you were completely oblivious.”
“Point noted. I’ll just have to figure out how to deal with that later.” He nodded then shoved the yellow receipt copy at her again. “But this is really important right now. This is the slip for the birch bark. Look what else is there.”
Delilah saw the short list. It included a poppet. White ribbon. A few other things . . .
Her eyes widened.
“Yeah.” Tristan’s lips pressed together like he was trying to hold in his anger. “He wasn’t just looking to see if there were spells on him. He’s been messing around, too. Yasmin was pretty sure he was in her beginner class the other week. There’s no telling what he’s tried to do, or how he’s messed it up.”
She opened her mouth, but Tristan beat her to it. “Where does he live?”
“No! Tristan! No.” She grabbed at his arm as he was already rising out of his seat, as though he was going to hunt down Brandon and throw the first punch. “You can’t.”
“Delilah, we don’t know what he did to you!”
“And he doesn’t know what I did to him.” She hung her head. How had it all gotten so messed up? Still, she couldn’t let Tristan get tangled in it, too. “You don’t do anything to him. I’m not going to tell you where he live
s or works, and I will hold it against you forever if you try to find him.”
She was the last of his family. They were clearly all each other had. Since Brandon was aware and buying spell supplies, he wasn’t what she had hoped he might be. Or might eventually become. So the threat to Tristan was a serious one. And one he would know she didn’t make lightly.
“Why are you defending him, Li?”
“Because I love him!”
She sucked in air. Her spine pressed against the round rails that made up the back of the seat. Her eyes fought to contain the water threatening to overflow them. She couldn’t look at Tristan.
“Are you serious? Delilah.” Tristan sank to the seat next to her, looking defeated. But he didn’t touch her.
All she could do was nod. Anything else was too much in the face of the wave that was crashing over her.
Oh shit. She was in love with him. The admission surprised her as much as it surprised Tristan. But how could she not be? Brandon had been excited about the baby. He’d been gentle and kind and held her while she cried when there was no baby.
She really wanted another beer, but she just couldn’t get one out in front of Tristan. Which meant she shouldn’t get one out at all. She was not going to become a shell of a person the way she did the last time she’d been turned over and found lacking.
After a few minutes of dead silence except for the living room clock ticking, Tristan stood. She thought he was going to excuse himself, but he didn’t.
“Lilah, at least let me check you.” He pulled a birch bark stick from his pocket. Apparently he’d planned ahead and figured they would need to see what Brandon might have done. “Maybe he hasn’t been doing any of it to you. Maybe he’s as good as you think he is and he’s just been checking his house.”
That was complete bull, but she nodded anyway. Delilah knew the things Brandon purchased weren’t entirely used for checking his house. They weren’t for seeing, they were for committing.
“Or,” Tristan tried again, “maybe he was just protecting himself.”
WishCraft Page 25