by Robyn Carr
A few weeks for the birth parents to choose Mel and Jack, who did not need a baby to soak up all the extra love in their hearts. Darla and Phil would find a child eventually. Or die with a lot of excess love in their hearts. And Phil had said it himself—there are worse things.
This isn’t who you are, Melinda, the voice said.
Then who the hell am I? she asked the voice. I’m just a woman like every other woman, a woman like Darla, a woman who wants to fulfill herself. It’s completely reasonable!
Reasonable, she thought. To try to force your husband to procreate with the help of a stranger to the tune of probably fifty thousand dollars even though you’ve already built a solid little family? To lie to him, to trick him into an adoption that fell into your lap? To manipulate him with anger to go along with your needs? To promise to assist a couple you love and admire—then hide their request so you could have more? Oh—reasonable. For a total nutcase.
She put the envelope on top of her desk. She grabbed her purse and medical bag and went into the reception area where Cameron was still at the computer. “I apologize—I think I’m coming down with something,” she said. “I need to go home. I’ll leave the Hummer for you in case there’s an emergency.”
“I’ll call Jack,” he said, getting to his feet.
“No, don’t. Let me take your car. I have a babysitter at home—I’ll keep her and lie down for a few hours. I’m sorry….”
“What’s wrong, Mel?” he asked, digging into his pocket for his keys. “Want me to drive you?”
“No. No, I just feel a bad headache coming on, a little nausea. I should just go home and lie down.” She took the keys. “I’ll be fine, just cover for me. Will you?”
“Well, sure. But…”
“I’ll check in later, if that’ll make you feel better. After I have a rest and some Advil or something. I’ll get your car back to you before end of business….”
“I’m not worried about that,” he said. “You’re pale and weird. Let me drive—”
“I’ll check in,” she said, cutting him off and going out the door.
At about one o’clock Cameron walked across the street to the bar to grab a sandwich. He jumped up on a stool and said to Jack, “How’s Mel?”
“Mel?” Jack asked. “You’d know that better than me.”
“She didn’t come by here? Before she went home? She didn’t call you?”
“What?” Jack asked. “What are you talking about?”
“She left a couple of hours ago—went home sick. She looked pretty bad, actually. Pale as a ghost. She took my car and left me the Hummer. I hope she didn’t have to pull over or anything.”
Jack just frowned.
“It came on real sudden. The Prentisses came in, brought in their adoption packet for her—I found it on the desk. Just minutes after they left, she took off. She said she thought it was a headache coming on, but in all the time I’ve worked with Mel—”
“Excuse me,” Jack said. He went to the swinging door that led to the kitchen, then came back through the bar on the way to the door. “Preacher will be right out to take care of you, Cam.” And he was gone.
Jack got home as fast as he could with no idea what he’d find when he got there. Mel’s moods had been weird, her personality off, her demeanor unpredictable. He’d tried to cope by just playing a little emotional balancing act, then going along as best he could. He’d never been through anything like this with his wife—she was the stable one while he was the one with issues, ranging from a little PTSD from combat to a temper if his buttons were pushed.
But never before had Mel confused him. She’d challenged him, scared him, saved him, but he always understood her. She was the straightest shooter he had known in his life.
When he walked in the house, fourteen-year-old Leslie jumped up from the couch, startled. “Jack!” she said.
“Mel home?” he asked.
“She said she didn’t feel well…. She went to lie down for a while.”
“Kids asleep?”
“Yeah. They should be down another hour. Everything okay?”
“Fine. Carry on. Do whatever fourteen-year-old babysitters do at nap time—talk on the phone, graze in the kitchen, nap, watch TV, whatever…”
“Sure, Jack,” she said with a laugh.
He went to his bedroom, the bedroom he’d carefully soundproofed when he built the house to keep his wonderful, wild, noisy sex with Mel from being heard by kids or houseguests. She was lying facedown on the bed, sobbing.
He sat on the side of the bed and gently rolled her over. Her eyes were swollen, her face wet and splotched. “Jack,” she said in a sob.
“What happened, baby?” he said, pulling her onto his lap.
“Phil and Darla came in with an adoption folder. They asked me to give it to anyone who might need them—to any birth mother looking for a good family for her child. Jack, I was going to hide it from Marley so she’d give the baby to us.” She buried her face in his chest.
“But you didn’t,” he said, stroking her hair.
“But I was going to because I thought the one thing in the world that would make me feel right was a baby. It didn’t really matter where it came from as long as it belonged to me. Belonged to us. Because that way I’d be a woman, a mother. I’d be whole again, like I was when we met….”
Major meltdown, he thought. Long time coming.
“You’re even better than when we met,” he said. “You’re everything. If there’s anything missing, I sure can’t see it.”
“Because you can’t see it,” she said. “But I feel it—there’s a hole where the center of my life used to be. I remember—when I was married to Mark and we couldn’t make a baby by ourselves, I felt like a cripple, but no one could see the limp but me. You can’t know what it was like to drive to the clinic with a vial of sperm kept warm between your breasts, hoping this one would do it, make the baby…”
“Between your breasts…?”
‘“Make it romantic,’ the doctor would say. ‘Try to forget this is all science and remember that the science is about you and your husband creating your child….’ We’d almost make love so I could collect the specimen, then jump into my clothes, into my car, rush it to the lab…But, Jack…I felt so unlike other women. So alien, so abnormal and strange. Do you know what the most commonly uttered prayer is? It’s ‘Oh, dear God, why can’t I just be like everyone else?’”
“No one is like everyone else, baby,” he said. “We’re all so different. We all have such different things we need. Such different burdens to carry…”
“I didn’t want to be obsessed with getting pregnant in my first marriage, but when I’d had a hard time for a year or two, it became everything to me. Everything changed when he died, of course—my losses just multiplied. Then I met you and without even meaning to, you filled that spot that had been wanting—filled it with life. Jack,” she said. “Jack, I’m a midwife—giving life, delivering life, it just seems like the foundation. Jack, I miss it. I miss it so much and it’s gone.”
“It’s only changed,” he said. “You have children and you still carry your women through the process. You still bring babies into the world, but more important, women depend on you for their health. You get them through so much….”
“But I want it back, Jack. I’m not done! I want to be the woman you met, the woman you made pregnant without even trying.”
“The woman I made cranky without trying,” he said with a smile.
“I want to bleed again, can you beat that? I should be so happy to be free of periods—but I miss them.”
“I miss them, too,” he said.
“How can you?” she said with a sniff, sitting up straighter.
He shrugged. “So much of my life revolved around your periods—when you had them, when you didn’t, whether you had them…You never had them after our first time in bed together, as it turned out. I was looking forward to arguing about whether it was all right to make love
anyway, fantasizing you’d be shy about that while I didn’t care….”
“You have always been way too horny for your own good,” she said.
“Because it was you,” he said. “Your body was always changing, going through phases. Moods.”
“I still have moods….”
“But I miss it, too, Mel,” he said. “I wanted to rub your back because you cramped, wanted to hear you tell me you were too messy or cranky. I miss watching for the blood to come and knowing that—uh-oh—once again, it didn’t come and you were going to get big and ripe and furious.” He chuckled. “All that stuff changed suddenly for me, too. Scary sudden.”
“But do you see? It made me a different kind of woman and there was no warning. It all changed too soon. It was supposed to change at forty-five or fifty, not thirty-five! I just figured out how to get pregnant after all that trouble and work and then bam! It was taken away from me again!”
He wiped the tears off her cheeks. “Replaced with children for you to raise and chase and yell at and swat and bring into the bed with us. Replaced with the wisdom that comes from survival and growth and balance. No more blood—no arguing about whether you can grit your teeth and let me love every last piece of you in spite of what time of the month it is. No more surprises—we can plan now. And once we’re past this crisis, no more crazy mood swings…”
“You think this is just a crazy mood swing?” she asked.
“Nope,” he said, shaking his head. “Nope—this is you admitting that losing a body part you found essential is very hard, but that you can admit it. That it’s loss, just like it was loss for Rick to lose a leg. So guess what, Mel? We’re not going to make any more babies. Luckily, we did that already. Now we can relax and enjoy them.” He bit at her neck. “Now I can make love to you as much as you want. All the time, if you want. We can get a sitter, lock the door and go at it like bunnies for days, if you want.”
“That isn’t making me feel better,” she informed him.
“Multiple orgasms have always made you feel better,” he whispered.
“Pah,” she scoffed.
He chuckled. “You sure fake it good, then. You’ve always been so mature about accepting what feels good….”
“Jack, there’s this place inside me, right here,” she said, sliding his hand over her lower abdomen, “that feels empty, like something important is missing….”
He pressed down with his big hand. “Because something that was there before, that you counted on, that you believed was an important part of who you are, is gone. Gone, Mel—because it was life or death. Those were the choices.”
“I didn’t realize how much I missed it, how much I’d like to have it back.”
“I know, baby.”
“What now?”
He shrugged. “If you feel like crying over it, I can hold you. Eventually, though, you’re going to realize that you’re ten times the woman you were when I met you and getting better every day, and that your womb never had that much to do with the you I fell in love with. Thank you just the same, though, for giving me children before you gave it up. And thank you for giving it up so we could be together…”
“That whole surrogate idea—what was so bad about that idea?” she wanted to know.
He shook his head. “Not sure. I just had this gut feeling you were trying to fill a hole in our lives that didn’t exist. Compensating. Being somehow unrealistic about the life we have together, which is as close to perfect as anyone could have. You know, when people compensate, sometimes what they give up is far greater than what they get.”
“I asked Phil Prentiss what he would do if they never got a baby and he said they’d die with a lot of excess love in their hearts….”
“And let’s not,” Jack said. “Let’s spend every drop. On the kids, on our families, on your patients, on the town. On people we don’t know yet and the ones who have been our good friends forever. On each other. Let’s spend our last drop as we’re taking our last breaths.”
Mel smiled at him, though a big tear ran down her cheek. “I have to give Phil and Darla’s packet to that young couple….”
“Of course you do,” he said, wiping away the tear. “And it’s going to double the size of your heart.”
Sixteen
A few days after Aiden’s arrest and release, his divorce lawyer called him at Erin’s cabin. “I have news. You are not divorced. But then, you weren’t exactly married.”
Aiden frowned. “Excuse me?”
“Your wife has been the wife of many,” Ron said. “She’s a con—this must come as no surprise, eh?” he asked. “But you were her second spouse, while she was still married to her first spouse. Her first husband was and probably still is her partner and partner in crime—his was the name on the back of your check. She’s used so many aliases, we’re not sure we’ve tracked them all yet. The couple are Bosniak—Albijana Kovacevic and Mustafa Zubac. She isn’t going to sue you, smear your reputation or do any of that. She can’t afford to. They’re wanted in five states.”
Aiden couldn’t speak. He could barely breathe.
“Aiden?” Ron asked. “Dr. Riordan?”
“Uh, back up. Are you sure about this?”
“I’ve e-mailed you some photos, but yes, we’re sure. They have a scam they’ve been running all over the place. Pretty young Annalee or Busha or Cerilla or any one of her aliases, marries. Usually a fairly rich older gentleman. Not so rich it would stand out, but with enough in the bank to be a lucrative target—they don’t invest much time. She’s been a masseuse, waitress, dancer, child-care provider…”
“Child care?” he asked, flipping open his laptop and getting online.
“I know. Terrifying thought, isn’t it? She treats them to her wild mood disorder and within a couple of months agrees to a divorce without a settlement if there’s a cash incentive. It’s pretty cost effective to give her fifty or a hundred grand to go away and the divorce is actually filed and recorded. Unfortunately for Albijana, some of her victims have had second thoughts after buying her off and reported the scam to the police.”
“But before they marry her,” Aiden said, “she treats them to a sample of her considerable sexual talents. This guy, her alleged partner—I’ve never seen him, nor did I know he existed—is her pimp.”
“Pretty much,” Ron said. “She’s been married and divorced a number of times in a number of states. Yours was a fluke—your lawyer hadn’t passed the bar after four tries, left a big stack of cases on his desk that were neither filed nor recorded, thus your marriage was recorded and not your divorce. That was a major screwup for them. It led to my staff finding that your marriage was not her first, that none of the subsequent marriages were legal. Bingo.”
He looked at the laptop screen where he’d just opened up a photo. Erin, who was listening attentively and hearing little or nothing from Aiden’s side of the conversation, looked over his shoulder. “God,” Aiden said in a breath. The woman was Annalee; the man had a very sinister, mature look about him, but Aiden instantly knew that was only one of his looks. “That’s her,” he said. “And the guy? I caught her in bed with him—a young sailor who said he didn’t know she was married, that he met her in a bar at ten o’clock in the morning. Jesus…he cried. I thought he was eighteen and scared to death—the only thing that kept me from beating him senseless.”
“Mustafa Zubac, goes by the name Mujo.”
“How’d you get the pictures?” Aiden asked.
“They’ve been arrested in the past several years. They just haven’t been prosecuted for their pretty simple fraud. They get out on bond and make a run to another location.”
“I knew she saw me coming,” he muttered. “I couldn’t prove it, but I always knew it—she caught me practically getting off a boat after a two-year assignment. A young doctor with money to burn. Jesus. But the navy? She went into the navy?”
“The history is sketchy, but I think what happened was she immigrated with her parents and h
ooked up with Mujo, a compatriot, after she’d enlisted. Albijana didn’t have it easy in Bosnia—her neighborhood was in constant conflict, but Mujo had it even worse and was a member of the underworld at an early age, the only thing that kept him alive. Both of them learned how to lie, steal, cheat and scam, probably as a matter of survival when they were young. They’re devastatingly good at it. And no one learns to live in the shadows like a couple of kids who grew up in a war zone.”
“No kidding. Now what?”
“Well, here are your choices—when she calls to ask if the payoff and documents are ready, you can tell her you know the whole story and that there are warrants for arrests of herself and Mujo, and I’d be very surprised if you ever saw or heard from her again. Or, you can pretend you don’t know and help flush her out for the police. The local police would love to take them into custody—the FBI would be happy to take them from there. It’s entirely up to you.”
“Much as I’d like to help, I’m going to pass,” Aiden said. “I just don’t want to create any more drama for my family or Erin. This has been as terrible as I want it to get.”
“That’s the option I would have taken,” Ron said. “Don’t be shocked if the local police ask for your cooperation, but it’s entirely up to you—don’t be pressured. In the meantime, we’ll petition the court with the appropriate documentation to have your record of marriage to Annalee Kovacevic nullified and removed. We’ll send you copies. That will take a couple of months, but we’ll keep on it.”
“I appreciate it, since I bought your colleague a big fat diamond and it doesn’t look like she’ll give it back.”
He laughed heartily. “Congratulations! Have a date set yet?” he asked.
“Not till you deliver the all clear, Mr. Preston.”
“We’re on it. Hopefully it won’t be long. Give us a heads-up when and if you hear from Albijana and deliver the bad news, will you?”
“When and if?”