TIDINGS OF GREAT JOY Read online

  "Does it hurt?"

  Her eyes came open slowly. "Not really. It's like having cramps." He nodded solemnly. She smiled and punched him in the arm. "What are you agreeing with, you jerk? You've never had cramps."

  He grinned lopsidedly. "I'm damn glad too. Would an aspirin help?"

  "I'd better not take anything without consulting the doctor."

  "Are you comfortable? Besides having the, uh, cramps."

  "I'm fine. You can go back to your office now. I'll call if I need you."

  His brows drew together ominously. "Don't make me mad."

  "But Taylor, there's nothing—"

  "I'm staying."

  Ria fell silent, secretly pleased that he planned to stay with her. She didn't want to face this ordeal alone, no matter what the outcome. If he let go of her hand, she thought she'd fly apart.

  "I wish you'd eat something," he said after a moment. "You look all shriveled up."

  Ria knew he needed to feel useful, so she sent him after cheese and crackers and fruit juice.

  "Taylor?"

  "Hm?"

  He was sitting on the edge of the bed, staring out the window. Shadows outside were growing longer. The sun was sinking below the horizon.

  "What are you thinking?"

  "That this is the longest afternoon I've ever lived through." He stroked her cheek. "I know it's been even longer for you."

  Ria had sent him on a dozen errands throughout the house. At some point he had realized that these needless errands were a device to keep them both distracted and occupied.

  Finally, tacitly, they had agreed to cut out that nonsense. Neither Ria's fickle demands nor Taylor's dogged fetching and carrying was going to take their minds off their child's life, which hung in the balance. There had been long stretches of silence between them, but they were companionable silences. They had communicated their anxiety on a higher plane than conversation would have allowed.

  "Whenever we've talked about the baby," Ria began slowly, "it's always been about a healthy baby."

  "What are you trying to say?"

  "How would you feel about the child if he weren't so healthy? If … if he weren't born perfect, how would you feel about him?"

  Taylor didn't answer, only looked at her with hard, implacable eyes.

  Nervously she went on. "It's the body's natural instinct to try and discard something that isn't perfect. Sometimes a miscarriage should be considered a blessing."

  He waited a long time to respond. When he did, it was obvious he was angry. "How could you ask me a question like that? Do you really think I'm that shallow? We didn't know each other very well when we got married, but I thought you knew me better than that now."

  Remorseful tears filled her eyes. "I'm sorry, Taylor. You're right. I do know you better than to ask that."

  Her tears dissolved his anger. Gently he laid his hands on her stomach, protectively covering her entire lower abdomen with his wide palms and strong fingers. "I love the baby. I want it. No matter what."

  She turned her head away, not because she didn't want him to see her tears, but because she couldn't bear to see his.

  "I think you'd better take me to the hospital." Standing silhouetted in the open bathroom door, Ria looked on the verge of collapse. She was trembling violently.

  Taylor didn't waste time asking unnecessary questions. He'd emptied the bathroom wastepaper basket twice. They no longer had any secrets from each other. He called the doctor and told him they were on their way, then saw to Ria.

  He scooped her into his arms and carried her through the house. "Are you in pain?"

  "It's not too bad."

  It was bad. Her lips were white. He secured her into the front seat of his car, then broke every speed limit and every state and city driving ordinance to reach the hospital. Her OB had arranged for a wheelchair to be waiting outside. As Taylor lowered her into it, she grabbed his hand and pressed it against her tear-damp cheek.

  "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

  The attending orderly didn't give Taylor time to respond before spinning the wheelchair around and pushing it toward the automatic glass doors. Outside the examination room, Taylor fidgeted on the uncomfortable plastic chairs. He sipped rank, vending-machine coffee. He paced. He cursed. He prayed. After what seemed like an eternity, the doctor came out and grimly shook hands with him.

  "Hello, Mr. MacKensie. I recognize you from your newspaper pictures."

  "How's Ria?"

  "I'm afraid she lost the baby."

  Taylor sagged against the wall. He had thought he was prepared to hear that, but discovered that he wasn't. The sense of loss was incredible. He felt as though he'd been socked in the gut by a giant fist, and that when it was withdrawn, the hole didn't fill back up, but remained, gaping and empty.

  He tilted his head back until it came into contact with the cool tile wall. Eyes closed and teeth bared, he squeezed his hands into fists. "Why?" He asked the question of the Almighty, but it was the doctor who answered him.

  "It was certainly nothing that Mrs. MacKensie did or didn't do. Just one of those accidents of nature."

  "A blessing," Taylor said bitterly.

  "I know it's hard to look at it that way."

  "You're right, Doctor. Damned hard." Taylor blew out a long breath. "How is Ria?"

  The doctor shook his head pessimistically. "She's extremely upset, naturally. I'm taking her upstairs."

  "Upstairs?" The first thing that popped into Taylor's mind was the psychiatric ward. Had Ria gone completely over the edge?

  "Yes. Usually the woman's system takes care of discarding the debris on its own, but in this case it didn't and I'm going to do a D and C." He explained the procedure to Taylor.

  "She can go home in the morning, but she'll be mildly uncomfortable for a day or two. She should take it easy, do nothing strenuous. Of course our primary concern is for her emotional stability. The emotional wound takes longer to heal than the body, and a lot of the responsibility for that falls to you, Mr. MacKensie."

  It was several hours before Ria was moved to a private room and Taylor was allowed to see her. In the interim he called his secretary at home and told her to cancel his appointments for the following day, Friday. He wouldn't be back in his office until after the weekend. He then placed a call to Delia Starr.

  "Ria had a miscarriage tonight," he told her as soon as she had answered and he had identified himself.

  After a stunned silence the reporter said, "I'm awfully sorry."

  "Keep any reference to the baby out of that damned feature story Sunday."

  "It's too late for that, Taylor."

  "The hell it is."

  "I've already turned the piece over to the copy editors. It's out of my hands."

  "Then get it back. I won't let Ria open up the paper and read about the baby she's not going to have. I don't care what you need to do, just do it."

  "I'll do what I can." Knowing the power that Ms. Starr wielded in the city room, that was as good as a promise that any and all references to the child would be edited out before press time.

  Taylor also got the word of the hospital's chief of staff that nothing about Ria should be leaked to the media. Mayor-elect MacKensie was news. This was one time Taylor didn't want to read any mention of himself on the front page of the newspaper.

  Ria's hospital room was dark and shadowy. Only one small night light was burning. Taylor thought she was sleeping, but as he crept nearer the bed, he saw that her eyes were open. Unmoving, she was staring at the ceiling. Her right hand looked frail and bloodless where it lay on her stomach, which looked obscenely concave.

  She turned her head, but said nothing. Taylor could think of nothing to say that didn't sound banal. Did tragedy automatically reduce normally articulate people to robots who were programmed to say only the expected things? He finally settled for, "How do you feel?"

  "Empty."

  The tonelessness of her voice alarmed him. It had died, just as her smile and an
imation had. He lifted her hand off her stomach and closed his fingers around it tightly, but she seemed not to notice. She didn't return his squeeze.

  "I exercise in a health club for hours each week just to keep my tummy flat." She laughed mirthlessly. "Mom always said, 'Be careful what you wish for.'" Taylor saw tears leave the outer corners of her eyes and roll toward the pillow. Her dark hair absorbed them.

  "Are you in pain?"

  "No. The doctor ordered a shot to help me sleep. That's why I'm so woozy."

  "Be woozy. The doctor said you'd need plenty of rest.

  "He also said that there was no reason why I couldn't have other … other…" She became so choked up, she couldn't speak.

  Taylor bent over her, propping his arm on the headboard and tightly squeezing the hand he held. "Don't, Ria. Don't cry anymore. Go to sleep."

  "I can't stop thinking about the baby." Her voice was gritty with emotion. "It isn't there anymore. It doesn't exist."

  "Shh." Taylor kissed her eyelids closed, though tears continued to roll down her temples. He pulled a chair up to the bed, sat down, and didn't move from her side until the sedative had taken effect and she fell asleep.

  In fact the sun was coming up before he left her. He stopped by the nurses' station and issued strict instructions that Ria be given anything she needed. Then he went home, showered, shaved, and quickly ate a scrambled egg. He scarfed it down ravenously, since he hadn't eaten anything since lunch the day before. He fortified himself with several cups of scalding black coffee before returning to the hospital, taking a change of clothes for Ria with him.

  He stopped in the lobby gift shop to buy her some flowers. He had wanted roses, but they only had red ones, and they reminded him unpleasantly of blood. He rejected pink carnations because they symbolized baby girls. He left with a bouquet of yellow daisy mums, which he decided looked cheerful, at least. As soon as he stepped off the elevator, he saw Ria's doctor in the corridor outside her room.

  "I've just examined her," he told Taylor. "Physically she's doing fine, but she's very depressed. The sooner she can resume her normal routine, the better. I told her to come see me in six weeks."

  He was off. Taylor wanted to grab him by the flapping tails of his white lab coat and ask a thousand questions, but he wanted to see Ria more.

  With her suitcase in one hand, flowers in the other, he entered her room. She was dabbling a spoon into a bowl of lumpy gray oatmeal that a starving man might have been talked into eating.

  "I can do better than that," he said, nodding down toward her breakfast tray. He laid the bouquet beside it and set the suitcase on the floor. "You've never had my super-duper Belgian waffles, have you?"

  She smiled wanly. "Thank you for the flowers. And for bringing my clothes."

  "I hope I brought everything you need." Pushing the unwanted tray away, she swung her legs over the side of the bed. Taylor stifled an impulse to spring to her assistance as she stood up. "I've already showered, so I won't be a minute." He got the message. He wasn't invited to stay and help her dress.

  "I'll take care of all the release forms," he said, backing toward the door.

  "I've already signed them."

  "I want to settle the account."

  "It's paid. I took care of that too."

  Taylor's mouth thinned with irritation. "You've been a busy lady this morning."

  "Excuse me, please," she said coldly. "I want to dress and get out of here."

  When she came out of the room a few minutes later, her lipstick looked exceptionally bright and garish in contrast to her pallor. The wheelchair should have melted beneath the baleful look she gave it.

  "I can leave under my own steam."

  "Their rules, not mine." Taylor, not the nurse, had his hands on the back of the chair. And he, not the nurse, indicated with a brusque nod of his head for Ria to sit down in it. He'd just about reached the end of his patience.

  Once they were in the car Ria said, "You can drop me at my house. I'll come over later to pack my things." Taylor deliberately drove past the turn. "Did you hear what I said?"

  "I heard, but I didn't listen."

  Ria jerked her head forward. "Suit yourself. This will work out better anyway, because I need to get my car. I can do it all in one fell swoop."

  He turned up the volume on the radio and tonelessly sang along.

  When he stopped the car, he tried to rush ahead of Ria, helping her out of the car, opening doors, but she seemed determined to do things by herself, and spurned his efforts to help her. Once inside the house, she went directly to the bedroom closet. Lifting several hangers off the bar, she carried them to the bed. Just when she was about to drop the first folded dress into the opened suitcase, Taylor stepped forward and yanked the garment out of her hand.

  "Just what the hell is going on with you? What do you think you're doing?"

  "Give me back my dress. I'm packing."

  "Why?"

  "I'm moving back home."

  "For the last few weeks this has been your home."

  "It had reason to be. That reason is now wrapped in a plastic bag and lying in a trash Dumpster behind the hospital."

  The moment the angrily shouted words left her mouth, she clapped her hands across it and slumped down onto the edge of the bed. "Oh, God." Groaning, she covered her face with her hands.

  For several minutes she rocked back and forth, silently mourning. Then she lowered her hands and looked up at Taylor. "I'm sorry. That was a ghastly thing to say." She drew in several deep breaths and nervously wiped her hands on her skirt. "Taylor, you've been wonderful about everything. Yesterday. Last night. This morning. It was sweet of you to bring me flowers." She glanced at the partially wilted mums now lying on the bed, where she had negligently tossed them when she came in.

  "I want to thank you for showing so much consideration and patience, Taylor. But … but the reason we got married in the first place no longer exists." She blinked away the flow of tears. "The doctor told me that I should resume my normal routine as soon as possible. Under the circumstances that means—"

  She glanced up and was shocked to discover that she was talking to an empty room.

  Taylor sometimes had a social drink at lunch, if he was entertaining a client and the client wanted one. But he never drank before ten o'clock in the morning. So when that first fiery belt of Scotch landed in his stomach, he sucked in a sharp breath and blinked tears out of his eyes. Just to prove that he could, he drained the glass of Scotch before stepping out onto the patio.

  It, like everything else around the place, had undergone a facelift, otherwise known as Ria's touch. There were well-tended hanging baskets and clay pots of blooming flowers everywhere. He'd had blooming flowers on his patio before, but by the middle of the summer they were either brown from not getting enough water or yellow from getting too much or straggling because he'd forgotten to pinch them back.

  This year his flowers were hothouse-pretty and flourishing. They typified the improvements Ria had made since she'd moved in. Not that she'd started changing things helter-skelter, like the dingbat mistress in a Neil Simon comedy. She always asked his permission before moving a chair a few inches one way or the other.

  The alterations she'd made ranged from dramatic, such as hanging her cherished Erte, lithograph over the fireplace in the bedroom, to subtle, such as keeping fresh flowers on the dining table. All her changes were improvements, not impositions. He couldn't walk through his house, which had been a showplace before, without seeing traces of Ria on everything. Her stamp was as indelible as the red letters on first-class postage.

  Hell, it was a cliché, but she'd made his house a home and given it a woman's touch. It had been spectacular when the expensive decorator got through with it. Now it was spectacular and homey. Ria had added what no decorator could—warmth. She'd breathed personality into the beautiful rooms. She was its heart.

  He'd gotten accustomed to seeing her nightgown hanging on the hook inside the bathroom
door. He'd even been guilty of fondling it every time he went in or out, of holding it against his nose and breathing in her scent, like a druggie getting secret fixes throughout the day.

  He hadn't minded seeing her razor resting next to his. In fact, he'd thought it was kinda cute. Pink. With impressions of daisies on it.

  "Hell." He spat out the terse expletive and crammed his fists into his pockets. Out of pure meanness, he kicked a crimson geranium. What the hell was he doing, thinking about razors with daisies on them? He'd gone daffy.

  Still, he couldn't help but think of her dressing table. It was lined with perfume atomizers that made air freshener unnecessary. The scores of little glass jars intrigued him. Silver-capped rouge pots held everything imaginable except rouge. He'd spent one entire, entertaining evening investigating them, asking her what this or that was for, sniffing it, rubbing the creamy contents between his fingers, and remembering times when he'd smelled or felt or tasted that particular emulsion somewhere on Ria's body. She was so deliciously feminine. He was going to miss having that feminine element in the house.

  "Face it," he said with a growl to the wounded geranium, "I'm going to miss her."

  He'd never lacked for female companionship, but there was something to be said for coming home to the same woman every night. It was much more relaxed than dating. Conversation came naturally; it wasn't a skill that constantly had to be practiced.

  When they went out in public he never had to wonder if his "date" was going to be dressed to suit the occasion, because Ria always was. She never committed a faux pas. She always knew the right thing to say in any social situation.

  Dropping down onto a chaise, Taylor contemplated the horizon through the tent he made of his fingers. How could he convince her to stay?

  He wasn't just considering himself, either, he thought righteously. He was being considerate of her. Damn, she'd looked pale and hollow when they left the hospital. And more than just physically wasted. She'd been emptied out spiritually too.