"Don't think too hard," Mitch said. "It's not going to do any good. The baby's gone and all the thinking in the world isn't going to bring him back."
"It was a boy…?" she said softly. She'd kept herself from asking, though Waxman had told her he'd share any information she felt she needed to know in order to deal with the loss.
"Yes," Mitchell said, "it was a boy. I thought you knew."
"We had better names for the boy than the girl," she said, feeling the tears shaking in her. "You liked Laurence, right?"
"Rachel, don't do this…"
"I liked Mackenzie-"
"Please. God. Rachel."
"Trouble with Mackenzie… everybody would have…" and now the tears were too close to be held back "… called him Mac…"
She put her hand to her mouth to stop the sob that was coming. But it spilled from her anyway. "He wouldn't have liked Mac," she wept, reaching for a tissue to wipe her runny nose.
As she did so she looked up at Mitch. He had half turned from her, but even through the tears she could see that his face was crumpled up, his body wracked with sobs. She felt a sudden rush of love for him.
"Oh my poor honey," she said.
"I'm sorry. I shouldn't be-"
"No. Honey. Na," She opened her arms to him. "Come here." He shook his head, still turned from her. "Don't be ashamed. It's good to cry."
"No," he said. "No, I don't want… I don't want to cry. I want to be strong for us both."
"Just come here," she said. "Please."
Reluctantly, he turned back toward her. His face was red and wet, his mouth turned down, his chin crumpled. "Oh God, oh God, oh God. Why did this have to happen? We didn't do anything to deserve this."
He was like a child who'd been punished, and didn't know why. Weeping as much for the injustice of his suffering as the suffering itself.
"Let me hold you," she said. "I need to hold you."
He went to her, and she put her arms around him. He smelled stale; his sweat had gone sour on a day-old shirt. Even his cologne had turned bitter.
"Why?" he asked her through his grief. "Why? Why?"
"I don't know why," she said. Her own sense of culpability seemed at that moment horribly self-indulgent. He'd been hurting quietly all along; she'd just chosen not to see it. But now, though she was looking at him through her own tears, she saw him more clearly than she'd seen him in weeks: the flecks of gray at his temples, the shadows around his eyes, the fever blister on his lip.
"Poor husband…" she murmured, and kissed his hair.
He put his face against her breast, and the sobbing went on, both of them crying, rocking one another.
Things got better after that. She wasn't alone with her pain after all. He felt it just as strongly in his way, and that was a comfort to her. It wasn't the last time they cried together-many times somebody would say something that would catch one of them amiss, and the other's eyes would fill with sympathetic tears. But there wasn't total darkness around her now; she could see the possibility that in a while her need to mourn would fade, and she'd be able to get on with her life.
There would be no further pregnancies; Dr. Waxman made that absolutely clear. If by some unlucky accident she were to become pregnant again they would need to terminate the pregnancy as quickly as possible so as to prevent any unnecessary stress upon her body.
"Am I frail?" she asked him when he told her this. "I don't feel frail."
"You're vulnerable, put it that way," Waxman replied. "In every other way but this, you can live a perfectly normal life. But as far as kids are concerned…" He shrugged. "Of course you can adopt."
"I don't know if the Gearys would approve."
He raised his eyebrow. "Perhaps you're being a little oversensitive," he said. "Which is perfectly understandable right now, by the way. But I think if you were to ask Mitch or his mother or even the old man you'd be surprised how open they'd be to the idea of adoption. Anyway that's all for the future. What matters right now is that you take care of yourself. Mitch says you're going up to his father's house for a while."
"I'm hoping."
"That's a beautiful part of the state. I've been thinking of retiring up there. My wife didn't care for it, but now she's dead…"
"Oh, I'm sorry. Did you lose her recently?"
Waxman's easy smile had faded from his face. "Last Thanksgiving," he said. "She had cancer."
"I'm so sorry."
He sighed; such a sad sigh. "I don't suppose you want to hear platitudes from your old fart of a doctor, but if I may just say: you only get one life, Rachel, and nobody can live it for you. That means you have to take a long, hard look at what you want." He was taking just such a look at her as he spoke. "One door's just closed, and that's a terrible shock. But there's plenty of others, especially for a woman in your position." He leaned forward, his leather chair squeaking. "Just do one thing for me."
"What's that?"
"Don't end up like Margie. I've watched her for the last God knows how many years, drinking herself into an early grave." Again, that laden sigh escaped him. "I'm sorry," he said, "I'll shut my mouth now."
"No…" Rachel murmured. "It's good for me to hear this right now."
"I wasn't always such a melancholy old bird. But since Faith passed away I see things differently. I knew her for forty-nine years, you see. I met her when she was sixteen. So I saw almost a whole life come and go. That makes you think about things in a different way."
"Yes…"
"I said to one of my colleagues after Faith died that I felt like I'd been shot out into space, and I was looking back at everything that had seemed so permanent and what I saw was this fragile blue rock in all that… nothing ness." His gaze had emptied as he spoke; now, when he looked up at Rachel again, she seemed to see right into him; into a loneliness that made her want to run from the room.
"You just be happy," he said to her softly. "You're a good person, Rachel. I see that. And you deserve happiness. So do what your instincts tell you, and if the Gearys don't like it then you just walk away." The words made her catch her breath. "Of course if you quote me," he went on, "I'll deny I ever said it. I'm hoping Cadmus is going to give me a little piece of land when I retire as a thank-you for putting up with his brood over the years."
"I'll put in a good word for you," Rachel told him.
There are occasions when the responsibilities of a storyteller and those of a simple witness contradict one another. For example: had I told you from the outset that the chief catalyst of Mitch and Rachel's separation was the loss of their child, I would have bled away what little suspense the previous chapters possessed. But I don't believe I misrepresented the facts. I began this portion of my account by telling you that there was no single calamitous event that began to undo the marriage, and I would still say that was the case. If the child had survived perhaps Rachel would have stayed with Mitchell a while longer, but she would have left him sooner or later. The marriage was in trouble long before the pregnancy; the most the death of the child did was hasten its collapse.
As Rachel had requested Mitchell took her up to the farmhouse in Caleb's Creek and stayed with her for almost ten days, going down to the city three or four times for meetings but returning in the evening to be with her. Though the Rylanders were there in his absence to attend to all Rachel's needs, Barbara told Mitch that Rachel had taken over most of her duties. It was true. The general homeliness of the house-its lack of expensive works of art, its modest scale-brought out the domestic side of Rachel's nature. She usurped the kitchen from Barbara and started to cook, remarking to Mitch one day that she hadn't so much as boiled a pot of water since they were married. She wasn't a particularly sophisticated cook, but she knew how to put a hearty meal together. There was a healing simplicity to the rituals of the kitchen: fresh vegetables from the garden, good wine from the cellar, the plates washed and neatly stacked when the meal was over.