“More or less.” She spoke with great concentration. “Well. More Jim’s doing than mine. He always took care of… you know. Contraception.”
“And you didn’t object?”
“No.”
“But contraception has been known to fail.”
“Yes,” Lillian said.
“How do you feel about the possibility of being pregnant?”
“Good.” Her smile was genuine but not vigorous. “It’s something I’ve thought about for a long time.”
“Really thought about? Diapers, midnight feedings, skinned knees, stretch marks?”
“It’s never real till it’s real. I know, Matt. But yes, I’ve imagined it often.”
“Talked to Jim about any of this?”
“Haven’t even mentioned the possibility. I don’t want to tell him until we’re certain.” She looked at Matt with a crease of concern above her small eyebrows. “You won’t tell him, will you?”
He said, “I can’t unless you want me to. Confidentiality.”
“Confidentiality even between doctors?”
“Honor among thieves,” Matt said.
She showed her brief smile again. It was there and gone. “But you have lunch with him all the time.”
Jim was a pathologist at the hospital; they had done premed together. They liked to meet for lunch at the Chinese cafe two blocks up Grove. “It could make for an uncomfortable lunch, sure. But it’s a quick test. We should have a verdict before very long.” He pretended to make a note. “You know, Lillian, sometimes, in a woman who’s a little bit older, there can be complications—”
“I know. I know all about that. But I’ve heard there are ways of finding certain things out. In advance.”
He understood her anxiety and tried to soothe it. “If you’re having a baby, we’ll keep a close eye on everything. I wouldn’t anticipate trouble.” That wasn’t all there was to it… but at the moment it was all Lillian needed to know.
“That’s good,” she said.
But her frown had crept back. She wasn’t reassured, and she was far from happy. He wondered whether he ought to probe this discontent or leave it alone.
He put down his pen. “Something’s bothering you.”
“Well… three things, really.” She rucked her handkerchief into her purse. “What we talked about. My age. That worries me. And Jim, of course. I wonder how he’ll react. I’m afraid it might seem to him like… I don’t know. Giving up his youth. He might not want the responsibility.”
“He might not,” Matt said. “But it would surprise me if he didn’t adapt. Jim likes to shock people, but he comes into work every day. He’s serious about his work and he shows up on time. That sounds like responsibility to me.”
She nodded and seemed to draw some reassurance from the thought. Matt said, “The third thing?”
“I’m sorry?”
“You said three things bothered you. Your age, and Jim, and—what?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” She looked at him steadily across the desk. “Some nights I open the window… and I see that thing in the sky. And it frightens me. And now what they’ve put in the cities. Those big blocks or buildings or whatever they are. I see that on television. It doesn’t make any kind of sense, Matt. What’s the name of that shape? An ‘octahedron.’ A word you shouldn’t have to use after you leave high school. An octahedron the size of an ocean liner sitting in Central Park. I can’t turn on the TV without seeing that. And no one knows what it means. They talk about it and talk about it and none of the talk amounts to more than a whistle in the dark. So of course you wonder. I mean, what happens next? Maybe getting pregnant is just a kind of wishful thinking. Or a new way to panic.” She sat with her purse nestled in her lap and looked fiercely at him. “You’re a parent, Matt. You must know what I mean.”
He did, of course. The same doubts were written in Beth Porter’s withdrawal into her Walkman, in the way his daughter Rachel came home from school and watched the network newscasts with her knees pulled up to her chin.
He calmed Lillian Bix and sent her home, did a little tidying up while Anne finished with her own last patient. Then he opened the blinds and let the sunlight flood in, a long bright beam of it across the tiled floor, the oak cabinets. He peered out at the town.
From the seventh floor of the Marshall Building, Buchanan was a long flat smudgepot in a blue angle of ocean. Still a fairly quiet lumber port, not as small as it had been when he opened the practice fifteen years ago. Many changes since then. Fifteen years ago he’d been fresh out of residency. Rachel had been a toddler, Celeste had been alive, and the community of Buchanan had been smaller by several thousand souls.
Time, cruel son of a bitch, had revised all that. Now Mart’s fortieth birthday was three months behind him, his daughter was looking at college brochures, Celeste was ten years in her grave at the Brookside Cemetery… and a spacecraft the color of cold concrete had been orbiting the earth for more than a year.
It occurred to Matt, also not for the first time, how much he hated that ugly Damoclean presence in the night sky.
How much he still loved this town. He believed he had always loved it, that he had been born loving it. It was funny how that worked. Some people have no sense of place at all; they can park at a Motel 6 and call it home. And some people, many of them his friends, had grown up hating the provincialism of Buchanan. But for Matt, Buchanan was a map of himself—as essential as his heart or his liver.
He had been a solitary, often lonely child, and he had learned the intimate secrets of the marina, the main street, and the Little Duncan River long before he acquired a best friend. He had folded this town, its potholed roads and Douglas firs, its foggy winters and the Gold Rush facades of its crumbling downtown, deep into the substance of himself.
His wife was buried here. Celeste had been committed to the earth at Brookside Cemetery, a stone’s throw from the estuary of the Little Duncan, where the chapel rang its small carillon of bells every Sunday noon. His parents were buried here.
He had always believed that one day he would be buried here… but lately that conviction had begun to falter.
He had deposited flowers on Celeste’s grave at Brookside just last week, and as he passed through the cemetery gates he was possessed of a dour conviction that some wind of destiny would sweep him elsewhere, that he would die in a very different place.
Like Lillian Bix—like everybody else—Matt had fallen prey to premonitions.
That ugly white ghost ship floating on the deep of every clear night. Of course Lillian was scared. Who the hell wasn’t scared? But you go on, Matt Wheeler thought. You do what you do, and you go on. It was the decent thing.
He heard Annie dismissing her last patient, and he was about to step into the hallway and offer his invitation when the phone rang: an after-hours call from Jim Bix that did nothing to dispel his uneasiness. “We need to talk,” Jim said.
Mart’s first thought was that this had something to do with Lillian’s visit. He said, cautiously, “What’s the problem?”
“I don’t want to talk about it over the phone. Can you stop by the hospital after work?”
This wasn’t about Lillian. Jim sounded too disturbed. Not having-a-baby disturbed. There was a darker note in his voice.
Matt checked his watch. “Rachel’s home from school and she said she’d fix dinner tonight. Maybe we could have lunch tomorrow?”
“I’d prefer tonight.” Pause. “I’m working shift hours, but how would it be if I stopped by on my way home?”
“How late?”
“Eleven, say. Eleven-thirty.”
“It’s important?”
“Yes.”