The Second Time Around
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Marie Ferrarella
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CHAPTER 1
If there was anything she looked forward to less than her annual visit to her gynecologist, Laurel Mitchell didn’t know what it was.
It wasn’t that her doctor was heavy-handed with the examination or made her uncomfortable. On the contrary, Dr. Rachel Kilpatrick, the same doctor who had seen her through all three of pregnancies, had a gentle touch and a fantastic bedside manner. And she was a kind, understanding woman to boot, someone she could talk to about anything that bothered her. Rachel Kilpatrick was not the kind of doctor who just roller-skated by, taking pulses and collecting fees. She genuinely cared for her patients.
No, it wasn’t Dr. Kilpatrick that she minded. What she found upsetting was the whole awful experience: sitting there in a cool room, wearing a vest that was made out of thin tissue paper with what could have passed as an extralarge paper towel draped around her lower torso. That was what she found so off-putting.
That and the stirrups.
Whose idea were they, anyway? Necessary or not, they made her think of something two steps removed from a torture rack from the Spanish Inquisition.
But she endured it all like a good little soldier. Because that was what women were supposed to do once a year: troop in, strip down and lie there, thinking of other things while cold steel instruments were inserted in places women of her grandmother’s generation never talked about.
Finally the probing and the scratching were over. Dr. Kilpatrick removed the instruments and put the prize she’d secured between two glass lab slides, then placed that on the side counter. Laurel lost no time in dismounting from the stirrups and sitting up. She tried her best to pull her dignity to her and ignore the goose bumps forming on her flesh from the room’s cold temperature.
When she raised her eyes to Dr. Kilpatrick’s face, she saw that her gynecologist was frowning.
Not a good sign, Laurel thought. The queasiness in her stomach increased, reminding her that the cereal she’d had for breakfast was not resting well. But then lately, very little had. She chalked it up to stress and told herself it would pass.
Dr. Kilpatrick pushed the stool she’d been sitting on back into the corner. She held Laurel’s file against her chest and moved closer to the examination table, and to Laurel.
Her eyes were kind as she asked, “How have you been feeling lately, Laurel?”
Laurel bit back a flippant answer. Whenever she was nervous, she tended to make jokes, a habit that drove her husband, Jason, and her sons, crazy. This time, she shrugged.
“Okay, I guess. A little run-down but that’s to be expected. I’m not twenty anymore.” Her suspicions began to multiply, conjuring up awful images. Her neighbor, Alexis Curtis, had been feeling run-down and she was diagnosed with cancer. The chemo treatments had made her chestnut hair fall out.
Laurel sat up straighter, drawing her shoulders back. “Why? Is something wrong? Tell me if something’s wrong,” she requested, hoping that wasn’t a tremor she heard in her voice. “I can take it.” She scrutinized her doctor’s face, trying to uncover what the woman was thinking.
Dr. Kilpatrick took in a slow breath, as if bracing herself to rip a Band-Aid from her patient’s arm. “Well, Laurel, as they used to say in the old days, you’re with child.”
“With child,” Laurel repeated, dazed. Numbed. Confused. She cocked her head, as if that would somehow shift everything in her head and make her better understand the words. “Whose child?”
Dr. Kilpatrick smiled, amused. “Your child, I’d imagine.”
Laurel heard the words clearly, but somehow, they just didn’t seem to register. She shook her head, confused. “I’m not getting this.”
An almost wicked smile curved the physician’s lips. “Apparently, you are, or at least did.” Leaning over, Dr. Kilpatrick placed her hand over Laurel’s. “Laurel, you’re pregnant.”
Laurel thought it was a miracle that she didn’t swallow her tongue from the shock. But then, this was a joke, right? Some bizarre April Fool’s prank just a couple weeks shy of its mark, since it was the middle of April. The doctor was apparently running behind in her attempt at humor.
Very emphatically, Laurel shook her head, never taking her eyes off Dr. Kilpatrick’s face. “No, I’m not.”
“You just left a specimen of your urine before the exam.” Dr. Kilpatrick flipped over a page to show her the results the nurse had gotten. “The test says you’re pregnant. Tests don’t lie.”
Again, Laurel shook her head, this time even more adamantly, refusing to accept this docilely. There was a mistake. This was all wrong. She was exhausted, she had the flu, maybe even walking pneumonia. There was a whole list of possibilities for her condition that didn’t have the word “baby” attached to it.
“Test me again,” Laurel pleaded. “I need a do-over. I was always careless on tests, always got the wrong answer the first time around.” She placed her hand on the doctor’s arm. “Please.”
“I don’t have to take another sample from you, Laurel,” Dr. Kilpatrick told her softly. “Your color’s changed.”
Laurel pressed her hand against her cheeks. Was she running a fever? Well, small wonder. The doctor had just scared her to death. “My color?”
The doctor’s smile turned into a broad grin. “Not there.” She indicated Laurel’s face. “There.” With a nod of her head, Dr. Kilpatrick glanced toward the blue “paper towel” that was inadequately pooled about her patient’s thighs, indicating the area she was referring to.
Laurel shifted uncomfortably, as if she could actually feel what the doctor was talking about. “It could still be a mistake.”
There was sympathy on the doctor’s face. “Could be,” she allowed skeptically. “But it’s really highly doubtful.”
Laurel blew out a breath. “Pregnant,” she said, still unable to absorb the implications behind the eight-letter word. Still holding it at bay with the last ounce of her strength.
The expression on Rachel Kilpatrick’s face was pure sympathy. And perhaps, just a touch of envy. “Yes.”
“Me.”
The doctor lifted her shoulders, then let them drop. “You’re the one on the examination table.”
Laurel laughed shortly. This wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be. She couldn’t possibly be pregnant. She raised her eyes to meet the doctor’s. “I’ll gladly switch with you.”
“Laurel, this is a wonderful thing.” The doctor gave her hand another warm squeeze. “A miracle.”
Miracles were things that you hoped for, prayed for, Laurel thought haplessly. Miracles were things that happened despite impossible odds because you wanted them to. Never in her wildest dreams had she ever wanted to be pregnant at forty-five.
“You bet it’s a miracle,” Laurel said sarcastically. “It’s damn near close to being an immaculate conception. In the last six months, I can count the number of times Jason and I made love on the fingers of one hand.”
“Now there’s your problem,” the doctor teased with a laugh. “The bed’s much more comfortable for that sort of thing.” And then, because her patient looked so sober, so upset by the news that usually brought tears of joy to so many of her other patients, Rachel sat down on the examining table beside Laurel and placed an arm around her patient’s shoulders. There was compassion in her eyes as she asked, “Is there trouble between you and Jason?”
Jason was one of those easygoing men who was hard to ruffle. But this should definitely do it, Laurel thought. An ironic smile curved her mouth. “There will be once I come home with this.”
The doctor shook her head. “Besides ‘this.’”
Laurel knew she’d lucked out the day she’d haphazardly picked Rachel Kilpatrick to be her doctor. She could come to her with anything, even after hours. It made her wonder how the woman managed to maintain a private life. But somehow she did. Laurel knew for a fact that the woman had a husband and children.
“No ‘trouble.’ Jason’s just gotten caught up in his old hobby. Trains,” she explained.
Her husband had been a collector when they’d first met. At that time, he had only three engines to his name. Over the years, under the guise of building up sets for their sons, he’d bought more and more. But they hardly ever even got out of the box once he brought the trains home. He was storing them. And then suddenly, last Christmas, they’d all come out of their boxes, every last one of them, and began showing up in almost every room in the house. She’d managed to convince Jason that he needed to have them all in one place. He settled on two, the bonus room and the garage, both of which looked like miniature Grand Central Stations these days.
“We’ve got tracks all over the garage. The cars are parked outside.” She’d had to find a cover for hers because she didn’t want the elements getting to the paint job. “Now he’s talking about setting up something outside in the backyard.” Actually, he was doing more than talking about it, but she didn’t want to take up the doctor’s time.
“So, see, this will work out just fine.”
Laurel looked at her, not following the doctor’s reasons. “And how do you figure that?”
“Well, if you give him a son, Jason will have an excuse to play with the trains. Give him someone to run the trains for.”
They already had a son, Laurel thought. As a matter of fact, they had three of them. Three big, strong, strapping boys. None of whom were in that getting-on-their-knees-and-playing-with-trains stage anymore. Besides, Jason didn’t want another son—he wanted a heavy-duty transformer to help run his trains over longer distances without losing power.
Laurel looked at the doctor, feeling overwhelmed and helpless as well as exhausted. “What I’ll be giving him an excuse for is leaving home.”
Dr. Kilpatrick rose from the table. “I think you’re selling your husband short.”
It wasn’t so much a matter of selling Jason short as it was having been privy to his dreams all these years. He had a plan for their future. And that plan definitely didn’t include morning sickness and swollen ankles.
“You don’t understand, Doctor,” Laurel sighed. “Jason and I are in a different place now than we were twenty-five years ago.”
“Yes, for one thing, you’re far more experienced now than you were then.”
That wasn’t what she meant. “Twenty-five years ago, Jason wanted enough kids to populate his own professional baseball team. Now he’s satisfied with just enough to play four-handed poker with. Occasionally. What he wants to do is travel, do all the things we couldn’t do back then because we had kids.”
Oh God, pregnant. I’m pregnant.
“How am I going to tell him that after all these years, we’re back to square one again? Less than one. Zero. How am I going to tell him that he’s got to wait another eighteen years before we go on that road trip he’s been planning? By then, they won’t let him drive because they’ll have taken away his driver’s license.”
The exaggeration made Dr. Kilpatrick laugh. “Jason’s what, one year old than you?” Laurel nodded, letting another from-the-bottom-of-her-toes sigh escape. “That makes him forty-six. I don’t think he’ll be ready to be put on an ice flow just yet. Besides, haven’t you heard? Forty-six is the new thirty-six.” She patted Laurel’s shoulder. “Forget about this early-retirement business,” she advised, referring to something Laurel had told her earlier about her husband’s plans. “It’s highly overrated. Being involved keeps you young. Babies keep you young,” she emphasized. “This way, he still has retirement to look forward to.” Crossing to the door, Dr. Kilpatrick paused for a moment, a fond expression on her face. “Sometimes, the looking-forward-to-something part is even better than actually getting that ‘something.’”
“You want to come home with me and explain that to him? Maybe he’ll believe it if he hears it coming from you.”
Her hand on the doorknob, Dr. Kilpatrick stopped and turned around. “What, that you’re pregnant?”
“No, that looking forward to something is better than having it.”
Dr. Kilpatrick smiled. “Look at the positive aspects—”
What possible positive aspects could there be about being pregnant at forty-five? “Right, I’ll be the oldest mother in kindergarten.”
The look the doctor gave her said she knew it was just the shock talking, nothing more. “No, you’re better off financially than you were when you had your other children. And you’re definitely more experienced. You know what to expect.”
“Yes, morning sickness for five months.” And one hell of an explosion when she broke the news. She couldn’t think of one person who was going to be happy about this unexpected twist.
“Afterward,” the doctor gently prodded. “Remember how afraid you were when you brought that first baby home? How you thought you’d drop and break him? How everything was this big mystery? Every rash, every cough had you fearing the worst? Now you’ll have the advantage because you’ll know what you’re doing.”
Laurel remembered the early years and, yes, she’d learned from them. Learned that she could survive and, most of all, learned to expect the unexpected.
She laughed drily. “Obviously you’ve had an easier time with motherhood than I have. Each one of the boys was different. Each one refused to play by the rules his brothers set down.” She had great kids, but it had been an uphill battle with each one of them. There’d never been any coasting, not even with the youngest one, Christopher, who’d been the most like her.
He wasn’t going to be the youngest one anymore, she suddenly thought. How was Christopher going to like that? “Every time I thought I knew what I was doing, I didn’t.” And it had been exhausting, physically and emotionally. Laurel raised her eyes to the doctor’s. “How am I going to go through that again?”
The doctor answered her question with a question. “Would you change anything if you could?”
“What do you mean?”
Just for a second, Dr. Kilpatrick moved back into the room. “If you could erase one of your sons, go back and not have him, would you?”
Laurel didn’t even stop to think. “No.”
It was obviously the answer the doctor had expected. “Then how do you know you won’t feel that way about this one?”
Laurel shook her head. Things were getting jumbled, twisted. “Because with this one, I’ll be forty-five years old. Because with this one, I won’t be able to run and play.”
The doctor opened her chart and glanced down at the notation she’d made earlier. “You still get in a game of tennis now and then, don’t you?”
It had been an exaggeration. Wishful thinking on her part. She was too busy with the demands of her career and personal life to spend much time on the courts. “More then than now.”
The doctor closed the chart again, accepting the correction and going from there. “Running is not a requirement with children.”
The hell it wasn’t, Laurel thought. “I guess your kids were less active than mine. Mine were born running.” At least it felt that way. “I get tired just thinking about it.” And then it suddenly dawned on her. “Is that why I’ve been feeling so tired lately? Because I’m pregnant?”
Dr. Kilpatrick’s smile filtered into her eyes. “That would be my diagnosis.”
One mystery cleared up—and she wished with all her heart that it’d had an easier solution. “I beat you to it. That means you can’t charge me.”
“All right,” Dr. Kilpatrick agreed, tongue in cheek. “I’ll just bill you for the urinalysis. And the friendly advice.”
She could use some advice, Laurel thought. Real advice. “Which is?”
“Enjoy.”
Laurel rolled her eyes as she crossed her arms before her. “Easy for you to say. You don’t have to face a man who’s stockpiling tons of brochures on summer cabins from three different states.”
“He’ll be thrilled,” the doctor promised.
“He’ll be in shock,” Laurel countered. Real concern began to set in. What if the news was too much for Jason? “Got any smelling salts I can take with me?”
Dr. Kilpatrick opened the door. “You have my number. Call if you need me.”
Laurel laughed. “That’s all Jason needs. An ob-gyn attending to him.”
Laurel’s smile faded the moment the door was closed again. She slid off the table, trying to stay one step ahead of the numbing shock that threatened to completely swallow her up.
This was absurd.
Unreal.
How in heaven’s name could she be pregnant? Weren’t eggs supposed to dry up at her age? She slipped on her underwear, then hooked her bra. Wasn’t that what the whole ticking-biological-clock thing was all about? Having babies before it was too late? Before she couldn’t have any? It looked as if she could go on having babies until she was an octogenarian.
Laurel pulled her turtleneck sweater over her head, then punched through her arms.
“This breaking news,” she mumbled to herself in disbelief. “Eighty-seven-year-old Laurel Mitchell has just given birth to her twentieth baby. Someone stop this woman for the good of humanity.”
With her panty hose still in her hand, Laurel leaned her hip against the table and sighed. How had this happened? She knew how it happened, she upbraided herself, putting on first one leg, then the other. She’d gotten lax. At the end of last year, she’d given in to Jason’s pressure and finally stopped taking her birth control pills. He thought it wasn’t too much of a risk.
Well, guess what, big guy, we’re pregnant. How’s that for a risk?
She was on the cusp of menopause, experiencing her own personal heat waves while others were bundling up in sweaters and jackets. She’d assumed that her birthing years were over. That any occasional romp she enjoyed with her husband was deemed safe for all concerned.
Well, you deemed wrong, Laurie old girl.
Old girl.
God, she was too old for this. Too old for morning sickness. Too old for prenatal vitamins and too old to be chasing around after a toddler.
Yet, here it was, happening.
She spread her hand out over her as-yet-flat stomach. There was a teeny-tiny occupant inside now, no bigger than a speck. But he was growing. Growing by the moment. Frowning even as she stood here in this nice, pastel-colored room, agonizing over it.
Him, she corrected herself. Agonizing over him. All she’d ever managed to produce was boys. There was no reason to believe this newest passenger would be any different.
Oh God, this was different.
She was forty-five, for crying out loud. What was God thinking, letting her get pregnant?
“This isn’t funny,” she murmured, looking up toward the ceiling. “Not funny at all.”
And the one who would be laughing the least would be her husband.
Slipping on her shoes, she closed her eyes. How was she ever going to explain this to Jason?
