“It’s beautiful, Gabe.” Gloria Crimpson and her heavily pregnant daughter toured the grounds and Gabe listened to her with half an ear. “It’s exactly as you promised.”
“I’m glad you like it,” he murmured. Gloria looked over her pink Chanel-clad shoulder at him. He smiled, trying to reassure her. Trying to get in the game. This was a big day for him and he felt as though he watched it all through a fog he couldn’t get clear of.
“David’s folks should get here tonight,” Savanah said, so in love and so young that the prospect only brought joy to her, despite Gloria’s pinched lips pinching farther. “I can’t wait to show them the cabins. They are so amazing!”
Gabe wished he could snap out of this funk and revel in the success of everything. But the funk was stubborn and his brother walking around with a shiner and Alice suddenly being Mary Sunshine as if this weren’t their last week of seeing each other, as if it didn’t matter that she would be leaving soon, didn’t help.
“Thank you,” he said. “They turned out even better than I had thought, too.”
“When do the decorations go up?” Savanah asked. “They looked so beautiful on the sketches.”
“The night before,” he answered.
“Your chef made them?” she asked and when he nodded she laughed. “That’s a talented chef.”
You don’t know the half of it, he thought, wishing she were here instead of him right now. In the past few days dealing with these women she’d been taking the lead, possessing a sudden sweetness compared to his unabating sour attitude. He’d thought she was different during their brief rekindling—laughing, working hard, loving her work. But this new Alice—welcoming and open and gregarious—he had never seen her. Ever.
His attraction to her doubled and redoubled every time he saw her hug Cameron, or offer the delivery guys coffee and cinnamon rolls. Every time she teased his brother and dad as if they were her own.
She needed to leave. Soon.
“Not judging by last night’s meal,” Gloria, whose acidic voice, normally loaded to capacity with superiority and judgment, managed to sharpen just a bit more on.
“It was wonderful,” Savanah insisted. “I’ve never had rabbit before.”
“I should say not. You weren’t raised in the hills.”
Gloria kept up her pace across the grounds despite her high heels and narrow skirt. Gabe and Savanah lagged behind momentarily.
“You’ll have to excuse my mom,” she said, stroking the round mound of her belly. “She’s not taking this pregnancy and small nonsociety wedding very well.”
“I hadn’t noticed.” He tried to say it magnanimously but it came out coated in sarcasm.
“Ah.” She swiped her long curtain of shiny blond hair over her shoulder like a woman in a shampoo ad. “Our unflappable host finally shows some cracks.” She said it with a laugh so Gabe didn’t jump to his own defense. He didn’t have the energy.
“We tried to book three other small inns along the Hudson and after the second conversation with my mother all three of them backed out.” The girl seemed to expect this reaction without any rancor and he found himself watching her, slightly astonished by the reality of the Fish-Stick Princess.
“But not you.” She shook her head and whistled. “I resorted to pink swans and sushi boats and you still didn’t crumble.”
Gabe gaped at her. “You wanted us to back out of the contract?”
She smiled and patted Gabe’s shoulder. “David and I always wanted to elope. This wedding is a compromise for my parents and I was trying my best to weasel out of it.” She winced comically and Gabe felt some true affection for the surprising Savanah. “Not the most honorable thing, but I couldn’t imagine my marriage, the creation of my family, taking place in front of seven hundred people I don’t care about.”
“I understand,” Gabe said as they strolled. “It’s a very personal thing. I hope having your wedding here won’t seem like such a bad compromise.”
“It won’t be. This is so beautiful, I couldn’t have even imagined it. I am so grateful you didn’t get run off by those pink swans.”
He laughed and patted her shoulder. “It takes more than pink swans to chase me off,” he said and swallowed.
“I’m glad.”
“Savanah!” Gloria shouted from the newly planted rose garden. “What’s the problem? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, Mom.” Savanah rolled her eyes and picked up her pace. “You know in the end it only proves something I’ve learned from my mother.”
“What’s that?” Gabe asked, matching her stride.
“That I can’t control everything. Sometimes you have to embrace what the world puts in your way.”
Gabe stopped for a moment, the world slightly tilted under his feet.
“Gabe?” Savanah placed a hand on his arm.
“Sorry.” He smiled without much heart, wondering what other surprises were in store for him this week.
Alice sent out the last of the lamb loins, served with the cucumber riata and fresh tomatoes. Elizabeth, one of the waitstaff, opened the door to the dining room and the sound of laughter came flooding in. The bride’s and groom’s parents certainly got along, though Alice wasn’t surprised. David Barister and his folks, when she’d met them today, seemed to be truly lovely people. Lovely enough to round off Gloria Crimpson’s sharp edges.
Of course, the bottles of wine they were going through didn’t hurt.
She tossed the pan in the sink and the gamy smell of cooked lamb and garlic punched her in the face. She staggered away and tried to breathe fresh air before she lost her dinner all over the kitchen.
Oh God, she thought, swallowing nausea and bile. This place is getting to me. I need a vacation.
The phone in Gabe’s office rang.
“Cameron?” she said, and her apprentice looked up from the lemon torte he was setting out to serve at room temperature. “I’ll be right back.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’m going to play with the grill,” he joked.
Alice threw the towel from her shoulder at him and went to grab the phone on Gabe’s desk by the third ring.
“Riverview Inn, this is Alice.”
“Hey, Alice. It’s Tim Munez.”
“Tim!” The nausea in her stomach tightened into knots and she sat in Gabe’s chair, trying to ignore the smell of him that wrapped around her like an embrace. “How are you?”
“Fantastic.” Tim said and Alice smiled. He was an infectiously cheerful man. The two years they’d shared a kitchen in Albany had been two of the most fun years of her career. “Really good. How are things on that mountain?”
“Better every week, Tim.” She nearly laughed at the lie.
“Well, the spread in New York Magazine made that place look like heaven on earth.”
“It is, Tim. So, have you thought about coming to work here?”
“Yep, and I’d love to do it.”
She sighed and melted into the chair, a thousand pounds lifted from her, while another thousand resettled on her shoulders.
This is it. I’m leaving. It’s over.
“But—” Tim said and her muscles reseized.
“But what?”
“I can’t come on the date you wanted. I need two more weeks. I’m training my replacement here and it’s going a bit slower than planned.”
Alice spun and looked at the calendar on the wall behind her and did some quick math. She could do it. She could stay an extra two weeks.
Her heart pounded. It was a curse and a blessing. She was torn right down the middle between wanting to be here and wanting to put this place in her rearview mirror.
“No problem, Tim. We’ll see you at the end of June.”
“Excellent. I can’t wait.”
Alice hung up and continued to study the calendar. The wedding weekend was the tenth, which would make Tim’s arrival the twenty-fourth, and she would stick around two days and—
She blinked.
Today was the fifth.
Her period was two days late.
As if summoned, the nausea gurgled in her stomach and she raced to the bathroom to throw up.
Hope, fear and dread churned through Alice’s brain, eating away at her nerves for the next three days. Every time she went to the bathroom she was sure she would see blood. Sure that her period was only delayed by stress and the fact that she had no appetite whatsoever.
But every time, there was no blood, and hope would replace dread. Then upon thinking about a baby, about miscarrying again, fear would replace hope and the vicious cycle would spin.
I should tell Gabe, she thought as she sugared flowers to place on the wedding cake. She took a purple pansy, dipped it in egg white and sugar and placed it on a wire rack to dry.
I should tell him.
But she didn’t.
Another day went by and her period still didn’t come. Guests began to arrive. Her parents came in the evenings and helped finish the prep work and it was all background noise, to the constant conversation she had in her head.
I should tell him.
There’s no point in telling him if I don’t know for sure. Why get him all worked up?
She never bought a pregnancy test—she put it off and put it off.
Another day went by.
Hope was unfettered, a giant bird loose in her body. She stopped drinking coffee.
“Are you kidding?” Max asked as he waited, cup in hand, for the coffee machine to stop brewing one early morning with the sky just beginning to lighten. “No coffee?”
“It’s bad for you.”
Max scowled at her. “You’ve lost it.”
Find out! she thought. Just find out for sure.
But then there were problems with her decorations. In storage a panel of silk tore from its frame and she and Max spent hours repairing it.
“You all right?” he asked while she mended the silk that had torn and he hammered a new nail into the corner joint.
“I’m great.” She smiled at him. “Why?”
“You seem a little juiced.”
“Juiced?”
“Yeah, like you’re on something. And I know it’s not coffee.”
“Right.” She laughed. “I’ve managed to find the time to start a drug habit.”
“I thought maybe it was Gabe. Maybe you fixed things.”
Hope, that giant bird on the loose fell like a stone in her stomach. Reality crashed in around her and she couldn’t laugh. Her face felt suddenly paralyzed.
I might be pregnant with Gabe’s baby. Again. The nightmare might start all over. Again. She rubbed her forehead. What if she told him and he asked her to marry him, then she lost the baby? Again.
She swallowed back a sudden painful sob.
This was a horrific roller coaster she couldn’t get off.
It was ludicrous that she could be pregnant after the years, money and procedures dedicated to getting this way. But it was like those women in that counseling group who, years after accepting their fates, ended up knocked up.
When you let go of the obsession, some of them said, laughing and flushed with their unbelievable luck, it happens.
Hormonal changes, that’s why it happens, said the science-minded.
God, declared the religious.
She’d sat there and doubted all of them.
And yet here she was. Poised on this terrible precipice.
Do I want to try this again? Go through all of this again?
But, hope tried to say, what if she took it easy? What if she went on modified bed rest, and was really careful and Gabe could help her?
She shook her head, clearing hope’s voice from her brain.
I don’t even know for sure, she rationalized.
“Alice?” Max asked. He touched her shoulder and she flinched. “You all right?”
“Yeah.” She sighed. “I—” She swallowed and felt the sudden burn of tears. “I’ll be right back.”
She stood and ran for the bathroom, feeling Max’s suspicious gaze on her as she ran.
This is crazy, Gabe told himself. You’re crazy. The stress has finally eaten your brain and now you are standing outside your ex-wife’s cottage like a stalker.
Worse, this was his third night out here.
He felt as if the proverbial other shoe was poised above his head, waiting for him to relax so it could fall and crush him. Alice didn’t look good these days and he wondered if she was drinking again. He told himself he was out here, watching her in her cabin to make sure she wasn’t. But the truth was, this was the only place he could actually take full breaths of air.
Everything was going fine. The wedding was four days away and the details that he checked and rechecked obsessively so as to keep thoughts of Alice and his mother away seemed straightforward and taken care of.
So what the hell is wrong with me? Why am I here?
Because in his office, his stomach burned as if filled with acid. And in his room, his chest ached and he couldn’t sleep.
He watched David and Savanah, day in and day out, young, in love, expecting their first baby, and missing Alice felt like an open wound.
It would be better when she was gone, when she wasn’t constantly there reminding him of things they would never have.
But then where will I go to breathe?
“Gabe?”
He whirled away from the cabin he’d been watching only to find Alice on the trail behind him, a plastic grocery-store bag in her hand which, when he looked at it, she tucked behind her back.
“Did you need something?” she asked.
He nearly laughed, nearly fell on his knees under the force of all the things he wanted. He opened his mouth but only a rattling gasp came out. Silence.
“Gabe?” Her voice was that soft pet, the delicious stroke against his body, and he wanted to pull her into his arms one last time. Banish the demons, the past, the specter of the future.
“Just wanted to make sure everything was going okay,” he said. “We’ve been so busy I never get a chance to see you.”
“I know. It’s like I blink and three days have passed. But everything seems to be going really well.”
“That’s making me nervous.”
She laughed and the tension in him balled tighter.
“Oh, I forgot to tell you, Tim Munoz has taken the job. He’ll be here on the twenty-fourth, so I can stay or—”
“That’s fine. Thank you.”
He was too abrupt, too close to apologizing, to asking for another chance, another doomed chance.
“Good night,” he said and walked away, into the dark.
“Good night, Gabe.” Her voice chased him all the way back to the lodge, to his empty cold bed.
The world cracked, opened and then closed again, different now than it had been before Alice looked at the stick. Pregnant.
She tore open the plastic around the second test, downed a glass of water, peed, waited and got the same blue plus sign in the window.
The earth dazzled, sparkled; her small cottage was the epicenter of the universe. Of creation.
She pulled in air that tasted like sugar and salt. Her heart pumped blood through her body, through the small tadpole deep in her belly.
“A baby.” She sighed, the words delicious on her tongue, the prospect all she would need to sustain her. For months. Years. Her life.
She put her hand to her mouth to stifle the laughing sobs. The giddy screams of joy and panic. Alice collapsed onto the toilet, slid sideways when she miscalculated and she landed on the floor. She lay back, flung her arms out and laughed at the ceiling.
A baby.
The world was filled with blessings and second chances.
Gabe.
She put her hands to her face, kicked her feet against the wall in a sudden thrilled spasm.
Gabe standing in front of her cabin, looking for the whole world, like a boy lost in a mall. She could give him a second chance, them a second chance. Another shot to make it work.
Tears burned down her face into her mouth, a champagne of hope and wish.
But soon the tiles grew cold against her back and what would be settled around her like a curtain, a screen showing old home movies of their life before the divorce.
She’d tell him she was pregnant and Gabe, honorable and longing for a family, would propose.
She didn’t want that marriage. She didn’t want him that way, tied to her by this fragile pregnancy. What she wanted them to have had to be real.
Gabe couldn’t know. Not yet.