The air of abstraction clinging to Dr. Blackmun as he took Franny’s pulse set Felipe on edge. He forced his fingers to be still and not grab the other man’s face and direct the doctor’s gaze back to his patient, rather than at the wall behind her.
For his part, Felipe’s gaze was hard on the spot where the doctor’s two blunt fingers lay across his wife’s wrist, sampling the cadence of her life.
The silence stretched and stretched, until Felipe’s very skin ached with it.
Blackmun needed to spit out an explanation for Franny’s distress and soon. The doctor hadn’t been best pleased at being torn from his dinner for “female complaints.” When Felipe had tried to explain it was much more serious than that, the older man had only laughed.
“Sounds like she’s breeding,” he’d said, with a bright edge to his words that had made Felipe’s teeth ache. “You ought to be happy.”
He hadn’t been happy. Instead, he felt as if a great hammer had smashed him over the head. She could not be expecting. They had been so careful.
Except for that first time. That wanton, twisting first time.
Despite his doubts, the doctor had come along anyway. Likely he thought that pacification of a nervous husband was all that was required.
Blackmun was an idiot. But there was no other doctor to call.
Felipe clenched and unclenched his fists. She promised. She never gets sick.
Franny was solemn as an owl. She was quiet. Too quiet. Oh, she answered the doctor’s questions, but never volunteered anything beyond that.
If she was expecting… no. No.
He could imagine her ill, could imagine her recovering, but he couldn’t imagine that. He could stretch himself just far enough to love Franny, but a child as well? He would tear himself in two.
He might be tearing in two right now.
“Well?” he demanded. What was taking so long?
“I’ll need to perform a more detailed examination.” Blackmun flicked a glance at him. “You can leave the room.”
Felipe’s fists stayed clenched as he looked to his wife. If she wanted him to stay, he would. To hell with Blackmun’s idea of propriety.
“It’s all right,” she said. She held out her hand to him and he squeezed it tight. “You can go.”
He waited outside the door. God only knew what Blackmun was doing to her. Murmurs came through—no distinct words or even emotions in the low buzz. He stared at the grain of the wood, the whorls there dipping and swirling in crazed patterns.
The minutes stretched, and still no one called him back in. He raised his fist. One knock and he could have the door open, could grab Blackmun with that same fist and demand answers. Demand that he cure his wife.
The doctor finally called to him. “You can come in now.”
Felipe shoved the door harder than he’d meant to. It met the wall with a bang.
The doctor was washing his hands in the basin, a pleased little smile on his face. But Franny wasn’t smiling. She was pale, her expression looking as if the doctor had flattened it with those large hands of his.
She looked frightened.
What had that doctor been doing?
“Well, I’m pleased to tell you,” Blackmun said, as he passed a towel from one hand to the other, “that you’re going to be a father in several months.”
A buzzing started low; a swarm of bees growing closer and closer.
No.
Blackmun, that idiot, stuck out his hand. “Congratulations.”
Felipe could only stare at that hand, the blunt fingers and back covered with wiry black hair. A doctor ought to have more refined hands.
“How… how can that be?” His voice rasped against his own ears, his tongue clumsy in his mouth. “I don’t understand—we used a preventative every time.”
Except the one.
No.
The doctor let his hand fall. “Young man, I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that. But before I do, I will inform you that no preventative is fail-safe. If you wanted guarantees, the preventative you should have used was chastity.” He picked up his bag, the latch catching with a click that echoed throughout the room. “My fee, if you please.”
The swarm was upon Felipe, the buzzing all he could hear, his skin prickling with a thousand phantom stings.
This could not be.
The doctor continued to look sternly at him, his hand outstretched for the money he didn’t deserve.
And still the swarm attacked Felipe. He snatched his billfold from the dresser. The bills were grimy between his fingers as he parceled out Blackmun’s pound of flesh. Felipe slapped the stack into the doctor’s hand, noting the other man’s wince with grisly pleasure.
“No need to count it,” Felipe ground out. “I’m not so immoral as to cheat you. And now I’ll show you the door.”
The doctor blinked uncertainly at him. And why wouldn’t he? Felipe had never in his life had a harsh word for anyone. Except his wife.
Oh God, his wife. What had he done to her?
He’d sworn to protect her, to keep her safe— and his own lusts had endangered her.
Before that thought could bring him to his knees, he started down the hall, not waiting for Blackmun to go first. The veneer he’d perfected over the years was gone.
Felipe let Blackmun pass through the door without a word or a glance. Let the doctor judge them. It was easy when he had his own wife and children, hale and hearty, waiting for him at home.
The doctor would pass the graves of Felipe’s family as he went and likely never spare a thought for them.
Felipe slammed the door behind the man, the frame rattling with it. He braced his forearm against the door before lowering his head to shelter the ache growing there.
Dear God, this was terrible.
Every inch of him vibrated with the need to push this news as far from him as he could. He could not do this, could not be a father.
And as for Franny…
Women died every day from bearing children. Women he’d known all his life, gone in the blood and fear and strain of a birth.
She was waiting for him in that bedroom, in the bed she’d likely give birth in. In the bed she and the baby might die in.
She’d promised.
Well, they’d both promised. He’d promised to not touch her, and he’d broken that while the marriage was still newly born. She’d promised to never leave him, and—
She’s not dead yet. Get hold of yourself.
He took a breath, and another, and another. He had to be strong. She needed him.
He pushed off from the door and began the long walk back down the hall, pausing before the bedroom door. What to say to her? He certainly couldn’t say it was his nightmare come true.
Expecting women tended to be volatile.
What if she were happy about this? She hadn’t looked happy, but perhaps it was still sinking in. If she did want this child, he couldn’t break her heart by telling her how he truly felt. Couldn’t tell her that he was in the grip of a gut-churning anxiety, the same state he got in whenever Franny was in a situation that might kill her.
Only much, much worse than before. Because he hadn’t been in love with her before.
All those years of fretting over her, of being so angry and scared for her—those would be nothing compared to the months to come.
Not to mention the years after with—with a child.
“Felipe?” She said his name tremulously, uncertainly; all the things she usually wasn’t. He had to go to her, to reassure her.
“I’m right here,” he called. He willed all of himself to be strong and stiff, and went in to his wife.
At first Franny hadn’t believed it.
Dr. Blackmun had been known to make mistakes before. Why, he’d thought Joaquin Obregon would die after he’d been gut shot—but Joaquin was married and living quite happily in Los Angeles.
If the doctor had been wrong about a mortal wound, he could be wrong about a baby.
But if it wasn’t a baby, then what was it? She was never sick, never tired like this. It was as if some stranger had taken her form—a sleepy, nauseous stranger.
She’d held quiet under the doctor’s prodding and probing, speaking only when he’d questioned her about her symptoms, her courses—and her relations with her husband.
It was one thing to speak unblushingly on the breeding of horses and cattle, and quite another to speak of intimate relations with the man you loved.
The thick smell of camphor coming off the doctor also hadn’t helped. She’d had to hold her breath except for when she spoke. Otherwise her stomach might have begun heaving again.
When Dr. Blackmun announced she was pregnant, not a single word came to her lips. He’d taken her expression for stunned surprise and declared it was time to tell the happy news to the father.
Which showed how much the doctor knew.
Besides, she didn’t feel as if there were a new life within her. There couldn’t be—she felt completely hollowed out, empty as a dry well.
She plucked at the bed covers. If only Felipe would come back. No doubt Dr. Blackmun was out there lecturing him on the immorality of what they had done.
But what was so immoral about it? She pinched the fabric hard, compressing it as tightly as she could. She didn’t want children, and she’d taken the steps she thought necessary to prevent it.
Her stomach rolled again, and she grit her teeth as she waited for it to stop. How did women survive months of this? After only a day, she’d had quite enough. She blew slowly through her teeth, trying to keep her bile in her stomach, sweat breaking out on her brow.
This was awful. She didn’t want this. Not at all.
She heard her husband’s steps coming closer, echoing along the hallway and through the half-closed door.
Felipe. What did he think of all this? He’d said he didn’t want children either, but perhaps he’d changed his mind, hearing this news.
Perhaps Dr. Blackmun’s pronouncement had eased his worries. Though it certainly hadn’t eased hers. No, this baby was an entirely new set of worries. She pinched at that bit of quilt again, pressing hard enough to make her fingers ache, the tips going white with strain.
The footsteps stopped, but he didn’t come in. What was he doing there, outside the door? Was he happy? Was he sad?
His silence from beyond the door stretched farther and farther, until she could no longer stand it.
“Felipe?” She had to know what he thought, the compulsion a full-bodied itch.
The door swung open immediately. So he’d been there the entire time, waiting.
But for what?
He walked in, his smile weak and forced. He looked as dyspeptic as she felt. “Doctor’s gone. How are you feeling?”
“About the same.” She tried to keep her tone light, but the effort was as unsuccessful as his smile. “How are you feeling?”
“Me?” He made a show of rummaging in the wardrobe, his back to her, all of him entirely too tense, no matter how he pretended at easiness.
“You said you didn’t want children.” Might as well say it straight out.
He paused in front of the wardrobe, his hands braced against it, his back rigid. “You said the same.”
She wished he would turn so she could see his face, rather than relying on his voice to read his emotions. Tugging at the quilt, she said, “I wasn’t lying. I still don’t.” She licked at her lips, her throat tight. “Does… does that make me immoral?”
He turned then, releasing a sigh that visibly deflated him. “I still don’t either. Does that make me immoral?”
“No.” She blinked hard. Not against tears, of course. Her eyes were simply dry. “I thought—I thought perhaps you’d changed your mind. Now that things are so different.”
He shook his head. “Nothing’s changed for me.” Soft, imploring. “So what do we do now?”
“I don’t know. What’s done can’t be undone.” She pulled at the quilt again. What a pretty pattern it was. Catarina had made it some years back, and it was as perfectly made as everything her sister did, not a single loose thread to be found.
If Franny had tried to make this, it would have looked like the efforts of a blind, fingerless child. She never had learned the knack of quilting. She supposed she would have to learn such things, with a child on the way.
And the doctor had said no more riding, not until after the baby had come.
A sob caught in her throat, but she held it there ruthlessly as the ache of it intensified.
It wouldn’t just be nine months of this. It would be an entire lifetime.
She’d come into this marriage thinking it would save her from such things, but the marriage had been the very thing to catch her in the end. Not even her mother could have devised a more perfect punishment for her.
“No,” Felipe said slowly, “it can’t be undone.” He remained by the wardrobe, on the other side of the room, his gaze fixed on the floor.
If things really hadn’t changed for him, he’d be by her side, not so far away.
“Should we tell everyone?” he asked in a low voice.
She shuddered at the thought. They would all be so…so happy. Catarina would no doubt give her one of those knowing-older-sister looks. Franny could even imagine what her sister would be thinking.
I told you it was your duty in a marriage.
Her mother might say the same.
How could she argue with them, prove that her vision of marriage was just as correct as theirs? They’d take this baby as evidence that they were right.
After all, Franny couldn’t do ranch work with a baby in her belly.
Her stomach rolled again. Thank God she hadn’t eaten anything today or she’d be rushing for the basin. “No,” she said. “We’d best wait. At least until after the quickening, in case something… happens.” She didn’t let herself think on that. “It’s more prudent to wait. Isn’t it?”
He shrugged, even as his throat worked. “I suppose. I’ve no experience with these things.”
Well, neither do I. And I’m… I’m frightened. She wouldn’t add to his burden by confessing that, though. He already worried too much.
“I suppose we should begin the chores,” she said instead. “I’ve wasted enough of the day.”
“No,” he said quickly, moving for the door. “You stay and rest. Gracie should be here—in fact, I think I hear her in the kitchen. I’ll have her bring you something to eat.”
He left without looking back, though she wished with all her might he would.
If things hadn’t changed for him, he would have looked back.