Chapter 3

This was the last place Monica ever imagined setting foot in again. She glanced around the brightly lit lobby of the Rochester Hospital. How many hours…days…weeks had she spent within these walls? She gave herself a mental shake to dispel the shroud of misery that was descending. It was water under the bridge now. She wasn’t here for herself, but to visit her mother.

Cathy was across the lobby asking one of the blue-coated volunteers for Terry’s room number. Her husband, Phil, had dropped them at the doorway and was trying to find a parking spot that wouldn’t “break the bank.” Monica remembered that problem, too.

“Monica?”

She recognized that voice. Please, no. She turned slowly, praying she was mistaken, that, perhaps, being here had conjured up his memory. But no, there he stood in real life, looking as handsome and self-confident as she always remembered him.

“Jeff? Wow!” She hoped the smile she forced would hide her shock. The blood had drained from her face and her body moved sluggishly toward him. What kind of hell had she fallen into?

His embrace was solid. Always the athlete, he hadn’t let himself go as he’d aged. She rested her cheek briefly against his shoulder and inhaled his familiar spicy scent. Then she pushed back and looked up at him, but couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

“I heard you were coming back to help run the daycare while your mother was in the hospital,” he said. “You look great. California certainly agrees with you.”

He’d always been quick with a compliment, yet she knew he was being sincere. Jeff, truly, was a nice guy. Growing up in the same village, she’d known him all her life, although they hadn’t start dating until college. He was studying business, and she was getting her childcare certification. They’d wanted the same things out of life: to have lots of kids and raise their family in Havenport. They’d married shortly after graduation. Jeff took over running his family’s hardware store, and she worked in her mother’s daycare while they tried to get pregnant.

They hadn’t worried too much at first, but, as the months and years went by without a baby, they knew something was wrong. And then it had begun: the doctor’s visits, the procedures, the start of each month believing that this time it would be different. But it never was. The years of disappointment took its toll. She’d begged Jeff to consider adoption, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He was an only child and it was important to him—and his parents—that he have a biological offspring. Besides, he wasn’t the problem.

The divorce papers hadn’t come as a complete surprise. After all, they’d tried for fifteen years and she, at thirty-eight, was past her prime child-bearing years. It had been amicable. He’d been generous. But Monica couldn’t stay. Everything in Havenport reminded her that she was broken, a woman unable to fulfill the most basic of womanly functions. Motherhood.

“California’s great,” she said. “No snow.”

He chuckled. “Are you here to visit your mom? How is she?”

“Yeah. The surgery went well. We’re just going up to see her now. What about you? What are you doing here?” She could have bitten her tongue.

“Well, ah…” Jeff played with the change in his coat pocket and smiled nervously. “I’m here with Andrea.” He nodded his head toward a very pregnant young woman seated in a wheelchair and watching them from across the lobby. “We’re having a baby,” he said unnecessarily. “Number four.”

“Oh.” Monica swallowed hard. “Congratulations.”

“Yeah, thanks. Look I should get going. Her water’s broke and we’re heading up to the birthing unit. Maybe I can drop by and visit your mom later?”

“She’d like that.”

She felt numb as Jeff wheeled his wife into an elevator and disappeared.

“You okay?” Cathy’s touch on her shoulder broke Monica out of her daze.

“Sure,” she said. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“What are the odds of him being here tonight?”

“Oh, I’d say they were pretty good,” Monica said. She turned to her sister. “Four kids? Can you believe that? I would have thought one or two would have been enough to prove his manhood—to demonstrate to everyone that I was the infertile one. Four is a little on the excessive side, wouldn’t you say?”

Her sister didn’t reply, but her raised eyebrow told Monica that, perhaps, she was over-reacting just a little bit. “There’s Phil.” Cathy linked her arm and steered her toward the elevator.

****

“Hey, Mom,” Monica bent down to give Terry a kiss. “How are you feeling?”

“Pretty good, all things considered.” Terry winced as she tried to adjust her position. Both Cathy and Phil greeted her and then stood back so Monica could sit on the edge of the bed.

“Where are my granddaughters?” Terry said, looking toward the door. “I was hoping Jennifer and Stephanie would be with you.”

“Sorry, they got a last-minute babysitting call,” Cathy said. “They’re going to come by tomorrow.”

“It’s a little late for a school night, don’t you think?” Terry said.

Cathy laughed. “It’s only eight-thirty, and besides, they’re teenagers, they don’t sleep at night anyway.”

“I’m looking forward to spending some time with them while I’m here,” Monica said. She’d been disappointed not to see her nieces in the vehicle when Cathy and Phil arrived to pick her up. She enjoyed spoiling the girls and flew them out to California to stay with her every spring break. “Maybe we’ll go shopping at that big mall in Syracuse on the weekend.”

“They’d love that,” Cathy said. “And better you than me.”

“I wish I could go with you,” Terry said wistfully.

Monica felt a twinge of guilt. There was nothing Terry liked more than shopping. It was a trait Monica and her two nieces seemed to have inherited, but for some reason it had skipped Cathy entirely. Her sister never seemed to want or need anything. Monica couldn’t imagine what it would be like to feel so completely contented with what one already had in life. “Well, we’ll just have to go again before I leave,” she said.

“How are you settling in, dear?” Terry asked. “Have you found everything you need?”

“Hah! Everything and more. You must have been shopping and cooking for the last month. I don’t know if it’s humanly possible to go through all the food you’ve got in the time I’m going to be here.”

“You’d be surprised,” Terry said. “Besides, the Donovan children often stay for dinner. Their father gets so busy he loses track of time.”

“Yeah, I noticed that,” Monica said dryly.

“So what did you think of our Mr. Donovan?” Cathy asked.

“Oh yes, do tell,” Terry said, grinning.

“Oh, please!” Phil groaned in the corner.

“You don’t like him?” Monica was surprised. Phil was so easy-going it was difficult to image him not liking anyone.

“No, no, no. Luke’s a great guy. What I don’t like is the way the women in this family go all googly-eyes over him.”

“I don’t go googly-eyes,” Cathy said indignantly and turned to her mother. “Do I?”

“I think we all do, dear,” Terry conceded. “Even Stephanie and Jennifer are a wee bit smitten with him.”

“Well, you can count me out of the googly-eyes club,” Monica said. “I’m sure he’s very nice, but our relationship is purely professional. I’ve made my expectations very clear, and it doesn’t include extending the daycare hours to accommodate his poor time management.”

“Oh dear,” Terry said, “you’ve already had a run-in. I hope you were pleasant.”

“I am always pleasant, Mother. I’m just not going to allow myself to be taken advantage of.”

“I doubt anyone would be foolish enough to try to take advantage of you, but rest assured, the message was received loud and clear.”

Four heads swiveled toward the door and Monica cursed under her breath as Luke Donovan stood on the threshold, holding a large bouquet of fall flowers.

“Luke, how lovely,” Terry said. “Are those for me?”

Monica glanced at her mother. Yup, googly-eyes. She stood up. “I’ll go see if the nurses have a vase.”

“No, you stay here,” Cathy said. “Phil and I’ll go. I want to talk to the nurses about when they’re moving Mom to the convalescent home.” Before Monica could stop her, Cathy had pulled her husband out of the room.

Looking for some way to be useful, Monica took the flowers from Luke and indicated for him to sit down beside her mother. She edged back toward the door, listening to them talk first about his kids and then the green community he was helping the town develop.

When Cathy returned she was accompanied by a nurse, who informed them it was time for the patient to go to sleep. Monica arranged the flowers while Cathy and Luke said goodbye to Terry, then she went to her mother’s bedside.

“Good night, Mom. You get strong so you can come back soon, okay.” Monica kissed her mother’s cheek.

Terry reached out and clasped her hand. Her expression turned serious. “Thank you for coming back. I know it isn’t easy.”

“I’ll be fine,” Monica said, hoping she sounded more confident than she felt. How was she going to manage when everywhere she went she was reminded of her failure?

“I know you will.” Terry squeezed her hand. “And be nice to Luke.”

Monica rolled her eyes. “Good night.”

Monica looked for Cathy in the hallway.

“Your sister and Phil took off. I said I’d drive you home,” Luke said. “I was hoping we could talk.”

“Oh? What about?”

“I don’t know. The kids? Most people have a lot of questions when they meet them and then me.”

She gazed up at him. Red hair, blue eyes, ruddy freckled skin. It was possible that his wife had been darker, but that wouldn’t explain the origin of all the kids. She glanced at her watch. Nine-thirty—six-thirty in Monterey. She was tired, but doubted she’d be able to fall asleep for a few hours anyway. “Sure. Do you want to grab a coffee?”

There were few patrons in the hospital snack bar: a pair of nurses on a break and an older man completing a crossword puzzle. Monica watched through the glass partition as a very pregnant young woman, in a hospital gown, lumbered along the hallway. Her husband was trying to help her walk, but she impatiently shooed him away. She prayed they wouldn’t come into the snack bar. They were too much of a reminder of Jeff and what was going on upstairs. She expelled a sigh of relief as they continued on past.

Luke set a Styrofoam cup of coffee in front of her. “Cream? Sugar?” He dumped a small pile of both onto the table.

“No, black’s fine.”

He nodded and sat down across from her. He picked up several of the sugar packages, ripped them open in a single motion, and poured them into his cup. He kept his head down, deep in thought, as he stirred his coffee. Finally, he looked up. “They all know they’re adopted, if you’re wondering,” he said. “With the exception of the twins, they were toddlers when they came to us.”

“Your wife…?” She didn’t know how to phrase the question. Were any of them hers from a previous relationship?

“No.” He shook his head. “Beth wasn’t their biological mother, either.”

“I see. That’s all I need to know.” She felt like a voyeur peering into his private life. Some things were personal and should be kept that way. Wasn’t that the very reason she’d left Havenport to find a new life in Monterey?

“Actually, if you’re going to be spending so much time with them, I’d like you to know the whole story, where they each came from and why.”

The coffee tasted foul, but Monica forced herself to swallow it. “Okay, if that’s what you want, but it won’t make any difference to how I treat them.”

Luke opened another two sugar pouches and poured them into his coffee.

“I don’t think it’s going to help,” she said. “The coffee’s pretty awful.”

He smiled and continued stirring the sugar in his coffee. “I met Beth when we were working for an aid agency in Africa. We fell in love and got married. For the next ten years we traveled the world doing international development work and trying to start a family.” He took a sip of coffee and grimaced.

“For ten years?” Sympathy stirred in her chest. She knew that routine.

“No, for about five. At first we figured it was the lifestyle, and we were okay with that. But then we got serious about having kids—we were getting older, you know—and we got checked out. It turned out Beth had an abnormally formed uterus; it was genetic, she was born with it, and it meant she couldn’t become pregnant.”

A cause. A real cause. What Monica wouldn’t have given to have been provided with a reason for her inability to conceive a child? Instead, all she’d gotten was medical mumbo-jumbo about idiopathic infertility and how she was among the twenty percent of barren women for whom a reason cannot be found. And without a definitive reason, month after month she allowed herself to hope.

“It must have been difficult for you,” she said, remembering the divorce papers and the point at which she’d given up.

“It was. We threw ourselves back into our work and that was fine for a few years.”

“What made you decide it wasn’t enough; that you wanted to adopt?”

He took another sip of coffee and then pushed the cup away. “I had accepted that we’d never have a family, and I thought Beth had, too. But we were working in the Baltic, helping to rebuild a school, when we encountered a young boy, an orphan, who was being cared for by several grandmothers in the community. His whole family was dead.”

“Michael?”

Luke nodded. “I saw the way she looked at him, watching his every move. If he fell, she’d rush to his side. She was always looking for him, trying to find some way to interact with him. That’s when I realized she wasn’t okay with not having children. So I talked to the grandmothers and the community leaders, and we applied to the proper government officials to adopt Michael. It took a while, but when we left the Baltic, we were a family of three.”

“He’s adapted to America very well,” she said. “You’d never know he wasn’t born here.”

“Yeah.” Luke’s face lit up with love. “He’s a great kid.”

“What about the others?”

“Well, with a young son we couldn’t very well go traipsing all over the world anymore. We came back to America, to Havenport, and settled down. We realized there must be more kids that needed good, stable homes with loving parents. We contacted some local adoption agencies, and it was through one of them we got Kate, Lucy, and Ophelia. Not all at the same time, of course, but over the next few years.” His expression turned wistful. “We were so blessed. I thought we had the perfect family.”

“And then you decided to adopt two more?”

“Not exactly.” He chuckled and then became more serious. “I was asked to consult on a project in Eurasia. While I was there I met two orphan babies who needed a home, and I just knew they belonged with us. They completed our family.”

“Did you never feel the need to have your own children?”

“Do you mean biologically?” He appeared taken aback by the question. “I wanted children with my wife. She was unable to conceive, so this was the only way to do that. The fact that we are not genetically related is irrelevant. I couldn’t love my kids any more, regardless of how they came into this world.” He frowned. “You seem surprised.”

“I guess I am. That’s not been my experience with men. The ones I’ve known seem to have some sort of primeval imperative to provide DNA to their children.’

“Then I’d suggest you’ve been hanging out with the wrong men.”

Monica’s tried to smile, but couldn’t quite manage it. A few floors above them her ex-husband was fulfilling his dream of becoming a father—again. It had taken him two wives to do it. Wrong man, indeed. “You’re probably right.”

Luke stood. “I should get you home. You’re going to have two high-spirited little boys to take care of tomorrow.”

“I’m looking forward to it,” she said truthfully. When she arrived, she’d been dreading facing young children day in and day out, a constant reminder of what she couldn’t have. But talking to Luke made her wonder if Jeff’s selfishness didn’t deserve a larger share of the responsibility for their childlessness. There were all kinds of families if one was open-minded enough.

“And you know that two hundred and seventy dollars? Let’s just forget about it.”