SEVENTY-FOUR
Well, perhaps one thing was missing.
Home once more, I began to wonder if it might be possible Chance and I could have a child together. Perhaps seeing Katherine’s Antonio was what put it in my mind.
No, of course Weston could not, could never, be replaced. But why could I not have another child? I had always assumed the fault in my inability to have more than one with John to be my own. But perhaps it had been his? Surely, Chance, on his most tepid days, was a more virile man than John had ever been. And, in spite of my advancing years, I did still bleed every month, so there was that hope.
I thought Chance might laugh at my idea; thought that, worse, he might not like it.
But he surprised me.
“You surprise me,” he said, gently grazing the back of his hand down the contours of my face. “I would not have thought you had an interest any longer…”
“I have an interest in having our child,” I said. “But I cannot have one alone. What is it that you want?”
“I’m touched,” he said, and he so obviously was. “But this is so different from the design we had previously made.”
“Can we not change the design?” I asked. “Must we complete things in the same way in which they have been started?”
I was thinking, but did not say, that everything we had now had been built on events others would deem horrible. That having been the base, did that then mean we could not now write a perfectly normal future?
And a part of me also still worried about what he really thought of my idea. Would he be jealous of a new person being added to our equation? I could see where he might have that in him.
But no.
He said, taking my face in both his hands, “Of course we can change the design. It is indeed a wonderful idea.”
Then he told me how he had been missing the traditional idea of family, how absent it had been from his previous life.
Odd, but we had never talked before about any family he might have left, about any friends he might have made before or after his release. He said now that he had no family left anywhere in the world—just me. He did not say anything about any friends.
“A family.” He spoke softly, his words touching me deeply. “I think that I should like that.”
Now we made love with new purpose, as if our nearly unconquerable desire for each other had not been purpose enough.
A new life—and I now believed I could attain it, have it—would wipe clean the slate of the past, erasing all sins, and healing the world.