An Act of Persuasion

chapterR SEVENTEEN



AS THEY WAITED for the lab technician to show up Ben grew increasingly frustrated. It had been a few weeks since they had begun what he liked to refer to as the sexual part of their relationship—a fact that made him gleefully happy. But that development certainly hadn’t made Anna any more malleable in her opinions.

Clearly, she was not a woman to be controlled by intense sexual gratification. Damn it.

She squirmed on the examining table, clearly trying to find some relief for the pressure on her bladder while he attempted to overcome her stubbornness about a topic they’d surprisingly butted heads on.

“We’re two intelligent people,” he began, attempting another logical approach to persuade her to his way of thinking.

“We are.”

“Then let me please present you my rational and sound argument one more time.”

“Go for it.”

“If we find out the gender now, we will be more prepared as parents. First, we can eliminate an entire spectrum of names to consider, which should reduce the chance of a conflict between us as your pregnancy advances. Also, we can buy the appropriate type and style of baby clothes we should have in preparation for this blessed event. Finally, while I believe we shouldn’t necessarily conform to any gender stereotypes, we can begin to cater the child’s toys.”

“Those are all really good reasons.”

“So when the technician comes in can we tell her we want to know the sex?”

“Nope.”

Ben imagined if the sonogram technician found him with his hands around the pregnant woman’s neck, it might not look good for him. No matter how justified he might be in his actions.

He gritted his teeth together. “I don’t suppose you can provide me with a logical reason for your decision.”

“Nope.”

“You see how unfair this is?”

“Uh, buddy, take a look.” Anna pointed to her exposed and quite round belly. “I’m sitting here about to burst with pee while I continue to get bigger by the minute. My reason... I think there really aren’t many surprises left in life except maybe this one. So I say, let’s be surprised.”

“It’s going to drive me insane knowing this information is out there but I do not have access to it.”

She smiled. “Uh, yeah. That’s part of the fun, too.”

The technician chose that moment to enter the room and Ben considered it a small miracle that she found him doing nothing more menacing than scowling at the mother of his child. Seriously, Anna would drive him insane.

He watched as Anna’s belly was covered with clear goo and the technician took a wand to her belly.

“Gotta pee, gotta pee, gotta pee.”

“Hold it a little longer,” Ben ordered as he stepped closer to take her hand.

After glaring at him, Anna politely told the woman that she did not want to know the gender. The technician went about her work, pointing out various features of their child on the screen along the way.

Ben was shown a nose and a chin and hand and a foot. He didn’t recognize any of the above amongst the grainy images. And even though he couldn’t recognize any of the prominent features, he still tried to search for some clue as to the sex of his child. Surely a man would recognize a penis on a screen when he saw it. But even his formidable powers of observation were no match for this technology. He was out of luck.

Finally, the ultrasound was finished and, while Anna wiped off the goo from her belly, Ben helped her off the table and found her the nearest bathroom.

Afterward they were led to another exam room to meet Anna’s OB/GYN. This state-of-the-art practice was located adjacent to the hospital where the doctor would deliver the child. All the facilities necessary for monitoring a pregnancy through to birth were contained within the one campus. Ben felt reassured by the proximity of the doctor to the hospital.

Anna, wearing a pair of stretchy yoga pants that had reached their absolute limit of stretchiness and an actual maternity top, was vastly more comfortable having made use of the bathroom.

“I’m telling you it’s almost criminal to make a pregnant woman drink that much then tell her to hold it.”

Ben was nodding while in the back of his mind he reviewed his list of questions for the doctor. The last time he’d been here he’d still been getting used to the idea that he was actually going to be a father and Anna had prevented him from asking much. This time he was better prepared and he had no intentions of letting Anna stop him.

A different doctor from the last time entered the room.

“You’re not her doctor.”

The woman put her hands in her pockets. “I’m Doctor Bradley and I work in the practice, too. We like our patients to rotate through all of us because we won’t know who will be on call when the time comes to deliver. Nice to meet you.”

Anna shook hands with the woman as did Ben, but he remained skeptical. “How many doctors are in the practice?”

“There are four of us. All women.”

Dr. Bradley was older, maybe in her fifties, with steel-grey hair and a pleasant demeanor.

“What if we prefer one over another? Can we have our choice of doctor to deliver the child?”

“Ben,” Anna chided. “We’re not going to have a problem with the doctors.”

“If you truly have a problem with one of us, then yes, you should let us know,” Dr. Bradley answered calmly. “We can try to make arrangements as Anna’s time grows closer. Now, let’s take a look at you, Anna.”

“I’m huge!” Anna announced as she pulled up her shirt.

“Not too huge,” the doctor told her as she gently palpitated her stomach. “You’re at nineteen weeks and it looks as though the baby is growing on schedule. Your ultrasound looks good. I see you didn’t want to know the gender of the baby.”

“No.”

“Do you know?” Ben asked. “When you looked at the pictures could you tell?”

The older woman seemed to assess him before she answered. “No, I couldn’t tell at all. The baby wasn’t in a position where the technician would have been able to tell you regardless. So, in this case, it’s actually a good thing you didn’t want to find out.”

Ben was satisfied until he saw the doctor wink at Anna.

“Now, Anna, do you have any questions?”

“I have questions,” Ben said.

Anna shrugged at the doctor. “You might as well sit down, Dr. Bradley, he’s going to have you here awhile.”

Ben frowned but proceeded with his list. “I’m concerned about sex and the best positions for it as she grows larger.”

“Ben!”

“Well, I am,” he said, refusing to be embarrassed. The woman was a doctor. There was no reason not to be frank. He had every intention of continuing to have sex with Anna up until the point she no longer found it pleasurable. But he had concerns about any impact intercourse might have on his unborn child.

“Well, I would say that’s up to Anna. She can best let you know what feels comfortable and what doesn’t.”

“I can’t...hurt the baby?”

The woman had the decency to not smile. “No. As long as her pregnancy remains normal with no bleeding or amniotic fluid leakage, sex is perfectly fine.”

“What about her diet? She’s eating an abnormal amount of ice cream. Should I restrict that?”

“Ben! I do not. Dr. Bradley, do not answer him.” Anna struggled to sit up until Ben reached out to assist her. “I am perfectly capable watching over my own health and you will not be restricting anything. Enough of these questions unless you have something serious to ask.”

Ben frowned. “Fine. Doctor, you may not be aware but I was recently treated for leukemia. It’s our wish to preserve the placenta after the birth. Who do I need to contact about making sure that happens?”

The doctor nodded and made a note in Anna’s folder. “We’ll have that on her record. I’ll give you a few contact names of the companies who handle that kind of storage. Anything else?”

“I have a question. You know, me—the actual mother. When will I feel the baby move?”

“I would say anytime. You might not recognize it at first. But usually by twenty weeks you’ll feel something.”

Ben watched Anna cover her belly with her hand. He tried to imagine what it might be like to feel life from the inside of his body reach out to touch him and failed. Women, he thought, were certainly the better choice to carry the newborns. Anna seemed to adjust to her changing body with aplomb.

Ben didn’t imagine he would be so serene about it. He certainly hadn’t liked it when he was losing his hair and weight by what felt like the hour.

They finished with the doctor and Anna made her appointment for next month. The next time they came for the appointment she would be at twenty-three weeks and already more than halfway to her delivery. It was crazy to think how fast time was moving.

“Can I ask you a question?” Ben asked as they were leaving the clinic.

Anna glanced at him. “It had better not be about a sexual position. I can’t believe you talked about that with my doctor.”

“Technically she’s the baby’s doctor, which makes her our doctor. I wanted to make sure I didn’t hurt you or it. We’ve been...engaging in sex quite often.”

The reality was they had been going at it like monkeys. Really horny ones. If he took her out for dinner or if they stayed in to cook, they would end the evening in her room, in her bed.

Her bed.

And once ensconced in her domain, Anna happily let him be in charge. It was exactly where he wanted to be and how he wanted things to be. At first, he wondered if the frequency and intensity of the sex was somehow linked to his recovery. That he was happy to be alive and be with Anna. He’d believed that her responses were about her matching need for him.

Lately, though, when he watched her face and listened to the sounds she made in the back of her throat, he could sense that sex was part of an escape for her. A way to not think about how things were changing between them. He supposed that shouldn’t bother him. After all, sex was about physical pleasure, not necessarily an intellectual activity. The fact that she threw herself into every experience and let him overtake her with pleasure meant she trusted him. When it was over she now slept in his arms, the two of them sexually completely content.

Still, he felt as though something was missing.

Most likely he was overanalyzing this and his conclusions were ridiculous. He was more than thrilled to satisfy her every desire, especially if the act of sharing pleasure was bringing them closer. He was convinced each time they were together the ties between them got stronger and more difficult to break.

On the nights he didn’t see her—because every once in a while she would say she needed some space, a gesture, he thought, made mostly to be perverse—he was edgy and nervous. As though with each minute that passed while he was away from her, he was losing some of the ground he had gained.

Ben didn’t do nervous and edgy well.

She was at nineteen weeks already and, while they had fallen into a normal pattern of domesticity, suddenly he felt like it wasn’t enough. He wanted more of a commitment.

“Call me crazy,” Anna said, pulling his attention to this moment. “But I thought you were happy engaging in sex...quite often. Right now, however, you don’t have a happy look on your face.” She bit her lower lip in a way that drove him wild.

“Of course I’m happy with our sex life. Hell, we’re standing in a parking lot in front of a hospital in the middle of the day—the least romantic place I could possibly imagine—and still I’m thinking of taking you. Against the car with your impossibly tight pants around your ankles.”

“Ben!” Her eyes widened in shock, but he could also see a gleam of answering desire.

“I can wait until we’re home. But that’s what we need to talk about, Anna. Home and where it is.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

He took a deep breath. It was a risk, and maybe he was pushing too hard and too fast, working against the advice Mark had given him. But it seemed to Ben that everything between him and Anna hinged on these months before the baby was born. They had to have their relationship defined and solid. Because after the baby was here and she had her family, she might not need him anymore.

“I want to know if you’re ever going to ask me to move in with you.”

Her jaw dropped and Ben decided that wasn’t the answer he was looking for.

* * *

THE DOORBELL RANG and Mark jumped up from his chair. He turned off the TV and jogged to the door. Deep breath first, then he opened it to three slightly unenthusiastic guests.

“Hi. Welcome. I’m glad you could finally make it.”

Marie gave Sophie a gentle nudge and the girl crossed the threshold as if she were doing so at gunpoint. Marie followed her, but turned quickly to watch Dom’s progress. He was using his walker today, which meant the arthritis in his legs was making walking a chore.

“Age is a bitch,” he said as he slowly made his way to the couch where he fell into the cushions with a groan. Marie propped a supporting pillow behind his back and hovered over him until he waved away her fussing. By the time she sat down, Mark could hear her slight wheezing. The two were definitely a pair.

But they were here. Finally. After many invitations—initially to Sophie alone, but extended to Dom and Marie when it was clear Sophie would not come to him alone—they’d consented to a group visit. It was a major advance as far as Mark was concerned. While Sophie had agreed to a few lunches and shopping trips, coming to his home seemed to cross a line in the sand she’d drawn.

A line Mark knew he had to erase. And the first step in doing that was to stop giving away home court by always going to her grandparents’ place. If you couldn’t beat the enemy on his terms, then you beat him on yours. A creed that had served him well during his years with the agency.

Not that Sophie was the enemy, Mark reminded himself. Just the prize.

“Sorry you’re having a rough day,” he said to Dom.

He pointed to the windows that overlooked the Philadelphia skyline. Dark clouds had rolled into the area and rain was threatening. “Humidity and rain make it worse.”

Mark considered suggesting that staying in Philadelphia through August and September wasn’t the best way to avoid humidity, but he kept his mouth shut. There would be no rocking the boat for this visit. The rocking could—and would—come later.

“Sophie, I thought you might want to see the room I had decorated for you.”

After their little adventure at IKEA, Mark hadn’t trusted Sophie to make the best calls regarding her room. Regardless of Anna’s advice to the contrary, he suspected Sophie would continue to let spite dictate her choices. Instead, he hired an interior designer and told the man exactly what he wanted—the most perfect room imaginable for a fourteen-year-old piano prodigy. Budget nearly unlimited.

The man understood and Mark was pretty happy with the end result. Not that his opinion mattered if Sophie wasn’t happy.

Evidently she wasn’t making a move, so Marie stood first. “All right, let’s have a look. This...apartment...is where you’ll be living for the foreseeable future?”

Mark could appreciate her concern. An apartment wasn’t a house and Sophie had always lived with a yard. “I think it’s for the best. I’ve never owned a home or taken care of lawn or anything like that so I’m not sure what I would even do with a weed whacker. Between starting the business and well...Sophie, I’ve got to be careful where I spend my time. It’s not like I need to worry about the correct school district for Sophie. And these units are all condos so I own this outright.”

Sophie, who had been looking out at the forty-story view of the downtown Center City, acknowledged that she was actually listening to the conversation.

“What do you mean you don’t have to worry about a school system?” she asked. “You don’t have to worry about anything with regard to me.”

“Come see the room, Sophie.” Mark hoped that once she saw the room, saw that he was serious about meeting her needs, she’d better accept him in her life.

“Why do I need to look at a room I don’t plan on ever staying in?”

Frustration mounting, Mark decided this was one of those moments that necessitated changing tactics. For months he’d been playing the nice guy. Months of pandering to her every desire in the hope that she might give him the time of day. Months of calmly accepting every snotty response to every question he asked. Months of tolerating her incessant eye rolling as if he were the least intelligent man on the planet and only she knew it.

He was done with being the patient, nice guy. She was his daughter. He was her father. It was time she understood the facts.

“Marie. Tell her.”

Marie instantly jerked and looked to Dom for support. “This wasn’t the plan. We said a few more weeks. She’s not ready.”

“She’s not ever going to be ready,” Mark said. “This isn’t working and she needs to know what’s happening in her future.”

Dom nodded his head slowly. “He’s right. We can’t keep putting it off. You might as well tell her.”

Marie opened her mouth but the only sound that came out was a sob. She made her way to Dom. “I can’t do it,” she said. “I just can’t.”

“Fine. I will.” Mark walked over to Sophie, who straightened, suddenly much more attuned to what was happening around her. “Come see your room, Sophie. Now.”

He added enough heat to the last word to actually send her in motion. They walked past the spacious kitchen to the hallway that had a linen closet, a bathroom and two bedroom doors.

“The bigger bedroom is mine, obviously, and I have my own bathroom.” Mark opened the door to his room and cringed when he realized that the bed was still unmade and he’d left his clothes on the floor. Shutting the door quickly, he opened the door to her room. “This is yours. You have a connecting door to the bathroom next to it.”

Sophie didn’t comment. The theme of the room was purple, but it wasn’t overdone. The bed had a musical motif comforter on it and enough pillows to make a harem happy.

Mark had purchased the electric keyboard Marie had said Sophie had her eye on and it was set up with a music stand along one wall. On the other side of the room there was a desk that held the latest iMac computer. Bookshelves framed the desk, but Mark had left those mostly empty. He figured she would want to fill them herself. Same with the closet that he’d had fitted with an organizer to be able to make the most out of the space.

“Okay. I saw it.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “Happy?”

“No. No, I’m not happy. I’m not happy your mother died in that car accident. I’m not happy about the kind of father I was while you were growing up. But I can’t change those things, Sophie, and you need to realize that we have to get over this in order to move on.”

She whirled on him with real anger in her eyes instead of the usual contempt. “I don’t need to move on from anything. My mother died and it sucks. But I’m dealing with it the only way I know how. You need to know though that losing her is the only thing that is changing in my life. Do you understand? I will live with Gram and Granddad. I will continue to perform and I will continue to be tutored in my home. I don’t need you. I don’t want you. So you can crawl back under whatever rock you crawled out from. Just because I lost her doesn’t mean I suddenly want you.”

The words hurt. But even more wrenching was the utter grief he heard in her voice. In all his efforts to get her to make a space for him in her life, he’d nearly forgotten that she was still a little girl who had lost her mother at the wrong age.

“You won’t be living with your grandparents anymore. You’re going to live here. With me.”

“What? No way! Gram!”

Mark moved out of the way as Sophie bolted past him. He gave Marie and Dom time to explain the situation. After a few minutes, when he entered the living room tears were streaming down his daughter’s face.

“I don’t understand,” she wailed.

“Honey, you have to. We have to sell the house. We’ve already bought our unit in the seniors’ community. Your grandfather’s health is declining, he needs more care. My lungs aren’t improving. I’m going to need to be on oxygen soon. That big house and the stairs...it’s too hard for either of us to move around.”

“We can get help. You can move into one of the bedrooms downstairs.”

“Sophie, I’m sorry,” Dom said, trying to reach out for her hand, but she avoided his touch. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be better for you. We wish we were twenty years younger. We wish...we wish our Helen hadn’t died.” He sighed. “Sophie, this move to the seniors’ community had been planned long before her death. After we lost her we canceled the sale. Of course we did. We thought we could take care of you together. We thought with you being so mature we could handle raising you. But these past few weeks have made us realize that Mark is a better option.”

“He’s not an option. He’s nothing to me. He’s just some name on a birthday card or a Christmas present.”

Mark stepped forward. “Sophie, your grandparents and I have discussed this a lot. You know them. Do you seriously think they would let you live with me if they didn’t think I could offer you a better option? Dom and Marie need the care. You’re a smart girl so you know this. They can’t keep traveling with you and you’re too young to travel by yourself. And they can’t continue with the way things have been just to make you happy. It’s not fair to them.”

“Not fair?” She was screeching now in a total teenage meltdown. “Not fair? What about what happened to me? My mother died. That’s not fair. Now my grandparents—the only family I have left—are going to leave me, too. To you?” She turned on Dom and Marie. “How could you? How could you?”

Marie was openly sobbing and Dom was doing everything he could to maintain his composure. Mark knew his daughter was hurting, but she was deliberately and maliciously hurting them all and he wouldn’t have it.

“That’s enough!” Mark got in her face so she could see he wasn’t playing around. “I know this sucks large for you, but this is your life. I am your father. You will live with me. And you will let your grandparents off the hook. This is not their fault. Everyone keeps telling me how mature you are...well, start acting like it!”

She jerked and he could see she was thinking about heading for the front door. Thinking of making a run for it, he imagined. It was exactly what he would do if he felt similarly cornered. Fortunately, paranoid former operative that he was, he’d installed a lock that required a key to function on both the inside and outside. And he’d had the foresight to lock it as soon as they walked through the door.

He shook his head. “You can’t run—the door’s locked and I have the key. However, if you would like to take some time to enjoy your lovely new room—”

The words were barely out of his mouth before she stormed down the hallway. The slam of a door closing echoed throughout the space.

Mark turned back to a sobbing Marie and a stalwart, but wounded, Dom.

“That went as well as we could have expected, I think.”

A crash sounded from inside the bedroom accompanied by a host of discordant electrical noises. Mark had a feeling she would need a new keyboard.

His daughter, it seemed, had a temper.