“Ready, Mrs. West?” the doctor asks, setting a clipboard beside my bed. “I’ll do the ultrasound first, then hook you up to the fetal monitor.”
All the color drains from Dean’s face. I grab his hand, my own apprehension kicking into gear again. Our eyes meet, and a thousand hopes, fears, and wishes pass between us.
“You and me, professor,” I whisper.
He leans closer to me, putting his other hand against my cheek. “You and me, beauty.”
He straightens when the doctor approaches to prep me for the exam. Dean doesn’t release my hand. Silence descends as the doctor spreads gel over the wand and starts a slow scan of my belly. My heart is racing. We watch the monitor.
For a second, there’s nothing. Even the nurse seems to be holding her breath.
Then a grainy swath of black and gray appears on the screen, a light flashing rhythmically.
“There it is,” the doctor says, sounding pleased. “A baby with a heartbeat.”
The screen blurs in front of my eyes. I blink hard because I don’t want to miss this. It’s a little, peanut-shaped blob on the screen. The light continues to flash as it bounces around. A baby with a heartbeat.
“Want to hear it?” The doctor flips a switch on the computer, and a thumping noise fills the air. “One-twenty beats per minute. Looks good and sounds good.”
Dean presses his hand to my hair. He’s watching the screen. I can’t read his expression.
The doctor is talking again, but I’m only half-listening. After I hear that I’m about six weeks along and everything looks normal, my entire body loosens with relief. The doctor inputs the data into the computer and tells me he wants to keep me overnight for observation.
Dean and I look at each other. He reaches out to put his warm hand against my neck, right where my pulse beats. He smiles that beautiful smile that makes his eyes crinkle at the corners and fills my heart to overflowing. And then there just aren’t any words.
The hospital seems quiet the following morning as I get ready for Dean to come and pick me up. After the doctor conducts another exam and proclaims me “all set to go home,” I dress in my clothes from the previous day and wait for the nurse to come with the discharge papers.
“Hello, Liv.”
I look up at the sound of my mother’s voice. She’s standing by the door, beautiful as ever with her silky gold hair, dressed in a floral wraparound skirt and a peasant blouse with an embroidered design on the bodice.
“Hi, Crystal.”
“They said I could see you since I’m family,” she tells me. “Everything’s okay?”
The lingering tightness in my chest loosens even more. “Everything’s okay.”
“You got your wish, I guess,” she remarks.
I can only nod, thinking of that little bouncing ball on the ultrasound screen whose heartbeat echoed my own.
“I remember when I found out I was pregnant with you,” Crystal continues. “Scariest day of my life.”
Something twinges beneath my heart. She’d been alone when she found out about me, and shortly afterward her parents would kick her out of the house.
I press a hand to my belly. I think of going home to our Avalon Street apartment with its blue-and-white curtains, overstuffed chairs, seascape paintings and photographs of me and my husband. Dean’s office lined with books, my desk beside the windows with a view of the sky-blue lake, the little white table where we have breakfast together every morning.
“I came to tell you that I’m leaving,” Crystal says.
“Oh. Where are you going to go?”
“Phoenix, I guess. Maybe head up to Las Vegas.”
“What will you do?”
“What I’ve always done.”
I know what that means. She’ll find places to stay, men to stay with. She’ll sell her jewelry, find odd jobs, meet people and then leave again.
“Thanks for your help at the café,” I say. There is an odd tightness in my throat.
Crystal moves closer to me. The smell of lavender clings to the air around her. Fresh, clean, a mixture of floral and musk. That scent was the only solid ground I had in all the places we lived. In dismal motel rooms, squalid apartments, strangers’ houses… whenever I smelled lavender, I knew my mother was near.
And because I had no one else, I needed her to be near me.
Behind her, someone else approaches the doorway. Dean pauses, his hand on the doorjamb, taking in the scene with one glance.
And then they’re both in my vision, both facing me—my mother and my husband. My past and my present. The one who hurt me, and the one who helped me heal.
“So, good luck, Liv,” Crystal says, and I don’t think she knows Dean is there. “I really did want you to come with me. I did want to help you.”
“I don’t need your help, Crystal.”
I remember what she said to Maggie Hamilton. Remember all the men Crystal went through because they were the only way she knew how to get what she wanted. I wish she’d found a different way. I wish she’d find one now.