First Comes Baby

“Caleb!” she exclaimed in delight. “You’re back in town.”

He wrapped a long arm around her shoulders and gave her a squeeze even as they kept walking. “Yep. Good trip. How are you?”

Oh, planning to get myself impregnated two weeks from tomorrow. Having daily panic attacks.

“I’m good. Can I offer you dinner?”

“I was planning to take you out.”

“I have beef stroganoff simmering in my Crock-Pot as we speak.”

“Deal.”

His smile was as amazing as ever although the effect was somewhat different now that he was a man rather than a boy. Most of his travels took him to Central and South America, which meant he was perpetually tanned, paler laugh lines fanning out from his blue, blue eyes. But the dimple still deepened in one cheek whenever he offered his beguiling, lopsided grin.

Caleb wore his hair longer than did most of the attorneys and businessmen in the lobby, not ponytail length, just a little shaggy, the curls making it constantly disheveled. He’d filled out a little in the years since college, but was still lean, and at a couple of inches over six feet he towered over her five foot four or so. Laurel was always aware of women’s heads turning when she was with him, not just because he was handsome, although he was. He had that indefinable quality that in an actor or public speaker would be labeled charisma. He exuded some kind of life force, perhaps a belief in himself that drew the stares.

And she was in trouble, she realized suddenly. Was she going to try to get through the evening without telling him what she was up to?

If she kept silent, he’d be hurt later, and for good reason. They’d always told each other everything important.

Everything but what she’d thought and felt when she’d been brutally raped during her first and only year of law school. That single subject was taboo. Only in her rape support group could she talk about that day, because every woman there understood in a way no man ever would.

Okay, this she’d tell him. She didn’t like explaining herself, hated the idea of having to tell him to butt out, it was none of his business. But secrecy would bother him more, she knew it would.

Typical Caleb, he’d found a parking spot on the street not half a block from the Drohman Tower where she worked. Nobody found street parking at this time of day downtown.

Nobody but Caleb, charmed as always.

“How was your trip?” she asked, once he’d pulled out into traffic.

“Really good. Haiti is always depressing. The poverty.” He shook his head. “But I’m excited about the cooperative we’ve got going there. Not just drum art, although the artisans in the group are making some wall sculptures that are different from the more common ones. But we’ve added a guy who makes the most extraordinary stone sculptures. Wait’ll you see them.”

In college, Caleb had been determined to work for a humanitarian organization like Save the Children. But during his time in Ecuador with the Peace Corps, he’d had what he’d described as a revelation. Outside aid wasn’t the key, self-sufficiency was. Every country in Latin and South America had unique, beautiful crafts that would bring high prices from Americans if they were made accessible to them. Instead of just buying from artists, he helped organize cooperatives, often village- and even region-wide with profit sharing. Some were comprised only of women, many of whom had lost their husbands to war.

Caleb had started with a tiny store on University Avenue in Seattle, expanding it within a year and adding a second two years later in Portland. Now he had another in upscale Bellevue and a fourth in Tacoma, with a fifth planned for San Francisco. He also put out a catalog and sold through a Web site. He made a good living but passed on profits to the artisans in the cooperatives on a scale that stunned Haitians and Guatemalans who were accustomed to getting pennies for work that sold for a hundred dollars in the United States.

Caleb loved what he did and what he’d accomplished. Every time she saw him, Laurel felt an ache of regret and disappointment in herself. Her dreams had been as vivid as his, and now where was she? Working a nine-to-five job, getting through each day as well as she could.

Choosing to become a mother was the first decision she’d made in a long time that looked ahead, that said, I have hope. Maybe, just maybe, Caleb would be glad for her.

Traffic on I-5 was stop-and-go. Laurel could have gotten home nearly as fast on the bus that ambled down Eastlake and through the University District. But she didn’t care if the traffic ever opened up. It was wonderful just to be sitting next to Caleb, hearing him talk about the wretchedness he’d seen side by side with the need to create something beautiful. He spoke with admiration of the warmth of community he saw down there and felt Americans had lost, but he also told her about glorious Caribbean beaches littered with bits of Styrofoam and hypodermic needles, about the children and the politics and the disease. He was passionate, angry, awed—and still able to believe he could make a difference.

A few times she’d imagined traveling with him, seeing with her own eyes everything he described. Once he’d tentatively suggested she join him on a trip to Honduras and Guatemala. He’d talked about monkeys leaping through branches above crumbling Mayan ruins, patient women weaving all day long to provide for their families, sunshine and darting fish in coral reefs.

But by then, all Laurel had to buttress herself from the world was her routine. The safety of eating the same cereal every morning, sitting in the same chair at the table, catching the bus at the same time, knowing the faces of the other riders at her stop. She hadn’t been able to imagine herself catching a plane, going to a foreign country where she didn’t speak the language, taking a boat upriver to places without cars or telephones, to a place where her own life didn’t make sense. So she’d made an excuse. He’d looked at her for a grave moment with eyes that saw more than she wanted them to and he hadn’t asked again.

Laurel lived in a neighborhood off Lake City Way in north Seattle that had been built in the thirties and forties. The houses were modest but charming, wood-framed, owned mainly by young families. Hers was the anomaly, a homely 1950s addition with a flat roof, a one-car garage made of cinder blocks and a chain-link fence. She’d been lucky to be able to afford it with her father’s help. So far, her budget hadn’t allowed anything that could be called remodeling, but the chain-link fence was disappearing beneath the honeysuckle and climbing roses and clematis she’d planted along it, and she’d painted the formerly street-sign-yellow garage a more unobtrusive coffee-brown. Trellises and more climbers were masking its ugly facade.

Inside, she’d torn up the shag carpets to expose oak floors that needed refinishing but were still beautiful; however, she was living with 1950s-era plywood and veneer kitchen and bathroom cabinets, aluminum-frame windows that dripped and a shower so tiny and dark it gave her claustrophobia.

Caleb parked on the street and commented on the shoots coming up in her garden.

“I planted a bunch of bulbs last fall. Mostly hyacinths and daffodils.”

“Did I tell you that you inspired me?” he said, as she unlocked the door. “I planted a couple hundred tulips in October. With my luck, the moles have eaten them, but I tried.”

She laughed, not showing her astonishment at his choice of words. She had inspired him?

Comfortable in her house, he found the corkscrew in a drawer and opened a bottle of wine while she changed into jeans, a sweater and slip-on shoes, then put on water to boil for noodles.

“So,” Caleb said, “enough about me. Tell me about your life.”

He always put it that way, as if she had a life.

Today, Laurel thought with a tinge of defiance, she’d prove that she did.

“I’ve decided to have a baby.”

He swore, and she saw that he’d poured wine on the counter. He grabbed the sponge, mopped up, then handed her a glass.

“You didn’t just tell me you’re pregnant.”

“No, I told you I’m going to get pregnant.”

His eyes narrowed. “Just like that.”

“It happens really quickly,” she assured him.

“And usually requires a woman and a man.”

“You know I can’t… I don’t want…”

What she could have sworn was anger faded from his face. “I know. So you’re—what?—planning to find a donor?”

“I already have.” She busied herself dumping noodles into the now-boiling water. “You know Matt Baker? My friend from legal aid?”

Caleb’s tone was careful, controlled. “Isn’t he married?”

“Yes, that’s the beauty of it. I already spend a lot of time at their house. They have great kids. I’m Madison’s godmother. So it’ll give my child a sort of extended family.” Beginning to cut up broccoli, she hurried on. “I thought of going the anonymous-donor route, but that made me nervous. It’s like, every guy who donates is a future Nobel Prize winner. Brilliant, of course, handsome, athletic, a Ph.D. candidate in something or other. I mean, what are the odds? Some of them have to be ordinary. Or worse than ordinary. Schmucks. I wanted my baby’s father to be somebody…” Somebody, in another life, I might have loved.

Standing there in the kitchen, the knife poised above a clump of broccoli, she thought, But Matt isn’t.

Well, she did love him, of course. But not…not that way. He wasn’t anybody who ever would have attracted her, not even before. Was that the problem?

Caleb muttered a word she couldn’t quite catch. “I didn’t know you were thinking about anything like this.”

“It’s been just the past few months.”