A Mother For His Child

This is why I married Mark, she suddenly understood. A man I loved, but didn’t desire. Because I was so afraid of how I’d felt about Will for so long. Afraid of how this desire might have weakened me and changed me. It would. Still, after all this time, it would. I guess I kept seeing my father, and all his torrid, pitiful affairs. Not to mention my mother, and her unmet needs. And I was afraid of wanting a man I didn’t respect. I didn’t respect Will then. Has that changed?

‘Perhaps it’s best described as grudging esteem,’ she managed finally, her voice deceptively light.

It was a typical Maggie-to-Will answer, and he recognised it as such. The tension of awareness between them had broken now. Maybe he hadn’t guessed after all. Please, let it be that he hadn’t guessed!

He turned and made his way around to the passenger door of her car.

‘Interesting choice of words,’ he said. ‘Esteem. A word that reeks of old-fashioned primness, with an aura of keep-your-distance. And grudging! You’ve always begrudged everything you felt about me, Maggie, as if I wasn’t even worth the effort of your anger. Except once. When we sat by the pool and talked for four hours straight and for once you forgot to fight.’

She sighed and spread her hands. ‘I won’t apologise again. You’d only laugh, and you’d be right. Apologies only go so far, don’t they? But let’s go back to the hotel. Tell me about Daniel. Tell me why you want to leave Arizona. Tell me what you’d have to offer my practice. I won’t fight with you. I’ll try. You’re right. I’m sick of making the effort.’

‘Sure. Yeah. OK.’

But he was silent as they drove until she prompted, ‘Will?’

‘Listen,’ he said abruptly. ‘I’m not asking you for any favours here. I’m a competent, experienced professional, with an impeccable track record and brilliant references. I have other options. So if you’re going to pull that let’s-see-whose-IQ-is-the-highest routine with me—and I don’t just mean tonight, Maggie, I mean ever—then I’m out. And, please, don’t bore me with denials. It’s what you used to do to me all the time.’

Of course, it was true. It shamed her.

‘And I probably lost every time,’ she finished, half to herself.

He laughed roughly. ‘Oh, no! You won. Plenty of times, Maggie Lawless, you won!’

‘Fifty-fifty at best.’

‘Never again,’ he stressed. ‘I’ve spent too much of my past wondering what would happen to my poor, damaged ego if you decided to try just a little harder.’

‘You mean I got to you?’ She was incredulous. ‘You mean you cared? I thought—’

‘Did you?’ He twisted in his seat and studied her face. ‘You never realised that half of—most of—how I responded to you was an act?’

‘No. I didn’t. And a lot of the time, Will…’

‘Yes?’

‘I—I was acting, too.’

He clicked his tongue against the side of his mouth and muttered, ‘Points to me that I never knew I’d won.’

‘We’re giving that up, remember?’ she reminded him softly, with a laugh in her voice. Maybe she needed to reassess every exchange she’d ever had with this man. ‘Tell me about Daniel.’

‘When did you find out?’ Maggie asked, some minutes later.

Their waiter placed a towering creation of puff pastry, custard, cream and fresh berries in front of her and the steaming richness of fresh coffee reached her nostrils. She ignored both cup and plate at first. Her gaze was riveted on Will’s serious face. His eyes were completely hidden by a screen of black lashes as he stared down at the table, and his mouth was tight.

‘I first felt that something wasn’t right when he was just a few months old,’ he replied. He prodded his own chocolate mousse cake with a fork, then looked up. His eyes seemed darker than ever. ‘It was summer. Practically every building in Arizona is air-conditioned, but whenever we were outside with him in the dry, intense heat for anything more than a few minutes, he’d just wilt, and we could see he was overheating. He had a couple of summer colds and he’d get feverish and his temperature just wouldn’t go down.’

‘Scary,’ she murmured.

‘He was hospitalised once, with suspected meningitis. Fortunately, that was a false alarm. I wanted to start some tests, but Alison…well…didn’t think that was needed.’

‘Of course, it’s natural that she didn’t want to think anything could be wrong,’ Maggie suggested.

Will smiled distantly, but said nothing.

‘That’s a normal reaction, isn’t it?’ she pressed.

She watched the way he chose his next words. ‘She found it hard to accept anything that threatened to deflect her from her goals. Alison has become very involved in her career.’

‘Couldn’t you say that of all of us? Medicine is a very demanding profession.’

‘She went back to work two weeks after Daniel’s birth and couldn’t manage to maintain breastfeeding.’ He paused. ‘She…uh…thought that my concern about Daniel’s health was just an attempt to make her feel guilty, a way of saying that she’d failed.’

Yes, it was true that Alison had never reacted well to criticism or defeat, Maggie thought cautiously. Reluctantly, too. Her instinct had always been to defend her friend against Will. It was a hard habit to break, even when his criticism was apparently reluctant as well. He was picking through his words as if they were unmapped mines in an open field.

‘She wouldn’t agree to tests,’ he went on, ‘even after another three days in hospital, again with what turned out to be a common, non-specific infant fever that just wouldn’t break.’

‘What about the issue of his teeth? Didn’t that set off alarm bells?’

‘No, it didn’t, because plenty of children cut their first teeth later than normal. It wasn’t until we had the provisional diagnosis of the genetic defect, two months later, that his jaw was X-rayed and we found there was nothing waiting to come through.’

‘How did Alison take the diagnosis?’

Again, there was a hesitation. ‘At first, she felt that it didn’t have to change anything.’

‘Which in many ways is true,’ Maggie suggested. ‘In terms of intelligence, he’s completely normal, right? And physically, it’s mainly about keeping cool. He has no teeth, no hair—’

‘He has false teeth, which will be changed several times as he grows. He has a thin blond fuzz, which he’ll probably keep. I think it’s cute.’ Will’s eyes were bright. ‘And I’m thankful for the current wide range of acceptable hairstyles and hope we never return to a more conservative era.’

‘And he has no sweat glands. That’s—’

‘Yes, the real concern. A reason…a major reason…I wasn’t prepared to stay in Phoenix.’

‘Alison didn’t want to leave.’

‘Alison…had her own solutions,’ he answered carefully. ‘I won’t bore you with the details of our debate.’

A smile flickered briefly on his face like a dodgy light bulb and then went out. Maggie felt an absurd need to touch him, even though it wasn’t likely he’d gain much from her action.

Will closed his eyes briefly, then continued, ‘Anyway, as soon as the divorce and custody issues were finalised, I was free to start looking around.’

‘I can see why Alison didn’t want to move. She’d just been given a position at the hospital which she’d wanted for a long time,’ Maggie said, defending her friend again.

She remembered the eager—and, now that she thought about it, self-important—detail contained in the annual Christmas card, written when Daniel must have been about eight months old. There had been nothing about his genetic abnormality.

‘This is a major, major milestone for me, Maggie!’ Alison had written. ‘I can’t describe to you how much it means!’ She had then gone on to describe it anyway, spelling out points which Maggie, as a doctor herself, understood very well already.

And OK, yes, that was annoying, but it was a small thing. Maggie reminded herself that there were two sides to every story.