Seeing Stars (26 page)

She needed to tell him. Now, while he stood there in the hospital, while she was safely at the other end of a phone wire. Now, because they were speaking of babies and it was probably the closest they'd get to a reasonable conversational opening.

"Blake... do you think about it?"

"Yeah. Yeah, I do. I'd like kids."

She mustn't cry. Not now. "What did she have? Was it a girl or a boy?"

"Girl. Five pounds eight ounces."

"Give her... tell her I'm happy for her."

"I will, later. She's sleeping now. Claire, I wish I could be with you right now."

She huddled her knees closer to her chest, hunched herself up into a ball of arms and legs and telephone. "You need to sleep."

"No." His chuckle sounded shatteringly intimate over the phone. "What I need is you, sweetheart, but what I have to do is head for the shipyard. I've got a sailboat that must be ready for varnishing by Saturday if I'm to deliver on time, and two delinquent punks who'll be expecting to find me working when they get there."

"Do you want me to come help?"

"You're tired too. Get some rest, and Claire, tonight—"

"I have to work on the telescope."

"We
have to work on the scope. Afterward, we'll talk."

She thought about it all day. Several times, she picked up the phone to call Jennifer, returning it to its cradle without dialing. It was one thing to confide in Jenn that yes, she'd taken the challenge and started an affair with the school bad boy. That had started as a joke, and... well, it just wasn't the same as trying to share the tangle of emotions Claire was mired in this morning.

Afterward, we'll talk.
She had three degrees, and not one of those pieces of paper could tell her how to get through the next two days. Wednesday, and she had telescope-building duty with the kids tonight and tomorrow night. That was a given. So how was she going to keep her commitments to the boys while avoiding intimate conversations with Blake?

She couldn't. 

She'd have to tell him she didn't want their relationship to continue. She'd wanted a one-week fling, and that's what he'd said he wanted, too, and he had no right now to change his tune and start talking about relationships and
more.

Unless...

What if there was no baby? What if her lies had been for nothing, and their loving had not borne fruit? Then... well, if she didn't get the job in Chile—which was a distinct possibility, because although she figured she was a good candidate, she didn't know who was going up against her, and the world was full of astronomers far more qualified than she.

So if she didn't get the Chile job, and if she wasn't pregnant...

... then there'd be no reason on earth she couldn't see Blake again. After all, Arizona wasn't exactly the end of the world, and the observatory was only an hour and a half's drive from Tucson. It would be easier, of course, if they both lived closer to major airport hubs, but...

If she wanted, she could have a continuing relationship... a lover met every couple of months, maybe every time there was a long weekend. She would fly to Port Townsend... perhaps sometimes he could meet her somewhere in between.

She tried to figure out what airport would be a midpoint. Maybe San Francisco or Portland. She'd arrive first, and she'd wait for his plane, watching the people come through the gate, looking for his dark curls, his seaman's walk. When she saw him, she'd run into his arms and he'd pull her close, feeling her...

Pregnant.

She whimpered, pacing the confines of the condo. It wouldn't work if she was pregnant. If she was pregnant, she had to stay away from him forever.

When the phone rang in the early afternoon, Claire approached it warily, relieved at first to discover it wasn't Blake on the other end.

"Claire," said Grace, "I wanted to thank you for last night."

"Thank me?"

Grace laughed self-consciously. "I was panicking. I'm so glad I found Mac."

"Congratulations on the baby. I hear it's a girl."

"She's beautiful. Gary got back this morning and... and we.... Why don't you come down to the hospital and see her? See the baby."

And face Grace again? Not likely. "Thanks, Grace, but this is a time for family. Just give her my best wishes and congratulate Gary."

"If you won't come, I'll have to do it on the phone." Claire heard Grace take a big breath. "I want to apologize for Sunday. I shouldn't have said what I did about Lydia and Mac. I've always known Lydia and I always thought she and Mac would get together. Mac chewed me out about it, and I wouldn't have said anything to you if I'd known that you and he really.... He got pretty angry with me, and I'm sorry."

"Grace, I wasn't trying to make trouble between you. I shouldn't have told him what you said." Why hadn't someone told her that family relationships were so complicated?

"I'm glad you did, because otherwise... I have no right to stand in the way of his happiness. I just want you to know that I'm happy to have you as part of the family, and I hope we can be friends."

"Look, Grace, you've got the wrong—"

"I guess you feel pretty mad at me, too. I don't blame you."

"It's not that. Grace, I'm not... we don't have that kind of relationship. I'm not going to be part of your family. I'm leaving Friday." In the pause that ensued, Claire seriously considered hanging up the telephone.

"I guess I put my foot in it," said Grace.

"It's a misunderstanding, that's all." How on earth had Grace got that part-of-the-family idea? Had Blake actually
told
her that? He'd been talking about babies this morning on the telephone, but he had to know it was impossible. If he really wanted babies, he should go to Lydia, to someone who could make a family, who could settle into that house on the hill and be his wife.

We have to talk.

But surely when he said that, he was talking about meeting her somewhere, being her lover, stealing weekends away. Not a picket fence and a three-car garage?

Chapter Twelve

Claire arrived at the boatyard just before four-thirty, her passenger seat filled with three large pizzas. Ever since she arrived in Port Townsend, she'd been bending like a willow in the wind, reacting to events, making impulsive—probably unwise—decisions on the spur of the moment.

Now she needed to become proactive, to take charge of her own life, or she'd end the week in even more of a mess than when she started. As a scientist, she knew the danger of becoming entangled in complex traps of logic, knew that the true answer to seemingly unanswerable questions was most often the simplest.

For a woman who had lived most of her life with simplicity, knowing her goals, her life had become incredibly complicated. She'd spent last night and much of the day wrestling with impossible alternatives, trying to come up with a painless way out of the tangle she'd woven for herself.

Blake wanted more, and for the past two days he'd been looking for an opportunity to explain exactly what that meant. Grace thought he meant something permanent and domestic, but Claire wasn't so sure. He told her he wanted children, but he'd just watched his sister's baby come into the world. And face it, if a man wanted a family of his own, children of his own, he usually found a way to get it before he reached his mid-thirties.

Claire pushed away that tangle of speculation, reminding herself it was academic what Blake wanted. Because he wasn't going to want a child he couldn't have, couldn't tuck up in bed and take out sailing.

Better for him never to know.

The picket-fence scenario was impossible, so there was no point wasting energy worrying about it. Reducing the situation to its simplest, her real problem was the quandary of trying to decide between two options: having Blake's baby and having an affair with him.

Ridiculous that it had taken until midafternoon today for her scientist's mind to inform her that there were no options, no decisions to be made. Pregnancy and a child were either a reality or they weren't. If she was pregnant, she couldn't have an affair with Blake, because it would be impossible to keep her secret while seeing him.

If she wasn't...

Well, she still couldn't have an affair, because she could hardly tell him she would let him know in a few weeks time if she was interested.

Once she accepted the inevitable, she felt an immediate weight drop from her. She no longer needed to struggle with how to avoid compounding her lie, how to get through the next two days with Blake. Having a week-long affair when they both wanted it to be temporary had been fine, but everything changed the moment one of the players started wanting more. As much as she might want to tell herself she could steal two more days from fate, it wasn't right.

She'd told too many lies already. Blake believed she was an honest, direct woman, and once she would have agreed, but now she knew better. Given sufficient temptation, she was capable of telling a terrible lie to a good man. At the very least, she needed to be honest with herself and admit she couldn't compound her lies through another two days and nights.

If she couldn't add to the lies, and she couldn't tell the truth, there was only one option left. She must leave as quickly as possible.

She picked up the boxes of pizza and slid out of her car. The door to the boatyard was standing open, letting in the warmth of a sunny late afternoon, letting out the sounds of young voices. She realized then that Blake's truck wasn't there, nor was his bike. She approached slowly, taking deep breaths, reminding herself of her purpose. Three hours working on the telescope, reorganizing tomorrow's schedule, then a direct, not-quite-honest talk with Blake over a restaurant table somewhere—definitely
not
at his house, her condo, or the boat.

Jake, standing at the top of a ladder, spotted her first.

"Hey, Claire! We're just cleaning up and we'll be ready to work on the scope. You brought pizza—hey, Tim, pizza!"

He scrambled down the ladder at a speed that made Claire catch her breath. "Mac's wasted," he announced. "Did you know he spent the whole night at the hospital, that he actually
saw
Grace's baby being born?"

"Pretty amazing, isn't it?"

"No kidding. Mac says tomorrow, if we want, he'll take us all up to the hospital. We can't see Grace 'cause she's resting, but we can look through the window at the baby."

Claire smiled, thinking he sounded like a normal boy, excited and confident.

"Where's Bla—Mac?"

"He went to take some scrap to the dump. He's been cleaning up, sanding and stuff all day. A guy shouldn't use power tools when he's missed a night's sleep."

"No," she agreed. "What about Tim?"

"Over here," shouted the older boy.

Easier this way, she decided. She'd talk to the boys now, before Blake returned. Then... well, she'd deal with Blake when he arrived.

With the boat-building cleanup mostly done and the pizza half eaten, Claire asked, "Do you think Mac would be willing to shift around tomorrow's schedule a bit? I have to leave a day earlier than I thought, and I was hoping we could do our last session on the telescope in the morning."

"And work on
Lady Orion
during the afternoon and evening?" said Tim. Jake was frowning, but Tim said, "Sure, Mac won't mind as long as we get our time in on the boat. He's into this telescope thing, too. He was saying, when we've got it done, he'd take us out on Mount Walker—no lights around anywhere, and we can set it up. Do you figure we'll see even more out there, Claire?"

"Yes, if you do it on a moonless night." She started sorting through the already cut pieces of plywood with Jake, thinking of these boys and Blake out on the summit on a star-filled night, wishing impossibly that she could be there too.

They were working when she heard the crunch of Blake's truck wheels on the gravel outside, and Claire said to Tim, "That's good enough. You've got all the wax off. Now, if you wipe the tube with a soft cloth you can put it aside to paint. You don't want to paint it with all this dust in the air."

"Yeah," said Jake, bending over the half-built box as he worked on smoothing one of the joints. "Mac says we should try to get all the sanding done by tomorrow night, on the boat interior and the scope. Then we'll vacuum and give the dust a chance to settle, and we can put on the last coat of preservative and paint and varnish Saturday."

She forced herself not to look up when she heard his footsteps, and she concentrated on the joint Jake was sanding. Then the boy stopped sanding and she had no choice.

"Hey, Mac," Jake called out, "can we work on the telescope tomorrow morning?" Jake sounded less certain of the answer than Tim had been, and he added hurriedly, "We can still work on the boat the same amount of hours, just later—right until eight-thirty. Claire has to go tomorrow, and we need more time with her. She's got to show us about the rocker box."

She looked up and found Blake staring straight into her eyes. "You're leaving tomorrow?"

Words tumbled through her mind, but not the words she'd planned. More lies. She could say she'd had a phone call, an emergency.