Suddenly (37 page)

Noah saw defiance. And pride. “Another time,” he cautioned, because it was one thing if he told Liv off, another if Sara showed disrespect, “tell your mother you’re leaving.”

“She would have tried to stop me. She would have taken my ticket and my money. She would have locked me in my room.”

Noah doubted that.

Sara was staring at him. “You don’t believe me.”

“Did she ever lock you in your room?”

“Once.”

He would have asked when, had her expression not told him. It had been after one of the shoplifting incidents. Sara didn’t want him telling Paige and Nonny about those.

So he didn’t ask. And her defiance faded. In a more reasonable tone she said, “She would have made me go out with her and Ray, and I didn’t want to do that. He’s smarmy.”

“Smarmy?” Paige asked.

“He fawns all over her. Whatever she says or does is always right. If she decides to marry him, I’m outta there for good.”

Noah rather liked the thought of that, except that he felt a moral responsibility to take the high road. “She’s still your mother. You don’t see her much now that you’re living with me, but it would be nice if when you do get together you could be civil to one another.”

Sara made a face. “Tell
her
that. She wasn’t very civil to me. She kept telling me that something was wrong—either my hair was a mess, or my skin looked lousy, or I was gaining weight.”

“You’re not gaining weight,” Paige said quickly. Eating disorders were the rage among the girls at Mount Court. She didn’t want to encourage another.

“I weigh fifteen pounds more than her,” Sara said.

“You’re also four inches taller,” Noah pointed out.

“Which means,” Paige added, “that inch by inch you weigh less than she does. You can tell her that next time she mentions it.”

Noah grinned at Paige’s resourcefulness. It was but another of the things that he loved—like the way she had hugged Sara without recrimination, the way she had put in her two cents when he’d been talking with his father, the way her thoughts had run parallel to his.

Then his smile faded, because he didn’t know what would happen if he went to Santa Fe next year and she stayed here.

“Anyway,” Sara went on, “I won’t be seeing her for a while. Not until spring break in March.”

“Aren’t you going there for Christmas?” Paige asked with a questioning look at Noah.

He shook his head. “She goes for Thanksgiving and spring break. Summer has yet to be decided.”

“So what are you doing over Christmas?” Nonny asked. The gleam in her eye told Noah she had plans.

“You tell me,” he invited.

“You’ll stay here, of course. We’ll have a big tree right in that corner. We’ll decorate the house and hang stockings on the mantel, and sing carols in Tucker center with the rest of the townsfolk.”

“Me too?” Sara asked.

“Why,
yes
, you too,” Nonny answered.

Noah would have hugged her for the wholehearted way she included Sara in her doings, except that the picture she painted was a bit premature. “Actually,” he said, “I was thinking of taking Sara to New York over Christmas to see Rockefeller Center and—”

“New York stinks,” Sara cried.

“I agree,” Nonny said.

Paige looked at her. “No one asked your opinion, Nonny.”

“Well, I gave it anyway. And I’ll continue to give it,” she said as she rose from her chair, “because I happen to be the senior member of this group”—she went to Sara’s side—”which means I’ve lived the longest and had the most experience—come, Sara—and my experience tells me that we’ll all have a far nicer time staying here.” She led Sara, who carried Sami, toward the kitchen. “We’ll be deciding what to make for supper.”

“I’ll bring something in,” Noah called after them.

“Mexican!” Nonny called back.

“I can’t eat Mexican!”

“Then we’ll
cook!
”

Noah watched the three of them disappear. He thought of the time Sara spent with his parents. She was comfortable with them. But with Nonny she was different. Nonny was an unexpected gift, part adult, part elf. Sara couldn’t resist her.

Or Sami, for that matter. For someone who didn’t have previous experience—despite what she had once told Paige—with children, Sara did just fine with Sami. She held her like a pro, played with her like a pro. But then, with little children one didn’t need experience, just love.

Noah hadn’t thought Sara had so much. She had always been quiet and self-contained, even sullen, yet in this house she smiled, she talked, she participated.

He reached for Paige’s hand. “What are you thinking?”

“Same thing you are,” she said with a sigh. “You’d think Sami was her sister.”

“She could be.”

“Yes. Well.”

“It’s worth considering.”

“Fine for you to say. You’re not the one who’s being asked to give up everything you’ve spent the whole of your adult life building.” She straightened her fingers, but Noah didn’t let go.

“Come on, Paige. People have relocated before.” He suddenly read more on her face. “But it’s not just the relocation, is it? It’s the commitment. It terrifies you.”

She took a breath and let it out in a high-pitched, “Uh-huh.”

Which was another thing he loved about her. She was honest. He didn’t necessarily agree with everything she said—certainly in this case he didn’t agree—but she said what she felt.

He tried to reason with her. “It doesn’t make sense. Your life has commitment written all over it.”

“In some spheres, yes.”

“Why not in all?”

“Because all’s too much to ask.”

“So you quit while you’re ahead,” he suggested with some bitterness. He was hurt that she wasn’t willing to take a chance on him, on them.

“That’s not it.”

“Sure sounds it to me.”

“No. I’m just recognizing my limits. I’m trying to avoid failure.”

“And in the process you’re missing out on the best life has to offer. Being with someone you love is the best kind of commitment imaginable. Lonely people all over the world would give anything for it. Think of your friend Mara.”

“I do. All the time.”

“Do you think she’d be backing away, like you are?”

“Not fair, Noah.”

“True,” he said, leaning closer, “but desperate circumstances require desperate measures. You’re backing away. Taking the coward’s way out. Why? Because your parents treated you like a drag so you think of family life as a drag? Well, what do you think you’ve had here—you, Nonny, and Sami? It’s family life, and it’s no drag. Same when Sara and I join you. You enjoy it. You know you do.”

She freed her hand and clutched it in her lap. “My life was so simple before. Suddenly you’re asking me to be a wife and a mother not once, but twice over, and on top of that you’re asking me to abandon my practice and move to Santa Fe.”

“That’s negotiable,” he offered, thinking for sure that he would pique her interest; but she only shot him a look.

“Negotiable? How romantic.”

“What I’m saying is that my leaving Tucker isn’t a done deed.”

“Fine. If you stay here, we can continue on like we are now.”

“Which would suit you perfectly well. You could keep on with your work, and play at having a husband and kids, and then when the going gets rough, you could take off, free as a bird.”

“I’d never do that.”

“Right! So what’s the difference if you’re married?”

“Precisely? What’s the difference if I’m not?”

He started to laugh. He couldn’t help it. “Christ, you have a quick mouth. Always could tie me up with words. Right from the start.”

“And right from the start you were rigid,” she returned. “You got an idea in your mind, like evening study hall, and insisted on it come hell or high water. Good Lord, Noah, you’ve been through one marriage and failed. Why in the world do you want to try it again?”

“So I can do it right this time.”

“And you’re sure you will?”

“I think so.”

“Well, you have more faith in yourself that I have in me.”

“No,” he said sadly. “I just want it more, I guess. That’s all.” Feeling dejected, thinking that if Paige didn’t really love him, moving back to Santa Fe and putting everything about Tucker, Vermont, behind him might be the only way he’d survive, he left to join the others in the kitchen.

*   *   *

Paige didn’t know what to do. Conflicting thoughts chased each other around in her head, leaving her little peace that night. Loving Noah was brand new. Left to her own devices, she might have worn the knowledge around for a while to see about the comfort of the fit, but he wasn’t giving her that luxury. He was pressuring her to make decisions she didn’t feel capable of making.

Then, the following afternoon, after she had muddled her way through a day’s work, she got a call from Joan Felix that upped the pressure something fierce.

“I
THINK WE HAVE ONE,” JOAN SAID
.

Paige didn’t follow. “One what?”

“Family. For Sami. It’s a mother and father who have four biological children and are looking to adopt a fifth. They just moved to Vermont from the Midwest. We had a preliminary meeting with them last Friday. On the surface, they look good. It’ll be at least a month before the home study is complete. You’ve been through that, so you know what it’s like.”

Paige heard only half of what Joan was saying. An awful thumping inside her drowned out the rest. She caught something about a biological family for Sami, four children wanting to take her west, but the only thing that really registered was an image of Sami’s bedroom, suddenly empty and quiet and cold.

“Paige? Are you there?”

“Yes.”

“I thought for a minute that we’d gotten cut off.”

“I’m sorry.” Paige pressed a hand to her stomach. “Would you tell me again? You found a family for Sami?”

She tried to listen this time, but when she hung up the phone, she was feeling nauseated. It was one upheaval in her life too many. She made her way back to the kitchen and opened a can of ginger ale. She was sipping it, willing her stomach to settle and her mind to make sense out of what she’d learned, when Angie slipped in.

She didn’t say anything, just leaned against the counter near Paige with a nervous look on her face.

Paige didn’t like that look. Not on the all-knowing and confident Angie. “Why do I get the feeling something’s happened?” she asked warily.

“Ben and I are going to make it,” Angie said.

The words registered. Paige intellectualized them and managed a semienthusiastic, “That’s great, Angie,” but she knew there was more. Whereas Angie should have looked pleased, she remained nervous.

“But we may be moving.”

“Moving?”

“Back to New York.”

“Oh, Angie!”

Angie closed her hands around Paige’s wrists and, beseechingly, said, “I’m torn, Paige. In so many ways. If I were the only one involved, I’d never even be considering this. I love Tucker. I love you. I love our families. But I’m not the only one involved—much as I may have fooled myself into thinking that for too long a time. There’s Ben. And what it boils down to is that he needs to be in the city. He’s bored here.”

Paige didn’t know what to say. She couldn’t grasp a future without Angie. From her first conception of the practice, Angie had played a vital role. “But…what will you do?”

“I called a friend in Manhattan. He knows of two slots for pediatricians—both slightly upstate, but within easy commuting distance. I may look into them.” She paused, expectant in a skeptical sort of way. “What do you think?”

Paige was having trouble thinking, what with her world tipping over again, but she tried. “I think, uh, I think that you can’t possibly go, because we need you here, but if that’s what’s necessary to save your marriage, you’ll have to.” Angie leaving? Sami being adopted by strangers?

Her stomach was a single large knot.

“Nothing’s definite,” Angie said. “I may hate both positions, and Ben may decide to work out of Montpelier, or teach in Hanover, or even commute to New York. But if he wants to go, I can’t say no. He tried here. For ten years he did, for my sake, and we all know what happened. So now I’m trying to listen to what he’s saying. He’s a smart guy. He knew his son. Dougie may only be fourteen, but he’s happy at Mount Court. He could either stay at school here or come with us if we move—not that I love the idea of his staying, any more than I love his boarding now. My heart still rebels. My mind sees the merit in it. Dougie needs to breathe. If the values I’ve spent fourteen years instilling in him haven’t taken by now, they never will.” She took a quick breath. “I’m trying to look realistically at the future. I haven’t done that before.” She searched Paige’s face. “Say something.”

“I can’t. You’ve always known what was best for you.”

“No. I thought I did. I thought that what was best for me was automatically best for Ben and Doug, but I was wrong. What’s best for me is intricately tied up with what’s best for them. They’re individuals with individual needs. If I can’t help satisfy their needs, then satisfying my own becomes meaningless. My happiness is contingent on theirs, which isn’t to say,” she added wryly, “that I’ve become subservient. I won’t go anywhere unless I find something that will give me professional pleasure, and Ben agrees with that. But I can’t be calling the shots all the time anymore. Some of the time. Not all.”

Paige wrapped her arms around Angie.

“Mara missed it,” Angie mused. “She wanted happiness, and it eluded her. We couldn’t understand that, because we saw so much success in her life, only she saw what we didn’t. She saw how easy it was to confuse success for happiness. She saw the potential for more. I want to realize it.”

Paige held on tight.

After a minute Angie asked, “Are you all right?”

Paige let out a shaky breath. “They found a family for Sami.”

“Oh, Lord.” Angie drew back. “Are they taking her now?”

“Not yet. But soon.” Paige started to tremble. “I have to leave now.”

“Where are you going? Let me come.”

“No. I need time. I have to think.”

“Can I talk with you later?”

Paige nodded. At least she thought she did, but she wasn’t sure if the directions she was giving to her body were being carried out. She felt uncoordinated, her steps uneven as she returned to her office. She dropped her purse twice before finally getting a grip on it, couldn’t seem to fit her keys into the ignition of her car, and when she got on the road, she drove for five minutes before looking through the dwindling daylight and wondering where she was headed.

It was with a determined effort that she finally got her bearings. Ten minutes later she drove under Mount Court’s curved wrought-iron arch. One minute after that, she pulled up in front of the Administration Building. Noah’s secretary wasn’t at her desk, so she went right to his door. He was inside, engrossed in a set of spreadsheets. The cuffs of his white shirt had been turned back, the neck button undone, and his tie loosened. He looked like a man who didn’t need an interruption.

She stood at the door, feeling guilty that she had come. Noah had his share of problems with Mount Court. He didn’t deserve her problems, too.

But he had said that he loved her. And, given the devastation she was feeling, no one else would do.

He looked up in surprise and came out of his chair. “Paige. I didn’t know you were coming.” He approached her, frowning. “You look pale.” He drew her into the room and closed the door.

“I’m sorry to bother you. I know you’re busy—”

“Don’t apologize. Never apologize.”

“It’s been a god-awful afternoon, like everything’s unraveling. Angie is talking about moving away, and the adoption agency found a family for Sami.” She looked up at him, letting her eyes say all she couldn’t put into words.

He rubbed her arms lightly.

“It probably won’t happen until after the holidays, but then they’ll take her away from me. She’ll have two real parents and four siblings. And a nice house, I guess. Joan said they seem like good people.” She was suddenly appalled. “But
four
kids? She won’t get much attention in a family of seven. She’ll just be another kid to wear the hand-me-downs of the ones that came before her. And the family is just moving to Vermont, which means that they don’t know people here. They don’t have an established support network. And if he’s taking a new job, who’s to say the job won’t fall through? Or that he won’t decide he hates it and move somewhere else? Sami can’t be moving around all the time. She needs to be able to settle in one place and stay there.”

“Did you tell Joan that?” Noah asked.

“No. She took me off guard. I couldn’t say much of anything.”

“Certainly not that you want to keep Sami yourself.”

Paige saw the dare in his eyes. She broke away and went to the window. Beyond it, the campus was covered with snow. The occasional student passed by wearing the wool overcoat that was the covering de rigueur for the winter semester, but otherwise the scene was as bleak as her view of the future.

“It isn’t fair,” she said, burying her hands in the pockets of her own wool topcoat. “I didn’t ask for Sami, but suddenly there she was, and I owed it to Mara to take her. So now, just when I’ve gotten used to having her, they find a family. Why didn’t they find one right away? Why did it have to take three months? I mean, it’s not fair to Sami, either. If she were an infant, three months might not be crucial, as long as there was someone to hold her and hug her. But she’s no infant, and it isn’t just any old someone who’s been holding her and hugging her. It’s me. It’s Nonny. It’s you.” Of course, he would be leaving, too. And Angie. And even Nonny, if Sami left.
It wasn’t fair
.

“I hate change,” she cried. “I’ve always hated change. Most of all, I hate change that happens after you’ve adapted to the change that you didn’t want in the
first
place.”

Noah came to lean against the wall where the window ended. In a low voice he said, “I don’t think change is the real issue here.”

“It’s definitely one of them,” Paige insisted. “For the first three years of my life my parents dragged me around wherever they went. I never had my own room, never had my own friends, never had much more by way of constancy than a teddy bear, and even that got lost in one of the moves. Finally Nonny put her foot down and took me in. It was another three years before I was willing to spend even a single night away from her house. Stability happens to be very important to me.”

Noah crossed his arms over his chest. “The real issue here,” he went on as though she hadn’t spoken, “is what you want in life. I don’t believe—not for one minute—that you took Sami in only because you felt you owed it to Mara. To do something as momentous as that—and to continue doing it, even when it meant that you had to go through all the red tape of being approved as a foster parent—demanded something else. Somewhere deep inside, you liked the thought of having Sami with you. Maybe it was to fill the void that Mara’s death left, maybe it was to satisfy your own maternal instincts—”

“I don’t have maternal instincts.”

“You sure as hell do,” he argued, “You may hide behind your profession and call it doctoring, but make no mistake, you mother your patients. You mother Jill. You mother Sara. And you damn well mother Sami. Maternal instincts are as natural to you as doctoring.”

“But—”

“It’s not just that you’ve
gotten used
to having Sami. She isn’t just a habit. You
love
her. Face it, Paige. You do.”

“Of course I love her,” Paige admitted. “How could I help but love her? She’s a darling child—”

“No, no,” he interrupted with a wave, “we’re not talking love in the general sense here. You love her like a mother loves her child. You take pride in her accomplishments. You worry when she’s sick. You look forward to coming home from work and seeing her. You give her time that you’d otherwise give to yourself, and you don’t think twice about it, because that’s what mothers do.”

“She’s been a novelty for me,” Paige reasoned. “I’ve never had a child around the house before.”

“And you like it. Admit it.”

“She’s such a
good
child.”

“And you like having her around,” he challenged.

“Okay.” She couldn’t see bickering the point. “I like having her around.”

“Only you run into trouble when you think of formalizing the relationship. Just like you run into trouble when you think of formalizing our relationship. You shy away from making formal commitments. So where does that leave you?” he asked. “Ultimately it leaves you alone. Sami will go either to this family or another one. Nonny will go back to her own apartment. I’ll go to Santa Fe, and that’ll be that.”

Paige could picture it. Those very images had been hovering at the periphery of her awareness since Joan had called. No. Longer. They had been hovering since she realized she loved Noah.

His arms were at his sides now, his voice sheathed in steel and reminiscent of the man she had first locked horns with three months before. “Your life will be just as it was before Mara died,” he said, “only it won’t be as nice as you remembered it being, because you’ll be coming home every day to an empty house. You’ll be eating dinner alone. You’ll be sitting on that love seat of yours, reading Mara’s letters for the umpteenth time, and you’ll be wondering what Sami is doing, or Nonny, or me. Only we’ll all be gone, and there will be no way you’ll be able to get us back. So, on top of everything else, you’ll be feeling regret. Your nights will be lonely as hell.”

“Why are you saying all this?” she cried. She had come for comfort, not torment.

He didn’t answer, simply stood with his arms limp, but something about the way he was looking at her caused a tugging inside. His glasses reflected the lights in the room. Behind them, she could swear she saw tears.

More gently he said, “I sometimes see my life that way, busy all day and barren at night. So now I’m looking forty-four in the eye, and I’m wondering where I go from here. I’m thinking that I came to this town expecting nothing. And now suddenly there’s something. It’s out there waiting to be grabbed, and even if I go for it, it might slip right through my hands. So I’m in the same quandary as you.”

She went to him and slid a hand in his. “You aren’t just talking about us, are you?”

He shook his head.

“This job?”

He thought for a minute, pursed his lips, shrugged. “I can’t separate the two. Does Mount Court excite me because when I go out of an afternoon I know there’s a chance I’ll bump into you down by the gym, or at the hospital? Is the challenge more meaningful because I can look forward to telling you about it at night?” He looked perplexed. “I didn’t ask for this, either, Paige. I didn’t want entanglements. I came here expecting to stay for a year and then be gone. Sara and I had a lot to work out, still do. The last thing I needed—wanted—was to fall in love with a married woman.”