The Abortionist's Daughter (31 page)

Never would he have guessed that something that had been so clear in December could have grown so indeterminate by the end of February. And it wasn’t because of Carolyn, either. Carolyn was willing to forgive him and move on. It was all inside him. Doubts the color of smoke. He fought them, he denied them, he opened his heart to let them fly away—and still they settled in each morning, unwilling to bargain.

It was over.

He’d blown it.

Big time.

The first weekend in March Carolyn came over to collect her belongings from his house. There wasn’t much, which surprised them both, for they assumed they’d woven their lives together with enough physical objects to require a day’s worth of sorting to unravel things. But apparently not. For the most part, everything she wanted she fit into a liquor box. Clothes, makeup, a few CDs. The Monet print that he’d never gotten around to hanging.

“Oh—the placemats,” he said. “Don’t you want them?”

“You can keep them,” she replied. “They were never my favorite.”

Ernie was kind, and did not berate him for his folly, although he did allow that it made things awkward for Leigh at work. “They’ll get over it, though,” he said. “They’re big girls.”

Fate was kind too, for not allowing him to run into Megan. He heard from a friend over at the DA’s office, who’d heard from Frank, that she’d thrown herself into her studies. Possibly she was considering spending the next year in Honduras, or Nicaragua, volunteering as a medical aide. That was good, he thought. From the same person he heard that Frank himself had taken an extended leave while the U.S. Attorney’s office down in Denver considered whether to file charges against him. The house was up for sale.

Huck assumed that with Bill Branson’s confession, the general public would allow the Duprey case to recede into its collective archives. But while national interest waned, local interest remained acute; having been fed a daily diet of sexy news, the town had developed an addiction, which it was unable to shake in the absence of something equally sexy to take its place. The newspaper didn’t help at all. Front-page articles detailing Bill’s arrest, his bond, his preliminary hearing—the headlines screamed for weeks. And then there were the spin-off articles: “Is Your Child Being Stalked?” in Sunday Lifestyles, for instance. It was an election year, and Huck wished they’d turn to politics.

One day in mid-March—three months to the day after Diana’s death—he stopped at a neighborhood coffee shop for a bagel. It was almost nine, but the tables were still crowded with scruffy laptoppers and sweatshirted fathers with their fleece-bundled babies and marathon runners all sinew and bone in their breezy nylon shorts. The girl at the espresso machine slammed her levers this way and that, and the pungent aroma of rich dark coffee, combined with steam and cinnamon, provided sharp contrast to the dry windy air outside.

Suddenly there was a lull in the general din, and Huck glanced up. Standing in the doorway were Robert and Sarah Branson, Bill’s parents. Their pictures had been in the paper enough so that if you hadn’t known them before, you did now; Robert was tall and broad-shouldered, a former football star for the University of Southern California, while Sarah was a diminutive woman with a sharp jawline and hair so thin on the scalp, it worried you a little.

Valiantly ignoring the silence, the Bransons took their place in line, and soon the noise levels rose to a happier level. But after Huck got his bagel, he turned, and in exiting he had to walk right past them. The last time they’d seen each other was in court for Bill’s preliminary hearing. Now as their eyes met, Huck felt well-contained sorrows begin to leak.

Robert Branson nodded. “Detective,” he said.

“Good morning,” Huck said politely.

Sarah Branson stared up at him from behind a spare fringe of bangs.

“Going to work?” Robert asked.

“I am,” replied Huck. He didn’t like this situation one bit and was eager to leave, and to that end he wished some car in the parking lot would back into another so he could excuse himself and tend to a simple fender-bender. “And you?”

“No,” said Robert. He did not elaborate.

“Well, then,” said Huck. “Off to work.” He toasted them with his coffee, giving a goofy smile.

“Mr. Berlin,” said Sarah.

“Yes, ma’am?”

“How old are you?”

Huck did not expect this question. “I’m twenty-six, ma’am,” he replied.

She nodded sagely, as though his age explained everything for her.

“Two decaf lattes,” Robert told the boy at the counter. “Honey, you want a scone?”

The woman knew something. She wouldn’t let go of him with her eyes. It made him nervous, and he wished more than ever that he’d eaten a bowl of cereal at home that morning.

“To you this is just another case, isn’t it?” Sarah said.

“No, ma’am, I—”

“Just another day on the job. Do you have any idea what it’s like to put the two people together?”

“Which two people, ma’am?”

“The boy who killed Dr. Duprey with the boy who wanted to be Michael Jordan for Halloween five years in a row?”

“Sarah, honey,” said Robert.

“Allegedly killed,” Huck pointed out.

“Whatever,” said Sarah. “No, you don’t, do you? How could you? You don’t have children.”

“I imagine it’s probably one of the worst things a parent could go through,” said Huck.

“Yes. It is. But it’s one thing to imagine it, and another thing to go through it.”

“Sarah, let the man go,” said Robert.

“Just one old woman to one young man,” Sarah Branson said. “Who knows what he’ll be dealing with twenty years from now.”

Robert gave her a nudge then, and Huck stood back to let them exit, even though he’d been the one on his way out before they were even served. He noticed that several people at nearby tables had been listening, and now they quickly dropped their heads back to whatever they were reading. And as Sarah and Robert left the coffee shop, he thought to himself, not for the first time, that it would be a lot easier to be a cop in a place where everyone didn’t know everyone else.

He plodded through his days at work. The chief had put him back on Investigations, and any minute things could change with the commission of a new crime, but it seemed that day after day the people in this town woke up with the sole ambition of obeying the law. He chastised himself for wishing for tragedy. It was a lousy profession, he thought.

—————

In mid-March a single room opened up, and Megan took it. She and Natalie had stopped speaking to each other at the end of February, over issues of music and alarm clocks and Natalie’s habit of borrowing even the most intimate articles of clothing without asking. Midterm examinations gave Megan a 3.9 GPA, which pleased both her and her father. They ran together daily now, rain or shine, three miles up into the canyon and back. He suggested they train for a marathon, and she was game. There was nothing quite like pushing yourself to see what you were capable of.

On the surface she was doing very well. She started seeing a school psychologist to explore the unresolved issues with her mother. She slept soundly at night and took vitamins and learned the
Ujaii pranayama
method of breathing as a means of relaxing herself when other methods failed. If she had any free time on the weekends, she helped her father sort through her mother’s papers; they made plans to publish a collection of her essays, the profits to be donated to a new clinic that was opening up in town.

Then, the third week in March, she ran into Huck, and everything around her shattered.

She was on her way into the grocery store to buy laundry detergent, and he was coming out with a cartful of groceries. Both slowed, and they stopped about ten feet from each other. He was wearing a baggy sweatshirt and carried a newspaper under his arm. To see him in the flesh made her want to stop and stare and run away, all at once. His eyes seemed to cut straight through her, blue lasers aimed at her heart.

“Hello,” he said.

Not one night had she gone to sleep without recalling the warmth of his body next to hers. Not for long; she knew it was unhealthy to dwell upon something that had happened only once. Still, if you’d asked her to recall the curve of Michael Malone’s shoulders, she’d have blinked and come up with nothing. If you’d asked her to recall not only the curve of Huck’s shoulders but the slope of his belly and the muscular hardness of his thighs as well, she’d have been able to take a lump of clay and mold the exact likeness, right down to the knuckles on his hands.

“Hello,” she said in return.

And in those few seconds when their eyes searched for answers to questions no one dared ask, she marveled at her foolhardiness for believing she could simply sleep with this man and then walk away as if it had never happened. For the first time in her life she wanted to talk to her mother about this, wanted answers to simple questions:
How do you know?
and
What do you do about it?
and
How do you forget, if it’s not meant to be?

Then Huck’s eyes broke into pieces, and he smiled at her.

“How are you?” he asked.

“I’m okay,” she said. “What about you?”

“I’m okay too,” he said.

What bores they were!

He asked her, then, what she was going to do over spring break.

“Not Mexico,” she said.

The trip, obviously, had gotten shunted aside following the death of her mother; at this point Megan would have felt out of place dancing naked on sunny beaches in throngs of coconut-oiled bodies.

“I’ll probably help my father. He’s still looking for a house.”

“You’re good to him,” he said.

“He’s all I’ve got,” Megan reminded him.

He didn’t mention Carolyn, Megan noticed, and she didn’t ask, for fear that he would tell her they’d gone and gotten married in the last month. She did notice, however, that the newspaper under his arm was folded open to the want ads.

“What are you looking for?” she asked.

He glanced at the paper. “Oh. A dog,” he said.

“A dog! That sounds homey.”

Huck grinned.

“What kind?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe a mutt. I was going to go to the Humane Society and take a look.”

“Oh.”

“Do you want to come?” he asked suddenly.

The question flustered her. She had laundry to do, a big lab to write up, a paper to draft, a run scheduled with her father that afternoon.

“Okay,” she said.

“Okay?”

“Sure.”

“Now?”

“I’m free,” she said, an entire vocabulary re-forming in her brain.

“Well hey,” he said. “Let’s go.”

“I’ll follow you,” she said.

“Still the VW?”

“A hundred and thirty-five thousand miles,” she told him.

“But no defroster.”

Megan smiled. “Still no defroster.”

They walked across the parking lot. A car drove by, windows open, music blaring. It was spring, and even in a sea of asphalt you could smell mud, and puddles rippled, and the Girl Scouts hawked their cookies, and purple crocuses poked through their leafy mulch, and buds swelled, pregnant with chlorophyll. And in a cement kennel a few miles away a litter of puppies, brown and black and gray and definitely not of one lineage, squirmed over one another in their efforts to simultaneously stay warm, and break free.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am deeply indebted to the following readers for their comments on the manuscript: Detective Jack Gardner of the Boulder Police Department; Patricia Bosak, RN, CNM, of the Boulder Valley Women’s Health Center; Professor Marianne Wesson of the University of Colorado School of Law; and Lisa Halperin, M.D. A huge thank you to my agent, Molly Friedrich, who just recently came into my life with all of her energy, warmth, and infinite wisdom; and to my editor, Jordan Pavlin, for her confidence and enthusiasm. I’m extremely grateful to Young Audiences of Colorado, for their continuing support over the years. Thanks to Kate, Zoe, and Nick, for unknowingly offering me a window into the teenage mind when my own memories failed. And Pierre: thank you for consistently vetoing alternative careers. You are the love of my life.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Elisabeth Hyde is the author of three previous novels, including
Crazy as Chocolate.
Born and raised in New Hampshire, she has since lived in Vermont, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and Seattle. In 1979 she received her law degree and practiced briefly with the U.S. Department of Justice. She has taught creative writing in the public schools as well as through Naropa University. She currently lives with her husband and three children in Colorado, where she is at work on her fifth novel.

ALSO BY ELISABETH HYDE

Crazy as Chocolate

Monoosook Valley

Her Native Colors

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2006 by Elisabeth Hyde

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hyde, Elisabeth.

The abortionist’s daughter / by Elisabeth Hyde.

p.                           cm.

1. Women physicians—Crimes against—Fiction.                  2. Mothers and daughters—Fiction.                  3. Mothers—Death—Fiction.                  4. Abortion—Fiction.                  5. Secrecy—Fiction.                  I. Title.

PS3558.Y38A64 2006

813′.54—dc22                                                                                                                                       2005044487

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

eISBN: 978-0-307-26548-7

v3.0