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  “I have to go,” Dix said, as the sound of breaking glass came through the phone. “Sheila’s out, and it sounds like one of the kids just destroyed something. Call me back if you want to talk more, OK?”

  “Sure.”

  “Later, though. Right now I’ve got to take care of this.”

  He hung up before I had the chance to say goodbye and to thank him for the help he’d given me. I disconnected too, and curled up on the sofa to contemplate my future and my choices.

  Chapter 2

  I’ve visited the same OB/GYN my entire adult life, ever since I was twelve and got my first period. Doctor Denise Seaver practices in Columbia, Tennessee, twenty minutes from where I grew up in Sweetwater. When I moved to Nashville, I still made the trip south twice a year to see Dr. Seaver, and when I was married to Bradley and had my miscarriage, she was the one who saw me through it. I trust her. But I had to think long and hard about whether to visit Dr. Seaver with this pregnancy. On the one hand, she knew me. She knew my history and what I’d had to deal with in the past, and there was comfort in that.

  On the other hand, she knew me. The same way she knew my mother and my sister and my sister-in-law, my Aunt Regina—my father’s sister—and my mother’s best friend Audrey, and at least half the other female population of Sweetwater. Todd’s late mother Pauline had probably gone to Dr. Seaver with her female problems. Rafe’s mother LaDonna might have done the same. Dr. Seaver knew us all, intimately. She knew I’d been a virgin until I entered college, and she knew I hadn’t been sexually active since Bradley and I got divorced. She’d asked me repeatedly over the past two years whether I wanted a prescription for birth control pills, and I’d always given her the same answer: “There’s no need for that.”

  I realize that my sex life, real or imagined, is no business of Dr. Seaver’s—or of anyone else’s, for that matter. I’m a consenting adult, and if I want to sleep around, I can. Not that I do. It had happened once in two years, so it’s not as if I’m promiscuous. But Dr. Seaver didn’t know that, and I knew what she’d be thinking when she found out. Margaret Anne Martin’s perfect youngest daughter isn’t supposed to get pregnant out of wedlock. The good doctor would be shocked. And then she’d probably be on the phone with my mother.

  “Nonsense,” Dix said. “There’s such a thing as doctor-patient confidentiality, you know.”

  It was a few days later. He had cleaned up whatever mess had resulted from the glass I’d heard breaking last time we were on the phone together, and when he hadn’t heard from me for the next couple of days, he’d called back. One of the questions he’d asked—right after inquiring whether I’d made a decision one way or the other—was whether I’d been to see a doctor about my options.

  “Well, why not?” he’d said when I replied in the negative. “You know you’re going to need one. Either you’re having the baby, and you’ll need someone to deliver it, or you’re not having the baby, and you’ll need someone to terminate the pregnancy.”

  He was right, but at the moment I stayed busy pretending that if I didn’t deal with the issue, it didn’t exist. And I didn’t want him to ruin my comfortable fantasy, so I tried to derail him. “Could you possibly talk a little louder? Just in case Sheila didn’t hear you?”

  “She isn’t here,” Dix said. “It’s just me and the girls, and they’re in bed. Don’t try to change the subject, sis. You need to go see a doctor. If you’re keeping the baby, you’ll need prenatal vitamins and regular check-ups. I’ve been through this twice with Sheila; I remember the drill.”

  Of course he did. And because he was putting me on the spot, I did the same to him. “Speaking of that, are you two going to have any more? Hannah’s three, isn’t she? You’d better hurry; you aren’t getting any younger.”

  “You sound like mother,” Dix said. “But for your information, probably not. At least not anytime soon.”

  “Something wrong?”

  “Nothing you can help with. To get back to what I was saying, if you decide not to have the baby, you don’t have all the time in the world to get rid of it, you know. That window closes after a while.”

  “I don’t know which doctor to go to. I don’t have one here in Nashville.” And the indignity of going to one of the clinics, like some vapid teenager who’d had no idea that sex could lead to pregnancy, was just too embarrassing to contemplate.

  “Go to Dr. Seaver in Columbia,” Dix said. “Just like you’ve always done.”

  “What if she tells mom?”

  And that’s when Dix reminded me that there’s such a thing as doctor-patient confidentiality.

  “I know that,” I said. “I studied law too, for a couple of semesters. But you know how that kind of thing goes out the window where mother is concerned. I’m sure she has Denise Seaver just as firmly wrapped around her finger as she has the rest of us. They’ve known each other forever.”

  “It’s the law,” Dix said. “She can’t tell mom, no matter how much mom whines and begs. It’s illegal. You’re not underage.”

  “Mom thinks so.”

  “Mom’s wrong,” Dix said. “The circumstances of how you got yourself into this mess is none of Dr. Seaver’s business, anyway. You don’t have to give her any of the details.”

  I hadn’t planned to. The way my family—and the population of Sweetwater in general—feels about Rafe Collier, I planned to keep his name out of the story for as long as I could.

  “What if meet someone I know?”

  “Just tell them you’re there for your annual checkup. It’s not like they’ll know the difference.” He hung up without waiting for an answer.

  And that was how I came to be in Dr. Seaver’s office a couple of days later.

  I’ll spare you the details. Peeing in a cup and pelvic exams make for poor narrative. Let’s just skip to the part where I was dressed again, and sitting on the examining table waiting to discuss my situation with the doctor.

  “You’re pregnant,” Denise Seaver said when she came back into the room. Somehow she managed to sound surprised.

  “I told you I was.” Six home pregnancy tests don’t lie.

  “I thought you must have made a mistake.” She seated herself on the stool by the wall, still holding the folder with the results of my various tests and examinations, and crossed her ankles.

  “Obviously not,” I said. Calmly, as if the implication that I’d done something surprising, even shocking, didn’t sting at all.

  She nodded. “You’re about eight weeks along.”

  “Seven weeks, four days.”

  She looked up at that. “You know exactly when you conceived?”

  “I’m not in the habit of doing this. It happened once. I’m not likely to forget.”

  To be honest, I wished I remembered it a little less well. Or at least part of me did. The well-brought-up part that was horrified at what I had done, and which couldn’t quite believe that it had happened.

  The other, less well-brought-up part liked to take out the memories and dwell on them in the darkness of night, when I lay in bed alone, with nothing but silence and worries to keep me company, snuggled into Rafe’s T-shirt that still smelled faintly of him.

  Dix was right: I had fallen for Rafe, maybe more than just a little, and the fact that he’d headed into what I knew was a dangerous situation, one he might not come out of unscathed, gave me plenty of cause to worry. He might be hurt. He might even be dead. I had to believe, for my own sanity, that Detective Grimaldi would contact me if something happened to him. She hadn’t, which had to mean, I told myself, that he was safe and still in one piece. But there were times when it was comforting to picture him being alive, and that invariably led to memories of warm skin under my hands, and hard muscles sliding against my body.

  Yes, I knew precisely how many weeks and days it had been since that night. I could have given Dr. Seaver the hours and minutes too, had she asked.

  “I guess I can take it you’re not in a relationship with the fathe
r of the baby, then?”

  I blinked, caught between answering the question because she was the doctor, and questioning her need to ask. Added to that was the fact that it wasn’t an easy question to answer.

  “It’s complicated,” I said eventually.

  Dr. Seaver looked at me. “Either you’re in a relationship or you’re not.”

  Not necessarily. Rafe and I had a relationship, certainly, but I had no idea how to describe it. Friendship, with a healthy dose of sexual attraction thrown in for good measure, and a lot more trust on my part than I’d found it easy to give to anyone before. And that was before we had sex.

  “Let’s start with something simpler,” Dr. Seaver said. “The father of the baby... do you know who he is?”

  I sat up straight, stung. “Of course! It wasn’t a one night stand, for God’s sake. I didn’t go out to a bar to pick up a guy I didn’t know and took him home with me.”

  “Excellent,” Dr. Seaver said and made a note in her folder. “So you’re involved?”

  “We’re...” Yes, I guess it would be accurate to say we were involved. Sort of. Except what sort of involvement was still up in the air, and besides, he’d been gone for seven weeks, and I didn’t know whether he was dead or alive. “Friends,” I said.

  Dr. Seaver arched her brows. “Friends with benefits?”

  “God, no!” That sounded so tawdry. “I’ve known him for a while, and there’s always been...” I hesitated, casting around for the right word, “...something there, I guess, but I never considered acting on it. And then this happened.”

  “And since then?”

  “He’s been away on business,” I said firmly. Everyone in Sweetwater knew that Rafe was supposed to be dead—everyone in Sweetwater had rejoiced, in their own quiet way—and in this, at least, I could make it sound like I was talking about someone else. Not that Dr. Seaver would have any reason to think I was talking about Rafe. He’s not the kind of man anyone in Sweetwater would expect me to associate with. No one but my family knew we had any contact at all these days.

  My family and the Satterfields.

  And Cletus Johnson, one of Bob Satterfield’s deputies. His wife Marquita had been working for Rafe until she was killed two months ago.

  Oh, and Yvonne McCoy, an old friend of Rafe’s from school. She knew, too.

  And then there were the waitresses and everyone else who’d been at Beulah’s Meat’n Three the morning the two of us had bumped into one another there...

  Yes, much better to divert attention from Rafe. Too many people had seen us together, and I certainly didn’t want anyone to jump to the conclusion that my visit to the OB/GYN had anything at all to do with Rafe Collier.

  “So you’ll be raising this baby by yourself?” Dr. Seaver asked.

  “That’s... something I wanted to talk to you about.”

  She blinked. Dr. Seaver is around mother’s age, mid fifties, and unlike mother she looks every inch of it. She’s a little plump, mostly gray, and has an avuncular manner. Very earth-motherly. The loose-fitting dress under the white lab coat looked like it was sewn from home-woven material, and she had plastic clogs on her feet, with pink ankle socks. “Yes?”

  “I’m not sure I want... I mean, I don’t feel like I’d be able to... I don’t know if...”

  Either way I tried to articulate it, my feelings didn’t make me sound like a very nice person. I’m not sure I want this baby, because my family is going to give me hell about its father, and I don’t know if I can handle bringing it up on my own with no support from anyone.

  It made me sound so selfish. Like I’d had my fun but now I didn’t want to deal with the consequences.

  Dr. Seaver must have heard it before. “Facing life as a single parent is never easy,” she said. “There are options.”

  “Adoption and abortion.”

  I’d thought about little else since I’d talked to Dix last week. And I was no closer to making a decision about what I wanted to do. Carrying the baby to term and then giving it away would be hard, and I’d still have to explain to my family—and possibly Rafe—what was going on. Once I started looking pregnant, he’d certainly ask. That’s if he ever got back to Nashville, of course. The only way I could avoid any of the explanations was by terminating the pregnancy before I started showing. That was probably what I ought to do. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Not quite yet.

  “You have some time to think about it,” Dr. Seaver said. There was no accusation in her voice, which I appreciated. “While you decide what to do, you should start taking prenatal vitamins. If you do decide to carry the baby to term, you’ll be glad you did.”

  I nodded.

  “I’ll also give you a prescription for mifepristone. That’s the abortion pill. If you decide you’d prefer to end the pregnancy within the next week, you can take it. If you do, I need you back in the office within three days of taking it to make sure that everything worked out as planned and the pregnancy has ended. After the middle of next week, that option is off the table and you’ll have to have an in-clinic abortion. I’d like to see you back here in four weeks. If you don’t take the pill but you decide you’d like to schedule an abortion procedure before then, call and I’ll make an appointment for you with a facility in Nashville.”

  I nodded. Each mention of the word abortion hit me like a tiny pebble, stinging just a little, with the accumulation turning into a sort of dull overall pain.

  “Make an appointment at the desk on your way out,” Dr. Seaver said, getting to her feet. “Here,” she pulled a business card out of her pocket and handed it to me, “this has my private number on it. If you want to discuss the options in more detail, give me a call.”

  “Thank you.” I pocketed it, reflecting that my voice sounded faint, strangely distant.

  She put a comforting hand on my shoulder as she herded me toward the door and the hallway beyond. “It’ll be all right, Savannah. You’ll get through this. I believe in you.”

  I managed a smile. She might believe in me, but I wasn’t sure I did.

  I was standing at the nurse’s desk making my appointment for next month and carefully keeping my eyes off the tiny newborns in their carriers, when the door to the outside opened and a woman came through. She was about an inch shorter than me, slender and elegant, with a sleek blonde pageboy haircut cupping her jaw and big, brown eyes in a pointed pixie face.

  My first reaction was to run and hide.

  I disregarded it almost immediately, although I did make a deal with myself to strangle Dix at the first opportunity that presented itself. If Sheila was here, it could only be because my brother had spilled the beans. Damn him.

  And if she knew what was going on, it wasn’t like hiding would do me any good. I put the best face I could on it. “Sheila.”

  She jumped, and for a second she looked as unpleasantly surprised as I’d felt upon seeing her. “Savannah.”

  “Dix didn’t tell me you were going to be here,” I said, since it was rather obvious she wasn’t there to see me.

  She smiled. It almost looked painful. “It must have slipped his mind. What are you doing here?”

  “Annual checkup. You?”

  “The same.”

  I nodded. “I can wait for you, if you want. We could have lunch or something.”

  “Oh,” Sheila said, sounding less than thrilled about the idea, “that’s not necessary. I’m sure you want to get back to Nashville as soon as possible.”

  “I can take time out to have lunch with my only sister-in-law.” I smiled.

  It’s not like I’m setting the real estate world on fire up there in Nashville. We were close to Thanksgiving now, and the upcoming holiday season had put even more of a crimp in what was already a slow economy. I’d managed to pull down a couple of commissions since getting my real estate license back in the summer, just enough to keep food on the table and the wolf from the door, but there wasn’t anything pressing that I needed to get back to. Not in the next
few hours.

  “I’m sorry,” Sheila said, “but I’ve already made plans for lunch. With a friend.”

  “Oh,” I said. “OK. Maybe I’ll run down to Sweetwater instead, see if Catherine is free for lunch. Or mom. Since I’m down here anyway.”

  “Sure.” She leaned in and gave me air kisses on both cheeks. I returned the favor, and then hightailed it out the door while Sheila turned to the nurse behind the counter and gave her name. I couldn’t help but notice that she spoke in a low voice, almost a whisper, as if she were trying to make sure no one in the waiting room would know who she was.

  Sweetwater is located about twenty minutes southeast of Columbia, down the Pulaski highway. It’s a nice little town, full of well-to-do people and old houses. The Martin mansion, my childhood home, is the oldest of them all: an 1839 red brick antebellum construction with tall, two-story pillars, sitting on a little knoll just outside Sweetwater proper. Rafe once likened it to a mausoleum, and as I passed by on my way into town, I could see his point. It did look forbidding sitting there among the bare trees. Especially, I imagined, to a boy who had grown up in the Bog, the trailer park on the other side of town.

  Once upon a time, all the land surrounding the mansion belonged to the Martin family. These days, there’s just a couple of acres left, with a few old outbuildings from the glory days and a whole lot of grass and flowers. Everything else is sold off. And there are new subdivisions cropping up all the time, all over town. The city limits are spreading in every direction, north toward Columbia and south toward Pulaski. In another ten years, Columbia will probably become a suburb of Nashville, and it won’t be long after that, that Sweetwater gets gobbled up, too. One day, we’ll all live in cities.