Angie Morelli came to see me on a Thursday afternoon. I had been half-dozing in the afternoon sunlight when she knocked softly and let herself in. I didn't know what to say to her, so I just stared. "Hello, Stephanie," she said hesitantly. "How are you feeling?" How was I feeling? Well, the placenta had continued to separate from the uterine wall, so I was now bleeding in a steady trickle. They were giving me all kinds of medications to help "mature" Hope, but we were still at least a week away from that magical 28 week mark. I had a headache from the potassium, and the steroids they'd starting pumping me full of to help develop her immature lungs were making me feral. How was I feeling? Like I could peel paint off of aluminum with my fingernails, that's how I was feeling.
"Fine, Mrs. Morelli," I said like an automaton.
She nodded. "I needed to come and see you."
I just looked at her, fear clawing at my gut. "Does Joe know you're here?"
She shook her head. "No."
Okay, one down. "Does Joe know I'm here?"
"Not that I know."
I relaxed. "Okay. Why did you want to see me?"
"You're carrying Joe's baby," she said.
I nodded. I might not want him to know, but I wasn't going to lie.
"You didn't have to."
"No," I answered, unsure where she was going with this.
She fished around in her purse and finally pulled out a beautiful antique rosary, the beads obviously hand-carved. It was obviously very old and very well loved, the intricate workmanship a true work of art. She slid the beads through her fingers like worry beads, and stared at the crucifix intently as she began to talk, her words tumbling out over the top of each other. "Rocco, my husband," she started, as if I didn't know who Rocco Morelli was, "wasn't a good husband. He wasn't a good father, either." She looked up at me then, and her eyes were open like a child's. "But I loved him. Far too much, really, but I just couldn't resist him." She paused for a few minutes and worried at her beads, then started up again in a soft dreamy voice that was obviously far from the antiseptic hospital room we occupied. "He was handsome and charming, and I thought the sun rose and set with him. He could charm the birds out of the trees, and any girl he met out of her underpants. Including me." She shook her head at the memory. "Before I knew it, I was pregnant for Tony, then Paul. And I kept thinking that Rocco would settle down, quit drinking, quit chasing young girls, and learn to love me as much as I loved him. And then I had Mary and Cathy. Four babies in seven years, and only Tony old enough for school. And still Rocco drank, and gambled, and had his women. By then, I wasn't so in love any more, but I didn't have a lot of options. I'd married Rocco right out of high school and I had my babies to think of. They needed their father, or at least I thought they did." She sat for a long time, then, and said nothing.
"What happened then?" I prompted. I didn't want to break her reverie, but obviously there was something she wanted to tell me by coming here today. If she was going to compare me to the faithless Rocco, I wanted her to get it over with and get out, frankly.
"I saved up my grocery money. We lived on spaghetti and marinara sauce, but I hoarded everything I could. Pretty soon, I had enough saved up to leave. To make a new start somewhere else. For me. For my babies." I knew Angie Morelli had never left Rocco, but stayed with him until the day he died, far too young, but not soon enough to spare his children from the "Morelli curse" of a lousy father. So something had happened between her saving her nest egg and the time when Joe's father had died while he was a teenager.
Wait. Four babies, she said. Four. Joe was Mrs. Morelli's fifth child.
Understanding must have dawned on my face.
"Just so," she said. "Just so. I found out I was pregnant for Joseph. And I cursed God. I had finally found my way out, and here I was tied back to Rocco and his drinking, and his women, and his fists. I hated God in that moment." She stopped for a minute to caress the crucifix then continued. "And it wasn't like it is now. There were no clinics, no doctors. There was only a whispered name. A man who came through town every few weeks with a folding table in a dirty basement. And it would take all my hard-earned money to pay him. I'd have to start over with my nest egg, but at least I'd only have my four babies to worry about, instead of five."
Tears were swimming in her eyes, and they were in mine as well. "I can't imagine a world without Joe in it," I finally choked out.
"Neither can I," she agreed, and patted my hand. "When the day arrived, Tony wound up in the hospital with appendicitis. His appendix burst on the table, and we didn't know for several days if he was going to live or die. By then, of course, the man with the table was long gone. And I'd nearly lost one of my babies to a massive infection. It somehow made my newest one that much more precious to me."
She finally put down the rosary, and came to sit close beside me on the bed. "You could have gotten rid of Joseph's baby, Stephanie, but you didn't. Just as I kept him. And I can tell you that he has been the joy of my life. I have never regretted it, not for one minute." She reached down and placed her own warm fingers over my own, shielding my precious daughter. "You will never regret giving this child life, Stephanie. She can and will bring you the greatest joy. I promise you that."
I nodded through my tears. "Does Joe know?" I had to ask.
Mrs. Morelli shook her head. "No. I never told him. He didn't need to know."
I nodded my agreement. Mrs. Morelli handed me the rosary she'd been worrying. "This was my grandmother's. Maybe someday you'd like your child to have it."
"Hope," I told her. "I'm going to name the baby Hope."
"It's a girl?" Her smile softened her face and dropped twenty years from her age. I nodded. "Then tell Hope this is from her grandmothers, would you? And that we love her very much."
"I will," I promised. She rose to leave and I stopped her with a word. "Mrs. Morelli? Thank you. For telling me."
She nodded and swiped a few errant tears of her own. "Call me Angie, please. And I'd like come back from time to time, if that's all right with you. Maybe see the baby, if you don't mind."
"I don't mind. I don't want to tell Joe, though," I explained. "I don't want to be an obligation to him, and Hope deserves more than that."
Mrs. Morelli thought for a minute, then finally said, "I think you underestimate my son, Stephanie, and I think you underestimate yourself. But this is your decision to make, and I'll abide by it."
"Thank you, Angie."
She came back over and gave me a light peck on the cheek and ran cool fingers over my hair and across my belly. "I'll see you in a few days." I nodded and soon fell into a drugged sleep.
When I woke the next time, the room was dark. The reassuring rhythm of Hope's heartbeat soothed my steroid tightened nerves, and I stretched languidly, trying to find a comfortable position. My skin felt tight and distended, with a preternatural elasticity. My stomach still roiled and my heart raced periodically in reaction to the chemicals warring inside my body. Two days before, the nurses had confiscated the stash of Boston Cremes Lula had sneaked in to me. The steroids were driving my blood sugar levels up into the stratosphere, so sugar was now contraband. The same bloodthirsty nurses had taken to coming by at irritatingly regular intervals to poke holes in my fingers to take blood out, then poke matching holes in my rapidly expanding backside to put insulin in. I wondered how much longer it would be until an overly cheerful bloodsucking vampire disguised as a nurse would waltz in to turn me back into a human sieve.
My eyes didn't need to adjust to the dark, and I realized I wasn't alone. The scent of Bulgari reached me, tickling an awareness deep in my aching bones. My body reacted like it did to most things these days, with mixed signals. Part of me was reassured by Ranger's presence, and the rest of me was repulsed by the cloying overly spicy scent of green tea. It reminded me far too much of the unknown woman's perfume that had emanated from Joe's clothes the last night I spent with him. The memories associated with that last time I'd seen him still cut like shards of glass, and the scent memory was one I really didn't need. I couldn't explain that to Ranger, though. I could barely explain it to myself. I settled for a non-committal "Yo," of greeting.
"Babe," he answered. Typical. I smiled in spite of my discomfort. Good to know some things never change. "How you feeling?"
I pondered that one a minute. Most of the time, I put everyone off with a deceptive but insistent "fine" and they were willing to let it go at that. But I wasn't fine. And Ranger knew that. If there was any positive thing that came of our Long Talk, it was that we'd finally managed to cut through the superficial bullshit. Ranger had been straight with me, about his feelings and his past, and I owed him the same honesty. "Scared," I finally answered.
He nodded sagely. "Understandable."
"Yeah," I answered in a shaky breath, and willed the tears to go back under my eyelids. That was why I kept everyone at bay. If I kept up the "fine" veneer, I wouldn't crack. I was desperately afraid that if I ever let go, if I ever released all this pent up stress that was coiling like a serpent deep inside my soul, I would start to scream and cry, and I would never be able to stop. And I couldn't do that. Who would pick up the pieces if I shattered in my self-imposed exile? Hope needed me to stay calm. I took a steadying breath. It didn't help much, but everybody says practice makes perfect, right? Obviously I just needed a little more practice, that was all.
"You'll get through this," he said, and I nodded, still not trusting myself to speak. Frankly, he had a lot more faith in me than I had in myself, but I was terrified to give voice to those fears playing hide and seek deep in the recesses of my psyche. I had to be strong, or at least I had to pretend to be strong. Hope needed me. I was all she had.
"You shouldn't be going through this alone," he finally said. I frowned at him. I wasn't going through this alone. I had Hope. She was my reason for breathing. "What I mean is, you're going to need help for awhile. Hospital bills, getting back on your feet, that kind of thing." Was he offering me money? Geez, that was really sweet of him, but there was no way I could take money from him. It had been uncomfortable enough when I was working for Rangeman. "So I think we ought to get married."
I goggled at him. Seriously, I think my eyes about bugged out of my head.
When I finally found my voice, I said, "So you woke up this morning, and decided you were madly in love with me, couldn't live without me, and suddenly found the idea of till death do us part and raising another man's child appealing. Is that about right?"
"Well, I wouldn't exactly put it that way," he admitted.
I was starting to get pissed off. Granted, part of it was probably the steroids, but part of it was undoubtedly testosterone poisoning. Damn the man. "So how would you put it? Exactly." My tone should have given him a warning that he was treading on dangerous ground. Joe would have picked up on it in a heartbeat, but then again, Joe had been on the receiving end of my temper far more often than Ranger ever had. I'd have to give that some serious thought sometime. I'd been comfortable enough with Joe to be sanguine about losing my temper, but somehow with Ranger I'd always been on guard. Not a good sign, in retrospect, but I'd been too blind to see clearly at the time.
I heard rather than saw him get up out of the uncomfortable plastic visitor's chair and begin to pace the far confines of the room. Rather like a caged animal, I thought absently. I shook my head at his obvious discomfort. Just talking about marriage had him agitated, a state most people would never associate with Ranger. "Look, I've been thinking about this a lot, okay? And the bottom line is you wouldn't be in this predicament if it wasn't for me." He exhaled sharply through his nose. "If I'd backed off instead of pursuing you, you'd have Morelli here with you instead of being by yourself."
"So you feel guilty," I said softly. "Guilty and responsible."
"Yeah, something like that."
I tried my breathing exercises. I tried finding my happy place. I really did. For about two seconds, but I was so infuriated, I about exploded right there on the bed, despite being hooked up to all the tubes and wires. "Let's get a few things straight, okay?"
He nodded. Stupid man.
"First of all, I'm not in a predicament. I'm pregnant. There's a big difference." I ticked off another finger, and my voice notched up in volume, just a little bit. "Second of all, I'm pregnant because I decided to crawl into bed with Joe Morelli and fuck him blind when he was too damn drunk to realize what he was doing. My choice, my responsibility. Mine. No one else's. Not yours. Not his. Mine. Nobody forced me, nobody coerced me. I got there under my own power, with all my faculties clear. You got that?"
He nodded some more and tried to make some vaguely shushing motions with his hands. Didn't do any good. My voice ratcheted up some more.
"Third of all, if I refused to be nothing more than an obligation to the man I love, who actually used to love me back, why would I want to be an obligation to a man who doesn't love me? I'm not talking about in your own stupid, limited way, here, Ranger. I'm talking about love with a capital L, the kind of love that makes you want to grow old with someone, makes you want to take care of them, wake up next to them every morning for the rest of your life kind of love. I won't settle. Not for you, not even for Hope. I know what it's like to be loved that way, and I won't sell myself short for something less." I could feel my neck veins standing out there at the end, and probably the red flush I could feel creeping up my face wasn't such a good thing. I heard the scuffle of rapid footsteps in the hallway and belatedly realized I could hear my own words echoing back at me from the empty corners of my sterile little box-like room.
A bright rectangle appeared and Helen Fuld's answer to Nurse Cratchett poked her head around the door frame. "Everything all right in here?" she asked, giving Ranger a look that would have had a lesser man shaking in his leather boots.
"Fine," I bit out, since I'd had lots of practice at it. The look I sent her must have really been a doozy, because she poked her head right back out again, though I did notice she left the door open as a preventative measure.
"I think you're a lot more to Morelli than an obligation," Ranger said quietly.
"Yeah?" I challenged.
"Yeah. You're the mother of his child."
As suddenly as it had come, my anger drained out of me. "Yeah," I replied wearily. "Look what a difference that made for you and Rachel." Oh, ouch. That was below the belt, and I immediately regretted it. "I'm sorry," I apologized, and meant it. "I shouldn't have said that. Just don't forget I'm also the one who broke his heart. The one who publicly humiliated him. The one who drove him away from his friends and his family." I laughed bitterly. "Yeah, I'm lots of things to Morelli, Ranger, but none of them are good."
Ranger just shook his head at me and smiled sadly. I reached over and placed my hand on his, where it rested on the mattress, wanting to make amends for my hurtful comment. "But thank you."
He looked at me, brown eyes confused and full of questions. "Thank you for what you tried to do tonight. I know what it cost you."
He smiled again, a little more broadly. I couldn't resist teasing him.
"Just think. I might have said yes." I grinned up at him, grateful for his strength and his support. "You could have been looking at dirty diapers, and white picket fences, and having to trade your cherished Cayenne in for a minivan."
"Perish the thought," he quipped in return, the smile finally reaching his eyes, and bringing the ambient light in the room up a few hundred watts. Then he got serious again, and his hand moved to cover that precious swelling on my abdomen. "I still think you should tell Morelli," he said quietly.
"Tell me what?"
