"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?" The tone was deliberately casual, but the tension in his body was unmistakable. If I'd had any sense, I would have closed my eyes and begged God for a do-over. I'd been doing that for more than six months, though, to no avail. Obviously, God had it in for me, and I wasn't going to cut a break. I even started to say, "This isn't what it looks like," when I stopped myself. I would have laughed if I weren't so close to tears. The irony was overwhelming. I'd said those very words to Mooch and Tony when half the Burg, including Joe, had caught me with Ranger's hand down the front of my shirt on Black Thursday. The situation then, of course, had been exactly what it looked like. Now, however, the situation was entirely different, but I knew Joe would never believe that. I couldn't say I blamed him given my past transgressions, but that didn't make his accusing glance any easier to swallow. If anything, it made it worse.
Ranger's hand snaked back from my belly, and he brushed past Joe like a whisper. Ranger was smoke.
I finally gave in and closed my eyes, unable to bear up under the anger in Joe's gaze. Deserved or undeserved really didn't matter right now. In either case, I couldn't spare the emotional energy for whatever confrontation he had in mind. I had to focus all my efforts on Hope. I laced my hands together over my precious baby as if to protect her from the hard words and anger that boiled just under the surface, silent and unspoken. I concentrated hard on the blue stones in the friendship ring Joe had given me years before. Somehow the hard bite of the sapphires on my fingers served as a connection to Joe, and I had worn the ring religiously since he'd left, switching it to my pinkie finger when my fingers had swollen after my admission to the hospital. I carefully addressed my words to the center stone.
"I'm sorry, Joe. I shouldn't have asked your mother to keep quiet about this. I shouldn't have put her in that position. I know how much your family means to you."
"Do you?" His question was hard and biting, and I mentally shored myself up to take whatever measure he needed to mete out. I would not break, not in front of him. Not now. "So if you know how much family means to me, how come I have to hear from Lenny Fucking Stankovic that I'm going to be a father, huh?" I could tell he was hanging onto his temper by a thread. He hadn't raised his voice, but he was more angry than I'd ever seen him. Oh, boy.
"And my mother knew about this? Fuck me." Shit. I really hoped he had missed that part. Still. Lenny ratted me out? Oh, I had a few words to say to Lenny Stankovic, and then I'd sic MaryLou on him. God help the man.
"How did you know I was here?" Last I heard Joe was firmly ensconced in Newark pretending that the entire city of Trenton didn't exist, which was part and parcel of the reason I was on Morelli Ignores from Joe's family. I had driven away their favorite person and he was staying incommunicado. I couldn't imagine Lenny Stankovic working up enough gumption to go all the way to Newark, track down Joe Morelli, and blindside him with the news that he was going to be a father. Lenny was an okay guy, but initiative had never been his strong suit. He and Morelli had hardly run in the same circles.
Joe gave me a small bitter laugh, looked down at his shoes, and shook his head. "I brought a woman home to meet my mother." Oh, God. In the back of my head, I always knew it would happen. Joe would meet somebody else, it was inevitable. Somehow, I'd just always thought I'd have more time to get used to the idea. Like a couple hundred years maybe. And I thought it would be from a distance. I never thought I'd actually have to hear him say the words. I'd have run out of the room if I'd been able, but the tubes and wires chained me to the hospital bed as effectively as any shackles could have done. I couldn't escape, so I'd get to hear all the sordid details whether I wanted to or not. If Joe wanted his pound of flesh, he would definitely get it. There was nothing but a huge oozing sore where my heart used to be.
"Ten minutes after I walk in, Lenny Stankovic is banging on my mother's front door, telling me he's gotta talk to me outside. He tells me if it was his woman up in Helen Fuld not knowing whether his baby was going to make it or not, he'd want to know about it. Said MaryLou would have his nuts for breakfast, but he thought I ought to know." He leveled a hard gaze right at me, and I didn't flinch. "Lenny Stankovic." He shook his head again.
"Six fucking months, Stephanie. When were you going to tell me?"
Sonofabitch.
Suddenly, the same red haze that hit me when talking with Ranger earlier was back. I felt it wash over me, bringing heat and rage in its wake. My eyes narrowed, and my fists balled with rage. "Fuck you, Joe."
He recoiled like I had slapped him, and started to speak, but I cut him off.
"Six months! You know what I was doing for six months while you were off in Newark finding a new girl? I was trying to work up the energy to dive under a fucking bus, that's where I was. Until MaryLou got scared I'd actually do it and strong-armed me into the doctors office so he could zone me out on enough drugs to keep me from offing myself. But here's the kicker, Joe—here's where it gets really funny. He couldn't give me any of those pills. Because it turns out I wasn't just suicidal, I was pregnant." Where the hell had the tears come from? I was still furious, and I wasn't finished with him yet.
"He started talking about options, and alternatives, and a woman's right to choose, and all of that. One part of my brain was thinking I should listen to him. The last thing you and I needed was a baby tying us to each other when you hated the sight of me. There was no way I was ready to be any kind of mother. I could barely take care of myself, let alone someone else. And then he started talking about the placenta tearing away, and the baby being compromised. And I couldn't hear any of the logical parts about how I wasn't ready to be a mother and how we didn't need a baby to complicate things. All I could hear was the sound of her heart." Tears were pouring down my face now, but I couldn't stop the torrent of words flowing out of me. I'd been so careful to keep everything bottled up, to keep my illusion of calm for the people around me, for Hope, for my own sanity. Now that carefully constructed facade was collapsing around my feet like a house of cards and I was powerless to stop it.
"Her heart was beating so strong, and so hard, and so steady. It was all I could hear. I knew she was struggling, she was trying so hard to stay alive. And in that moment, I knew I would do whatever I had to in order to help her." I swiped away my tears and met Joe's look with eyes that never wavered. "I've been fighting God every second since then. He wants to take her back, and I can't let her go. She's all I have left. And I'm all she has." I looked away from Joe, back to the heart shaped spot on the wall I'd come to rely on to center my thinking, to focus my thoughts. "It's all I can do to fight God right now. My daughter's life hangs in the balance. I can't fight you too. Not now." I closed my eyes wearily. "Go home, Joe. Go home to your new girl. Go home to your life. I can't do this right now. You want to know when I was going to tell you? When I knew whether or not she was going to live or die. That's when." I deliberately turned my face away from him and toward the wall. I ran my hands down over the thin cotton of the hideous hospital gown and soothed my unborn child. I rubbed her tenderly, pretending it was her back instead of the scratchy cotton stretched taut over my own skin. I cradled her gently, my hands resting under the swell of my belly to cozen her to me. I don't know who was comforting whom, but I needed the feel of her tiny weight to steady me right then.
"How's she doing?" His voice was quiet, barely above a whisper. I thought I felt his hand feather across the top of my head, but realized it was probably wishful thinking on my part. I opened my eyes and looked at him. He had moved the chair over next to the bed, and his eyes were focused on my belly with its precarious but precious cargo.
I shrugged. "Okay for now," I answered. He looked up at me, and I knew he wanted the real answers, the hard answers, the answers only another parent would have to have. "She's very small, Joe, and the placenta has partially torn away from the uterine wall. That means she isn't getting the blood supply she should be. Less blood supply is less oxygen, less nutrients. It's not good." He dropped his head and I could see him struggling for control. I reached out my hand before I could stop myself, and laid it gently on the back of his neck, my fingers feathering up into the soft waves with a will of their own. "She's holding her own, though. She's a strong little girl." He raised his head back up, and I dropped my hand as if burned. I continued, "The doctors are really cautious, and don't want to commit themselves. But they're pumping me full of steroids to try and mature her lungs so she can breathe. If we can just hang in there until I'm 28 weeks and she's two pounds, she's got a lot better shot."
"Two pounds." He shook his head. "Jesus."
"I know," I said solemnly. "But that's what they're telling me."
"And you're how far along?"
I looked away from him then. "We, uh." I cleared my throat. "We think a little over 27 weeks." I stopped and gathered my thoughts, looking anywhere but at him. "We've been assuming I got pregnant that last time, but there's no way to tell. Frankly, for her sake, I hope I got pregnant before that, but I just don't know."
The silence stretched between us for so long I thought I would scream. I finally couldn't take it any more. "I'm sorry, Joe. That night, I shouldn't have. Well, I should have stayed on the couch. But I didn't." I took a deep breath, determined to finish this. "You were asleep, and I wanted one last memory. To last me. It was selfish, and now this is my punishment." I swallowed back tears, and choked out, "I just wish God would punish me and not her."
"I wasn't asleep."
I thought about that one. "Drunk then." I shook my head. "Doesn't matter. Hardly in a condition to give consent."
"Don't do this Stephanie," he said, shaking his head. "Yeah, I had too much to drink, but I knew what I was doing when I slid inside of you." The muscles along his jaw clenched and released. "You weren't the only one who wanted one last time to remember. So don't do this to yourself. There's plenty of guilt to go around."
Guilt. Yeah, it had become my closest friend. It ate away at me when I was awake and robbed me of sleep at night. I couldn't meet my own eyes in the mirror any more, because I didn't like what I saw reflected there. Hope, at least, had given me a reprieve from the awful, heart-gnawing knowledge that I had betrayed Joe. Had caused him so much hurt that he'd left his home and family to escape.
"What was he doing here?"
"What?" I had been lost in my own morass of negativity, and Joe's question caught me by surprise.
"Manoso. What was he doing here?"
I stifled a wild urge to laugh. Oh, God. It was too much.
"He asked me to marry him."
Well, that certainly got his attention. His dark eyes bored into me with an intensity I hadn't seen before. "What?" Low, menacing. Territorial? I couldn't hope for territorial, but I knew I would reexamine all the nuances of that 'what' long after Joe left.
"He felt guilty," and this time, a small, bitter laugh did escape me, despite all my efforts. "He, uh, thought that if he had backed off when I asked him to, then you would have been here with me and I wouldn't be here by myself in this 'predicament', he called it."
I saw the feral gleam grow more pronounced, though his voice never wavered. If anything, he was speaking softer now than he was before. "You told him to back off and he didn't?"
I shook my head. "Not like you mean, Joe. I wish it were that easy." I swallowed hard. "Like you said, there's plenty of guilt to go around. I have to own my share."
Joe exploded out of the chair, and it skittered up against the far wall. "Well, fuck guilt. And fuck Manoso!" He began to pace restlessly. "This is not how it was supposed to be."
"So how was it supposed to be, Joe? Huh? God doesn't give do-overs. Believe me, I've tried." I hated sounding bitter, but there wasn't anything I could do about it.
He raked his fingers through his hair, and my palms itched. My hands still burned as if branded from the brief time I'd touched his hair. Soft, like the finest silk. An oddity in such a masculine man, it was as if I could still feel his hair flowing under my fingers as I sifted through the fine strands as he rested his head in my lap while we watched some inane gore-infested guy movie. Joe's attention was always firmly on the screen, but mine usually wandered to the vibrant locks under my fingers. And then the movie would end, and his attention would shift to me. Sometimes his hair seemed to come alive under my fingers as I dug my nails into his scalp as his mouth moved over me in passion. Those strands had wound around my knuckles more times than I cared to remember as I'd held his head buried between my hips on long, languid nights long after the sounds from the movie had grown distant, and finally silent.
"Not like this," he finally said, and my attention snapped back from my reverie. I flushed with embarrassment that just the feel of his hair under my hands could evoke such vivid memories. If Joe had any inkling of the effect he still had on me, bloated, blotchy and minus any vestige of an hourglass figure, my humiliation would be complete. I shook my head to clear it.
"You want to talk about do-overs? How about this. How about if I never left that night?" I could see the guilt creeping in around the edges of his tight control.
"It wouldn't have made any difference," I answered calmly. If there was one thing I'd had time for over the past few weeks of staring at the ceiling and listening to my baby's heartbeat, it was running down each and every "if only" my tired brain could come up with. This might be new territory for Joe, but it was familiar, well-trodden ground for me. "Hope isn't in trouble because you left, or because I was a lousy girlfriend. The doctors don't know why. It just is, Joe. Don't do this to yourself."
"Okay, then what about this. What about if I'd never given you that ultimatum. And we'd never broken up. And you'd never slept with him." He was grasping at straws, and watching him tear himself apart was tearing me apart as well.
"Joe, don't. Please."
"What if I'd – I dunno, had you pick out those damn kitchen curtains that first morning at my house. You remember?" Joe was desperately looking for a way to control the situation. The cop in him was frantically searching for fixes and solutions that just weren't there.
"I remember, Joe," I said quietly.
"Part of me wanted to," he admitted.
"And a bigger part didn't," I countered. "It's okay, Joe. There's nothing you did."
He shook his head, still determined. "What if I hadn't left you that night at the bakery. What about then? Shit, we were so young." He got lost in memories of his own, just then. I could tell by the faraway sound of his voice, and his eyes were focused on things that had become nothing more than dust many years before. "You have no idea," he said, "what you looked like laying there. You looked up at me, and it was like you could see straight into my soul. It scared the shit out of me."
"I know."
"You deserved more than that, you know. You deserved better." He looked away and refused to meet my eyes. "Better than a quick roll on the concrete floor."
"I never had any regrets Joe."
"Still. I wish I'd stayed."
I smiled a little at that. "Somehow I think the owner would have been more than a little shocked the next morning."
Joe smiled in return. "Yeah. And your father would have been all over my ass."
"Count on it."
"Shotgun wedding for sure," he said.
"I think my dad only has a Beretta," I teased. "Italian, you know."
"Of course," he conceded with a slight nod. "And the church would be decked out in yellow roses." I inclined my head in mock acceptance. "And Father Alphonse would have a blistering preamble just for us." I smiled again at him. It was so easy to slip back into sync with Joe. Sometimes I felt like he inhabited a part of me I didn't even know was there. It used to scare me. Sharing my body space with Hope, though, had made me less squeamish about the intimacy. It didn't feel cloying or forced, just like coming home at the end of a long, hard journey. Being with Joe, even teasing about our past like this was just home for me. If we were talking do-overs, I wished I'd realized this much sooner.
"And I would be the envy of every girl in the Burg," I closed my eyes and just enjoyed the sound of his voice washing over me.
"They're all positively livid. Sitting right on the front row." That was Joe, all right. I could always count on him to help make my fantasies come true.
"Terry Gilman, too?" I opened one eye and gave him a narrow look.
"She's bawling her eyes out."
"Good."
Joe's chuckle wafted over me, and I felt it warm me from my toes all the way to the ends of the hairs on my head. "You're wearing a white dress," he continued. "And then when it's over—" I interrupted him. I couldn't help myself.
"What about my dress, Joe? You can't just skip to 'when it was over'!"
Joe hemmed and he hawed, and he finally said, "Well, to tell you the truth, Cupcake, I never paid a whole lot of attention to the dress. I can tell you a lot of details about what you were wearing under it though. I had some pretty specific fantasies about that way into my thirties."
I couldn't help myself. I laughed out loud. That was just such a typically Joe answer that I started laughing and I couldn't stop. The harder I tried, the more the laughter just welled up inside of me. I couldn't remember the last time I had laughed so hard that tears came to my eyes. I couldn't remember the last time I had just felt happy. I finally controlled myself, and looked up at him through tear-studded lashes.
"And we would have been young. And we would have been poor." He reached over and brushed the hair back from my face in an old, familiar gesture that brought tears for another reason. "But we would have been happy." I nodded, content at least to be with him in his fantasy, a moment stolen out of time. "And our place would have been small, but we would have made room. Painted a nursery. Had a baby shower. Made a hash out of putting the crib together, and argued over where to put the rocking chair."
"I like your world," I said softly.
He just nodded, and moved his hand over the spot where our slumbering daughter lay. "May I?" he asked.
This man had been inside my body. Inside my soul in many ways. And the thought that he had to ask permission to touch my body, to touch his own child, cut me to the quick. "Of course," I answered, my voice thick with unshed tears. I took his hand, then, and carefully placed it atop my belly. I knew where Hope was likely to flutterkick, and we both waited for her to react to the warmth of her father's hand.
I felt the beginning of her flutter just then, under the large palm that rested on her sleeping place. I could tell the moment Joe felt her move. His eyes grew dark and soft, and his mouth softened and turned up in a small unguarded smile.
"Wow," he said.
"Joe, meet your daughter Hope." I carefully addressed my belly in an equally serious tone. "Hope, this is your daddy."
