Follow the Stars Home (15 page)

“Doctors and lobstermen,” Dianne countered. “You're both very practical.”

“He's scared,” Alan said. “He's seen some very bad suffering. He knows what can happen between parents when they have a sick child.”

Dianne lowered her head. She was scared too. Her eyes welled up and tears spilled down her cheeks. She had known about Tim's parents fighting, his mother's drinking, their turning against each other, and she had smelled beer on Tim's breath ever since getting the test results.

“Don't,” she said, “say anything against my baby. Don't tell me not to—”

“I won't,” Alan said.

“Don't tell me not to have her.”

“No,” Alan said. Walking across the room, he knelt beside Dianne. Taking her hand, he waited for her to look up. Tears were running down her face, and she felt too tired to wipe them.

“I'll take care of her,” he said. “I'll be her doctor.”

His words hung in the air. She saw the circles under his eyes, imagined he had lost some sleep coming to this decision.

“You will?”

“Yes.”

“Did Tim show you the piece of paper?” she asked then, grabbing his hand tighter. “Could you understand the results? Will it be very bad?”

“I don't know,” Alan said.

“Will she be in pain?”

“I don't know that either.”

Dianne wept, feeling Alan's arms around her shoulders. She had already made up her mind: She was having this baby no matter what, but the questions were still hard. The child's problems could be great or small, but she was going to be born, and Dianne was going to be her mother.

“I want Tim to love her,” Dianne had said. “I want him with us. Tell him he has to accept this.”

“Don't ask me that,” Alan said. “He's my brother, and I can't tell him what to do. Okay?”

Tim was gone before the next full moon. So much for loving each other through the worst. Dianne wept for weeks, remembering the broken promise.

Alan had kept his though. He had been there from the beginning. Tim had walked out on his family, saddling them on Alan, a doctor and an uncle, but not a father. A fine man who made Dianne crazy because he was Tim's brother. Dianne took down the picture of the three young McIntosh brothers fishing. They had been inseparable. When Neil had died, so had parts of the other two. The parts that knew how to love, Dianne thought now.

She had no business being at Alan's house. Deciding to leave the soup on his kitchen counter, she
walked around the corner into the sunroom. And there he was, sacked out on a sofa.

“Alan,” Dianne said, not wanting to scare him.

Well, her mother had been right. He really
was
sick. Anyone could see it by the way he lay on his back, fast asleep, breathing through his open mouth, one arm flung over his eyes, the other flopping down to the floor. He hadn't shaved that morning, and his beard was dark. With his glasses off and a five o'clock shadow, he looked almost like a different man. A little dangerous, too mysterious to be Alan.

He wore khakis and a T-shirt. Dianne stared at his bare arms. They were strong and lean, the forearms covered with hair. Those were real muscles, and his patients' mothers would never guess they were there. His stomach was flat and lean.

Feeling weird, Dianne just stood and stared. Her insides flipped, and she felt she was doing something forbidden. He really did look awfully cute lying there. His tousled hair, the way his mouth looked, those arms: She was used to thinking of Tim as the McIntosh with muscles. The plaid blanket had slipped, and Dianne reached down to pull it a little higher.

She walked out. But on her way down the front steps she stopped. Her heart was pounding. She told herself it was the bizarre intrusion of standing beside a person while he unknowingly slept, and maybe it was. The birdhouse was leaning right where she'd left it. Picking it up, she put it in the back of her truck.

And then she drove home.

Alan woke up to the smell of chicken soup. His head was thick and stuffy, and his mind swirled with a thousand dreams.

He was in Italy or Greece, somewhere hilly and green with shimmering light silhouetting everything from dark cypresses to goddesses. Water flowed, and Alan lay helpless on a blanket of moss. The goddess stood over him. She had small hands and clear eyes and messy, straw-colored hair. Wanting to reach for her, he was paralyzed by love. The goddess was Dianne. She had come back to him after all this time.

When he woke up, he went to the kitchen for a glass of water. On the butcher-block island he saw an unfamiliar paper bag. It smelled like his dream. Starving, he pulled out the container. The soup was still hot, and there was a hunk of fresh bread included as well.

Sitting at the island, he ate the soup straight from the jar. Had Dianne actually been here? Dazed from his cold, he couldn't figure anything out. What would she be doing, delivering chicken soup to him?
She wasn't the chicken-soup-making type. And usually she didn't want anything to do with Alan that didn't involve Julia.

Chicken soup seemed more like Rachel, other people he could think of. He had a few regular mothers who knitted him sweaters, baked him cakes, dropped off casseroles. His friend Malachy Condon called them the SMB—Single Mom Brigade. They were nice women, grateful for the way he took care of their kids. They were kind and generous, and their gifts usually came thoughtfully packaged in wicker baskets strewn with fresh flowers, pinecones, seashells, and chocolates. Heartfelt notes always accompanied the offerings.

The soup had come in a paper bag: decidedly original. He rifled through, looking for clues. No note, no flowers. No sign it was from Rachel or anyone else.

Alan knew he was willfully stupid about the gifts. Some of the women who gave them were divorced, a couple were widowed. He knew how hard it could be, raising kids alone. These were conscientious people: They read all the good-parent literature, and they tried hard. Being alone hurt. Always being the parent to answer the nighttime crying, to soothe the sore throat, to hold the bowl that caught the throw-up. The single pediatrician could start to look pretty good. So they'd knit him a sweater, bake him a pie.

Alan would ask some of them out. They had good times. The women were nice, fun, smart, pretty. Alan would always wish he felt more than he did. Marriage and a family sounded so fine. He had started to wonder what he was missing in himself: Why couldn't he love these women who seemed so ready to love him?

One answer came to mind: They weren't Dianne.

When Alan made house calls to Gull Point, Dianne would answer the door looking like the wrath of God. Her face would show however she felt, and at those times it generally wasn't good. Wild hair, madwoman eyes, clothes stained with Julia's spit and urine, bearing almost no resemblance to the girl he'd taken to the Rosecroft Inn. She'd talk to Alan but all the while be staring at Julia. No dislike, no affection for him at all. At those times Alan was incidental. He wasn't her brother-in-law nor a man she'd once dated-someone who had once been a friend, a guy she'd grown to resent-he was just the person she had called to stop her daughter's suffering.

She had mentioned time. She had wanted to know that they-she, her mother, and Julia-would have time together. He glanced at the calendar hanging by the phone, sent to everyone in Hawthorne by the Layton Pharmacy. It showed the lighthouse where he'd gone with Rachel, where he'd caught his cold. There was the exact spot where they had-Alan looked for the word:
coupled.
It couldn't be called making love. He ripped the picture off and threw it in the trash.

Then he stared at the days. All those white squares stretching through June, July, August, September, October, November, December. Seven pages, seven months. Alan's head was thick and heavy, and his eyesight blurred. He didn't think Julia was going to live more than seven months, seven calendar pages.

On the other hand, Julia had confounded him again and again. He hadn't expected her to survive her first birthday. He would never have believed she would see her fifth. Children with such severe health problems rarely lived long, so every year was a gift. But this year Julia had decided to grow.

Alan dragged his hand over his eyes. He had only one niece. Staring at the calendar, he saw how fast summer was coming. Julia loved the sea. When the water was warm, she and her mother would lie on the tide line at the protected lighthouse beach, letting small waves wash over them. Alan had seen it, two summers earlier at Jetty Beach, Dianne holding Julia in her arms as the sea swirled all around. The clean green wash, the cream-white foam, the two blond heads.

They seemed so free: Dianne unencumbered by worry, Julia afloat in her mother's arms. Alan heard Dianne singing, saw her smiling. The summer sun was pouring down, and the tide was going out. When they finished their swim, Dianne built a castle from the wet sand. Julia lay peacefully beside her, warm and content.

The sand castle was vast, elaborate. Dianne built turrets and a moat. She used jingle shells, sea glass, and driftwood for decorations. This was her beach version of a playhouse, and it was for Julia alone. Taking her daughter's hand, Dianne helped Julia to pat the sand. Julia did her part, unaware. But the look on Dianne's face was pure joy. She was playing with her daughter, and no one could say she wasn't.

Seven months, Alan thought. Seven pages. He didn't know how many more times he had left to see her, to see Dianne-once Julia was gone, Dianne would disappear from his life. Alan would have no reason left to see her. Their worlds would go dark with missing Julia.

White squares on the calendar. Alan wanted to go after Dianne. She had asked whether they would have time “together.” Alan wanted to be part of that. He wanted to marry Dianne. He wanted to help her
raise Julia for the little time she had left, be with her through it all. The little girl deserved a father. Alan wanted to be that for her.

Holding the chicken soup someone had left in his kitchen, Alan stared at the days and wondered which one would be Julia's last. He thought of his brother Tim, far away on a lobster boat. Out of sight of land, alone with himself and the stars, the focus of so much unfinished business. Alan wanted to haul Tim back to shore, force him to settle things with Dianne. With Alan. Give everyone a chance to move on.

Before it was too late.

Lucinda Robbins had been hoping to talk to her daughter all evening. But Dianne was late getting back from her mission and Lucinda's reading group had gotten wrapped up with layers and irony and symbolism and love in Shakespeare, staying a full forty-five minutes later than usual. Then Dianne rocked Julia to sleep and Lucinda went for a walk in the fog. Finally they were alone in the kitchen.

“Well?” Lucinda asked.

Dianne stood at the stove, stirring squares of bitter chocolate into the pan of steaming milk. She wore a white summer nightgown, and from the back she looked thinner than ever, as if she were shrinking right down to Julia's size.

“It's almost ready,” Dianne said.

“Not the hot chocolate,” Lucinda said. “That's not what I mean at all.”

“How was your reading group?”

“Marvelous. Ducky beyond belief. We're all wondering how we got through college without reading
Love's Labor's Lost.
All of us English majors, and not one—”

“I'd like never to do that again,” Dianne said.

“What, honey?”

“Deliver soup to Alan McIntosh.”

“Why? Did he—”

Dianne shook her head. She tasted the chocolate, added more milk, continued stirring.

“He was asleep. I know, because he didn't answer the door and I walked in. I should have just left the soup on the porch, but I wanted him to find it-I feel like a jerk.”

“But why? It was a caring thing to do.”

“It was
your
caring thing to do, Mom.”

“He's all alone, dear. You think of him as the great doctor, but let me tell you: He comes into the library on his days off just because he's lonely through and through. He's not Tim, you know.”

Dianne gave her a look. It was completely smile-less, a serious signal for Lucinda to back off.