Miracle

  She lifted her hands through the mist and cupped his face. “You’re afraid something’s wrong with you? You’ll bring another deformed child into the world? I don’t believe it. Please, don’t you believe it, either.”

  “I won’t take the chance.”

  “Please don’t say that. I love you for your reasons, but I can’t let you be crippled by them.”

  “If you had gone through what I have—”

  “But I haven’t, and I’ve got faith.” She caught her breath and stared at him, then added quietly, “What you’re saying affects our future together. Do you really want to make this decision alone?”

  He took her hands. “No. Your feelings are crucial. Is there any doubt in your mind that you and I will marry?”

  All the years of waiting, of loving, fell into place. “None,” she whispered. “But I want children.”

  He bowed his head to her hands. “I don’t want you to suffer the way Marie did.” His voice was hoarse, and she knew he was fighting for control. She made a soft sound of comfort and stepped closer to him.

  “Everything I’ve ever wanted has been hard to get,” she whispered. “I don’t need guarantees things are going to work out perfectly. If I’ve learned anything from the way I grew up, it’s that most of what I’m afraid of turns out to be what makes me feel strong, and confident, and happy—if I don’t run from it.”

  He raised his head and gave her a troubled, tender frown. “I’ve never run from my fears. I’ve confronted them head-on, like a bull too blind with anger to see the matador stabbing at him. And I assure you, the results never made me happy. But strong, yes. And confident? I hope so.”

  “But still blind.”

  “Blind, then, and nervous because of it.” He gripped her hands harshly, and she couldn’t look away from the intensity in his eyes. “Amy, I’ve decided to have a vasectomy.”

  Trembling, she pulled her hands away and stepped back. The thought of him putting an end to such an intimate part of their future was beyond her sympathy, but at the same time she forced herself to think about all the disappointment he’d been through and his fear that he’d never produce a healthy child. “I understand why you’re afraid. But don’t do it. Don’t do that to us. To yourself.”

  “I wouldn’t protest if you wanted to adopt a child.”

  “What about you? Don’t you want one?”

  He shook his head. “But I won’t deny you the right to be a mother—”

  “That’s not good enough.” She looked at him miserably. “I’ve never thought much about having children, but that was because I didn’t picture Elliot as the father type. I couldn’t depend on him. But I want a family. I’ve never had one—not like everybody else’s, anyway—and there’s this stubborn little dream of mine to have everything I missed when I was growing up. And that includes raising some happy, well-adjusted kids.”

  “You want a moral victory over your father. You want to rebuild your childhood by watching your own children grow up happy. Are those good enough reasons to bring them into an ugly world?”

  “My world isn’t as ugly as yours.”

  “You didn’t have a pitiful, deformed daughter. You didn’t watch her die and hold her heart in your hand, knowing it was all you could save of her … and all that was worth saving.”

  “But if we had a healthy baby, you’d feel different, don’t you think?”

  The mist was settling around them now, gray and cold. distraught that she clasped his other hand in sympathy. “How would you feel?” she repeated.

  “I’d worry about making the same mistakes my father made.” He studied her reaction grimly. “You’re certain you can triumph over your past. I’m not so certain I can defeat mine.”

  “You’re a kind, thoughtful man. You’re not your father. You’re not my father, either. I won’t let you turn into either one of them. You’ve always told me to believe in myself and go after what I want. Well, I want children, our children. And I believe in you. You can be a wonderful father. You will be. I know. He took her by the shoulders. “Miracle,” he said gently, “your funny name has always suited you so well. You’ve changed so much about my life, about me. Now that I have you back, there’s contentment, and pleasure, and a quietness inside me that I never had before. I want you with me for the rest of my life. I’ll try to make you very happy.” He hesitated, the softness fading from his expression. “I won’t risk losing you in childbirth. I’m afraid of that too, you see.”

  She cried without sound, stroking his cheek with the back of her fingers. “Just be patient with yourself. You haven’t had time to heal.”

  He pulled her inside his arms. “No, I have to be honest with you. What happened with my daughter nearly destroyed me. I’ll never forget it. Call it a morbid idea, if you want, but I don’t think I’ll ever have children of my own. I don’t think that I’m meant to. Something will always go wrong. I’ve always felt that I’m being chased by some awful fate that should have caught up with me long ago. Please try to understand. If anything terrible happened to you, I’d never forgive myself. If you died having my child, I’d die, too.”

  Her large, anguished tears slid under his fingertips as he cupped her chin. She believed she could teach him to trust their happiness; she knew she’d never love him more than at this moment. “Promise me this much, Doc. You won’t have a vasectomy anytime soon. And you won’t do it without telling me, first. Please.” Her voice broke. “You know I’m not gonna surprise you with a baby you don’t want. But you have to promise me you won’t have a vasectomy.”

  “Love, I don’t doubt your honor.” He drew back, and they shared a tender gaze. He nodded. “I won’t do anything unless we agree on it. I swear.” He placed a light, slow kiss on her mouth. “Will you still marry me, after all I’ve just told you?”

  Amy took his face between her hands. “Of course. I’ve intended to since I was eighteen years old.”

  “Thank God you believed in me. I never want to destroy that.”

  “You won’t.”

  She kissed him. He frowned thoughtfully, as if looking into the past, while she saw only a future that held battles she would willingly fight.

  “You need to go on the road,” her agent said. “With the Letterman spot and the cable special in your credits, you can headline at the better clubs all over the country. We’re talking a couple thousand bucks a week, maybe more, not to mention more Letterman spots and the auditions I want you to start doing. This is no time to stay home and play footsies with your man.”

  Amy smiled at her. “Forget it. I’m still getting married in two weeks.”

  “Don’t remind me. I’m sick about it.”

  “A small, intimate ceremony at a little chapel up in the wine country—”

  “So why didn’t you invite me? Because I’d drown my sorrows in cheap domestic chablis?”

  “There won’t be any guests. Only the minister and his wife.”

  “I’d hide the ceremony, too, if I were hamstringing my career.”

  “Sebastien and I have always been loners, see, but now it’s me and him against the world—”

  “Oh, God, don’t start sounding like a bad song lyric.”

  “So we decided that we’d keep the ceremony between ourselves.”

  “This is so sweet that I may need a diabetes test.”

  Amy frowned past her at the smoggy L.A. skyline outside the office window. “I know you think that I’m getting myself in too deep and too fast. And I know that going on the road would be the best thing to do, careerwise. But there’s more than one way to hatch this chicken, Bev. I can stay in L.A. and work the Comedy Store, and that’s not a shabby way to get noticed, you have to admit. I’ll go on auditions; I’ll even audition for that voice work you told me about. Good Lord, this voice was made for cartoon characters.”

  Bev Jankowski sank her head in her heads and sighed. “But no road tour.”

  “Right.”

  “Tell me something, is this man w
orth it?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you said that he’s getting involved in his own career again. I thought heart surgeons led pretty high-powered lives, not much free time. He’d hardly notice if you were out of town—”

  “I think he’d notice if I was gone for months at a time,” Amy said dryly. “Besides, he’s making sacrifices, too, so that he won’t be working all the time. He’ll probably go into research rather than private practice; he’s had an offer to work at a research institute.”

  “All right, all right, true love wins out. Let’s focus on the positive. Here.” She handed Amy a file folder. “Hadley Rand is casting for a small part in a TV movie. He saw you on Letterman and took a fancy to you and your goofy southern voice. I want you to go up to his office in Burbank this week and read for him.”

  “Isn’t he the guy who directed Maid for Murder?”

  “Yeah. Won an Emmy for it last year, too. He’s young, fresh, and really hot.”

  Amy opened the folder. “This movie he’s casting … it’s called Bingo? What’s it about—game night at a VFW post?”

  “Close. It’s about a bunch of old people in a little Florida town who open an illegal bingo parlor so they can save the town from bankruptcy. There’s a part for a geeky daughter. Not much to it, but you’d get a few good lines. Give it a shot.”

  “Okay. Hadley can only laugh.”

  “Let’s hope so.”

  An audition. She was actually going to ask strangers to believe she was an actress. All those years of devoted fandom, spent memorizing and mimicking the greats, might pay off.

  Sebastien was waiting when she returned to their hotel room. She told him about the movie audition. “Even if I don’t get the part, it’s mind-boggling. Who would’ve thought I’d be auditioning for a part in a movie.”

  He applauded. “I’m not surprised. You have natural talent.”

  “Hmmm. More. More.” She kissed him. “How did your meeting at the institute go?”

  “Very well. They are eager to have me.” He bowed.

  “I know how they feel. Then negotiations are underway?”

  “Yes.” He studied the radiant smile she gave him. “You like the idea?”

  “I just want you to feel at home here. And be happy.”

  “I already am, dear Miracle. But speaking of homes, we need a second one in California, something closer to Los Angeles. I think an apartment in New York should be a consideration also. Since television and film people always seem to be working here or there. Perhaps we should also buy a country estate in Georgia. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  “You collect homes the way some men collect beer bottles.”

  “Don’t look so stunned. Won’t it be fun to pick them out and decorate them? Won’t you enjoy that?”

  She sagged against him, chuckling. “I have the interior-decorating skill of a rock. How do you feel about vinyl upholstery?”

  “We’ll hire professional help.”

  “I don’t think there are any therapists who specialize in treating the decorating-impaired.”

  He laughed. “I meant professional decorators, of course.”

  “It’s gonna take me a while to adjust to this, Doc.”

  “What?”

  “Contentment.”

  He led her through the suite to its opulent bath. Water bubbled in the oversized, sunken tub. He’d set candles around the marble ledge, along with a silver ice bucket containing a bottle of champagne. “A celebration,” he said, beginning to undress her. “Of contentment.”

  The ringing of a phone in the middle of the night was always a frightening sound to Amy. But Sebastien, who had spent most of his adult life answering emergency calls concerning his patients, didn’t even fumble in the hotel room’s inky darkness. His voice was coherent and calm. He listened for a few seconds, began to converse in French, then sat up and swung his legs off the side of the bed.

  Her heart pounding, Amy wrestled with a tangle of sheet and covers while listening in bewilderment. She couldn’t tell much from his brief questions. Finally she wiggled free and turned on a bedside lamp.

  Squinting at his bare back, she watched it stiffen as the conversation continued. A hard timbre crept into his voice. A small muscle along his spine quivered with tension. Amy sat up and put a hand on his shoulder; he pulled it down and tucked her arm around him, holding her hand next to his chest. She felt the accelerated thumping of his heart under her fingertips. Worried, she slid close to his back and put her other arm around him, then rested her cheek between his shoulder blades.

  When he hung up the phone he sat motionless, staring at the floor. “What’s wrong?” she whispered.

  “There’s been an airplane crash.”

  “Oh, no, no, not your family—”

  “My brother-in-law was flying to Monaco in a small private plane of his. He crashed in a storm not far from Paris. My sister and father were with him.”

  She cried out and moved around in front of him, kneeling on the floor and taking his hands in hers. His expression held sorrow, but also the kind of black anger she thought he’d lost forever. “My brother-in-law was killed,” he told her. “My sister is badly injured, but is expected to live. The doctors think it will be months before she recovers fully.” He was silent, his face shuttered, his control absolute.

  “What about your father?”

  “His back was broken. He’s paralyzed. And there are other injuries, as well. He’s in a coma. The doctors doubt he’ll survive.”

  “I’m so sorry, sweetheart.”

  “I’m sorry for my sister.”

  She shivered. “Be sorry for your father, too. He can’t hurt you anymore.”

  Sebastien’s brutal laugh frightened her, and she drew back quickly to look at him. His eyes glittered. “That, dear Miracle, remains to be seen.”

  She just wanted to get this over with. Sebastien had left for Paris two days before. He had insisted that she stay behind for this audition. Also, he didn’t want to inflict his brother-in-law’s funeral on her. Or so he said. Nagging self-doubt made her wonder if he was reluctant to have her meet his family’s friends and business acquaintances.

  Oh, don’t be oversensitive. You’ve outgrown your insecurity, remember? He loves you. He’s proud of you. He’s going to marry you in two weeks. Right? Right.

  Hadley Rand looked friendly and bookish, like a hamster wearing glasses. He squinted at her across a desk that was more battered than stylish. “Amy?” Hadley said. “It’s a simple part. No need to meditate about it.”

  She smiled quickly. “Sorry.”

  “No problem. I’m Shirley’s grandmother; you’re Shirley. We’re in the laundromat. You’re confused. Shirley is perpetually confused. Start with the line, ‘Is that a piece of lint, or did Frankie leave his mouse in the clothes hamper again?’ ”

  She dutifully went through the scene with him, but her attention was in France, worrying about Sebastien. She didn’t expect to get this movie role, even though it was a minor part that didn’t require great skill. Good Lord, she wasn’t even an actress.

  When she and Hadley finished, he stared at her open mouthed. Everyone else in the room had strange expressions, half-smiling, half-stunned. Her heart sank. So she had been that bad. She was reminded of the terrible night during college, at the dinner theater auditions in Athens. Oh, well, at least this time she hadn’t failed because of an anxiety attack.

  “Guess that’s it,” she said awkwardly. “Thanks for givin’ me a chance.”

  “We’ll call you.”

  Don’t call us. She shook Hadley’s paw and left the office.

  At the hotel she began to pack. She had a dawn flight to New York, where she’d connect with a flight to Paris. Restless, she wandered around the suite, thinking about Sebastien.

  His brother-in-law’s funeral would be held tomorrow, in the early morning hours by L.A. time, late afternoon by Paris time. Sebastien would be with his sister’s two small children. Wh
at kind of emotional support could he offer them in his dark, cold mood? His change of attitude made her distraught. He had been reserved and brusque since the phone call, and it was more than concern for his family. She sank her hands into the pockets of her slacks and paced, thinking about Sebastien and children, Sebastien and his family problems, Sebastien and her career.

  The phone rang. It was her agent. “I didn’t do real well,” Amy said immediately.

  Bev hooted. “That must be why Hadley Rand has just offered you the part.”

  “You’re kidding! After I read for him he stared at me like I was a wart on a frog’s butt.”

  “A talented wart. You intrigued everybody in the office, he said. They think you’re terrific.”

  “I’m leaving for Paris tomorrow. I’ll give you my phone number there, so call me if Hadley was only kidding.”

  “Try not to sound so excited,” Bev muttered. “It’s only ten thousand dollars for two weeks’ work and a part in a very respectable made-for-TV movie.”

  “My man needs me in Paris.”

  “This is no time to focus on your personal life. Come back soon. You’ve got to be on location in Florida in three weeks.”

  “Oh, we’ll be back by then. No problem.”

  “Make your agent happy. Become celibate until we’re both rich.”

  She had expected Sebastien to meet her at the airport in Paris. Instead she found a very dignified chauffeur waiting for her. He was holding up a sign with her name written on it. “Doctor de Savin regrets that he cannot meet you himself,” the chauffeur said in heavily accented English. “He is spending the evening in meetings with officers of the family corporation.”

  Amy was dismayed. It was past midnight. His brother-in-law’s funeral had been held in the afternoon. Did the family businesses require attention tonight, while Sebastien’s sister and father lay in the hospital and his sister’s children stayed with servants? She tried not to frown and forced a gentle shrug. “Okey dokey. Let’s hit the trail, then.”