Love Potion #2

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Maybe she was attracted.

He got their drinks—double cappuccino for himself, raspberry leaf tea for her—and joined her at a table by the window, out of hearing range of the other patrons.

He was easy to talk to, told her about his marriage and the ex-wife who was a model. He’d brought her a chapbook of his poems, for which she thanked him.

Watching her with great penetration, he said at last, “I think there’s something on your mind.”

Cameron knew that he was someone who could keep a secret, knew because he had been that way in the past. So she said the requisite words. “I’ll tell you, but you can’t say anything to anyone.”

“Of course.”

And she told him. His mouth fell open slightly, and he gazed at her with an expression of wonder. His dark brown hair was going prematurely gray, but his eyebrows remained extremely dark and bushy. “When are you going to tell him?”

Cameron shook her head. “Not yet.” She wouldn’t mention the possibility of miscarriage because she could no longer acknowledge that possibility, even to herself. It was unthinkable. And if she didn’t think of it, it could not happen.

Sean gave her a very serious look. “You should tell him, Cam.”

“I will. Just…not yet.”

SEAN CALLED every day and became Cameron’s confidant. Cameron really wasn’t surprised that he hadn’t been put off by the reality of her carrying another man’s child. She’d seen men who were just terribly attracted to mothers, and maybe Sean was one of these. Some of these, Cameron felt, were looking for a second mother for themselves, but she couldn’t believe Sean fit into this category. In any case, Sean was not an object. Paul was the man who interested her—and she didn’t want him to interest her.

Paul and she always talked daily, but now Cameron found herself avoiding him. Besides, whenever he brought up Sean—which he always did—they ended up sniping at each other. But it was nearly Thanksgiving before she had a heart-to-heart with her cousin, on the telephone, and felt no jealousy when she learned that Mary Anne had indeed slept with Graham Corbett—only relief at finally speaking with her best friend. Cameron was again astonished by her own reaction. She no longer cared. Not remotely. Cameron could picture Graham in her mind’s eye—the tall body, the curly dark hair—she could imagine his voice, that radio voice—she could imagine all these things beside her tall, model-beautiful cousin with no discernible feeling. Was she actually over him? She didn’t realize she’d spoken out loud until Mary Anne replied.

“You mean, Bridget’s potion worked?”

Cameron now wondered if the draught Bridget had given her had been a love potion, so she wasn’t impressed with Paul’s sister at the moment. After briefly excoriating Bridget, she invited Mary Anne to go caving with her Thanksgiving weekend—a Women of Strength outing. Big Jim Cave was at the state park. Maybe Cameron would go by the zoo afterward. Maybe she’d do what Sean kept urging her to do and tell Paul…. It took Mary Anne’s mentioning her own “suffering” because days had passed without Graham calling to bring Cameron out of her reverie.

Suffering made Cameron think of her sister Beatrice giving birth and of her own pregnancy. It all came out then. Cameron admitted that she was pregnant, avoided mentioning the father and used Mary Anne’s sudden burst of compassion—for Mary Anne knew how terrified Cameron was of pregnancy and birth—to persuade Mary Anne to go caving.

Cameron, who had been talking on one of the lines at the Women’s Resource Center, abruptly feared that somebody might have overheard, that she shouldn’t have said out loud that she was pregnant. Because she had not yet told Paul. Wasn’t sure how—or even if—to tell him. What if he thought her silly for doing a pregnancy test, because it was so early? What if he believed she wanted to be pregnant with his child?

In any case, she was alone at the Women’s Resource Center, catching up on work—checking statistics for a grant writer who was trying to get more funding for the center—and holding down the hotline until the scheduled volunteer showed up later that afternoon.

The hotline rang, and Cameron picked it up from her desk. “Women’s Resource Center Helpline.”

“Hi. Mm. I’m upset by something. Something my husband did.”

“Yes?”

As she listened to the horror story that slowly unfolded, Cameron’s skin began crawling. She felt a terrible anger toward the man who had treated his wife so shamefully.

“He says it’s his right because he’s my husband.”

“He’s wrong.” Cameron questioned the woman about what she planned to do. Nothing. I can’t leave him, can I?

Fifteen minutes later, when she was off the phone, Cameron wondered if her answering the helpline might be bad for her baby. Weren’t you supposed to avoid negative emotions? And on the helpline, she listened to women in impossible situations, who truly believed there was no way out. The doubt and despair of rape, of violence, the constant echoing of Was it my fault?

She liked helping people, liked helping other women, and she knew she was good at it. She’d experienced enough unpleasantness in her life, seen enough, that she had compassion, that she knew bad things, or at least sad things, happened—eventually, to everyone. She’d been in bad situations with men, and what had been ghastly at the time had ultimately made her stronger.

But she wanted to do everything right for this baby, and she was only going to think positively about out-comes. Not for a second would she allow a negative thought to enter her head.

She wondered if it was too early to see a physician. Or a midwife.

Cameron believed that most women in the United States in particular—and especially their babies—were better off when birth happened at home. Hospitals routinely did things that made it difficult for women to labor and that compromised the health of the baby. The perfect example was the electronic fetal monitor. Hospitals used these, which forced a laboring woman to be on her back; the only worse position for giving birth would be standing on one’s head. The weight of the baby then pressed down on the mother’s vena cava, robbing the baby of blood and oxygen. Then fetal distress occurred.

But Cameron didn’t have a normal pelvis. Well, she suspected she didn’t, though she couldn’t really judge for herself. She was built like Beatrice. After miscarriage number four, Beatrice had decided to have her baby at the hospital. The baby had been premature, so the best place was the hospital. Preemies should always be born in the hospital. They were so vulnerable with their organs not fully formed.

Cameron knew midwives, of course. Clare Cureux was a “lay” or direct-entry midwife, meaning she hadn’t been to school to become a midwife, though she certainly was well-educated, her office filled with medical texts. And she went to workshops and conferences—or had done, for years. Bridget was thinking of going to school to become a certified nurse-midwife.

But Cameron couldn’t go to the Cureux women because she hadn’t yet told Paul she was pregnant.

She reached for the phone book to see who else she could find.

Thanksgiving

Myrtle Hollow

DAVID CUREUX had carved the turkey and was filling plates for the assembled family. Though he had divorced Clare more than two decades earlier, this was still his family: his eldest, Paul; his daughter, Bridget; Bridget’s husband, Beau; their two children, Nick and Merrill; and Clare.

He and Paul had put the extra leaf in the table so that the entire family would fit.

Bridget said, “Couldn’t Cameron make it?”

“She’s with her family at her grandmother’s house,” Paul said, not liking something sly in Bridget’s tone. He refused to encourage Bridget by asking what kind of concoction she’d brewed for Cameron or if it really had been innocuous, just something to help Cameron get over Graham Corbett.

Bridget was annoyed with him anyhow; she said he’d been insensitive in how he’d told her that she needed to watch Nick at the zoo when Nick was near the pond. Basic child safety! He hadn’t thought tact was an issue. Bridget, your kid could drown, hello? Which wasn’t what he’d said, admittedly.

His sister could hold a grudge for a lifetime.

Clare said, “We’re supposed to get snow next week.”

She spoke matter-of-factly. She loved to listen to weather reports. Though Clare had “the Sight” and knew some things in advance, she never knew what the weather would do except by listening to forecasters.

Bridget said, “Is her black eye gone?”

“Yes,” Paul answered succinctly.

“How’d she get a black eye?” asked David.

“Walked into a cabinet door.” Paul had given this explanation so many times that he’d begun to feel as though it was a lie. He did not want to talk about Cameron. Cameron was acting very strangely. She’d been avoiding him for two weeks. It reinforced that their sleeping together had been a mistake.

Bridget said, “Who’s that hunk she’s been hanging around with?”

Paul deliberately kept his face expressionless. “Someone we knew at school. Sean Devlin. New drama teacher at the high school.”

He could feel his sister watching him as though expecting him to turn neon-green.

“Are they seeing each other?”

“How should I know?”

Bridget made a sound that could have expressed amusement or scorn or triumph. “Because you talk to her every day?”

“She doesn’t talk to me about him.”

Bridget seemed to have exhausted the topic, for she exclaimed suddenly to her mother, “Oh, did you hear about Lou Anne Shaw?”

“That was a travesty,” her mother replied tartly.

Paul listened as Bridget described everything that had been done wrong by the local hospital for Lou Anne Shaw and her baby.

Paul’s father remained uncharacteristically silent on the subject. He was not going to leap in and support the colleague in question, which meant, Paul decided, that he felt that the people at the hospital had made some mistakes.

“They should have sectioned her right away,” exclaimed Bridget, an unusual point of view from a woman who’d grown up in a home where homebirth was considered the best way to have babies.

“Is everyone all right?” Paul finally asked, unable to forget Cameron’s hysteria a couple of weeks earlier. Childbirth was normal. He knew that. And, of course, Cameron wasn’t pregnant, would probably never get pregnant. But it seemed to him that labor and birth could be a risky business.

“Yes, everyone’s fine,” said Bridget. “No thanks to that quack.”

Her father roused himself to make tut-tutting sounds.

As far as Paul could make out, the woman had been a true case of something called CPD, which seemed to be what Cameron thought she had. A pelvis too small for having babies. The woman, who’d grown up in Logan but had moved away and was receiving prenatal care elsewhere, came in with premature labor. The physician, rather than listening to anything she told him, said he’d have a nurse monitor her for a bit and see what happened. Or something of that nature.