Page 70 of The Last Mrs. Parrish

“I promise.”

“All right, then. It’s all good. Let’s unpack, and then I’ll show you around.”

As I hung my meager ensembles next to his custom suits and ties, I turned to him with a sinking feeling. “How would you like to do a little shopping after that tour?” I asked.

“Already in the plans,” he answered.

The next two days were wonderful. We went horseback riding, spent hours in the spa, and couldn’t get enough of each other in bed. It was our last day, and just as we were on our way to breakfast, my phone rang. It was my mother.

“Mom?” I could hear in her voice that something was wrong.

“Daphne. I have some bad news. Your fa—” The sound of her crying came over the line.

“Mom! What is it? You’re scaring me.”

“He died, Daphne. Your dad. He’s gone.”

I started to cry. “No, no, no.”

Jackson rushed over and took the phone from me, pulling me to him with the other arm. I couldn’t believe it. How could he be dead? I’d just talked to him last week. I remembered his cardiologist’s warning that his full recovery was far from complete. Jackson held me as I sobbed, and gently led me to the sofa while he packed us up.

We flew straight to the inn and stayed there for the next week. As I watched my father’s casket being lowered into the ground, all I could think about was the day we’d done the same thing for Julie. Despite Jackson’s strong arm around my shoulder and my mother standing next to me, I felt utterly and completely alone.

Forty-Two

Jackson wanted kids right away. We’d only been married for six months when he talked me into putting away my diaphragm. I was twenty-seven, he reminded me; it could take a while. I got pregnant the first month. He was delighted, but it took me longer to warm up to the idea. Of course, we had already been tested to make sure he didn’t carry the CF gene. I had the recessive gene, and if he had it as well, we wouldn’t have been able to have a child without the risk of passing on the disease. Even after the doctor’s assurances that we had the all-clear, I still found it hard to get rid of my anxiety. There were plenty of other diseases or birth defects that might await our child, and if I’d learned anything growing up, it was that the worst can and often does happen. I shared my concerns with Jackson over dinner one night.

“What if something’s wrong?”

“We’ll know. They’ll do the testing, and if it isn’t healthy, we’ll terminate.”

He spoke with such detachment that my blood ran cold. “You say it like it’s no big deal.”

He shrugged. “It isn’t. That’s why they do the tests, right? So we have a plan. Nothing to worry about.”

I wasn’t finished discussing it. “What if I don’t want to have an abortion? Or what if they say the baby’s fine and it isn’t, or they say it isn’t and it is?”

“What are you talking about? They know what they’re doing,” he said, an impatient edge in his voice.

“When my cousin’s wife, Erin, was pregnant, they told her that her baby was going to have major birth defects, but she didn’t end the pregnancy. That was Simone. She was perfect.”

An exasperated sigh. “That was years ago. Things are more precise now.”

“Still...”

“Damn it, Daphne, what do you want me to say? Whatever I tell you, you come up with an illogical retort. Are you trying to be miserable?”

“Of course not.”

“Then stop it. We’re going to have a baby. I certainly hope this nervous Nellie act goes away before the birth. I can’t abide those anxious mothers who worry about every little thing.” He took a swig from his tumbler of Hennessy.

“I don’t believe in abortion,” I blurted out.

“Do you believe in allowing children to suffer? Are you telling me that if you found out that our baby was going to have some horrible disease, you’d have it anyway?”

“It’s not so black-and-white. Who are we to say who deserves life and who doesn’t? I don’t want to make decisions that only God can make.”

He raised his eyebrows. “God? You believe in a God who would allow your sister to live a life of suffering and then die when she was still a child? I think we’ve seen where God’s position on these things takes us. I’ll make my own choices, thank you very much.”

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