Page 73 of That Weekend in Paris
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I STOP FOR a cup of coffee at the front door, the smell drawing me into the enormous foyer. Andréis standing by the coffee setup and glances at me in surprise.
“Hey,” he says. “Good morning. What happened to you two last night?”
“We just decided to head back. It was a lot of fun, though. Thank you so much for inviting us.”
“What did you do with Klein this morning? He is not up this early?”
“Actually, I just dropped him off at the airport. He had an emergency back home. He had to leave.”
“Oh,” André says, looking surprised. “You’ll stay with us a bit longer, then?”
“I’m actually not sure yet. This all came up kind of suddenly, and our plans got changed. So I need to figure out what I’m doing.”
“Yeah. I understand that,” André says. “But if you’d like to get dinner tonight or something, Elizabetta and I would love to do that.”
“Thank you,” I say. “That’s really nice.”
“Absolutely,” he says. “And if you decide you’d like to go for a ride this afternoon, come to the stables.”
“Thank you again,” I say, and head toward the elevator with my coffee.
Once I get to the room, I close the door and stare at the furnishings, realizing how empty the place feels now without Klein. Suddenly, I can’t imagine staying here without him. AndI don’t want to.
Riley
“I have formed my plans—right plans I deem them. . .”
?Charlotte Brontë,Jane Eyre
THINGS HAVE NOT worked out as I imagined they would.
The baby is two months early, and I am filled with an unreasonable terror that I will be left with no cards to play. Even in my current state of agony, I realize how callous and cold this sounds, but I’m nothing if not realistic. Without this baby, there is no chance of me ever having Klein.
Dagger-sharp pain stabs through the middle of my body, and it is all I can do not to lunge from the bed and grab the sympathetic-looking nurse standing beside the IV pole and shake her until she adds something to the plastic bag cocktail that will take away this agony.
Through clenched teeth, I manage to say, “When will the doctor be here?”
“As soon as you are dilated a little more, he will come in to check you.”
“And the epidural?” I almost scream.
“I’m so sorry, my dear. It’s way too late for that.”
“What? What do you mean, ‘It’s way too late’?”
“You’re too far along,” the nurse says, and some part of me wonders if she’s taking a little too much pleasure in this announcement. Her sympathy seems to have faded and been replaced with an awareness of how close I am to strangling her. If I thought I could get away with it, I’m pretty sure I would, simply as a release for my own despair.
“I’m afraid there’s no possibility of rowing backward from here, my dear. You’ve got to row upstream now,” she says in her cheerful nurse voice.
I now know for sure if I had the means to do so, I would gladly strangle her. But another slice of pain sears through me, and it is all I can do not to scream, grappling for self-control.
I have always prided myself on being able to suffer through what others could not seem to. When I was twelve, I was having a tooth filled when the novocain wore off. I forced myself not to tell the dentist because I wanted to see if I could actually bear it, and I did.
But this was something altogether different. The pain feels as if it starts at the top of my head, boring through me with the ferocity of a lightning bolt slamming through an oak tree.
It’s then that I realize I’m not afraid for the baby’s life; I’m afraid for my own.
