Only Son

by Kevin O'Brien

Genres: Crime Fiction; Psychological Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

Every parent’s worst fear has become her reality… SOME LIES It only takes a minute for Amy McMurray to run from her car to the cash machine. That brief, unforgivable minute is enough time for her infant son to be snatched from the back seat and for Amy’s family, her marriage, and her peace of mind to be shattered beyond repair. ARE TOO CLOSE To everyone who meets him, Carl Jorgenson seems an exemplary single father. His son, Sam, is bright, considerate, and devoted to his dad. Only Carl knows about Sam’s real identity and about his own unthinkable crime. TO BE SEEN One careless slip, one chance meeting is all it will take for the devastating truth to be revealed. Sam is growing up, asking questions, increasingly suspicious that the life he believes in is a lie. But with that knowledge comes dread. Because when someone has risked everything to create a family, how far will they go to protect it? “A fast-paced, powerful novel.” --Seattle Post Intelligencer

Release date: February 28, 2017

Publisher: Pinnacle

Print pages: 448

Sample

Sam didn’t know there was a cop car behind him until he saw the flashing red strobe in his rearview mirror. All at once, he couldn’t breathe, and his heart pounded furiously. He switched on his indicator, then pulled over to the side of the road.

Until tonight, he hadn’t driven much farther than the mall and back. But he’d just put close to three hundred miles on his mother’s Toyota; five hours from Seattle to Eugene. He’d been secretly planning this trip for a month. What had made him think he could get through it without an accident or a cop stopping him? Now his mom would find out that he’d come here, and it would kill her.

The patrol car pulled up behind him. Sam squinted at the headlights in his rearview mirror. He watched the cop get out of the car, but could only see his silhouette: a baseball player’s stocky-muscular build. As the cop approached the Toyota, he switched on his flashlight, then Sam couldn’t see him anymore.

“Can I see your license and proof of insurance?” the officer said, very authoritative. His face was still swallowed up in the shadows.

“Yes, sir.” Sam fumbled with the seat belt and reached back for his wallet. “I’ve never been stopped by the police before. I—I’m a little nervous.” He still couldn’t breathe right. He noticed the cop direct the flashlight to his gym bag on the seat beside him. WEST SEATTLE HIGH SCHOOL was emblazoned across it. He pried the license out of his wallet, then handed it to the cop. “This is my mother’s car,” he explained. “I’m sorry, but I don’t know where she keeps the proof of insurance.”

“Ink on this driver’s license is barely dry,” the cop said. “You’re sixteen?”

“Yes.” Sam tried to smile into the blinding flashlight.

“Pretty far away from home, aren’t you? Does your mother know where you are?”

“Yessir,” he lied.

“What exactly are you doing down here?”

Sam was afraid he’d ask that. He made up a story about visiting his cousin, who was going to show him the University of Oregon campus. “I might go to school here,” he said.

The cop finally turned off the flashlight. “The reason I stopped you, Sam, was that you were weaving slightly and seemed to have difficulty staying in your lane.”

“I’m sorry. I’m kind of lost. I’ve been trying to read the street signs.”

He really was lost. He might have asked his dad for directions. But Sam wasn’t even supposed to talk to his father, much less visit him.

“Um, are you going to give me a ticket?” Sam asked.

“Just a warning,” the policeman replied, handing back the license. “Watch where you’re going.”

“I will, thanks. Um, can you tell me where Polk Street is?”

It was where his dad lived, a big secret. He wasn’t supposed to know.

“Polk Street?” the cop said. “Yeah, you’re only five minutes away. What’s your cousin’s address?”

The cop was right. It didn’t take Sam long to find Polk Street. But he didn’t like what he saw. He drove past lot after lot of neglected lawns, and run-down houses and apartment buildings. God, please, don’t let my dad live here, he thought. He kept waiting for the neighborhood to get nicer. Then again, his father must have gotten out of jail less than a year ago. He probably couldn’t afford to live someplace nice.

Sam wondered if prison had made him mean. Would he look like someone who had “done time”? Maybe he was a wino, or a drug addict, or he’d gotten a bunch of really creepy tattoos while he was in jail. Sam didn’t want to think about his dad in there. He didn’t want to think of him as a baby snatcher either. But that was what Sam’s real father called him: that bastard, that pervert, that baby snatcher.

Sheila, his stepmother, was the one who had let it slip that he was in Eugene. She’d had a few too many beers at a barbecue during one of his bogus “family weekends” in Portland last month. Sam remembered feeling trapped as he sat across from her and his real father at the picnic table. Both of them had on “I’M WITH STUPID T-shirts. They were oblivious to their two younger sons, fifty feet away, throwing rocks at each other. Sam’s bratty half sister, Brandy, the preteen queen, had wandered off with some of her delinquent friends.

“Well, I for one don’t feel safe,” Sheila said, puffing on her Virginia Slims. “I mean, Eugene isn’t so far. Okay, so he’s not allowed in the same state as Sam. But we live in Oregon, and Sam stays with us at least once a month. So how come they let this crazy live in Eugene?”

“Drop it, will ya, hon?” her husband said in a low voice.

“You’re the one who started talking about how laws are made to protect the criminal. I was just agreeing—”

“I started the talk, and I’m finishing it,” he said firmly.

Sheila looked ready to give him an argument, but just then, the nine-year-old, Todd, bounced a rock off his younger brother’s forehead. There were screams and tears, some blood, too. Sheila puffed on her cigarette and inspected the cut on the younger boy’s forehead. She handed him a napkin to soak up the blood.

Little Todd stared at the ground while his father yelled at him: “Hey, shit-for-brains, what the hell is wrong with you?”

“I’m sorry!” Todd cried miserably. “I’m really, really sorry. It was an accident!”

Sam’s heart went out to the kid. But his father, clutching a beer and shaking his head at the boy, wasn’t moved by the tears. “Hey,” he called to Sam. “What should I do with this brat, huh? Maybe smack a rock on his head, see how he likes it…”

“I’ll take him for a walk, Dad,” Sam said, grabbing Todd’s hand. He frowned at the boy’s father, their father. He had to remind himself that the creep now on his way to the cooler for another beer had sired him, and that the “crazy” in Eugene was indeed a criminal.

When the heinous weekend ended, he returned home and sneaked a peek at his mother’s daily planner. Under the “J” section, he found a Polk Street address in Eugene, Oregon; but there was no name written above it.

He passed a 7-Eleven that must have been a dividing line between Polk Street’s high- and low-rent areas, because suddenly the neighborhood became cleaner. Lawns were tidy, flower boxes decorated windows, and stately houses stood next to apartment buildings that had what people called Old World charm. Sam wondered if he’d passed his father’s address a while back—before the 7-Eleven.

Then he saw the building, about a block ahead. He couldn’t see the number, but he knew. It was a three-story, tan brick building with an awning over the front door, probably built during the thirties. He’d grown up in an apartment building very much like this one. In fact, the similarity was eerie.

He parked across the street from the place and saw the numbers over the door. It was the right address. He didn’t like it that his father had found a new home so similar to the one they had shared years ago. It was as if his dad wanted to repeat the past or something. The phrase, repeat offender, came to mind, and Sam tried to block it out. His dad would never repeat what he’d done sixteen years ago. Never.

June 7, 1977—Portland, Oregon

The overweight, copper-haired nurse waddled into the waiting room. “Mr. McMurray?” she asked.

Paul McMurray tossed aside the copy of Sports Illustrated and hopped off the light green vinyl couch. He was twenty-seven years old, with straight flaxen hair and a tan. His athletic good looks were just starting to slide, and his Trailblazers T-shirt didn’t quite camouflage a slight beer belly.

In fact, he hadn’t been in the waiting room very long before he’d left and returned, smuggling in a six-pack of Budweiser and some cigars. He’d slyly pulled a beer from the grocery bag and offered it to another expectant father, who had shown up just a few minutes after him. The guy said, “No, thanks,” and that was it. Didn’t say another word the whole time—and they’d been in the waiting room for over two hours.

But now the man was standing up along with Paul McMurray. The nurse looked confused for a moment, her eyes darting back and forth between the two of them. “Mr. McMurray?”

“Yeah,” Paul said anxiously. “I’m McMurray. That’s me.”

The nurse broke into a smile. “Congratulations. You’re the father of a healthy, eight-pound-two-ounce baby boy.”

“ALL RIGHT!” he yelled, shoving a fist in the air.

“You can see him in the newborn room in just a few minutes. And the mother’s doing fine. She’s resting, but you can see her in a little while.”

Paul McMurray had another beer, then went to the window outside the newborn room. He waited, his nose fogging the glass. In his hand he clutched the cigars. He gave one to the man standing beside him, the other expectant dad. He was a tall, well-built man with light brown hair. He looked like the country club type, handsome and well dressed. He had on a green sport shirt with some designer logo on the breast pocket.

“Congratulate me,” Paul grinned. “I’m a daddy. Got myself a little boy. How about that, huh?”

The stranger gave him a limp smile. “Congratulations,” he murmured, tucking the cigar in the breast pocket of his sport shirt. “Thanks for the smoke.” He turned back toward the window, a sad look on his face.

“This is my first kid,” Paul said. “My name’s Paul McMurray.”

“Jack Spalding,” the man said, shaking his hand. But he still didn’t smile. He glanced back at the infants.

Paul wondered if the guy’s trip to the hospital had started much earlier today. He looked so goddamn gloomy. Maybe there were complications with the birth. Maybe his kid had already been born—perhaps born dead or deformed. “Is—ah—your baby in there?” he asked.

But before the man answered, Paul saw the nurse on the other side of the glass, holding something in a white blanket. She came up to the window. Paul pointed to himself and mouthed his last name. She nodded. He blinked at the purple, no-eyed thing—the face all squashed and its head lumpy. And it was so dark.

He mouthed his name for the nurse again, and she nodded emphatically. She showed him the baby’s hands so he could count the fingers. The nurse was talking to the baby, pointing at Paul. He could read her lips: “There’s your daddy,” she said.

Paul let out a surprised laugh. “That’s my boy!” he cried. “That’s my little Eddie. Hi, slugger.”

The nurse gently rested the infant in a bassinet, then pinned a tag at the foot of the little bed: “McMurray.”

Paul glanced at the man, who also seemed mesmerized by little Eddie. “That’s my little boy,” he said.

“He’s beautiful,” the man whispered. There were tears in his eyes.

“Um, which one is yours?”

The man pointed to an infant three cribs over from Eddie.

“A boy?” Paul asked.

He nodded.

“Uh, he’s a handsome little tyke, too,” Paul said, trying to be polite.

“Not as handsome as yours,” the man said.

Paul McMurray gazed at his son and smiled. But then it struck him as pretty damn strange. What a weird thing for a new father to say about his own little boy: “Not as handsome as yours.” Was the guy’s kid really that ugly? He glanced over at the other baby. He wasn’t deformed or hideous-looking. The tag on his crib read: Copeland.

Paul McMurray scratched his head. “Hey, what did you say your name was?”

He turned, but the man wasn’t there anymore.

 

At a stoplight on his way home, Carl Jorgenson was about to toss the cigar out the car window. But then he changed his mind and tucked it back inside the pocket of his sport shirt.

“Nights in White Satin” came over the car radio. He cranked up the volume. “Suicide Music,” Carl called it. This song and Brook Benton’s “A Rainy Night in Georgia” were his favorite I’m-depressed-and-want-to-wallow-in-it tunes. The music certainly fit his mood now. He almost wished it would rain. The night was too beautiful, with a gentle, early summer breeze and the clear, starlit sky. He never felt so lonely in all his life.

When the light turned green, Carl suddenly realized he was headed in the wrong direction. “You don’t live there anymore, stupid,” he whispered to himself. He made a U-turn. His new apartment was on Weidler, another part of town. He wasn’t crazy about the place. But it beat the Best Western, where he’d stayed for two nights after walking out on Eve. Two nights of limbo. He’d longed for a sense of permanency, and wanted his things out of the house. He also wanted Eve to know he wasn’t coming back. So he signed a lease on the first apartment he’d seen.

Carl parked in front of the building, a homely four-story brick structure built in the Eisenhower era. Maybe he’d taken the apartment because he felt sorry for the landlady. Old Mrs. Gunther didn’t look long for this world. She had short, curly hair, and cat-eye, rhinestone-studded glasses. While she’d shown Carl the apartment, she’d clutched to her bosom a mangy old poodle she had introduced as Sparkle. Sparkle had a crooked jaw and yellowish grey hair the same shade as her owner’s. In fact, the two could have passed as sisters—if you put rhinestone-studded glasses on the dog.

“It’s a warm, friendly building,” Mrs. Gunther had explained, stroking Sparkle’s head. “You’ll like it here…”

But Carl found the other tenants a cold assortment of forgettable faces. He didn’t recognize the man now following him up the walk to the front door. Carl guessed he was around his own age, thirty-nine—maybe older. The dark-haired man wore tennis clothes, and ate an ice-cream cone. A few paces behind him straggled a little boy, also working on an ice-cream cone. Carl glanced back at them, thinking the father ought to walk beside his son so he could keep an eye on him and make sure he was safe.

Carl unlocked the door, then held it open for them. Without a look at him, the man strolled by and called back to his little boy, “Come on, quit dawdling.”

Carl felt like the invisible doorman. “You’re welcome a helluva lot,” he said, loud enough to be heard.

But the man ignored him. He grabbed his son’s hand and moved toward the elevator.

Carl let the door swing shut. “Hey, don’t thank me, buddy,” he growled. “I love holding doors open for ingrates like you…”

The man stepped inside the elevator, let go of his son’s hand, then turned around and flipped him the bird. “Fuck you very much,” he said. The elevator doors shut.

“Oh, nice!” Carl yelled after him in vain. “And in front of your kid, no less. You got a lot of class!” He stomped toward the elevator and jabbed at the button. Creeps like that shouldn’t even be allowed to have children, he thought; damn, it was so unfair…

As the elevator took him up to the fourth floor, Carl wanted to hit something—someone. He’d come very close to belting Eve that night, the week before, when she’d told him what she’d done. It had taken every drop of restraint to keep from knocking her across the living room. But he’d left her unharmed; both of them angry, in tears. Now, he was glad he’d held back. A blow to the side of that pretty raven-haired head would have smacked some of the guilt out of Eve, and she deserved to feel one hundred percent terrible for her actions.

Carl stepped inside his new living room, dark and cluttered with half-unpacked boxes. The hide-a-bed sofa he’d ordered from Meier & Frank had arrived. It was still shrouded with plastic. Mrs. Gunther and Sparkle must have let the delivery people in. At least he wouldn’t have to use the sleeping bag tonight.

Switching on the kitchenette overhead, he dug a frozen pizza and a beer out of the refrigerator. The telephone rang. He stared at it a moment, fancying that it might ring off the daisy-patterned kitchenette wall. Maybe Eve, calling to make amends? He hated himself for hoping it was. Finally, he shoved the pizza in the oven and went to the phone. “Hello?”

“Carl?”

It was his lawyer. “Hi, Jerry,” he said, opening the beer. “How are you?”

“I’ve been trying to get you all day. Where have you been?”

Carl sipped his beer. “The old neighborhood pool, the movies, here, there. What’s up, Jerry?”

“Eve called me this morning, asking for your new phone number. She wants to talk with you—”

“Well, I don’t want to talk with her. Another thing, Jerry, please tell her to stop calling me at work.”

“Carl, she thinks the two of you ought to see a marriage counselor and try to work things out.”

“There’s nothing to work out,” Carl sighed, setting his beer on the yellow Formica counter. “All the counseling money can buy won’t change things. Now, have you filed the petition for divorce or whatever it is you do to get the ball rolling?”

“Not yet, Carl. I thought maybe—”

“Jerry, please, get off the pot and do it.”

“I just want you to be practical about this. Now—”

“She can have the house, the second car, everything she can get her bloodstained hands on. I don’t care.”

 

“Carl, you’re not acting rationally…”

“For God’s sakes, how do you expect me to act?” he said. “That was my baby, goddamn it! I wanted that child more than anything.”

“I know that,” Jerry said. “And I understand—”

“Then you understand why I can’t have anything to do with her right now. So—please, please file that petition. Okay?” Carl didn’t want to give him time for any more arguments, and he quickly said: “Listen, I have a pizza burning up in the oven here, so I’ve got to go. Just file the sucker. Thanks for calling, Jerry. G’night.” He hung up. Friend or no friend, if Jerry didn’t file on Monday, he’d find a new lawyer.

Screw dinner. Carl switched off the oven. He needed a shower. He hadn’t taken one after swimming his laps that afternoon, and hated the idea of dried community pool water covering his body. He’d been in such a hurry, throwing on his clothes over the damp swim trunks and running to his car to follow that young couple home.

Two weeks before, elated that at last he would become a father, Carl had first spotted them at the neighborhood pool. The guy looked like an ex-jock, a bit out of shape. The wife was cute with brown hair and dimples, but no stunner like Eve, whose haute couture looks always turned heads. He wouldn’t have given the girl a second glance if not for the beautifully swollen belly that stretched the fibers of her lavender swimsuit. That’s Eve in just a few months, he’d thought, a satisfied grin on his suntanned face. How radiant the girl had seemed, carrying new life inside her.

Seeing them again today, he’d felt as if they had something that used to be his. He noticed them after finishing his laps, and he moved his blanket over to the grass, near where they sat in lawn chairs. The guy had brought the newspaper and a cooler with him. He opened a beer and stuck the can in one of those Styrofoam receptacles to keep it cold. The girl was wearing her lavender swimsuit again, and she looked overdue for the delivery room by several days. “Promise me, honey,” the girl said as she rubbed suntan lotion on her husband’s shoulders. “Don’t let me get one of those ugly postnatal haircuts like my sister got. She looked so frumpy in her pictures with the baby.”

The husband was deep into the sports section.

Some kids were screaming “Marco Polo!” in the shallow end of the pool, and Carl couldn’t hear the young couple for a minute.

“—might as well be talking to myself half the time,” the girl was complaining. She applied lotion to her legs, barely able to reach them past her inflated midriff.

Carl watched as a skinny, wet kid in baggy trunks raced past the husband, a little too close. Apparently, the kid had shed some water on his sports page. The husband looked very annoyed, and grumbled something to his wife.

“Oh, relax!” Carl heard her say. She tipped her head back.

Carl saw something that the guy hadn’t noticed yet. Down by his feet, his precious beer had spilled over on its side. If the skinny, wet kid had done it, Carl hoped the boy was long gone. One of the worst beatings Carl had ever gotten in his life was from knocking over his father’s beer; and he imagined that this guy was a lot like his old man.

“MARCO POLO! MARCO POLO! MARCO POLO!”

In between shrieks, Carl heard the husband say, “Somebody should get them to shut the fuck up.”

Oh, bub, you’ll be great for those 2:00 a.m. feedings, Carl thought, sitting at the edge of his towel.

The wife muttered something to the guy, and he laughed. He reached down for his beer. Carl waited for him to make the discovery. But just then, the skinny kid ran by once more, giggling and flailing his arms. Again, he must have doused the guy with a little water. The husband threw down his paper and almost leapt up from the lawn chair to chase him, but then he sat back down.

Carl watched the boy gleefully threading around people, chairs, and towels.

When he looked back at the couple, the father-to-be had discovered the spilt beer. He was cursing, but the Marco Polo game had gotten loud again, and Carl couldn’t hear exactly what he was saying.

Her head still tipped back, the wife dismissed his anger with a wave of her hand. But the guy took off his sunglasses, and seemingly out for blood, he sat forward in the lawn chair and scouted the area for that poor dumb little kid. He didn’t see the boy coming up from behind him—not until it was too late. He made a grab for his skinny arm, but the boy unwittingly escaped.

The wife must have nodded off, because she didn’t seem to notice. Carl wanted to get to the kid and tell him to keep away from that man in the lawn chair, but he lost sight of him in the crowd. The boy was about eight years old, simply having fun at the neighborhood pool. How was he to know that he’d made somebody so furious at him?

Carl heard his by-now-familiar giggle. So did the husband. He set down a new can of beer he’d just opened and watched the kid play by the foot shower. The boy started running again, weaving around towels and sunbathers, toward the man and his sleeping pregnant wife.

The children were screaming again: “MARCO POLO! MARCO POLO!”

Helplessly, Carl watched as the kid sprinted along the grass. The father-to-be inched forward in his chair, and he stuck his foot out.

“Oh, Jesus,” Carl whispered.

The kid tripped, and that skinny little body hit the ground hard. He let out a sharp cry. No one saw who had tripped him. The husband quickly grabbed his newspaper just as the wife sat up to see what all the crying was about. There was a tiny smirk on the guy’s face.

Creeps like that shouldn’t even be allowed to have children.

The kid was crying and at the same time, trying to catch his breath. Somebody helped him to his feet. The boy glanced back toward the couple, apparently looking for what had made him stumble. There was a grass stain all up and down his leg. He wiped away his tears and limped toward the pool house.

Carl wanted to confront the man, maybe even beat the crap out of him for picking on that pathetic skinny kid in the baggy trunks. Instead, he didn’t move—and said nothing. He followed the young couple as they left the pool that afternoon. They had a bumper sticker on the back of their VW: a leering cartoon billy goat, and the slogan, “HONK IF YOU’RE HORNY!” Probably the husband’s idea. They seemed like a couple of greasers. He imagined a pair of fuzzy dice dangling from their rearview mirror as well.

Carl parked in front of their town house and sat in his car for two hours. He was in no hurry to return to his empty apartment. Later, the couple came out again and got into the VW. Carl followed them to a movie theater. He went inside, sitting two rows behind them.

The guy had a way of eating popcorn that was really annoying. From the bucket he’d scoop out a handful, shake it like loose change, then shove the entire fistful into his mouth, crunching loudly. Only God knew how the wife put up with him.

The movie was pretty good, and Carl started getting interested in it; but then, the young couple suddenly got up. They whispered back and forth until someone in the row behind them asked them to be quiet. “Can’t you see my wife’s in labor?” the creep of a husband snarled.

Carl kept a safe distance behind them in his car. His heart beat faster and faster as he watched them pull into the hospital’s emergency entrance. He had to go inside and see.

Of course, three hours later, when he finally set eyes on the baby boy that could have been his, Carl was miserable.

He didn’t want to talk to the father. Then the guy asked him his name, and Carl lied. He lied, too, about having a son of his own in that roomful of infants. Why should this McMurray guy think he had something over him? But he did. He possessed something Carl had wanted for a long, long time.

 

The warm spray from the showerhead felt wonderful, as if it were washing away his troubles and heartaches. Some people he knew drank to ward off depression, but Carl took showers—long, leisurely showers. He was sitting down, his head tipped back against the tiled wall. He’d put the plug in the drain, and the shower made a poor man’s whirlpool in the rapidly filling tub. For the first time that day, Carl smiled. He rubbed a bar of Irish Spring over his broad, hairy chest, then down the rippled stomach. He soaped up his flaccid penis with hygienic apathy. It hadn’t seen any action in almost two weeks—not even from his own hand. He’d sort of lost interest in sex, because it only reminded him of Eve.

“You have a wonderful physique,” Eve had told him after the first time they’d made love.

The memory of her nude body—so taut and tan—was still painfully fresh in his mind. Just seeing her naked had never ceased to fascinate and arouse him. He enjoyed giving her massages as a postlude to sex. The feel of her body always made him hard again. There was one spot, at the small of her back, where he loved to rest his head. He’d stare at the upward curve of her buttocks and lazily caress the soft flesh. She said she liked his foot rubs the most, and he saved them for last, often nibbling and sucking on her toes.

He’d met her on a blind date. A teacher friend at the grade school where Carl taught physical education had set it up. Friends at work were constantly trying to fix him up. They seemed more anxious to see him in a relationship than he ever was. Some of the dates were abysmal; and some were abysmal—but with sex. But most of these attempted matchups just left him feeling awkward and sad. The women had a certain desperation to them. They’d laugh hysterically at his mediocre jokes, quiver at his casual touch, and worst of all, they’d want to know all about him. Carl had always been well liked, but no one ever really knew him; and he wanted it that way. There were certain things about himself that he didn’t want people to know. When these women expressed interest in seeing him again, Carl ran in the other direction.

But Eve was different. She was more beautiful than any of the others, more confident, with a dry sense of humor. But there was also a haughtiness to her that proved challenging. He actually had to chase after her. When they made love, Carl wanted to stay with her for the rest of the night—maybe even remain in bed with her forever, holding her in his arms, whispering, kissing. He was thirty-five years old, and for the first time, Carl felt really intimate with another human being.

Eve had also come along at a time when Carl felt ready to settle down and start a family. This was the woman he wanted to have children with. Even her name meant mother.

But Eve was in no hurry to get married or fulfill the origin of her name. She was very wrapped up in her work as a tennis instructor, and played in minor pro tournaments. Sometimes, she criticized Carl for his lack of career drive. There were better jobs with higher salaries than he made as a grade school P.E. coach. It was a waste of his college degree. After eight years with the job, wasn’t he ready for something more challenging?

Not really. He loved acting as a father figure to all those kids, guiding the young athletes and building up confidence in the weak, underdeveloped ones. His only complaint about the coaching job was that the kids weren’t his own.

But for Eve, he reluctantly hung up his coach’s whistle, then worked like hell to climb into a management position at an insurance corporation. The job was a yawn, but his reward came when Eve finally agreed to marry him.

Then came the blow: “Maybe in a few years down the line,” she said. “I’m twenty-nine. There’s no need to rush into starting a family. I want you all to myself for a while.”

It seemed the real reason she didn’t want a child was because she always had some tennis tournament coming up.

At least one of them liked their work. Carl began to resent her for driving him into the insurance game. He’d done it for her. Why couldn’t she make a career sacrifice for him—and a temporary one at that? Sure, she didn’t have to worry about the clock ticking away, but he’d be forty in a year, and he wanted to start a family now. He loathed the sight of that slim, fashionable box which contained her birth control pills—the only thing standing between him and his dream of fatherhood.

One spring morning, Eve bolted out of bed before the alarm went off. Carl followed her to the bathroom, and found her hovered over the toilet, throwing up. She thought it was a bad stomach flu. But Carl had an idea what it really was—divine intervention. He didn’t want to think that she was just ill. All day long, she was tired, and the following morning, she threw up again. Carl hid his enthusiasm in the face of her misery. Eve would be all right, he told himself. As soon as she realized it was their child growing inside her, she’d accept it, embrace it.

“Oh, Christ, of all the shitty things to happen!” she cried over the phone. Carl was at work. “I just got back from the doctor’s, and guess what? I’m pregnant, he says.”

“Well, that’s wonderful, honey!” Now he could bring home the rattle he’d bought three days ago.

“It’s awful! How the hell could this happen? I’ve been taking the pill religiously for the last four years. I should sue our pharmacist…”

“Oh, you read in the papers all the time about women getting pregnant while on the pill. It’s nobody’s fault. Maybe it was just meant to be, honey. In fact, I’m really thrilled about it.”

Over the next two weeks, Carl gave her pep talks. There would be other tournaments to play after the baby was born. She wasn’t the type to let herself get out of shape. Hell, she’d bounce right back. Maybe they should enroll in one of those natural childbirth classes. He’d help her along through the whole experience. Carl bought baby things and made plans to convert the spare bedroom into a nursery. He began watching pregnant women on the street, and they fascinated him. Bringing home books on childbirth and child development, he pored over them eagerly. But Eve refused to crack open a cover.

“Can’t you get it through your thick skull that I don’t want to have this baby?” she screamed.

“You wouldn’t say that if you knew how much it means to me, honey. I swear, I’ll be with you all the way through this—”

“Yeah, well, you don’t have to have it.” She paused. “And I don’t have to have it either.”

“Don’t talk like that, Eve. I won’t listen. I mean it.”

He chalked up her tantrums to the hormonal changes and nausea. Carl tried to be patient, and he pampered her.

One night he came home from work to find Eve sitting up in bed, half-awake. Her face was pale, and the long, black hair limply hung down past her shoulders. No, she didn’t want him to fix her some dinner. She just needed to be left alone. Carl kissed her forehead and as he crept out of the bedroom, he heard her: “I feel so sick and miserable, I just want to die…”

God, what I’m putting her through, he thought; the poor, brave thing. There had to be some way of making it easier for her. The next day, at the office, Carl a. . .