what kind of a woman could let him go. You’ll think I couldn’t have loved him—but you’ll be wrong. You’ll be so wrong….”
She’d missed her period, and she hadn’t been able to tell him. She’d told herself it was because she wanted to be sure before giving him the news, but when the home pregnancy test showed positive she’d been glad that she’d waited until he was out of the apartment before taking it. Hunched over like an old woman, she’d sat down on the edge of the bathtub and started to shake.
It was what they wanted, she’d told herself, staring at the pink-tinted stick in front of her as if it was a snake about to strike. Wasn’t it what they’d wanted—a family of their own someday? Two boys, two girls, and Cord had always joked that he’d teach the boys how to be as good a cook as their father if she’d show the girls how she caught five lake trout to everyone else’s one.
He would be the perfect father-to-be, worrying about her health, indulging her quirks and cravings, attending Lamaze classes with her. Finally the day would arrive when he bundled her into the car, drove like crazy to the hospital, and she gave birth to their baby—a tiny, perfect, fragile human being that they would be responsible for.
And she wouldn’t be up to the task, she’d thought with cold certainty. Of all people, she knew how swiftly tragedy could strike, how no amount of precaution could totally insure a child’s safety. The world was a dangerous place, and more often than not its victims were the innocent, the defenseless—
The children that she hadn’t been able to save.
She’d taken each failure personally—the instances of abuse that she had been informed of too late, the Have You Seen This Child? photos that eventually faded and curled on bulletin boards and telephone poles around the city, the confused bereavement of parents who berated themselves and each other with a barrage of if onlys—if only I hadn’t let go of her hand, if only we hadn’t let him sit in the front seat, if only we’d taken her with us, if only we’d kept him at home…if only we could have kept our child safe.
What it all came down to was if only they’d known, they would have done things differently, Julia had thought. But she did know. And, having that knowledge, what had she been thinking of by making a child with Cord—a child that would be born into such a capriciously violent world?
When she’d eventually learned that her pregnancy result had been an error, she’d felt as if she’d been given a second chance to avert a tragedy, and more than ever she’d been glad she hadn’t told Cord anything yet. She’d left the doctor’s office and had sat in a nearby park until afternoon grayed into dusk. When she’d finally risen from the park bench, her limbs stiff from the hours of frozen immobility, she’d known what she had to do. Her job was to save the children she could, and even at that there were dozens who slipped through the cracks. But she could ensure that no child of hers and Cord’s would ever be lost through her inadequacy.
She would send him away. She would tell him any lie it took to make him leave her, but the one thing she would never tell him was the truth. If he ever knew her fear he would try to make things right for her, and because losing him would break her heart Julia was afraid she might weaken enough to listen to the lies she knew he would tell her. He would tell her that a life without children wouldn’t devastate him, he would tell her that he wouldn’t ache for the feel of a baby’s fist holding his, he would tell her that he wouldn’t envy the friends of his who were fathers themselves.
And he might even believe it himself for a while. But as the years passed the sense of loss would grow in him, because more than any man she knew, Cord wanted children of his own. And no matter how much he loved her, he would always know that but for her he could have had them….
“You’ll never know me,” Julia whispered. Back at the house King barked playfully on the porch, and a flock of mourning doves flew fussily into the trees. “But one day you might learn that there was a woman before you in his life. Don’t let that worry you.”
Their children would look like Cord. They would grow up beside the Pacific. They would be tennis players like their mother.
“I let him go because I love him so. I always have.” Blinking the tears from her eyes, she started up the path toward the house. Then she turned and looked one last time at the blue lake, the far shore, the distant horizon. “I always will,” she whispered to herself.
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