Lightning Read Free Page B

briefly, and this time she brought the subject up to him, after another partner at the office had a baby, and this time she conceded it was just adorable, and her friend seemed to be handling both career and child well. It had made Alex think seriously, for the first time, about having children.
    But this time, Sam could no longer imagine it. Their life was too set, too well regulated, and too easy without kids. After twelve years of marriage to her, he thought it was too late, and it would no longer enhance anything. He wanted her to himself now. He liked things just as they were, and she surprised herself at how easily she gave the idea up again. Obviously, it was just not meant to be. She had an enormous trial to handle right after that, and the subject of children in their lives went out of her head completely until four months later.
    They were coming back from a trip to India, where she had never been before, and she was feeling seriously ill, and afraid she had caught some dread disease, when she went to her doctor. It was the first time she had felt really sick in years, and it scared her. But what he told her of her malady scared her even more. And that night, she looked at Sam and told him the news in bleak desperation. She was pregnant. She had really put it out of her head, this time permanently, after the last time the subject had come up, and so had he. And they looked at each other like two victims of the crash of ‘29 when she told him.
    “Are you sure?”
    “Absolutely,” she said miserably. It was the first time she'd ever been pregnant. And she now knew what she'd never been completely sure of before. She didn't want children.
    “It's not cholera or malaria, or something like that?” A near fatal disease would have been more welcome news to either of them than a baby.
    “He says I'm six weeks pregnant.” She had been late on the trip, but she'd thought it was from the extreme heat, or the malaria pills, or just the rigors of travel. And she had never looked as miserable in her life as she did now, staring unhappily at her husband. “I'm too old for this, Sam. I don't want to go through it. I just can't.” Her words surprised him too, but he was relieved to hear them. He didn't want the baby either.
    “Do you want to do something about it?” he asked, startled by her adamant dislike of the situation. He had always suspected that she might want kids someday, and lately, he had begun to fear it.
    “I don't think we should. It seems like such a spoiled rotten thing to do. It's not like we can't afford to have a baby … I just don't feel I have the time, or …not the energy,” she thought about it carefully, “but the interest. The last time we talked about it, I just figured that was it. The conversation was over. We're happy like this …and then, blam …we're pregnant.”
    He grinned ruefully at her. “It's ironic, isn't it? We finally decide not to, and you get pregnant. Life certainly has its little curve balls.” It was one of his favorite expressions, but it was true. And this was a doozy. “So what do we do?”
    “I don't know.” She cried when she thought about it. She didn't want an abortion, or a baby. And after two weeks of agonizing about it, they decided to go ahead and have the baby. Alex didn't feel that they had a choice, morally, and Sam agreed, and they tried to be philosophical about it, but they were anything but enthusiastic. Alex was depressed every time she thought about it, and Sam seemed to forget about it completely. And when they did discuss it, which was as seldom as possible, they sounded as though they were discussing a terminal illness. This was certainly not anything they looked forward to. It was something that had to be faced, but they were clearly dreading everything about it.
    Exactly four weeks later, Alex came home from the office early one afternoon, throwing up uncontrollably, and with such acute pains in her abdomen that she was literally doubled