"So, no matter what Alicia Stokes told Claude, she's really still an employee of the Cleveland Police Department."

"Yes," said Jack, looking surprised. "I guess she is. Surely Claude called up there when she applied for a job here; that's one of the first steps, checking references. You call and get the official story. Then you use the network of cops you know to get the real story, like I did this morning. So Claude must know about her problems."

But I wondered if Claude, chronically understaffed, had taken the extra time.

I shook my head free of problems that really didn't concern me and returned to work on my grocery list. It was taking me an awfully long time to finish my task. I couldn't seem to concentrate. Truthfully, I was feeling less than wonderful. When Jack showed signs of wanting to make up for his inattention the night before, I had to wave him off. It was the first time for that, and when he looked surprised I felt obliged to tell him I was about to have my monthly time, and that somehow it felt worse than usual. Jack was quite willing to leave our discussion at that; I think he feels it's unmanly to ask questions about my femaleness.

After thirty more minutes, my list was complete and I'd figured out the weekly menu. Also, I was in pain. Jack agreed to go to the store for us, and when I saw the worry on his face, I was embarrassed. I was seldom ill, and I hated it; hated going to the doctor, spending the money on prescriptions, not being my usual self.

After Jack left - after many admonitions and a lot of scolding - I thought I might lie down, as he'd suggested. I couldn't remember the last time I'd lain down during the day, but I was feeling very strange. I went back to our room and sat down very carefully on the edge of the bed. I swung my legs up and lay on my side. I couldn't get comfortable. I had a terrible backache. The weird thing was, it was rhythmical. I would feel a terrible tense clenching feeling, then it would back off. I'd have a few minutes of feeling better, then it would start again.

By the time I heard Jack unloading groceries in the kitchen, I was sweating and scared. I was lying with my back to the bedroom door, and I thought of turning over to face him, but it seemed like a lot of trouble to move. His footsteps stopped in the door.

"Lily, you're bleeding," he said. "Did you know?" There was lot of panic behind the calm words.

"No," I said, in the grip of one of those pulses of pain. "Gosh, and I put a pad on, just in case. I've never had this much trouble." I was feeling too miserable to be embarrassed.

"Surely this isn't just your period?" he asked. He went around to the side of the bed I was facing and crouched down to look at me.

"I don't think so," I said, bewildered. "I'm so sorry. I'm just never sick."

He glared at me. "Don't apologize," he said. "You're white as a sheet. Listen, Lily, I know you're the woman and I'm the guy, but are these pains you're having... have you by any chance been timing them?"

"Why would I do that?" I asked, irritated.

"Your back hurts?" he asked, as though he were scared of the answer.

I nodded.

"Low down?"

I nodded again.

"Are you late?"

"I'm never very regular. Hand me the calendar." Jack got my bank giveaway calendar from the nail in the kitchen and I flipped back to the months before. I counted. "Well, this one is late. I don't know why it's so painful, my last one was just nothing. A couple of spots."

If I was as white as a sheet, we were a matching set. Jack lost all his color.

"What did you say?" he asked.

I repeated myself.

"Lily," he said, as if he was bracing himself. "Honey, I think you ... I think we need to get you to the hospital."

"You know I don't have insurance," I said. "I can't afford a hospital bill."

"I can," Jack said grimly. "And you're going."

I was as astonished as I could be. Jack had never spoken to me that way. He said, "I'm going to call an ambulance."

But I balked at that. It would take us only four minutes to get to the hospital in Shakespeare, and that's even if we caught the red light.

"Just put the bath mat down over your car seat," I suggested, "in case I leak any more." Jack could see I wouldn't go unless he did as I'd said, so he grabbed the bath mat and took it out to his car.

Then he returned to help me up, and we went out to the car during a moment when I wasn't actively in pain. I got in and buckled up, and Jack hurried around to his side of the car and jammed the key into the ignition. We went backward at a tremendous rate, and Jack got out into the street as though there were never any traffic.

After a minute, I didn't care. I was really hurting.

Suddenly, deep inside me, I felt a kind of terrible wrench. "Oh," I said sharply, bending forward. I took a deep breath, let it out... and the pain stopped.

"Lily?" Jack asked, his voice frantic. "Lily? What's happening?"

"It's over," I said in relief. I looked sideways at Jack, but he didn't seem to think that was good news. Just when I was about to ask him if he'd heard me, I felt a gush of wet warmth, and I looked down to see blood. A lot of blood.

I felt very tired. I thought I would lean my head against the car window. It felt cool against my cheek. Jack glanced over and nearly hit the car ahead of us.

"What's happened to me?" I asked Jack from a far distance, as we pulled into the emergency room carport and he pushed open his door.

"Stay right there!" he yelled, and disappeared inside the building. The bath mat underneath me turned red. I congratulated myself on my foresight, trying not to admit to myself that I was terrified. In seconds, a nurse came out with a wheelchair. Jack helped me out of the car, and the minute I stood up my legs were drenched in a gush of fluid. I stared down at myself, embarrassed and frightened.

"What's happened to me?" I asked again.

"Hon, you're miscarrying," the nurse said briskly, as if any fool should have known that.

And I guess she was right.

Chapter Seven

Carrie was there in five minutes, and she confirmed what the nurse had said. I was so shocked I didn't know which piece of knowledge was more stunning; the fact that I'd gotten pregnant without knowing it, or the fact that I'd lost a baby.

"Our baby," I said to Jack, trying to absorb the loss, the impact of the facts. Tears rolled down my cheeks and I was too tired to blot them. I didn't know if I was exactly sad or just profoundly astonished.

He was just as amazed as I was at the whole incident. He left the cubicle in the emergency room abruptly, and I was left staring after him from the gurney.

Carrie reentered. "He's crying," she whispered to me, and I could not imagine that. Then I remembered that when Jack's previous lover, Karen Kingsland, had been murdered, she had been pregnant. Carrie said, "Did you really not know?"

"I never even thought of it," I admitted. "I never put everything together. I guess I'm just dumb."

"Lily, I am so sorry. I don't know what to say."

I shook my head. I didn't know what she could say, either.

"I thought I had too much scar tissue," I told Carrie. "I thought between the indications that I wouldn't be very fertile, and the fact that we used birth control every single time, I was safe as I could be."

"Only abstinence is a hundred percent safe," Carrie said automatically. Her round brown eyes fixed on me from behind her big glasses. "Lily, I have to do a D and C."

That meant operating room fees and an anesthesiologist and an overnight stay in the hospital. I began to protest.

"You don't have an option," she told me firmly.

Jack said, "You do what you have to do, Carrie. We're good for it." He'd come back through the curtains behind her. His eyes were red. He took my hand.

"You know," Carrie said very slowly, propping her bottom against the wall and hugging a clipboard to her chest, "If this has happened once, this could happen again." She rested her chin on the clipboard, and I could tell she was thinking of saying something she knew she ought not to say.

I looked over at Jack. His hair was hanging in tangles around his shoulders, and his scar almost gleamed in the harsh overhead light. He didn't seem to know what to think, and I couldn't even figure out how I felt about what had just happened to me, or at least how I fully felt. But the truth was, it was like being at the bottom of a deep pit of sorrow.

"A baby," Jack said tentatively. "A baby."

"Lots of work," I said, thinking of the Althaus home.

Carrie braced herself. "Of course," she interjected in a very low voice, looking anywhere but at us, "I think it's always nice if a baby's parents are married."

"Oh, no problem," Jack said absently. Then he snapped to, and his eyes met mine. I shrugged.

Carrie perked up. Her glasses glistened as she raised her head. "So, you guys are going to get married?"

"No," I said. "We already are."

After all that "parents should be married" preaching, Carrie gave us hell because we were married. I'd been her only bridesmaid, and I should've returned the compliment; Claude would've liked to have been at the ceremony; they would've welcomed the chance to give us a wedding present; etc.; etc. Blah, blah, blah.

"Listen, Carrie," I told her. "I am going to say this once because I am your friend. We don't want to talk about being married, we don't want to change the way we are, we don't want to put it in the papers. I haven't even told my parents, though Jack did tell his sister, since he can't seem to stop hinting." I cast a look at Jack, who had the grace to look abashed. "This isn't a good day for us anyway, right? Wait and hop on us when I feel better."

"I'm sorry." Carrie apologized thoroughly. "Listen, Lily, I'm going to do your D and C in..." she looked at her watch. "About an hour. The operating room'll be free then, Dr. Howard's in there now."

"What can I expect afterward?"

We went over that for a while, and I began to feel better. Carrie was sure I'd be feeling physically well very soon.

When she ducked out from the curtain, Jack took my hand. He hooked a chair with his foot, drew it closer, and settled in by the bed, resting his head against it. We were still and quiet together for a while, and it was wonderful after the hubbub of arriving at the hospital, the struggle to remove my jeans, the shock of the miscarriage. I felt drained, mentally and physically. I'd lost a lot of blood. After a while, I think I dozed a little, and Jack may have, too.

As I drifted in and out of uneasy napping, I was thinking that this was the first time I'd felt really married. It felt like a cord ran between Jack and me, an umbilical cord, pulsing with life and nutrients. Then I thought of the baby, the baby who'd been attached to me with a real umbilical cord, and I thought of Jack leaving this brilliant white cubicle to cry for our lost child. I stared at the wall, at the incomprehensible medical things attached to it, and I considered that if I had not allowed Jack into my life, none of this pain would have been mine or his. Dry eyed, I stared at the wall, from time to time stroking his dark hair, and I did not know if I was glad or miserable that I'd ever seen him.

That evening Tamsin and Cliff came to my room. It was a double, but there wasn't another patient in there, which was a relief I was sure I owed to Carrie. Jack had left to spend a little time at the house cleaning up the disorder we'd left behind us that morning and to shower and change. I'd been dozing again, this time from the anesthesia, and I was startled to open my eyes and see the couple standing in the doorway.

"Tamsin," I said. "Cliff."

"I was visiting a client on my lunch hour and I saw your name on the admissions list," Tamsin explained. She had a little arrangement of daisies and baby's breath in her hand. "Are you feeling all right, Lily?"

"Yes, much better," I said, being careful not to move. "Thanks for coming by."

Tamsin placed the flowers on the broad windowsill, and Cliff came to the side of the bed and peered down at me. "We've had a miscarriage, too," he said. "Tamsin lost our baby about three years ago."

Tamsin looked away, as if the mention of the loss was a reproach.

"How are you doing?" I asked her.

"You mean, about the death of Saralynn?"

I nodded.

"I'm adjusting," she said. "Her mother came to see me. That was bad."

"I can well imagine," I lied.

"I brought you some magazines." Tamsin fumbled with a bag. "Here, maybe one of them will distract you for a while." She arranged a stack on my rolling table. She'd been smart enough to avoid House Beautiful and Vogue.

"Thank you," I said.

"Then, I guess, we'll see you later. I hope you feel better."

"Thank you."

After they'd left the room, I was ashamed of my eagerness to have them gone. I didn't want to see anyone, not a soul, but normally I would have expended some effort to be more polite.

Between the slit left between the curtains, I could see the late summer sun setting on one of the longest days of my life. I was seeing only a slice of the brilliant ball of glory, the briefest flare of red and orange. I looked for a long time. Then I pressed my call button.

The nurse eventually arrived to help me to the bathroom. She was a burly middle-aged woman who had no sympathy for me at all... kind of a relief after the emotional fire-walking I'd had that day.