The Woman Next Door Read online

  The house itself, barely ten years old, was the first in a circle of four Victorians that had been built around a wooded cul-de-sac. With its generous yellow body and white trim, wide wraparound porch, quaint picket fence and gaslights, it was as picturesque as its neighbors—and the beauty didn’t end at the front door. The entry hall was open and bright, flanked on either side by living and dining rooms with carved moldings, mahogany built-ins, and high windows. At the back of the house was a large kitchen with granite counters, wood floors, and a glassed-in breakfast area. A winding staircase, replete with window seats at each of two landings, led to four bedrooms on the second floor, one of which was a lavish master suite. As if all that weren’t enough, the real estate agent led them to a pair of rooms over the garage.

  “Offices,” Amanda whispered excitedly when the woman turned away to take a cell call.

  Graham whispered back, “Could you counsel people here?” “In a minute. Could you draw landscape plans here?” “Big time.” The whispering went on. “Look at the woods. Smell the lilacs. If not here, where? Did you see the bedrooms?”

  “They’re huge.”

  “Except for the one right next to ours. It could be a nursery.”

  “No, no.” Amanda envisioned something else. “I’d put the cradle in our room and make the little room into a den. It’d be perfect for reading goodnight stories.”

  “Then we’ll give Zoe and Emma the room across the hall, and put Tyler and Hal at the end.”

  “Not Hal,” Amanda begged. It was a long-standing debate. “Graham, Jr. And if they’re anything like you and your brothers, they’ll be into mischief, so they should be closer.”

  “Hal,” Graham insisted, “and I want them farther off. Boys make more noise. Trust me on this.” Slipping an arm around her waist, he drew her lower body close. His eyes grew heavier, the color on his cheekbones warmer, his voice deeper, a whisper. “Diaphragm put away?”

  Amanda could barely breathe, the moment was so ripe. “Put away.”

  “We’re makin’ a baby?”

  “Tonight.” They had deliberately waited the year, so that they could have each other for an uninterrupted time before their lives inevitably changed.

  “If this house was ours”—his whisper was more hoarse—“where would you . . . ?”

  “In the breakfast nook in the kitchen,” she whispered back. “Then, years from now, we’d look at each other over the heads of the kids and have our little secret. What about you?”

  “The backyard. Out in the woods, away from the neighbors. It’ll be like our first time all over again.”

  But it wasn’t their first time. They had been married a year, and they had pressing dreams. “This house is perfect, Gray. This neighborhood is perfect. Did you see the tree houses and swing sets? These are nice people with kids. Can we afford to live here?” “No. But we will.”

  ***

  They celebrated their second anniversary by seeing Amanda’s gynecologist. They had been making love without benefit of birth control for a year, and no baby had come of it. After months of denial, months of reassuring each other that it was only a matter of time, they were starting to wonder if something was wrong.

  After examining Amanda, the doctor pronounced her healthy, then repeated the verdict when Graham joined them. Only when Graham flashed Amanda a broad smile and pulled her close did she allow herself to be relieved. “I was frightened,” she told the doctor, sheepish now that the worst had been denied. “People tell awful stories.”

  “Don’t listen.”

  “That’s sometimes easier said than done.” The worst storytellers were her sisters-in-law, and what could she do? She couldn’t turn and walk away when they were talking, and it wasn’t as if they spoke from personal experience. Their stories were about friends, or friends of friends. O’Learys didn’t have trouble making babies. Amanda and Graham were an anomaly.

  The doctor sat back in his chair, fingers laced over his middle in a fatherly way. “I’ve been at this for more than thirty years, so I know what problems look like. The only one I see here is impatience.”

  “Do you blame us?” Graham asked. “Amanda’s thirty-two. I’m thirty-eight.”

  “And married two years, you say? Trying for a baby for just one?

  That’s not very long.” He glanced at the notes he had scrawled earlier. “I’d wonder if it was stress, but you both seem happy with your work. Yes?”

  “Yes,” they both said. It had been another banner year.

  “And you enjoy living in Woodley?”

  “Very much,” Graham said. “The house is a dream.”

  “Same with the neighbors,” Amanda added. “There are six kids, with great parents. There’s an older couple—” She stopped short and gave Graham a stricken look.

  He pulled her closer. “June just died,” he told the doctor. “She was diagnosed with cancer and gone six weeks later. She was only sixty.”

  Amanda still felt the shock of it. “I barely knew June a year, but I loved her. Everyone did. She was like a mother—better than a mother. You could tell her anything. She’d listen and hear and make solutions seem simple. Ben’s lost without her.”

  “And what did June say about your getting pregnant?” the doctor asked.

  Amanda didn’t deny having discussed it with her. “She said to be patient, that it would happen.”

  The doctor nodded. “It will. Truly, you do look fine. Everything is where it should be. Your cycle is regular. We know you’re ovulating.”

  “But it’s been a year. The books say—”

  “Close the books,” he ordered. “Take your husband home and have fun.”

  ***

  For their third anniversary, Amanda and Graham drove into Manhattan to see a specialist. He was actually their third doctor. The first had fallen by the wayside when he kept insisting that nothing was wrong—and it wasn’t that Amanda and Graham were convinced that there was, just that they thought a few tests were in order. So they met with the second, a local fertility specialist. He blamed their problem on age.

  “Fine,” Graham said, voicing the frustration he and Amanda shared, “so how do we deal with it?”

  The man shrugged. “You can’t turn back the clock.”

  Amanda reworded the question. “How do you treat . . . older couples who want to have kids?”

  Graham gawked at her. “Older couples? We average out at thirty-six. That’s not old.”

  She held up a hand, bidding him to let the doctor answer.

  “There are definitely things you can do,” the man said. “There’s AI. There’s IUI and ICSI. If all else fails, there’s IVF.”

  “Translate,” Graham ordered.

  “Yes, please,” Amanda added.

  “Haven’t you read up on this yet?” the doctor asked. “Most couples in your situation would have done research.”

  Amanda was taken aback. “The last doctor we saw kept saying nothing was wrong. He told us just to keep on doing what we were doing and not to worry about special procedures.”

  “Do you want a baby, or don’t you?” It was less question than statement, and wasn’t spoken harshly, but it had that effect.

  Graham stood. “This isn’t a good match.”

  Amanda agreed. They needed someone who was understanding, not judgmental.

  The doctor shrugged. “Go to ten others, and you’ll hear the same thing. The options are artificial insemination, intrauterine insemination, intracytoplasmic sperm injection, and in vitro fertilization. The procedures get more expensive as you progress from one to the next. Likewise, you get older and less apt to conceive.”

  When Graham caught Amanda’s eye and hitched his chin toward the door, she was by his side in a flash, which was how they found themselves in New York on their third anniversary. Seeming empathetic and resourceful, this newest doctor started with a battery of tests, some of which, for the first time, were on Graham. When the immediate results showed nothing amiss, he gave them a
pile of reading matter and a folder filled with instructions and charts. Assuring them that he didn’t expect any surprises from the results of the remaining tests, he sent them home with a regimen that had Amanda identifying her fertile periods by charting her body temperature, and Graham maximizing his sperm count by allowing at least two days to pass between ejaculations.

  They joked about it during the drive back to Woodley but their laughter held an edge. Inevitably, making love wasn’t as carefree as it used to be. Increasingly, the goal of making a baby was coming before pleasure. With that goal unrealized month after month, their uneasiness grew.

  ***

  They spent their fourth anniversary quietly. Amanda was recovering from minor surgery performed by yet another doctor. This one was female, and ran a fertility clinic thirty minutes south of Woodley. She was in her forties, mother to three children under the age of six, and disgusted with colleagues of hers who blamed things they couldn’t diagnose on emotions, as finally the doctor in Manhattan had done. This one insisted that they call her by her first name—Emily—and not only asked questions none of the others had, but did different tests. That was how she noticed a small blockage in one of Amanda’s tubes, and while she wasn’t sure that it was severe enough to be causing the problem, she advised a precautionary cleanup.

  Amanda and Graham readily agreed. By now they had hoped to have three children—Tyler, Emma, and Hal—born in three consecutive years. As things stood, the house that they loved for family space was starting to feel too large and much too still. And though they tried not to obsess about it, there were times when each wondered whether children would ever come.

  There was no lovemaking on this fourth anniversary. Amanda was still too tender for that, and even without the surgery, the timing wouldn’t have been right for sex. So it was a morning for gentle exchanges. Graham brought her breakfast in bed and gave her a pair of heart-shaped earrings; she told him she loved him and gave him a book on exotic shrubs. Then he went off to work.

  Indeed, work was the good news on their fourth anniversary. O’Leary Landscape Design flourished. Graham now rented a suite of rooms in the center of Woodley to house two full-time assistants and a business manager. He was given preference for the best materials in the three largest nurseries in western Connecticut, had ongoing relationships with tree farms in Washington and Oregon, and shrub farms in the Carolinas. He kept two of Will’s crews busy planting on a regular basis.

  For her part, Amanda had been named coordinating psychologist for the Woodley school system, which gave her the power to bring a slightly antiquated system into the modern day. That meant getting to know students in nonthreatening situations such as leadership seminars, lunch groups, and community service programs. It meant opening the door to her office, allowing for five-minute sessions as well as forty-five-minute ones, and communicating with students by e-mail, if that was the only way they could handle a psychologist. It meant working with consulting psychologists on difficult cases and with lawyers on matters of confidentiality. It meant forming and training a crisis team.

  So she and Graham had their house, their jobs, their neighborhood, and their love. The only thing that would have enhanced their fourth anniversary celebration was a child.

  ***

  Two months shy of their fifth anniversary, with Amanda feeling more like an egg-producing robot than a woman, she and Graham met for lunch. They talked about work, about the weather, about sandwich choices. They didn’t talk about what Amanda had done that morning—which was to have an ultrasound that had measured her egg follicles—or the afternoon’s activity—which would entail Graham producing fresh sperm and Amanda being artificially inseminated. They had already failed the procedure once. This was their second of three possible tries.

  A short time later that day, Amanda lay alone in a sterile clinic room. Graham had done his part and gone back to work. Emily had poked her head in with a greeting on her way down the hall. After what seemed an interminable wait, a technician Amanda didn’t know entered the room. Amanda figured she couldn’t have been more than twenty-one, and “technician” was the proper word. The girl had neither social skills nor personal warmth, and Amanda was too nervous to make more than a brief attempt at conversation. When that attempt got no response, she simply stared at the ceiling while the girl injected Graham’s sperm. Once that was done, she was left alone.

  Amanda knew the drill. She would lie there for twenty minutes with her pelvis tipped up to give the sperm a nudge in the right direction. Then she would dress, go home, and live with her heart in her mouth for the next ten days, wondering if this time it would take.

  But today, lying there alone with Graham’s silent sperm, Amanda felt a pang in her chest. She wanted to think it was a mystical something telling her that a baby was at that instant starting its nine-month intrauterine life, but she knew better. This pang came from fear.

  Chapter One

  Graham O’Leary shoveled dirt with a vengeance, pushing himself until his muscles ached, because he needed the exertion. He was filled with nervous energy that had no place to go. This was Tuesday. That made it D-day. Amanda would either get her period or miss it. He hoped desperately that she would miss it, and only in part from wanting a child. The other part had to do with their marriage. They were feeling the strain of failing to conceive. A wall was growing between them. They weren’t close the way they used to be. He could feel that she was pulling away.

  For Graham, it was déjà vu.

  Grunting at the unfairness of that, he heaved an overloaded spadeful of dirt from the hole, but when he lowered the shovel again and pushed in hard, he hit rock. Swearing angrily, he straightened. Sometimes it seemed that rock was all he found. Forget the historic bit about stone walls marking one man’s land from the next. He would bet that those walls were built just to get the damn rocks out of the fields! Put ’em over near the other guy’s land, he imagined the old-timers saying. Only they’d missed a few.

  Annoyed, he bent, worked his shovel under the rock, levered it up, and hauled it out. Clear of that impediment, he tossed spadefuls of dirt after it, one after the other in a steady rhythm.

  “Hey.”

  Oh, yeah, he knew what pulling away looked like. He had seen it in Megan, building slowly, mysteriously, reaching a point where he had no idea what she was thinking. With Amanda, he knew the cause of the problem, but that didn’t make it easier to take. They used to be on the same wavelength on everything. Not anymore.

  Grunting again as he dug deeper, he remembered the tiff they’d had the week before when he had tossed out the idea that she might be more relaxed, and therefore more apt to conceive, if she cut back on the hours she spent at school. She didn’t have to be the head of a dozen different programs, he had said in what he thought was a gentle tone. Others could do their part. That would allow her to come home early one or two afternoons each week; she could read, cook, watch Oprah.

  She had gone ballistic over that. He wasn’t suggesting it again.

  “Gray.”

  Gritting his teeth, he hauled out another rock. Okay, so he was working longer hours, too. But he wasn’t the one whose body had to provide a hospitable environment for a child to take root. Not that he would even breathe that thought. She would take it as criticism. Lately, she misinterpreted lots of what he said.

  “Hey, you.”

  She’d actually had the gall to accuse him of being absent for the second artificial insemination—like the thing could have been done without his sperm. Okay, so he’d gone back to work after producing it. Hell, she had told him to leave. Of course, now she was claiming that what she’d said was that he didn’t have to stay if he was uncomfortable.

  “Graham!”

  His head flew up. His brother Will was squatting at the edge of the hole. “Hey. I thought you left.” The crew worked from seven to three. It was nearly five.

  “I came back. What are you doing?”

  Planting his shovel in the dirt, Gra
ham brushed spikes of wet hair back with an arm. “Providing a hospitable environment for this tree,” he said with a glance at the monster in question. It was a thirty-foot paper birch that would be the focal point of the patio he’d designed. Not just any tree would do. It had taken him a while to find the right one. “The hole is crucial. It has to be plenty wide and plenty deep.”

  “I know,” Will replied. “That’s why I have a backhoe coming tomorrow morning.”

  “Yeah, well, I felt like getting the exercise,” Graham said offhandedly and went back to it.

  “Heard from Amanda yet?”

  “Nah.”

  “You said she’d call as soon as she knew.”

  “Well then, I guess she doesn’t know yet,” Graham said, but he was pissed. They hadn’t talked since he had left the house early that morning. If she’d gotten her period, she was keeping it to herself. His phone was right there in his pocket, silent as stone.

  “Did you call her?” Will asked.

  “No,” Graham said, pedantic now. “I called yesterday afternoon. She said I was pressuring her.”

  “Moody, huh?”

  He sputtered out a laugh and tossed up another shovelful of dirt. “They say it’s the Clomid. But hey, it’s not easy for me either, and I’m not taking the stuff.” Under his breath, he muttered, “Talk about feeling like a eunuch.”

  “No cause for that,” Will said. “You haven’t lost it. You have an audience, y’know.”

  Graham paused, pushed his arm over his brow again, shot his brother a wry look. “Yup.” He went back to digging.

  “Pretty lady.”

  “Her husband’s an Internet wizard. They’re barely thirty and have more money than they know what to do with. So he plays with computers, and she watches the men who work on her lawn. It’s pretty pathetic, if you ask me.”