“I know you are, Travis, and I love you for it. I promise I’ll stay away from Charlene.”
It’s far from the only promise she’s broken since Travis had left.
Around Thanksgiving, Melody had called Charlene to ask her about the underground network that helped pregnant young women. But the moment she picked up the phone, Charlene announced that she and Gary were expecting their first child. Melody stammered a congratulations and hung up.
On a grim December day she’d finally found her way, on her own, to the so-called way station: a small white clapboard church in a backwater Georgia town up near Macon.
Otis Redding’s hometown. The musician had been killed in a plane crash days earlier. Melody had wept as if she’d known him personally. She hadn’t, but . . .
“I have kin up Macon way. They introduced me to their old pal Otis . . .”
That voice, rich as pecan pie, had still oozed into her mind even then. Even now.
She closes her eyes and sees dolphin fins dancing in pink light arced across a glittering blue sea. She remembers leaning against a strong chest, encircled in the arms of a man who wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.
“That’s the most beautiful sunrise I’ve ever seen,” she’d murmured, and he’d told her that in his world, they refer to dawn as dayclean.
She’d loved that. Dayclean: a fresh start, with yesterday left behind.
Ah, it really had been a summer of love, hadn’t it? If not in the beginning, then certainly when it had drawn to a close. Love, and many other things—not all splendored, as the song goes.
Here on the southern Atlantic coast, summer gives way to hurricane season.
Melody starts the engine.
The radio disk jockey is in mid-announcement: Priscilla Presley delivered a baby girl yesterday.
“That’s right, all y’all. Elvis is a daddy. Let’s celebrate that with his latest hit.”
Melody turns off the radio amid the opening notes of “Just Call Me Lonesome.”
The doctor’s words echo in the silence.
“No man ever forgets the day he finds out he’s going to become a daddy.”
There are no hurricanes in the forecast today. The winter sky is a brilliant blue as she heads northeast toward Barrow Island off the coast of Georgia to deliver the news in person.
Brooklyn
“Matthews! You’re still here?”
Oran looks up from his stack of files. The clinic’s obstetrician, Harold Brooks, has exchanged his white lab coat for a tweed overcoat.
“Not for long,” he says. “I have to finish this paperwork.”
“Take care getting home. It’s sleeting out there.” Brooks puts on his hat, black galoshes squeaking as he heads for the door. “Be sure to lock up. There was an armed robbery the other night at the pharmacy around the corner—a masked man with a gun. Sign of the times.”
End times, Oran wants to say, and then elaborate—oh, how passionately he can elaborate on that topic. But this isn’t the right time or place. Or person. This man will never be one of the chosen few.
“Have a good night, Doctor.”
“You, too. See you tomorrow.” Brooks disappears into the blustery February evening.
The receptionist, Carla, is long gone, as are the nurses. Ordinarily, Oran, too, would have left after the day’s final patient departed. For what they’re paying him, the paperwork can wait.
He’d been anxious, sitting there at his desk in the reception area, waiting for the doctor to split. If she’d shown up while he was here . . .
She hadn’t. But she’s coming soon.
He locks the door and goes to the darkened patient examination room with a window facing the subway entrance. He watches Brooks pause to light a cigarette, shielding the flame from the precipitation.
Get moving, man! Go!
Slush appears to be freezing on the steps to the elevated subway platform. The doctor ascends with great care and disappears from view above.
Oran watches the stairway until the next Manhattan-bound train rumbles away with Brooks on board. Carla had confided that the doctor—married with five children at home in Oyster Bay—is having an affair with one of the nurses. Not the stacked blonde one, she’d added, as though that were the shame of it all. No, he’s sleeping with the quiet, middle-aged brunette who lives alone in the Village.
Carla, a stacked blonde herself, enjoys office gossip. That’s served Oran well. He’s turned on the charm with her, too, volunteering to cover the phones during her extra-long lunch breaks—a key part of his plan.
Oran grabs Dr. Brooks’s white lab coat hanging on a hook behind the door. It smells of cigarettes and Brut aftershave. He slips into it. The sleeves are a little short. The other girls hadn’t seemed to notice. Such a trivial detail in such a monumental moment in their young lives.
He drapes the stethoscope around his neck. Spotting the doctor’s thick reading glasses on his desk, Oran tries them on and checks the mirror. A blurry man with a brown crew cut gazes back at him, blue eyes masked behind the thick horn-rims.
Square and stodgy. Nice. He practices Dr. Brooks’s commanding stride and mutters to himself, getting into character.
With the first girl, he’d accidentally dropped a “far out” into the conversation. It might have given her pause, though only for a moment, and then he reeled her back in.
Oran has a way with women. With people. Always has.
“That’s my handsome, charming boy. He knows how to wrap everyone around his little finger,” his mother, Pamela, used to say.
He isn’t just good-looking, quick-witted, and charismatic. He’s smart. Genius IQ, just like his Gypsy. Like his mother, Pamela, too, his grandmother claimed, but that was hard to believe. Pamela had been spectacularly stupid, throwing away opportunities just as she’d thrown away her parents, and her son.
He opens a file cabinet’s bottom drawer and reaches way into the back, retrieving a new patient chart hidden inside a long-dead elderly patient’s folder. Pushing the glasses down his nose, he skims the details she’d provided over the phone when she called looking for an appointment while Carla was out to lunch.
She’d given her name, address, and date of birth. When he’d asked which school she attends, she’d asked, “Why do you want to know?”
“Routine question.”
“That seems awfully personal.”
“This is a medical office, ma’am. We hold your information in strictest confidence.”
He’d smiled when she named one of the borough’s Catholic high schools, clinching her place in his plan.
She’d faltered again when he’d gone on to more intimate questions about her menstrual cycles, regularity, and date of her last period, but complied just as the others had. Catholic schoolgirls are trained to comply with authority. They’re also aware that contraception and premarital sex go against the teachings of the church, but shame doesn’t keep them from breaking the rules. God forgives their sins, just as Oran does.
Hearing a knock, he takes off the glasses. He needs to be able to see her. See into her soul to confirm that she’s worthy.
They’re lining up nicely, his girls. She’ll be the third. If all goes as planned, he’ll need just one more.