Moonlight Road (Virgin River #11)(96)

Jack got home as fast as he could with no idea what he’d find when he got there. Mel’s moods had been weird, her personality off, her demeanor unpredictable. He’d tried to cope by just playing a little emotional balancing act, then going along as best he could. He’d never been through anything like this with his wife—she was the stable one while he was the one with issues, ranging from a little PTSD from combat to a temper if his buttons were pushed.

But never before had Mel confused him. She’d challenged him, scared him, saved him, but he always understood her. She was the straightest shooter he had known in his life.

When he walked in the house, fourteen-year-old Leslie jumped up from the couch, startled. “Jack!” she said.

“Mel home?” he asked.

“She said she didn’t feel well…. She went to lie down for a while.”

“Kids asleep?”

“Yeah. They should be down another hour. Everything okay?”

“Fine. Carry on. Do whatever fourteen-year-old babysitters do at nap time—talk on the phone, graze in the kitchen, nap, watch TV, whatever…”

“Sure, Jack,” she said with a laugh.

He went to his bedroom, the bedroom he’d carefully soundproofed when he built the house to keep his wonderful, wild, noisy sex with Mel from being heard by kids or houseguests. She was lying facedown on the bed, sobbing.

He sat on the side of the bed and gently rolled her over. Her eyes were swollen, her face wet and splotched. “Jack,” she said in a sob.

“What happened, baby?” he said, pulling her onto his lap.

“Phil and Darla came in with an adoption folder. They asked me to give it to anyone who might need them—to any birth mother looking for a good family for her child. Jack, I was going to hide it from Marley so she’d give the baby to us.” She buried her face in his chest.

“But you didn’t,” he said, stroking her hair.

“But I was going to because I thought the one thing in the world that would make me feel right was a baby. It didn’t really matter where it came from as long as it belonged to me. Belonged to us. Because that way I’d be a woman, a mother. I’d be whole again, like I was when we met….”

Major meltdown, he thought. Long time coming.

“You’re even better than when we met,” he said. “You’re everything. If there’s anything missing, I sure can’t see it.”

“Because you can’t see it,” she said. “But I feel it—there’s a hole where the center of my life used to be. I remember—when I was married to Mark and we couldn’t make a baby by ourselves, I felt like a cripple, but no one could see the limp but me. You can’t know what it was like to drive to the clinic with a vial of sperm kept warm between your br**sts, hoping this one would do it, make the baby…”

“Between your br**sts…?”

‘“Make it romantic,’ the doctor would say. ‘Try to forget this is all science and remember that the science is about you and your husband creating your child….’ We’d almost make love so I could collect the specimen, then jump into my clothes, into my car, rush it to the lab…But, Jack…I felt so unlike other women. So alien, so abnormal and strange. Do you know what the most commonly uttered prayer is? It’s ‘Oh, dear God, why can’t I just be like everyone else?’”

“No one is like everyone else, baby,” he said. “We’re all so different. We all have such different things we need. Such different burdens to carry…”

“I didn’t want to be obsessed with getting pregnant in my first marriage, but when I’d had a hard time for a year or two, it became everything to me. Everything changed when he died, of course—my losses just multiplied. Then I met you and without even meaning to, you filled that spot that had been wanting—filled it with life. Jack,” she said. “Jack, I’m a midwife—giving life, delivering life, it just seems like the foundation. Jack, I miss it. I miss it so much and it’s gone.”

“It’s only changed,” he said. “You have children and you still carry your women through the process. You still bring babies into the world, but more important, women depend on you for their health. You get them through so much….”

“But I want it back, Jack. I’m not done! I want to be the woman you met, the woman you made pregnant without even trying.”

“The woman I made cranky without trying,” he said with a smile.

“I want to bleed again, can you beat that? I should be so happy to be free of periods—but I miss them.”

“I miss them, too,” he said.

“How can you?” she said with a sniff, sitting up straighter.

He shrugged. “So much of my life revolved around your periods—when you had them, when you didn’t, whether you had them…You never had them after our first time in bed together, as it turned out. I was looking forward to arguing about whether it was all right to make love anyway, fantasizing you’d be shy about that while I didn’t care….”

“You have always been way too horny for your own good,” she said.

“Because it was you,” he said. “Your body was always changing, going through phases. Moods.”

“I still have moods….”