Third Degree

“I wish you’d let me hug you,” Danny said. “Don’t you need it?”

She closed her eyes. You have no idea … “Please stick to Michael, okay? What specific changes have you noticed in his behavior?”

While Danny answered, slowly and in great detail, Laurel doodled on the Post-it pad on her table. Danny couldn’t see the pad from where he sat; it was blocked by a stack of books. After covering the first yellow square with spirals, she tore it off and started on the next one. This time she didn’t draw anything. This time she wrote one word in boldface print: PREGNANT. Then, without knowing why, she added I’M above it. As soon as she wrote the second word, she realized she meant to give the note to Danny on his way out. She wasn’t going to tell him out loud—not here. There would be no way to avoid a tense discussion, or maybe something far less controlled.

The note would work. He could dispose of it on the way home, the same way she had disposed of the scrawled missives hurriedly passed to her at her classroom door. Like the e.p.t box she would ditch later today. All the detritus of an extramarital affair. Like that baby you’re carrying, said a vicious voice in her head.

The thing was, she couldn’t be sure the baby was Danny’s. She certainly wanted it to be, as absurd as that was, given their situation. But she didn’t know. And regardless of what Kelly Rowland had done in college, Laurel needed to find out who the father was. Only a DNA test could determine that. She was pretty sure you could analyze the DNA of an unborn child, but it would require an amniocentesis, another thing she’d have to go out of town to have done, if she was going to keep it from Warren. She would have to get some of Warren’s DNA without him knowing about it. Probably a strand of hair from his hairbrush would be enough—

“So, what do you think?” Danny concluded. “You’re the expert.”

For the first time in her life, Laurel had not been listening to what Danny was saying about his son. For more than a year, Michael McDavitt had been her highest priority in this classroom. It wasn’t fair, but it was true. She loved Danny, and because Michael meant everything to him, she had let the boy far inside her professional boundaries. Not that he was more important than the other kids; but until last month, she had believed she would one day become his stepmother, and that made him different.

“Danny, you’ve got to go,” she said with sudden firmness.

His face fell. “But we haven’t talked. Not really.”

“I can’t help it. I can’t deal with us right now. I can’t.”

“I’m sorry.”

“That doesn’t help.”

He stood, and it was clear that only force of will was keeping him from crossing the classroom and pulling her close. “I can’t live without you,” he said. “I thought I could, but it’s killing me.”

“Have you told your wife that?”

“Pretty much.”

A wave of anxiety mingled with hope swept through Laurel. “You told her my name?”

Danny licked his lips, then shook his head sheepishly.

“I see. Has she changed her mind about keeping Michael if you divorce her?”

“No.”

“Then we don’t have—”

“You don’t have to say it.”

She could see that he hated his own weakness, which had brought him here despite having no good news. Nothing had changed, and therefore nothing could change for her. He put his hands in his jeans pockets and walked toward the door. Laurel quietly tore the I’M PREGNANT Post-it off the pad and folded it into quarters. When Danny was almost to the door, she stood.

“Are you sleeping with Starlette?” she asked in a voice like cracking ice.

Danny stopped, then turned to face Laurel. “No,” he said, obviously surprised. “Did you think I would?”

She shrugged, her shoulders so tight with fear and anger that she could hardly move them. The thought of Danny having sex with Starlette could nauseate her instantly. Though he’d sworn he wouldn’t do it, her mind had spun out endless reels of pornographic footage in the lonely darkness before sleep: Danny so desperate from going without Laurel that he screwed his ex-beauty-queen wife just for relief—and found that it wasn’t so bad after all. Laurel was sure that Starlette would be trying extra hard to make Danny remember why he’d married her in the first place. Midnight blow jobs were her specialty. Laurel had dragged this out of Danny one night when he’d drunk more whiskey than he should have. Apparently, Starlette would wait until he was sound asleep, then start sucking him while he slept. Sometimes he wouldn’t wake until the instant before orgasm, and his expression when he’d told Laurel about this said all she needed to know about how much he enjoyed this little ritual. Once or twice she had thought of trying it herself, but in the end she decided it was better not to compete with Starlette at her game; better to stick to her own bedroom tricks or invent some new ones—and she had.

“We’re broken up,” Laurel said. “She’s your wife. I just assumed …”

Danny shook his head. “No. What about you?”

“No,” Laurel lied, hating herself for it, but too afraid of giving him an excuse to make love with Starlette to tell him the truth. Besides … if she admitted to sleeping with Warren—even just twice, which was the truth—the pregnancy would become a nightmare of doubt for Danny.

Danny was watching her closely. Then, as he so often did (and Warren almost never), he read her mind and did exactly what she wanted him to do. He marched up to her and smothered her in his arms. His scent enfolded her, and the strength in his arms surprised her, as it always did. When he lifted her off her feet, she felt herself melting from the outside in. The note stayed clenched in her hand, for until he let go, there was no way to slip it into his pocket. When he finally let her down, she would squeeze his behind, then slide the folded square into his back pocket. She could text him later and tell him to look in his pocket.

He was murmuring in her ear, “I miss you … Jesus, I miss you,” but she felt only the moist rush of air, which sent bright arcs of arousal through her body. As he lowered her to the floor, he slid her crotch along his hard thigh, and a shiver went through her. She would be wet in the time it took him to slide his hand past her waistband. She was thinking of helping him do just that when she saw a dark flash at the window in the door, as though someone had looked in and then jerked suddenly out of sight. She clutched Danny’s arm with her right hand and dragged it away from her stomach.

“Keep hugging me,” she told him. “You’re an upset parent.”

“What?” he groaned.

“There’s someone at the door. I think they saw us.”

Danny’s body went limp, and Laurel patted his back as though comforting him. Then she pulled away and assured him that everything was going to work out eventually, that Michael might make surprising progress before the school year ended. Danny stared back like a lovesick teenager, deaf to her words, his eyes trying to drink in every atom of her being.

“I love you,” he said under his breath. “I think about you every minute. I fly over your house every day, just hoping to get a glimpse of you.”

“I know.” She had seen the Cessna he taught lessons in buzzing over Avalon several times in the past five weeks. The sight had lifted her heart every time, in spite of her vows to forget him. “Please shut up.”

“It’s better that you know than not. I don’t want you thinking there’s anything between me and Starlette other than the kids.”

She felt a surge of brutal honesty. “But what’s the point? Either you talk some sense into your wife, or you may as well start sleeping with her again. This is the last hug we’ll ever have. I mean it.”

He nodded soberly.

“Danny?” she said, realizing that she had not yet given him the note.

“What?”

She moved forward, but now there was a face at the door, and this time it did not retreat. It belonged to Ann Mayer, mother of Carl, the severe ADD case. Ann was staring at Danny with undisguised curiosity.

“To hell with her,” Danny whispered, stepping between Laurel and the door. “What were you going to say?”

“Nothing. Don’t worry about it.”

“It was important. I could tell.”

Laurel waved Mrs. Mayer in, and the door opened immediately. “Michael’s going to be fine, Major McDavitt,” Laurel said, using Danny’s retired rank to put some distance between them.

“I appreciate you saying so, Mrs. Shields,” Danny replied, a note of surrender in his voice. “I’m sorry I got upset like that.”

“Don’t give it another thought. It’s tough raising a special boy. Especially for fathers.”

Mrs. Mayer nodded encouragingly to Danny; at last she thought she understood what she’d witnessed.

“Good-bye,” Laurel said, and then she turned and led Mrs. Mayer over to the round table, not even looking up when Danny closed the door.

“Is he all right?” Mrs. Mayer asked, her eyes hungry for details.

“He will be.”

“Lord, he really lost it, didn’t he? Looked like he flat broke down to me.”

Laurel frowned. “I’m sure he wouldn’t want anyone to know.”

“Oh, of course not. You don’t have to worry about me. I’m just surprised, that’s all.”

“Why?”

“Well, my husband told me Major McDavitt killed dozens of Al Qaeda terrorists over there in Afghanistan. He flew with some kind of commando unit. That’s what the newspaper said, anyway.”

This local legend was partly true, Laurel knew, but in some ways a gross exaggeration. “I think he saved more people than he killed, Mrs. Mayer.”

Her eyes flickered. “Oh, really? Did he tell you that?”

Laurel pulled Carl Mayer’s file from her stack. “No, Major McDavitt taught my husband to fly last year. He doesn’t like to talk about his war experiences, but Warren dragged a few things out of him.”

“Oh, I see,” said Mrs. Mayer, relieved—or bored—to hear the word husband brought into the equation. Laurel could plainly see that in Mrs. Mayer’s eyes, she and Danny made far too natural a couple to spend any innocent time alone.

Laurel felt precisely the same.

FOUR

Laurel was in the middle of her seventh conference when her vision started to go. The rapt face of the mother across the table wavered as though fifty yards of broiling asphalt separated them; then the center of Laurel’s visual field blanked out, leaving a void like a tunnel through the world.

“Oh, God,” she said, in utter disbelief. “Oh, no.”

She had lied to Diane Rivers about having a migraine; now the lie was coming true. Already the blood vessels were dilating, pressing on the cranial nerves, interfering with her vision. Soon those nerves would release compounds that would drop her to her knees in unremitting agony.

“What is it?” asked Rebecca Linton, a woman of fifty with a mildly retarded daughter. “Are you all right?”

Could the pregnancy be causing it? Laurel wondered. She’d read that some women’s migraines worsened during their first trimester, but in other women they improved. It’s probably the shock of finding out I’m pregnant, on top of all the other stress. Ultimately, the cause didn’t matter. But coming on the heels of the positive pregnancy test, the incipient migraine made her feel she was being pursued by furies intent upon delivering retribution for her moral transgressions. A wave of nausea rolled through her, which might be part of the prodrome or merely fear of the crippling agony that would soon lay her low. A shower of bright sparkles burst like fireworks beside Mrs. Linton’s right ear. “Jesus,” Laurel breathed, pressing her fist into her eye socket.

“You’re covered in sweat!” cried Mrs. Linton. “Are you having a hot flash? I mean, you’re too young for it, but that’s what happens to me when I get them.”

Laurel gripped the edge of the table, trying to get her mind around the situation. Best case, she had forty-five minutes before the headache hit. Worst case, fifteen. Just enough time to make arrangements for the kids and get home to her dark and silent bedroom. “I’m afraid I need to cut our meeting short.”

“Of course. Is there anything I can do?”

“Could you wait here and tell my last appointment I had to leave? I’m about to have a migraine headache.”

“Of course I’ll wait, darling. Who’s coming next?”

Laurel looked at her schedule sheet. A blank spot like a bull’s-eye hovered in the middle of it. “Mrs. Bremer.”

“You go on, sweetheart. I’ll call Mary Lou. All us moms are like family now.”

“Thank you so much,” Laurel said, grateful for the graciousness of Southern women. “I don’t get these much, but when I do, they’re severe.”

“Say no more. Go, go, go.”

She picked up her purse and computer case and hurried across the driveway to the elementary building’s office. She told the secretary that she had to leave, then walked down to Diane Rivers’s classroom and poked her head through the open door. Twenty-nine third-graders looked up as one. Diane looked over from her desk and saw instantly that Laurel was in distress. She got up and walked out into the hall, her face lined with concern.

“Migraine worse?”

“Deadly. I have to go home. Do you think you could drop my kids off after school?”

“You know I will. It’s right on the way.”

Laurel squeezed Diane’s hand, then walked to the door at the end of the hall. She was crossing the drive to her car when her aide called out from the playground behind the school, where the children of the parents Laurel had been meeting were playing. Erin Sutherland was a local girl in her early twenties, an education major from USM. Laurel didn’t want to stop—if her students saw her, some would come running—but Erin waved both hands as she jogged to the fence, so Laurel walked over and forced a smile.

“Hello, Erin. Is something wrong?”

“I wanted to tell you one thing. Early this morning, Major McDavitt came out and sat with his son for a while. I figured it was okay since you and he are friends, and I know how much he does for all the kids.”

Laurel nodded warily, then cringed as another wave of nausea hit her.

“The thing is,” Erin went on, “he looked really upset. I think maybe he was crying. Michael definitely was.”

Laurel had known Danny was upset, but crying was totally out of character for him. She looked past Erin, scanning the playground until she found Michael. He was sitting alone on a motionless swing, a small, dark-haired boy with his hands floating before him as he rocked forward, then back, again and again. “Did Major McDavitt say anything to you?”

“No. I went up and asked if everything was all right, but he just kind of waved me away. You know, like, mind your own business.”

“And then he left?”

Erin nodded as though worried Laurel would scold her. Laurel was about to reassure the girl when her cell phone vibrated against her left thigh. It had been so long since Danny had texted her that she ignored it at first. Then she remembered that her clone phone was in her left pocket, and her legit one in her right. The clone was registered to a friend of Danny’s, and Danny paid the bill in cash. Danny also carried a duplicate phone, so that he could speak to Laurel without Starlette finding out about it. This message could only be from Danny.

Laurel patted Erin’s arm, then turned and walked briskly to her Acura, flipping open the Razr as she went. Danny’s text read, Sorry about today. Please call. Star gone to Baton Rouge for the day.

Laurel shut the phone without typing an answer, then climbed into her car and drove quickly out to Highway 24. In her mind Michael still sat on the motionless swing, endlessly rocking. With a stab of maternal guilt, she forced the image from her mind. She needed to drive to Warren’s office and get a shot of Imitrex. But Warren was the last person she wanted to see right now. He rarely noticed when she was angry or upset, but he would have to be brain-dead not to see that she was on the ragged edge of a breakdown today. Besides, she was pretty sure that her old Imitrex injection kit was still at the house, in the back of Warren’s medicine cabinet.

Only … there was Danny’s message to consider. Her pride told her to ignore it, but she had been praying for just such a message for more than a month. And now she’d gotten it. Danny was waiting to hear from her right now. Waiting in his lovely old cypress house on fifty acres at the end of Deerfield Road—less than five miles from where she stood. That was where they’d spent most of their extended time together, except for a couple of overnight trips they’d managed to take last summer. Starlette frequently left town, usually driving to Baton Rouge to shop in the upscale stores there, or to have her hair and nails done in a “real” salon. Her expensive habits had given Danny and Laurel hundreds of hours to get to know each other over the past year, so that instead of a frenetic affair that consisted of hurried sex in cramped and inconvenient places, they’d enjoyed long afternoons taking walks, swimming, riding horses, and even flying together.

The temptation to turn north on Highway 24 was strong. All Laurel had to do was send a reply, and Danny would be waiting in the clearing he had cut out of the forest just for her. Ostensibly a “feed plot” designed to attract deer, the clearing was a circular opening in the trees about fifty feet across, covered with clover a foot deep. Laurel had often lain in that fragrant green lake with Danny inside her, watching the clouds drift from one edge of the sky to the other. To get to the clearing, she used a small gate in the barbed-wire fence that lined Deerfield Road. Danny had given her a key, which she kept in the inside zip pocket of her purse, but whenever he knew she was coming, he unlocked the gate, so that she could nose her Acura through it without even getting out. Thirty seconds later, she would be in the clearing, where Danny sat on his four-wheeler, waiting to chauffeur her up to his house.

Sometimes, sitting behind him, she would open his belt and squeeze him as he drove along the trail. On rainy days, he’d let her drive and cup her breasts to protect them as the four-wheeler bounced along the deep ruts like a tractor crossing rows in a cotton field. If he sensed that she was in the mood, he would rub gentle circles around her nipples as she drove, so that by the time they reached the house, she was well and truly ready.

Laurel shifted on the seat as she stopped for a traffic signal. Five weeks without Danny had given her a constant low-grade ache down low, and sex with Warren had done nothing to alleviate it. The stoplight was a Robert Frost moment: a left turn would take her home; a right would carry her toward Danny’s property. Even with blank spots floating before her eyes, she felt compelled to turn right. Two or three shattering orgasms might just nip her migraine in the bud. But then where would she be? Back in an affair with a man who wouldn’t leave his wife—or his son, rather. Whichever, the result was the same: the second-class citizenship of Other Womanhood.

Laurel turned left and angrily gunned the motor, her mind on the Imitrex waiting at home. As she neared the stately new homes of Avalon, the seemingly idyllic sameness of the place began to close in on her: perfectly manicured lawns, oceans of pink azaleas, well-placed magnolias, brick border walls, wrought-iron gates, and cookie-cutter Colonials that held every antique armoire, top-end deer rifle, and flat-screen television that the upper crust of Athens Point could buy on credit. Much of it had been purchased to distract the owners from marriages in various states of decomposition, or so it seemed to Laurel, who heard the inside story on every couple in the teachers’ lounge at school.

As she turned onto her street, Lyonesse Drive, instinct suddenly got the better of her pride. She took out her clone phone and texted Danny without taking her eyes off the road. She had sent so many text messages in the past year that she could work the keypad as effortlessly as any high school girl at Athens Country Day.

Give me 30 mins, she typed.

Driving as swiftly as she dared between the mountainous speed humps, she slid the Razr back into her pocket. She needed Imitrex in her system as fast as she could get it, but she needed Danny just as bad. Images of past lovemaking fragmented into another shower of sparkles, and she clenched her shoulders against what could be the first hammer blow to the side of her head.

Why am I going to Danny’s place? she wondered. To pour out my heart to him?

So what if she was pregnant? Would Danny abandon his autistic son to take care of a child that only might be his? What if he suggested that she get an abortion? She’d probably kick him in the balls—something to hint at the pain she would have to endure on an abortionist’s table. There was no equivalent analog of the emotional loss she would endure in that case, not for a man.

With that thought, Laurel’s father popped into her mind. This was strange, because she hadn’t seen him for more than three years. God, would he rant if he knew about her situation. At least she didn’t have to worry about that. The “Reverend” Tom Ballard was off on a “missionary trip” in Eastern Europe, an endless one, apparently. He’d tried to explain his goals before he left, but the more he’d told Laurel, the more it had sounded like recruitment for some sort of Christian cult, so she’d tuned out. Her father was a lay minister who’d spent more time and money on other people’s children than he ever had on his own. Nominally Baptist, but really more of a roving tent show built around his own unconventional beliefs, Tom’s ministry was based in Ferriday, Louisiana, forty miles up the river from Athens Point. This one-horse town had also produced Jimmy Swaggart and Jerry Lee Lewis, and Tom carried the spirits of both men within him. Itinerant by nature, he traveled ceaselessly to spread his version of the Good News, which always included music and sometimes involved an intimate laying on of hands.

Laurel’s clearest and most embarrassing childhood memories were of squatting on the shoulders of highways in half the states in the union, while her father tried to repair whatever broken-down junker he happened to be driving at the time. Laurel would wait in mute rage, sweating or freezing as the case might be, while her mother implored her father to let her flag down a passing motorist (translation: a man with more practical sense than the one she’d entrusted her future to). Tom wasn’t a bad man, but he was a poor father. About the only two benefits Laurel had derived from his peripatetic lifestyle were world travel and books. Their rickety old house in Ferriday contained more books than many of the big houses by the country club in Athens Point. She had spent her preteen years reading a moth-eaten Cambridge History of the Ancient World—all fifteen volumes—and vowing to marry a man opposite from her father in almost every way.

In Warren Shields, she had found that man. Warren was so organized that at twenty, he’d kept meticulous records of his mileage and car maintenance. In hindsight, that should have signaled a seriously anal-retentive personality, but to Laurel Ballard, those records were flags marking a safe harbor. Warren hadn’t come from a rich family, but during his first year of medical school he was already buying bargain stocks and calculating which specialties would allow him to retire soonest. (Only later did she begin to see the dark side of these traits, such as being kept on a strict household allowance, one that barely allowed her enough money to buy decent clothes.) Warren also attended a real church with hardwood pews and stained glass, not a one-room saltbox with an aluminum steeple clapped on top with baling wire. In Warren’s church, the congregation spoke softly and needed hymnals to follow the hymns. The minister always acted with great rectitude, and no one ever—ever—danced or fainted in the aisles.