Genuine Lies

pregnancy frightened me, not only because of my age, but the circumstances. I wasn’t afraid of public opinion, Julia, at least not for myself.”
    “It was Victor’s,” Julia murmured, understanding throbbing like a wound in her side.
    “Yes, it was Victor’s, and he was bound by law and church to another woman.”
    “But he loved you.” Julia brought Eve’s hand to her cheek a moment, in comfort. “How did he react when you told him?”
    “I didn’t tell him. I’ve never told him.”
    “Oh, Eve, how could you have kept it from him? It was his child as much as yours, and his right to know.”
    “Do you know how desperately he wanted children?” Eyes dark and bright, Eve leaned closer. “He had never, never forgiven himself for the loss of one. Yes, things might have changed if I’d told him. And I would have trapped him with me with that child as surely as she had trapped him with guilt, God, and grief. I couldn’t, I wouldn’t do it.”
    Julia waited while Eve shakily poured more wine. “I understand. I think I do,” she corrected herself. “I never told my parents the name of Brandon’s father for much the same reason. I couldn’t stand the idea that the only reason he would be with me was because of a child conceived by accident.”
    Eve took one sip, then another. “The child was inside me, and I felt, always will feel, the choice was mine. I ached to tell him, to share it with him even for one day. But it would have been worse than a lie. I decided to go back to France. Travers was to go with me. I couldn’t ask Gloria, couldn’t even tell her when she was so cozily picking out names and knitting booties.”
    “Eve, you don’t have to explain to me. I know.” “Yes, you would. Only a woman who had had to face thatsame choice would. Travers …” Eve fumbled with a match, then sat back gratefully when Julia lit it for her. “Travers understood as well.” She blew out a stream of smoke. “She had a child, yet, at the same time, could never really have him. So, with Travers, I went back to France.”
    Nothing had ever seemed so cold, so without hope as the plain white walls of that examining room. The doctor had a gentle voice, gentle hands, gentle eyes. None of it mattered. Eve suffered through the required physical, dully answered all the necessary questions. She never took her eyes from that plain white wall.
    That was what her life was like. Blank and empty. No one would believe that, of course. Not of Eve Benedict, star, movie goddess, the woman men craved and women envied. How could anyone understand that she would have given anything, at this single moment of her life, to be ordinary? The ordinary wife of an ordinary man having an ordinary child?
    Because she was Eve Benedict, because the father was Victor Flannigan, the child could not be ordinary. The child could not even be.
    She didn’t want to wonder if it would have been a boy or girl. Yet she did. She couldn’t afford to imagine what it would look like if she allowed those cells to grow, expand, become. Yet all too often she did imagine. And the child would have Victor’s eyes. She would nearly collapse with love and longing.
    There could be no love here, and certainly no longing.
    She sat, listening as the doctor explained the simplicity of the procedure, as he promised little pain in his soft, soothing voice. She tasted her own tears as one slipped down her cheek and through her lips.
    It was foolish, unproductive, this emotion. Other women had faced this same crossroads, and traveled it. If there was regret, she could live with it. As long as she knew the choice was the right one.
    She didn’t speak when the nurse came in to prep her.More gentle, competent hands, more quiet words of reassurance. Eve shuddered to think of the women without her funds and resources. Her sisters whose only solution to an impossible pregnancy was some shadowy back room.
    She lay quietly on the gurney, felt only the quick sting of the needle. To relax her, she was told.
    They wheeled her out. She watched the ceiling. In moments she would be in surgery. Then, in less time than it takes to talk about it, she would be out again, recuperating in one of the charming private rooms looking out on the distant mountains.
    And she remembered the way Gloria had looked when she’d thrown her arm over her eyes.
    Eve shook her head. The drug was making her sleepy, floaty, fanciful. She thought she could hear a baby crying. But that couldn’t