Sacred Trust. Meg O'Brien
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starting to get too warm, which is what I get for not layering. At the bar the patrons, mostly locals, carry on easy conversations with one eye on the television on the back wall.
“I want to know about Marti’s baby,” Ben says. “That’s one thing you forgot to mention, Ab—the reason for that Cesareian scar.”
“I didn’t forget,” I say, shrugging. “I just promised her I’d never tell anyone.”
“But she’s—”
“Dead now. Yeah, gee, you know what? I know that.” I frown. “It’s just hard. Anyway, why do you need to know about that?”
“I’m not sure yet. I just have a feeling it’s got something to do with the reason she died.”
“You do, huh?”
Ben’s “feelings” are something I’ve learned not to ignore. He’s known for his intuitive skills, not that he’s like one of those fancy profilers on television. He just thinks things through better than most, while seeming not to move ahead much at all.
Besides, wine has always loosened my tongue. It doesn’t take much on an empty stomach.
“It was a long time ago,” I say after we’ve ordered food. “Back in the eighties. Marti had been working in Central America a lot, so I didn’t see her much. One day she showed up at my door, already in labor. It was shortly after I’d married Jeffrey.”
“She came here? To Carmel?”
“Right. I tried to get her to tell the father about the baby so he could help her, but she was adamant. Said it would be better for everyone concerned if he never knew. She wouldn’t even tell me who the father was.”
“Maybe he was married,” Ben says.
“Maybe.”
“What did she want from you?” he asks.
“Only to stand by her, I think. Her parents had been killed a few years before in a plane crash in Honduras, and except for Ned, that left her pretty much alone in the world. She never had much time for making close friends, with all the traveling and the kind of work she did.”
“So you were with her throughout her labor?”
“Yes.”
Ben is silent a moment. “What did Jeffrey think of all that?” he asks finally.
“He never knew. He was away when it happened, and Marti swore me to secrecy afterward.”
“Still…wives usually tell their husbands things they keep secret from others, don’t they?”
“Not in this case.”
He doesn’t push, and I don’t have to tell him how little I trusted my husband, even that early in our marriage.
“One thing I don’t get,” he says, shaking his head. “How could she have covered up her pregnancy? Wasn’t she well known by then?”
“Yes, but Marti was always very thin. She was able to hide the fact that she was pregnant, she told me, for the first six months. After that, she took a sabbatical from work and went off to some cabin in the woods.”
“A cabin in the woods? Sounds kind of rough.”
“Marti was used to difficult conditions. She was also very strong.”
“Where was this cabin?”
“I think she said in Maine. A friend loaned it to her.”
“Where was the baby born?”
“Right here in Monterey.”
“At Community Hospital?”
“Yes.”
The waitress sets our plates before us, and Ben toys with the hot turkey sandwich, mushing it around on his plate. “Another thing I don’t get, then, is how she managed to keep the birth of this child a secret for so many years. Especially if she had it in as public a place as CHOMP.”
CHOMP, the Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula, is high-profile because it’s the initial hospital visiting celebrities go to for care.
“First of all,” I say, “she never went anywhere for prenatal care. Marti was into alternative methods of healing, and she knew her body really well. Also, when she went in to deliver the baby, she went through emergency. And paid cash.”
“Cash? That must have set her back a lot.”
“I helped her,” I say, shrugging.
“Ah. That explains it.”
He tastes the sandwich and makes a face. I knew he wouldn’t like it; Ben loves turkey like a Pilgrim, but hates gravy with too much pepper in it. Besides, they’d made it with toast. He prefers mushy white bread.
“Still,” he says, “with computers being what they are, or were even in the eighties, you’d think there would have been a record of the birth.”
“There was a record. For a Maria Gonzalez, from Salinas. You know how many Gonzalezes there are in Salinas? Marti told them she was here in Carmel working as my maid when she went into labor.”
“And she passed? As Hispanic?”
“She had brown hair, brown eyes, and she was dark from all the years of working as a photojournalist below the equator. Plus, she spoke the language. She passed.”
The truth is, most busy doctors and hospitals don’t really look at people as people, anyway. Especially when they’re named Gonzalez and have no insurance.
“I confirmed that she was my housekeeper,” I say, “and the closest thing she had to family.”
“And, of course, since she—or you—paid cash, no one asked too many questions.”
“Right. We figured this would be better than if she went to the county hospital. She’d have had a harder time disappearing into the system there, given the way the government keeps an eye on things. And she might not have had as good care.”
“Your wiles continually astound me.” Ben shakes his head, turning his attention to a hot, chunky slice of garlic bread.
“Send it back,” I say.
“Huh?”
“Send the turkey san back. Tell them the gravy’s too heavy on the pepper and you don’t like it on toast. They’ll give you something else.”
“Nah, I don’t want to bother them.”
“They’re good about those things here, they’ll fix you whatever you want.”
He pushes the plate away. “I’m not really hungry, anyway.”
“We should have gone to the Bully III.”
He gives me a look. But truth be told, I’m not hungry, either. When the waitress comes by again and asks how things are, we tell her they’re pretty good. She takes our plates away and brings us another round of drinks, which suits me just fine.
After dinner we walk south along Sixth Street till we come to the park with the sculpture of an elderly man and woman sitting on a bench side by side, like an old married couple. He wears wingtips, she an old-style hat. The sculpture was donated to the city by an art gallery, after much dissension as to whether or not it was good enough to be put there. Which goes under the heading Only in Carmel.
“You know what pisses me off about them?” I say.
Ben looks at me with obvious surprise. “These old people? What?”
“They look perpetually happy. Nobody’s perpetually happy.”
“Well, maybe they give us something to aim for,” he says, defending the bronze duo.
“Hmmph.”