undiscovered talent for dealing with the many petty rivalries that surfaced in the office environment. At the end of the day, she and Ron would meet for dinner in Redondo Beach or at the little Italian res-taurant in Lunada Bay's small shopping center to share the day's adventures with each other. When it was finally safe to make love, they did so with an unbridled intensity that was just clearheaded enough for them to use at least three of the many precautions against preg-nancy. That summer, she took nine days of her vacation time right after the long Independence Day weekend and traveled with Ron through the Bahamas. They took their contraceptives with them. Over the months, though, she discovered that she would stare for an instant whenever she saw a pregnant woman, sizing her up, estimating her term. For a while this mystified her, until she realized that she was trying to envision how she would have looked had she not had the abortion. It troubled her to be in an island paradise such as Eleuthera watching pregnant young women, wondering if this one was six months along, that one seven, and was that one exactly six and a half?
In late September she began to wonder when she would have given birth. She estimated that it would have happened some time in mid-October. That's when she stopped looking at preg-nant women and started to observe women with babies.
She said nothing about this to Ron, but one day in October he caught her staring for longer than usual at a blond woman with a tiny red-haired baby in her arms. Its little face peered out over its mother's shoulder, watching the world with the stunned, unfocused expression of every recent immigrant.
'Sweetheart?' he said, reaching across the restaurant table to touch her hand.
'Hmm?' She looked back at him, realized why he seemed concerned, then blushed lightly.
'Don't think about what's past,' he said. 'Whenever you want to, we can go ahead.' Valerie nodded. Her tension relaxed a bit. The woman and child had moved on into the depths of the mall. She smiled with embarrassment. 'It's silly. I feel sometimes as if I'm look-ing for my baby. It's the way I felt when my uncle Lanny died. My mother thought I was too young to attend the funeral, so I never fully accepted that he was dead. I always thought that he had vanished for some reason but that I would someday see him on a local street or in some place far away. Maybe a face in the crowd in a newspaper photograph.' Her voice dropped. 'I never did.'
Ron grasped her hand more tightly. 'It's natural to wonder about the way things might have been. Don't let it detract from what we have right now. We-'
'I'm not,' she said quietly, looking up into his dark brown eyes. 'It's just that if I'd stuck with it, the baby would have been born by now.'
Ron said nothing, held her hand. His concern for her re-flected in his face.
'I'll be all right,' she said. 'I sometimes just wonder how it might have been.'
'Remember, Valerie, what your doctor said about regrets. They're pointless.'
'I know,' she said. 'I'm fine. Really.'
A woman walked past the restaurant patio with three chil-dren in tow. The one on her shoulder wailed loudly as the two older ones orbited around her legs in the midst of some sort of disagreement. The woman's face was haggard with annoyance. Bitterness radiated from her like the sputtering light from a street lamp ready to burn out.
This sad vignette comforted Valerie in a small way. The might-have-beens could always be far worse.
'
The Metagram pager beeped insistently.
Evelyn's hand groped in the darkness over her nightstand. Finding the offending device, she squeezed it until it shut up. She switched on the light to read the liquid crystal message strip. Call re K. Chandler
Picking up the telephone, she punched star-zero-one on the glowing keypad and let the autodialer do the rest.
'This is Dr. Fletcher,' she said when a young man's voice answered at the other end.
'Karen Chandler's husband called,' the voice said. 'Her water broke. They're on their way in.'
'Page Nurse Dyer. I'm on my way.' She rolled out of bed.
Two A.M. on a Sunday morning, she thought. It never fails.
'
The blue Saab roared into life eight minutes later, breaking the residential quiet of the complex. Headlights illuminated the dark alleyway lined with fences and cinder-block walls over which grew ivy and bougainvillea. Even in the bright beams the colors had the grey look of late night. Evelyn sped through the rear entrance of the apartment building, wended toward Normandie, then turned south. Though she might have had an excuse if pulled
