Third Degree

Right here in this town. Desperate to avoid thinking of her impending meeting with Starlette, Laurel spun through the possibilities. If you were going to be stuck in a loveless marriage for the rest of your life, that “love child” might be your only link to sanity, or at least to the life that might have been. But could she live a lie for the rest of her life? She had found it difficult enough to lie about even small things over the past year, to bring off the thousand tiny deceptions that an extramarital affair required. The thrill of the forbidden had lasted about three weeks for her, and after that, the lies had begun to produce a sort of psychic nausea. Every lie generated the need for a dozen others-lies and sub-lies, Danny called them-sprouting like heads on an endlessly replicating Hydra. Yet she had worked hard to maintain the charade of normalcy. She’d even become good at it-so good that lying had become automatic. She felt the dishonesty corroding her soul, yet still she lied, so desperately did she need the love that Danny McDavitt gave her.

Yet what she was contemplating now was no simple deception. She wouldn’t be the only one lying. She would be forcing her unborn child into a lie from the moment of its birth. Its very life would be a lie. And what about Warren? He would try to love this baby, but would he actually feel love? Or would he sense something alien in the little interloper in his house? Something inexplicably but profoundly wrong? A disturbing scent? A genetically dissonant sound? A shiver at the touch of skin or hair? And of course, the baby wouldn’t look like Warren-it couldn’t-except by the merest chance.

Laurel actually knew one woman who had done it. Kelly Rowland, a sorority sister at Ole Miss who had become pregnant by a one-night stand while engaged to the boy she had been dating for three years. Kelly’s fiance had been a good, stable, somewhat bland boy of medium attractiveness and excellent financial prospects; in short, the ideal husband for a sorority girl at Ole Miss. Kelly had always insisted that her fiance wear condoms religiously during sex, so it struck Laurel as odd when Kelly allowed one of the house-boys-a devastatingly hot soccer player-to screw her brains out sans protection one night after a candlelight ceremony for one of the other sisters. But when Kelly learned she was pregnant, she had simply moved up her wedding date, scheduled her own candlelight ceremony, and never looked back. That was thirteen years ago, and the couple were still married and living in Houston.

Laurel drew no inspiration from this memory. But what was the alternative? Abortion? How could she abort the child of the man she truly loved? And even if she convinced herself she could bear that, how could she tell her husband she wanted an abortion? You get the abortion without telling him you’re pregnant, said a cold, Darwinian voice. With dread she pictured herself running a gauntlet of antiabortion protesters to sit alone in the waiting room of some distant women’s clinic. She’d have to go at least three states away to avoid any possibility of being recognized, and even then the physician might-

A fist rapped on the window beside Laurel’s head.

She jerked away from the noise like a woman being carjacked, then looked back to see Diane Rivers, the third-grade homeroom teacher, mouthing her name with obvious concern. Diane was a bighaired Southern belle with a heart of gold, almost a throwback to Laurel’s mother’s generation, though she was only forty-three. Laurel had seen pictures of Diane in a glittering sequin unitard as she twirled two batons at a national college competition. Diane made a cranking motion with her hand, meaning that Laurel should roll down her window, though almost no cars had window cranks anymore, at least not in the parking lot of Athens Country Day.

Laurel wiped her tears on the shoulder of her blouse, smearing mascara on the white silk, then pressed the window button. The glass sank into the door with a low whir.

“What’s the matter, honey?” Diane asked. “Are you all right?”

Do I look all right? Laurel silently responded. But what else was someone supposed to ask when they found you crying in a parking lot? Some teachers would have derived savage ecstasy from finding her in this state, but Diane wasn’t one of them. She really meant well.

“I think I’m getting a migraine,” Laurel said. “I’m getting that aura, you know?”

“Christ on a crutch,” Diane said with empathy. “Seems like a long time since you had one.”

“Over a year.” Since before Danny and I got together, Laurel realized.

“Do you think you can handle your conferences? If it was just classes, I’d sit with your kids, but I wouldn’t know what to tell special-ed parents.”

“I’ll be all right,” Laurel asserted, leaning down to lift her purse and computer off the floor. “Sometimes I just get the aura but not the headache. They call that a silent migraine. I’m hoping this is one of those.”

Diane shook her head. “Oh, honey, I don’t know. You don’t have one of those shots with you? The stuff that heads it off?”

“Imitrex? It’s been so long since I had a migraine that I stopped carrying the kit.”

Diane gave her a look of maternal reproach.

“I know,” Laurel said, getting out of her car. “Stupid.”

“You should run to Warren’s office,” Diane suggested. “Get that shot, you know? What’s the use of having a doctor for a husband if you don’t take advantage now and then? I could cover for you till you get back. My homeroom knows I’ll skin them alive if they misbehave.”

Laurel almost laughed. Diane had a glare that could paralyze a mischievous boy from a hundred paces. After locking the Acura, Laurel started toward the Special Students building. “I’ll be all right, Di, seriously. I saw some spots, that’s all.”

“You were sobbing in pain, girl.”

“No…I was just overwhelmed. I really believed I might be over them. That’s why I was crying. Facing reality.”

“Reality’s a bitch, all right,” Diane said under her breath. Then she giggled like a 1950s wife who’d accidentally said shit.

She squeezed Laurel’s wrist as she left the door of the Special Students building. Her touch was oddly comforting. Laurel felt an irrational urge to pour out her heart to the older woman, but she didn’t say a word. Diane couldn’t possibly help with her predicament, even were she so inclined. And Diane was unlikely to feel sympathy for the deranged slut who was cheating on her husband-Diane’s personal physician-and was stupid enough to get pregnant while doing it. Laurel nodded once more that she was okay, then walked down the short hall to her classroom, easily found by the raucous chatter of special-needs kids in the grip of their morning energy.

After an aide escorted her students to the playground, Laurel sat at the round table she used for parental meetings. Sitting across a desk made parents feel they were being lectured to; the round table made them feel like partners in educating their children. Laurel had eleven special-needs children in her program, almost too many, given that she had only limited help from an aide. But Athens Point was a small town, and parents had few options. She hated to turn anyone away. Her kids’ problems ran the gamut from ADD and oppositional/defiant disorder to mental retardation and autism. Handling such a broad spectrum was hard work, but Laurel relished the challenge.

To insure that parental meetings went as smoothly as possible, she kept meticulously organized records during the year, and none was more detailed or better organized than the file on Michael McDavitt. The way to get through this, she thought, is to focus on my second meeting. That way I can keep Starlette at arms’ length-psychologically speaking-until I’m actually facing her across this table.

It was a nice idea, only Laurel couldn’t manage it.

Even when she closed her eyes, she saw the former Tennessee beauty queen sweeping into her classroom wearing her latest catalog purchases, her bleached hair perfectly coiffed, her nails flawlessly painted, her waist pathologically thin, her fancy cowboy boots (which must surely be passe by now) shimmering. Laurel’s negative feelings toward Starlette McDavitt had not begun during the affair. That happened during their first meeting, when it became clear that Mrs. McDavitt saw her autistic son as a burden dumped on her by an unjust God. Starlette had run on for half an hour about how some parents claimed that autism was caused by mercury in government- mandated vaccinations, but deep down she knew it was a divine punishment. Something so deeply destructive simply had to be God’s will, she believed. And it wasn’t necessarily anything you’d done. It could be retribution for some sin committed far back down the ancestral line, rape or incest or something you didn’t even know about. In less than an hour, it had become clear that Michael McDavitt’s primary caregiver was his father, Daniel, who was fifteen years his wife’s senior.

Danny McDavitt was a soft-spoken man a year shy of fifty. He looked younger, but his eyes held a quiet wisdom that bespoke considerable experience. It wasn’t long before Laurel learned that McDavitt was a war hero,