The book disappeared as if by magic. "Can I help you?" Rochelle asked.
Joanna asked for Dr. Donaldson to be paged.
"Are you Joanna Meissner?" Rochelle questioned.
Joanna nodded.
Rochelle's eyes switched to Deborah. "Are you Miss Cochrane?"
"I am," Deborah said.
"I have something for each of you from Margaret Lambert, the comptroller." Rochelle opened a drawer to her right and pulled out two envelopes with cellophane windows. Neither was sealed. She handed them to the surprised women.
After exchanging a covert, conspiratorial smile, the two women peeked inside their respective envelopes. A moment later their eyes met with new smiles.
"Bingo!" Deborah said to Joanna. She laughed. Then she turned to the receptionist and said: "Mille grazie, signorina. Partiamo a Italia."
"The first part means a thousand thanks in Italian," Joanna said. "The rest I'm not sure about. And forget about paging Dr. Donaldson. It's not necessary."
Leaving the confused receptionist, Joanna and Deborah started for the door.
"I feel a little like a thief taking this kind of money out of here," Deborah said sotto voce as they wended through the crowded room. Like Joanna she was clutching her envelope in her hand. She avoided eye contact with anyone, fearing she might be forced to face someone who'd had to mortgage her home to pay for infertility treatment.
"With this many patients here I think the Wingate can afford it," Joanna responded. "I'm getting the distinct feeling this business is a virtual money machine. Besides, it's the prospective clients who are actually paying us, not the clinic."
"That's just the point," Deborah said. "Although I suppose those people choosey enough to demand a Harvard coed's egg can't be hurting for cash."
"Exactly," Joanna said. "Concentrate on the idea that we are helping people, and they, in their gratitude, are helping us."
"It's hard to feel altruistic getting a check for forty-five thousand dollars," Deborah said. "Maybe I feel more like a prostitute of sorts than a thief, but don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining."
"When the couples get their children, they'll be thinking they got the better deal by a long shot."
"You know, I think you are right," Deborah said. "I'm going to stop feeling guilty."
They emerged into the crisp New England morning. Deborah was about to descend the stairs when she became aware that Joanna was hesitating. Glancing at her friend's face she noticed that Joanna was grimacing.
"What's the matter?" Deborah asked with concern.
"I just had a pang down here in my lower abdomen," Joanna said. She gestured with her left hand over the area. "I even felt a twinge in my shoulder, of all places."
"Do you still feel it?"
"Yes, but it's better."
"Do you want to go back and see Dr. Donaldson?"
Joanna tentatively pushed against her lower belly just in from the crest of her left hip. There was a mild degree of discomfort until she let go. Then she got another stab of pain. A whimper escaped from her lips.
"Are you all right, Joanna?"
Joanna nodded. Like the first spasm, the pain had been fleeting except for a remaining mild ache.
"Let's go page Dr. Donaldson,' Deborah said. She grasped Joanna's arm with the intention of leading her back into the Wingate Clinic, but Joanna resisted.
"It doesn't feel that bad," Joanna said. "Let's go to the car."
"Are you sure?"
Joanna nodded again, gently extracted her arm from Deborah's grip, and started down the steps. At first it felt decidedly better to walk slightly bent over, but after a half dozen steps she was able to straighten up and walk relatively normally.
"How does it feel now?" Deborah questioned.
"Pretty good," Joanna asserted.
"Don't you think it would be a better idea to go back in and see Dr. Donaldson, just to be on the safe side?"
"I want to get home," Joanna said. "Besides, Dr. Smith specifically warned me about having the kind of pain I'm experiencing, so it's not as if it's unexpected."
"He warned you about pain?" Deborah asked with surprise.
Joanna nodded. "He wasn't sure which side I would feel it on, but he said I'd have a deep ache with some stabs of sharp pain which is right on the money. The surprise for me is that I didn't feel it until now."
"Did he have any suggestions for what to do for it?"
"He thought ibuprofen would suffice, but he said that if it didn't, I could have a pharmacist call him through the clinic's telephone number. He said he's available twenty-four hours a day."
"That's strange they gave you a warning about pain," Deborah said. "Nobody warned me, and I haven't had any. I think maybe you should have insisted on local anesthesia like I did."
"Very funny," Joanna said. "I liked being asleep through the ordeal. It was worth a bit of pain and the mild inconvenience of having to get three stitches removed."
"Where did you have stitches?"
"At the peephole sites."
"Are you going to have to come back here to get them removed?" Deborah asked.
"They told me any medical person could do it," Joanna said. "If Carlton and I are talking by then, he can do it for me. Otherwise I'll just stop in the health service."
They reached the car and Deborah went around to the passenger side to open the door for her roommate. She even supported Joanna's arm as Joanna climbed in. "I still think you should have had local anesthesia," she said.
"You're never going to convince me," Joanna said with conviction. Of that, she felt sure.
FIVE
A SHUDDER RIPPLED THROUGH the plane signaling the start of a period of mild, clear air turbulence. Joanna lifted her eyes from the paperback book she was reading to glance around the cabin to make sure no one else was concerned. She didn't like turbulence. It reminded her that she was suspended far above the earth, and not being of a scientific mind, she didn't mink it was reasonable that an object as heavy as a plane could actually fly.
No one had paid the few bumps and thuds any notice, least of all Deborah sitting next to her, who was enviably asleep. Her roommate hardly looked her best. Her now shoulder-length mane of almost-black hair was tousled and her mouth was slightly agape. Knowing Deborah as well as she did, Joanna knew she'd be mortified if she could see herself. Although the thought of awakening her passed through Joanna's mind, she didn't. Instead she found herself marveling at the transposition of their respective hairstyles. Deborah's was now long while Joanna had spent the last six months with her hair short, even shorter than Deborah's had been back when they had lived in Cambridge.
Switching her attention to the window, Joanna pressed her nose up against the glass. By doing so, she could see the ground thousands upon thousands of feet below, and just as it had been fifteen or twenty minutes ago, it was featureless tundra interspersed with lakes. Having consulted the map in the airline magazine, Joanna knew they were flying over Labrador en route to Boston's Logan Airport. The trip had seemed interminable, and Joanna was antsy and looking forward to their arrival. It had been almost a year and a half since they'd left, and Joanna was eager to set foot in the good old USA. She had resisted coming back to the States for the duration, despite her mother's recurrent pleading, which was particularly insistent during the Christmas holiday seasons. The holidays were a big deal in the Meissner household, and Joanna missed them, especially when Deborah had gone back to New York to be with her mother and stepfather. But Joanna had been unwilling to face her mother's constant harping about the unmitigated social disaster caused by her breaking off the engagement with Carlton Williams.
As they'd originally planned, she and Deborah had gone to Venice, Italy, to escape the humdrum aspect of their graduate student lives and to make sure Joanna didn't have a relapse into believing that marriage was a necessary goal. At first they lived for almost a week in the San Polo district near the Rialto Bridge in the bed-and-breakfast that Deborah had found on the Internet. After that they'd moved to the Dorsoduro Sestiere on the recommendation of a couple of male university students they'd met on their second day while having coffee in Piazza San Marco. With a bit of luck and a lot of walking, they had managed to locate a small, affordable two-bedroom apartment on the top floor of a modest, fourteenth-century house on a square called Campo Santa Margherita.