Читать книгу The Baby Gift - Bethany Campbell - Страница 9

FOR A MOMENT Briana’s gaze locked with Josh’s. There was a wildness in his hazel eyes, a desperation she’d never before seen. In that look she read the depths of his love and fear for Nealie.

She understood his feelings, shared them. She had an impulse to join him and Nealie in their crazy embrace. But she did not. Instead she turned away and let them have their moment.

She bit her lower lip and wished her heart wouldn’t beat so hard that its every stroke felt like a stab wound. The airport looked blurry through her unshed tears, and she gave all her will to blinking them back.

But then she felt Josh’s touch and, helpless, she turned to him. Nealie clung to his neck, and he carried her in his left arm. His right hand gripped Briana’s shoulder.

He said nothing, only stared. His looks had always been a paradox to her, his face both boyish and rough-hewn. The jaw was pugnacious. The nose had a thin scar across the bridge from having been cut in a street fight when he was twelve.

But the eyes under the dark brows were alert and sensitive, and she had never seen such vulnerability in them. Still, his mouth had a crooked, slapdash grin that she knew he put there for Nealie’s sake.

His brown hair was long and not quite even. He had a close-trimmed beard, and the harsh winter had burnished his cheekbones and etched fine lines at the corners of his eyes.

He put his free arm around her. “Briana,” he said. He bent and kissed her on the mouth. His beard tickled and scratched. He smelled of Scotch and airline peanuts. His lips were chapped.

None of it mattered. Something turned cartwheels inside her, and to steady herself, she put her hand on the thick gray fur of his parka.

He drew back too soon, or maybe not soon enough.

He shook his head in mock disapproval. “You weren’t supposed to come for me.”

“She insisted,” Briana said, giving Nealie a shaky smile. “You think I could keep her away?”

Nealie’s arms tightened around his neck. “You came all the way from Russia. We just came from Illyria.”

He shifted her to hold her closer. “It doesn’t matter where we started out, does it, shrimp? We ended up together.”

She smiled and buried her face in his shoulder. He hugged the child and pressed his cheek against her hair. “I love you,” he said. “I’ve missed you. Every day, every night, I’ve missed you.”

NEALIE CHATTERED on the way home, bombarding Josh with volleys of questions. “The people really have reindeer that pull their sleds?”

“Indeed they do.”

“Just like Santa Claus?”

“Pretty much. Except Santa lives in one place. And these people move around.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re nomads.”

“What are nomads?”

“People who move around,” Josh said. “They have to hunt. They have to have fresh grazing for the reindeer. They change places when the seasons change.”

“Why do the seasons change?”

“Because the earth goes round the sun.”

“Why?”

“Because of gravity.”

“What’s gravity?”

“It keeps things fastened down.”

“Why doesn’t it keep the nomads fastened down?” Josh darted a helpless glance at Briana’s profile. She had a strange, sad little smile, but she kept her eyes on the road.

“That’s a good question,” Josh hedged. “I’ll have to think about that one. Ask me again tomorrow.”

Nealie settled more comfortably into her booster seat. She was growing tired, he could tell. He held her hand, and her head lolled against his shoulder.

“Daddy?”

“What, Panda Girl?”

“Why do you always call me Panda Girl?’

She knew the answer to that. It was a game they played. “Because when you were born, you had an extra thumb on one hand. Pandas have extra thumbs.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re special. Everybody loves pandas.”

“Then why’d the doctor cut off my panda thumb?”

“So you’d match on both sides.”

She held out her left hand, staring at it. A small white scar marked the operation. “Why didn’t the doctor put another one on my other hand?”

“He couldn’t find one. Panda Girl thumbs are very rare.”

“I wish I kept the one I had.”

“Naw,” he said and kissed her ear. “Then everybody would have been jealous.”

“Rupert says I was born a freak. That I had too many thumbs and a hole in my heart.”

He resisted to the urge to say what he thought of Rupert. “See,” he said. “Rupert’s clearly jealous. Too bad. Poor old Rupert.”

“Too bad,” she echoed. “Poor old Rupert.”

She dozed off. For a time neither Josh nor Briana spoke. The only sound was the soft stroking of the windshield wipers.

Josh shifted so the child leaned more comfortably against his arm. He took off her glasses and slipped them into the pocket of his travel vest. His parka lay in the back seat, flung atop his bags.

“Does your family know I’m coming?” he asked, trying to keep the sarcasm out of his voice.

“Of course,” Briana said, eyes on the road. “I had to tell them as soon as Nealie knew. She couldn’t keep it secret. Not possibly.”

“Do they know why I’ve come?”

Briana shook her head. Her dark hair swung about the shoulders of her white sweater. “No. I told everybody your assignment was done and you wanted to come back to the States to see Nealie. That’s all.”

He cocked his head, examining her. Oh, she was still something, all right, with her golden skin and exotic eyes. When she was serious, like now, she was a pretty girl. But when she smiled, he remembered, she was dazzling. She had the best smile he’d ever seen. He wondered how long it had been since she’d really used it.

“So,” he drawled, “how’d your family take the news I’d be here? Great wailing and gnashing of teeth?”

“Poppa was polite,” Briana said. “He said you could stay in his guest room if you want.”

“No, thanks,” Josh said and looked out the window on the passenger’s side. Leo Hanlon was a deceptively amiable man, but his true feelings for Josh were as cold as the ice that glittered in the trees.

Josh had almost succeeded at the unthinkable—he had almost taken Briana away from Leo. But the old man had won. He’d won with one of the oldest plays in the game—just when Briana had to choose between the two men, Leo had gotten sick.

“How’s his health?” Josh asked. This time he couldn’t keep the edge out of his tone.

She stared straight ahead. “He’s doing well. He went to the cardiologist last week. His heart’s good. He hasn’t had any episodes lately.”

Episodes, Josh thought sourly, are what you have on soap operas. “But,” he said, “I suppose he can’t work much.”

“No,” she said.

“So Larry oversees the farm.”

“Larry’s a physical guy. He likes it.”

He turned to Briana. “And what about Larry? Did he offer to let me use his guest room?”

“No.” She cast him a cool look. “He hasn’t got one. All his rooms are full of kids.”

“He still thinks of me as the guy who deserted his big sister?”

“He doesn’t change his mind easily.”

No. He’s like a Rottweiler or a water buffalo that way. Once an idea worked its way into his thick skull, it seldom found its way out again.

Josh didn’t really care about Larry’s opinions. But he knew down the line he’d have to grapple with them. As well as the far more complex ones of Leo Hanlon.

“Just when do you plan to tell them?” Josh asked. “About her?” He nodded toward Nealie, who was sleeping with her head on his shoulder. “And about—us?”

Every visible muscle in Briana’s body seemed to tighten. “I don’t want to discuss it now.”

“Have you thought about it? How you’re going to tell them? When?”

Her chin was stubborn. It was a look he knew well. “I said not now. She might wake up.”

As if to prove Briana right, Nealie stirred, rubbed her eyes, murmured something incomprehensible, then nestled against him.

She’s so small, Josh thought, so thin. She wasn’t this thin last time I saw her. She was light as a bird, like a creature with air in its bones.

“You and I,” he told Briana, his voice hard, “have to talk soon. And for a long time. I didn’t come all this way to be stonewalled.”

She nodded without looking at him. “Tonight. When she’s in bed.”

He frowned. “This thing you want to do—another baby—it’s going to cause all kinds of—”

“Shh. Tonight.”

“Fine,” he countered. “Tonight. And where am I supposed to stay? Am I invited to use your guest room?”

She shot him a look. “I don’t have one, either.”

“I’ll sleep on the couch.”

“No. People would talk.”

He sighed in exasperation. She was worried what people thought? She wanted him to father another child for her—like that wasn’t going to make people talk?

She said, “If you don’t want to stay with Poppa, you can stay at the motel. I’ll loan you my truck to get back and forth.”

He groaned. He remembered Illyria’s motel from the photo shoot when he’d met Briana. It was a far cry from the five-star Kempinski in Moscow. Instead of private bars in every suite and a view of the Kremlin, it had a soda machine at the end of the hall and a view of a cornfield.

But that wasn’t what bothered him. What bothered him was that he and Briana had spent their wedding night there. They’d married in a kind of ecstatic haste, too hungry for each other to go anywhere else. They’d made love, then dozed, woke, made love again, and when the sun came up, they made love again.

If Briana remembered, she didn’t show it.

He tried to steer the conversation to neutral ground, not sure they had any.

“The farm’s a success?” he asked.

“Oh, yes,” she said, businesslike. “These days people are careful about what they eat. The more particular they get, the more they like us.”

“No preservatives,” he quoted from memory. “No additives. No artificial fertilizers. Only natural pesticides. No hybrid or patented seeds. The heritage of pure, old-fashioned food.”

“You’ve got it,” she said with a hint of the smile that used to make him crazy with wanting her.

“As George Washington said, ‘agriculture is the most healthful, most useful and most noble employment of man.’”

“Wow,” Briana said. “You really do remember.”

I remember much more. Too much.

“Yeah. I remember,” he said.

“In growing season, we do well at the farmers’ market,” she said. “We always sell out. We have buyers from restaurants as far away as St. Louis.”

He thought about this past growing season. During it he had traveled over half the earth. She’d stayed home and tended her garden. And their child.

She said, “Was it a problem, getting time to come here?”

He shook his head. “No. Gave up a couple of short assignments. Nothing major.”

“Where do you go next?”

He tried to sound casual. “I’m not sure.”

“Are you still tied up with that crazy Adventure magazine?” she asked, an edge in her voice.

“I’ve got one more assignment,” he said. “That’s all.”

She tossed him a displeased glance. “Where?”

“Don’t know. Maybe Burma. An outside chance of Pitcairn Island.”

“Burma?” she asked with alarm. “Pitcairn Island? Josh, those are dangerous places. When would you have to go?”

He shrugged. “Burma? Probably not for a month, maybe more.”

“Burma has terrorists,” she said. “It has land mines.”

“I’ll be careful. Besides, a few weeks in Burma beats months on Pitcairn.”

Briana had said he needed to be in Missouri for at least three weeks. He’d told Carson he wasn’t touching anything for three weeks, and Carson had been bitter because there was money at stake, a lot of it.

From the unhappy look on Briana’s face, he decided the subject needed changing. “So how’s the seed business?”

She seemed relieved to talk of something else. “It keeps me busy. We’ve got a Web site now. And I computerized as much of the business as I could.”

One corner of his mouth pulled down. “Computerized? Didn’t Poppa object to that?”

The ghost of her smile flickered again. “Until he saw the results. He liked the profits.”

“So it’s the same as just after his heart attack. Larry’s the brawn, you’re the brains. In fact, it’s the same as before his heart attack.”

Her mouth went grim. “That’s not fair. He’s never been the same since my mother died. I told you that when we met.”

“Sorry,” he said, but he felt little true sympathy.

Briana’s mother had died two years before Josh came to Missouri. She had been the one with the business mind. She kept the books, made the payments, studied new directions to take the business.

Leo Hanlon had neither the patience nor the sort of mind to take over the job his wife had done. It fell to Briana to do, and she did it brilliantly.

Leo’s bachelor brother, Collin, a true workhorse of a man, died shortly after Leo’s wife did. He had done all the farm’s heavy work.

Without his wife and brother, Leo was nearly helpless. His back bothered him, his joints ached, and he was lonely. He wore his depression like a badge that exempted him from responsibility. He hired out more and more of the physical work. He was a genial man, sweet-natured, but he seemed to Josh to have drifted into a sort of privileged laziness.

“So what exactly is your father doing these days?” he asked, trying to quash the sarcasm in his tone.

She detected it anyway. He could tell by the way her jaw tightened. “He’s owner and president, same as always. This whole business started with his vision.”

His vision, his brother’s sweat and his wife’s smarts, Josh thought. Leo Hanlon’s shaping dream had been a simple but good one. Most important, it came at exactly the right time.

Twenty-five years ago, the time of the small farmer in America was nearly over. People were not merely migrating to the cities, they were swarming there. Big farms gobbled up the small ones, and corporations bought out the big farms.

But America had begun as a country of farmers and settlers. Many who had gone to the cities missed the cycles of planting, growing and harvesting. They missed the feel of dirt between their fingers and the taste of tomatoes fresh-picked and still warm from the sun.

Leo Hanlon might not have succeeded as a farmer, but he prospered as a nurseryman. He supplied seeds and seedlings and potting mixtures to those city-dwellers who still yearned to garden.

But Leo’s true stroke of genius was not to sell just any seeds and plants. He specialized in the old-fashioned varieties with old-fashioned flavor. He was in short, one of the pioneers in heirloom gardening.

The big seed companies often didn’t offer the older classic breeds. Instead, they came up with new, improved, scientifically developed strains. They grew fast, uniformly and well. They just didn’t seem to taste as good.

Heirloom varieties were in vogue again, and across the country a few dozen places like Hanlon Heritage Farms kept gardeners in supply. Leo Hanlon’s mission was good. It was even noble. Josh sincerely admired it.

But Leo himself was a different matter.

When they first met, Josh had thought Hanlon likable, well-intentioned and slightly comic. But Josh had underestimated him.

Leo Hanlon had proved to be the strongest adversary he’d ever met.

The two of them waged a stubborn war, and Hanlon won, hands down. What he had won was Briana.

THE TRUCK PASSED between the gates of Hanlon’s Heritage Farms. We’re home again, Briana thought.

At least she and Nealie were home. She wondered how the farm looked to Josh’s worldly eyes.

The main farmhouse, where Leon lived alone, stood on the hill, a stark shape against the gray sky. Set in the valley was the ranch house Larry had built for his family. There were the old greenhouses as well as two new ones, modern and utilitarian.

Her house was on the next rise, clearly visible through the winter-bare trees. Her brother would be in one of the sheds, tinkering with the tractors. It was that time of year.

Her father would be in the room that served as his office, pottering with his endless notes. Was he watching? Did he suspect anything?

She glanced at Josh, who peered at the landscape, frowning.

“It looks pretty boring to you, eh?” she said. “It’s not exactly Moscow or Paris.”

“That’s not what I was thinking.”

“Oh?”

“I was thinking of the fields. They’d make a nice shot. A black and white abstract.”

Briana looked at the familiar fields. Snow filled the furrows but hadn’t stuck to the black ridges of dirt that ran between. The effect was like a painting, a great, complex design of sensuously rolling stripes.

How wonderfully he sees things, she thought. I think Nealie sees things that way, too.

Nealie stirred. “Are we home yet?” She rubbed her eyes with her fists. Josh took her glasses from his pocket and helped her settle them on her nose. “We’re home, Panda.”

The girl looked out the window, then settled against him with an air of contentment. “You’re really here,” she said to him. “I thought maybe I only dreamed it.”

“No dream, kid.” His voice was gruff. He kissed her tousled hair.

Briana’s emotions made a hard, painful knot in her throat.

“How long can you stay?” It was the third time Nealie had asked him the same question.

“I don’t know. As long as I can. A while, I guess.” For the third time he gave her the same answer.

“Then you have to go back to work,” Nealie said with unhappy resignation.

“But for now, I’m here,” he said. “With you.”

Briana pulled into her driveway, pushed the button to open the garage door and drove in. “I guess we can leave your things in the back,” she said to Josh. “There’s no sense unloading them. You’ll be going to the motel.”

He said nothing. He gave her a look that clearly said, We’ll see about that.

THE MOMENT CAME that Briana had dreaded.

Josh came down the narrow stairs. “She’s asleep.”

Briana stood by the couch, nervously folding the afghan. Josh had been upstairs for almost an hour. He had promised to read Nealie to sleep.

He crossed the room and stopped, looking at Briana. She felt threatened in a dozen conflicting ways. She was glad they had the couch between them, like a barrier.

“It’s time,” he said. “Now we talk.”

She paused, biting the inside of her cheek. At last she said, “Let me pour us some wine. I think I’m going to need a drink for this.”

She moved toward the kitchen, and he moved with her. He said, “Now what’s all this about artificial insemination and healthy embryos?”

Why do you have to start with the hardest question?

She tried to keep her hands from shaking as she took the wine from the cabinet and poured two glasses. But she knew what she had to say. She’d rehearsed it enough. The words came to her lips almost as if someone else were saying them, and she was only mouthing them, a ventriloquist’s doll.

She explained about the Center for Reproductive Health in St. Louis. There specialists could fertilize a group of eggs in vitro, a test tube union. The fertilized eggs would grow and divide until they produced what was called a blastocyst or pre-embryo.

When the pre-embryos were three days old, geneticists would test to see whether they showed signs of Yates’s anemia. If a fertilized egg was healthy, it could be placed in the mother’s womb before the end of the week.

“So that’s it,” Briana finished. “It’s pretty simple, really.”

“It’s anything but simple,” Josh said.

She shrugged and moved to the living room, wineglass in hand. She sat in the easy chair so he would be forced to sit on the couch. She crossed her legs. “Should I explain it again? I—I have some brochures and magazine articles and things if you want—”

He cut her off with a sharp gesture of his free hand. “The science I understand. At least well enough. It’s the ethics that bother me.”

“What do you want? Your ethics or your daughter’s life?”

The coldness of her voice surprised her. But he didn’t flinch, and his eyes didn’t waver from hers.

“What about the baby?” he demanded. “We bring a child into the world for one reason. To save another child who’s sick. Not because we want him, but because we don’t want to lose the one we’ve got.”

She raised her chin. “I’d love him. You know I would. I love children. I always wanted a big family.”

Josh shook his head. “And what am I supposed to feel for him? I mean, we’re talking about a child who’s mine, too, you know.”

She wished he’d sit down, but he stood in front of her as if rooted in place. She was ready for his argument. She’d anticipated it.

“Your feelings are your own business. But I know you. You’d care for him. You know you would.”

He studied her as if she were a being from another planet. “But suppose, Briana, it doesn’t work.”

She turned her face away so she wouldn’t have to look at him, but he went on, his voice relentless. “Suppose we have this child, but the transplant doesn’t work, and we still lose Nealie. What then? Is it the baby’s fault? Would you still want him? Or every time you looked at him, would you wonder why he was there but Nealie was gone?”

“Don’t talk about her being gone, dammit!”

“And how would he feel? Knowing that he was born not because we wanted a child but we wanted a donor? And, unfortunately, he just didn’t work out.”

She clenched her fist on the arm of the chair until she felt her nails cutting into her palm. “I said I would love this child. That love is without condition. I would love him no matter what happened.”

“Would you love him if he had Yates’s anemia?”

Her head jerked up, and she glared at him. “I’m trying to make sure neither of them has it. That’s the point.”

He turned from her with a sound that was part sadness, part disgust. He walked to the mantel and struck it with the flat of his hand. He swore. “What if none of these hypothetical embryos is healthy? What if they all carry the disease? What do you do then? Flush them away and start over?”

“You can freeze them,” she said, setting her jaw.

“Freeze them,” he mocked. “That’s nice. Do you have any other children? Yes, but they’re in the freezer. They would have been flawed, so we didn’t let them get born.”

“Someday there may be another way to cure this disease.” She shot the words back. “A sure way. Then they could be born and grow up safe.”

“There may not be another cure for years. Decades. What then? We just keep the little nippers on ice for eternity?”

“Someone else could bring them into the world,” she argued. “Someone who couldn’t conceive on their own. It happens all the time.”

“You’ve got all the pie-in-the-sky answers, don’t you?” he said. “I’m not asking for just myself, you know. Other people are going to be raising the same questions.”

“I don’t care about other people,” she said with passion. “I care about my daughter.”

“And your other child, too, of course. The one you want for spare parts.”

She could have slapped his face. Instead she took a long drink of wine. It tasted bitter as gall.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “That was a cheap shot.”

“Yes. It was.”

“But people will say worse things. About us. To us. And to our children.”

“I said I don’t care about other people. And what’s more, they don’t have to know. It’s none of their business.”

He blinked. He set his untasted wine on the mantel. He stared at her in disbelief. “They wouldn’t have to know?”

Her chin shot up. “I mean it. Why would they have to know?”

“Sweetheart, if you’re pregnant and you have a baby, somebody’s going to notice, I’ll guarantee you.”

“They don’t have to know how we did it. The center has a confidentiality agreement. Nobody else ever has to know.”

“And how do you explain this baby? Say we had a wild fling? And then we decided it wouldn’t work, but there’s a baby on the way, so what the hell, you’ll just go ahead and have it?”

“Why not?” she challenged. “People try to reconcile all the time, and it doesn’t work out. One of us got careless, I got pregnant. I wanted another child, so I had it.”

“Good Lord,” he said from between his teeth. “You’re something, you know that?”

“Isn’t it better?” she asked. “It’s a white lie, it’s not meant for an evil purpose. It’s just to protect us—all of us, the whole family.”

He picked up his glass and took a deep drink. “You should have been a lawyer. Your powers of equivocation are wasted on tomatoes.”

She ignored the gibe. “If the truth got out, it’d be a media circus. Other people have done this. They ended up being national news stories. Do you want that? Do you want it for Nealie? Or the baby?”

Suddenly he looked older, and more tired than she’d ever seen him. He rubbed his forehead. “The baby. You talk about this kid like he’s real.”

“He could be a she,” she said.

“Don’t change the subject.” He turned his back to her. He put his elbow on the mantel and leaned his forehead on his hand. “Look,” he said. “I don’t know if I can go through with this.”

Panic flooded her. “But you said—”

“I was in shock. I’m still in shock. None of this seems real.”

“Oh, Josh,” she said, her throat tight. “It’s too real. You’ve seen her. How little she is. How frail.”

He made no answer.

She said, “We have two choices. We can do nothing for her. Or we can do—this.”

He swore.

Desperate, she said, “It’s hard to accept, I know. It’s taken me two months to come to terms with it.”

She knew immediately she’d said the wrong thing. She saw the tension seize his body. For a moment he was as immobile as if turned to stone.

Then he dropped his hand from his eyes, straightened and turned to face her. “You’ve known about this for two months?”

“I—I guess I was—in denial.”

“Oh, please,” he said with contempt, “spare me the psychobabble.”

“If that’s the wrong word, I don’t know the right one.”

“My child’s seriously ill and you waited two months to tell me?”

“I couldn’t face it. I couldn’t talk about it. I couldn’t believe it. I had to think about what to do.”

He glared at her. She knew she deserved it. Tears welled in her eyes.

“I’m sorry. Be as angry as you want. But take it out on me. Not her.”

He put his hand to his forehead again. “Look, I’m still on Moscow time. I’ve got jet lag. Denial’s a lousy word. But I understand what you mean. Maybe I can’t forgive, yet. But I understand.”

She knew what he felt—grief, fright, anger and a terrible sense of isolation. He was full of the same roiling welter of emotions that had overwhelmed her when she’d first learned. And he was clearly exhausted, as well.

“Oh, Josh,” she said. “you need rest. Let me give you the keys to the truck.”

He said nothing, just stood there with his eyes covered.

She rose from the chair, then stood behind it, clasping its back, unsure what to do. “I’d drive you, but I can’t leave Nealie alone. I—I could call Poppa. It’s still early. You could just walk over there.”

He shook his head no. “I don’t want the keys. I certainly don’t want Poppa.”

“Then…”

He dropped his hand and met her gaze. He moved to her with a quickness that belied his fatigue. His hands gripped her shoulders. “What I want,” he said, “is you.”

Then his arms were around her, and hers were around him.

They clung to each other so desperately it was as if they were trying to forge their two bodies into one. She wanted to be as close to him as possible.

“Briana,” he said, “oh, Briana.”

Then his mouth was on hers, as hungry and seeking as her own, and she was lost in her need for him.