The Unexpected Wedding Gift Page 11

  He stared off into the distance. “I could change your mind real fast on that, Julia.”

  “How?” she said, her skin pebbling with an apprehension unrelated to the drama taking place in the operating room down the hall.

  “I called Marian again. It was the first thing I did after they’d taken our son into surgery.”

  Strange how the news struck a different nerve from the one it would have attacked three hours ago. Suddenly I called Marian didn’t assume near the same threatening proportions as our son.

  Whose son are you referring to? she wanted to ask him. Yours and mine, or yours and Marian’s?

  Accurately gauging her silence for the dismay it represented, he said, “I sense the volcano is about to erupt. Well, don’t hold back on my account, just go find somewhere else to do it. Oh, yeah, and one more thing. Don’t expect me to come crawling after you begging forgiveness for my crass insensitivity to your finer feelings because it’s not going to happen. Marian had a right to know our child’s ill and I had an obligation to tell her.”

  “Let’s not fight about Marian,” Julia said urgently. “Right now, we should be focusing all our energy on your son. He needs our strength, our love, to help him pull through this. Because, if he should die—” she swallowed the sudden lump in her throat as the unthinkable reared up to confront her “—it will destroy us, Ben. Our marriage will be over.”

  “Is that all he is to you—a passport to marriage?” he said, bleak disgust coating his words with ice.

  “Of course not! That isn’t…!” Horrified that he could even think her capable of such blatant selfinterest, she clapped a hand to her mouth.

  “That’s what it sounded like to me.”

  “What I meant,” she said, her voice trembling, “is he’s part of us, part of the very heart of our marriage. Without him, something vital will be missing.”

  “Couples do survive such tragedies. It has been known to happen, if they’re both pulling together.”

  “But we’ve had so much to deal with already and people can take only so much before they break. I don’t want us to break, Ben.”

  “You could have fooled me. The way you’ve acted at times, this last week—”

  “But it has been only one week, Ben. Not such a long time for me to absorb the changes I’ve had thrust on me.” She touched his arm pleadingly. “When everything first came out on our wedding day, you asked me to cut you some slack, to show some understanding, and I’ve tried to do that. Is it too much to ask that you show me a little patience?”

  “I’ve been patient, Julia. I’ve made allowances. But it hasn’t done me much good.”

  “I’m sorry if I’ve disappointed you,” she said stiffly, annoyed despite herself by his unbending attitude. “Perhaps if I’d known ahead of time how our wedding day would turn out, I could have rehearsed the part you assigned to me. Unfortunately, none of the bridal etiquette manuals I read covered how to respond to the groom handing his wife the unexpected wedding gift of a baby he’d fathered with someone else.”

  Whether or not he’d have replied to that she never learned because just then the surgeon came into the room. “Mr. and Mrs. Carreras? I’m Dr. Burns. I operated on Michael and you’ll be happy to know he came through everything beautifully. It was pyloric stenosis, just as we suspected from the ultrasound.”

  Julia expected Ben to ask questions but he stood there as unresponsive as if he were in a trance, so she said, “Is he going to be all right, Doctor?”

  “Barring complications—which, by the way, I don’t anticipate—he should make a full recovery and you’ll be taking home a much happier baby than the one you brought in tonight. He’s had a rough ride so far, but the worst is over.”

  “May we see him?”

  “For a minute or two, sure. But he’s catching up on his sleep and from the looks of the pair of you, I recommend you do the same. You’ll all be in more of a party mood tomorrow.”

  He led them through a pair of swing doors to a big window looking into the recovery room. White-knuckled, Ben stared through the pane of glass at the tiny figure hooked up to oxygen and IV tubes on the other side. Julia wasn’t sure, but she thought his eyes misted at the sight.

  “He’s tough like his daddy, Ben,” she said, clasping his hand. “He’s going to be just fine.”

  “He has to be,” he said brokenly, gripping her fingers as if they were all that held him together.

  She heard the heartfelt anguish in his voice and when he looked at her, she saw the full extent of his suffering in his eyes. Wordlessly, she lifted his hand and kissed it.

  “You once asked how I’d feel if he turned out not to be mine,” he said. “I didn’t know the answer then, but I do now. I love him—no strings attached.”

  They left soon after, with Julia driving. She waited until they’d cleared the city limits and had picked up speed along the straight, deserted stretch of highway heading south to White Rock before asking, “When did you decide to call him Michael?”

  “When they admitted him to the hospital and I had to fill out a whole bunch of forms.”

  “I didn’t know you’d even thought about names,” she said, striving to control the hurt she couldn’t quite suppress. She’d hoped they’d choose one together.

  “I hadn’t until tonight when it struck me that, for all that I talked about accepting him as my son, in fact I’d done nothing to prove it. I’d given him nothing. To all intents and purposes, he was just John Doe, currently residing at my address.”

  “You gave him a home in the real sense of the word, Ben,” she said gently. “You opened your arms and your heart to him. That means a whole lot more than just giving him a name. You’re a wonderful father.”

  He slumped in his seat. “If I’m so wonderful,” he said bitterly, “how come I didn’t clue in to the fact that there was more to what was going on with him than colic?”

  “How were you supposed to know? You’re new at this. We both are.”

  “That’s no excuse. It’s my job to look out for him. His survival depends on that and I let him down.”

  “Stop blaming yourself,” she said. “You’re human, just like the rest of us. You—”

  But he cut her off with a slash of his hand. “Stop trying to sugarcoat the truth, Julia,” he said, turning his face away. “We both know that if I hadn’t spent so much time trying to keep you happy, I might have realized sooner that he needed medical attention.”

  After that wounding observation, he didn’t acknowledge her presence again for the rest of the trip. In fact, he couldn’t have excluded her more effectively if he’d opened the car door and shoved her out onto the side of the road. She simply ceased to exist for him.

  Felicity must have heard the car pull up outside. Even though they’d called to give her the good news on the baby’s condition before they left the hospital, when they let themselves into the house, she was waiting at the foot of the stairs, her face a study in loving concern.

  Without a word, Ben walked into her arms and took from her the comfort Julia had so badly wanted to give him. More vulnerable than she’d ever seen him, he rested his chin against her grandmother’s head and let loose with a long, heartbroken sigh.

  “Well, dear boy,” Felicity said, stroking his hair, “it’s been a long, trying night but it’s over, that little boy’s going to be just fine, thank God, and we’ve all survived. Go to bed now and sleep late tomorrow with an easy mind because I’ll here to take any phone calls that come in.”

  Watching, and finding herself yet again on the outside looking in, Julia felt all the old resentment churning around inside. This time, though, the anger was directed at herself. What right had she to carp about his having broken her trust when she was guilty of the same sin toward him?

  She’d promised before God to support her husband through all adversity and in the short span of their marriage, had broken her word time and again. Small wonder that when he really needed someone, it wasn’t to h
er that he’d turn. Why would he when she was never there for him?

  Quietly, she slipped down the hall to the kitchen and stood at the window, watching the glimmering reflection of the pier lights on the water and listening for one of those little sounds to which her ear had become so finely attuned. But the house was wrapped in the dense silence of the post-midnight hours and there was no baby upstairs trying to convey to those in charge that all was not well with him. Ben was right; they had both failed in their parental duties.

  After a while, when she thought he’d had time to fall asleep, she followed him upstairs, to the room they’d shared only one other time. She went there not because she thought he’d welcome her into his bed, but because her grandmother occupied the only other furnished bedroom in the house.

  But Ben wasn’t there, although the clothes he’d been wearing lay strewn across a chair. She found him in the nursery, clad in a pair of pajama bottoms and staring at the empty crib. He looked somehow incomplete without that little body held against his broad chest, and so bereft that it was more than she could do not to go to him. Even if he rejected her, she at least had to try to let him know she was there if he needed her.

  For a minute or two, she simply stood next to him, but fatigue had him almost swaying on his feet and when she slipped her arm around his waist, he didn’t object. Docile as a sleepwalker, he let her lead him to his own room and his own bed. Without a murmur, he let her pull the covers over him and turn out the lamp before she went into the bathroom to undress and brush her teeth.

  She hoped he’d have dropped off to sleep when she returned, but knew from his utter stillness that he was staring into the dark with wide-awake eyes. Cautiously, she slipped into bed next to him, aching to touch him, to kiss him—not in the hope of stirring him to passion but because she wanted so badly to absorb some of his pain and make it her own. But he’d drawn that formidable shell of reserve around him and it was more than she dared to try to penetrate it.

  Eventually she drifted off herself, only to awake just before dawn with her head at an awkward angle and her neck aching. He was lying on his side and facing her, with his arm flung across her shoulders. She didn’t know if he’d deliberately put it there or if it happened without his knowing while he was sleeping, but she knew that, stiff neck notwithstanding, she’d rather die than try to move and risk having him withdraw it.

  Felicity was already up and about when he staggered downstairs the next morning. The table in the breakfast area was set for three and the aroma of freshly brewed coffee, underscored with the bittersweet pungency of freshly squeezed orange juice, filled the air.

  “Is that the time?” he croaked, peering at the clock on the wall in shock. “Cripes, I’ve got to phone the hospital!”

  “I already did, dear,” Felicity said, busily whisking eggs in a bowl. “Michael is doing wonderfully well and has been moved to a room on the regular ward. You can go in to see him any time but the nurse did say that if you could bring yourself to wait until after eleven, it makes it easier for the staff to get done everything that has to be done. I’m making omelets, by the way, so what would you like in yours? You’ve got the choice of cheese, onion or mushroom.”

  Last night, he couldn’t have swallowed a crumb but suddenly, in the bright optimistic light of this new morning and with his son on the road to recovery, he was ravenous. “I’ll take all three, thanks just the same.”

  She smiled. “Good. You were getting them anyway.”

  What an elegant, gracious woman she was. “How’d you manage to look so glamorous first thing in the day, Felicity?” he said. “It’s not as if you expected to be sleeping over when you stopped by yesterday, yet here you are with not a hair out of place. I can see where Julia gets her sense of style.” He poured himself a cup of coffee and tried to sound casual when he added, “Speaking of Julia, where is she—or didn’t she bother to let you know?”

  “She’s in the garden, cutting roses. Why don’t you take your coffee and a cup for her, and have a little visit together while I finish up in here?”

  He wasn’t sure he wanted a little visit. Last night had finally impressed upon him the futility of trying to get her to accept his past and move on. The sad but simple truth was, she couldn’t, for all that she’d been so sympathetically concerned over Michael.

  It wasn’t her fault and he wasn’t trying to shift blame, but perhaps it was time they stopped trying to fool themselves into believing they were going to get the happy ending they’d been so sure was theirs for the taking. However, right then, he didn’t have the energy to cope with splitting up, though he was sure, if he asked his mother-in-law for help on the matter, this would be the one time she’d be more than happy to offer advice!

  “You can’t avoid one another indefinitely, you know,” Felicity remarked, watching him from the other side of the breakfast bar.

  “I guess not.” He shrugged philosophically and topped up his coffee mug. “Wish me luck, Felicity.”

  He found her at the bottom of the garden where a climbing rose covered with yellow blossoms had run wild over its supporting trellis. When she saw him headed her way, she froze and watched him as warily as if she thought he might produce a shotgun from behind his back and blow her to kingdom come.

  “Relax, Julia,” he said. “I’m not going to bite you.”

  Not that he’d mind—she looked good enough to eat! Hair tied up with some sort of white ruffled scarf, skin tanned just enough to look as if it had been dipped in honey, mouth soft and pink and perfect…gad, whoever had said breaking up was hard to do didn’t know the half of it!

  “I guess you heard that Michael’s out of the woods,” he said, handing her the coffee.

  She nodded and sort of chewed at her lower lip to keep it from quivering. “Yes,” she said. “I’m very happy and relieved.”

  “You don’t sound it, and you certainly don’t look it. Why the long face, Julia?”

  Her glance flickered to a ladybug crawling up her arm. “I know Michael’s going to recover. I’m afraid our marriage isn’t.”

  Well, that certainly saved him having to be the one to broach the subject! “I’m afraid you’re right,” he said gravely.

  She made a sound at that, a subdued moan that ripped his heart out. “Don’t,” he said, resisting the urge to go to her and take her in his arms because, although she needed comfort, he wasn’t up to being the one to give it to her, at least not right then. His own emotions were too fragile.

  “I wanted us to work out,” she said. “I had such high hopes for us, Ben.”

  He’d never seen her cry before they were married, but since then it seemed to him that was all she’d done, the moments in between were so few and fleeting. This time, though, was different. There were no sobs, no outpourings of frustration or disappointment or needless jealousy. Apart from that one little whimper of distress, she was silent and so were the tears. One at a time, they rolled down her face as smoothly and noiselessly as oil.

  “Everyone does, at least in the beginning. Nobody goes into marriage expecting it’s going to fall apart on them.” He took a mouthful of the scalding coffee and shoved his free hand into his pocket. Anything to keep from going to her, from touching her! “If I’d had any idea of what lay in store for us, I’d never have asked you to marry me in the first place.”

  “It’s my fault—”

  “No,” he said. “If you’re determined to blame someone, blame me. I asked for too much. No man has the right to do that, not to his wife, and not to his marriage.”

  She wiped her fingers over the tears on her cheek. “If I told you that, for me, the worst is over, would it change your mind about us?”

  “Oh, honey,” he muttered, swinging away from her before he gave in to the sudden indecision plaguing him, “it’s never going to be over, don’t you see that?”

  “But I love Michael!”

  “No, you don’t. You want to love him, and that’s not the same thing.”

&nbs
p; “You’re wrong,” she said, and even he had to admit to the conviction in her voice. “Any doubts I might once have had about my feelings for him were resolved last night when I saw him hooked up to all those tubes. If I didn’t know it before, I know now that I couldn’t love him more if he were my own child. I’m ready to be his mother in every sense of the word, Ben.”

  “And what about Marian?” He turned to face her again. “Are you ready to accept the fact that she’ll always be his birth mother? That I’ll never be able to shut her out of our lives completely? That I don’t even want to do that because it wouldn’t be fair to Michael? Can you deal with the possibility that, one day, he’s going to want to know about her and that he’ll never hear me criticize her or the choices she’s made? That I’ll teach him that she’s a good woman deserving of his respect, his gratitude and, if he’s inclined to give it, of his love?”

  “I—”

  “Wait, Julia, I’m not done!” He cut her off, determined to complete the reality check he’d been trying to avoid. To promote any idea that Marian would just quietly disappear if they looked the other way would be like sticking a Band-Aid on a leaking roof: sooner or later, the whole building would collapse. “How are you going to react when Michael asks if she can come to visit him, or if he can go and spend time with her? What are you going to do if he wants to put the birthday cards she sends next to the ones you gave him? Or if he keeps her picture in his bedroom?

  “What if he decides to call her Mother, or Mom? Because all those things could happen, Julia. She might not be the one wiping his nose or kissing it better when he scrapes his knee, or holding the bowl when he throws up, but she’ll always be on the perimeter of his life and, by extension, of yours. She’s a part of him and I’d never ask him to be ashamed of that, or to disown her because she couldn’t raise him herself.”

  She sat on the garden bench under the rose arbor and stared at her hands lying folded in her lap. Examined them for so long that he could practically feel his skin pulling inward in anticipation of the blow she’d surely administer if she had a grain of sense. Because he’d used every bit of ammunition in his arsenal to give her good reason to walk away from him in the belief that the best thing for her would be to start over with someone else who didn’t have his history. Yet still, a part of him wanted her to stay.