The Black Sheep’s Baby Read online

  There was a long pause, and then Wood said softly, “Know who I think they’d’ve been proudest of, Lucy? You.”

  She made a sound like a startled horse. “Me!”

  “Yeah, you. Keeping this place going all by yourself, after Rhett and I ran out on you. Think how many generations this farm has been in our family. All the way back to-”

  “Great-great-I don’t know how many greats-Grandmother Lucinda Rosewood, my namesake.” Lucy picked it up, smiling around the ache inside her. “Who once foiled a Sioux raiding party when she set her barn and fields on fire, tied up her baby in her apron and climbed down the well and hid there-”

  “While the fire burned all the way to the river!” everyone chimed in, laughing, on the refrain. It was an old Brown family story, well-loved and often told.

  The laughter died and silence came. Wood broke it with a gruff, “You did-we all know it. It was you who kept it here for us all to come back to.”

  “For a little while, anyway,” Lucy said. She plunked the kettle full of beans down on the stove and turned on the burner, making as much noise as she could to cover up the sounds of knowledge and sadness and inevitability in the room behind her. Just small rustling, shuffling sounds, because no one was about to say out loud what they all knew to be true, which was that, after Lucy, there wasn’t going to be anyone left to keep the farm going. At least, not anyone in this family. The best they could hope for, Lucy knew, was that someone would buy the place who’d want to live in the big white farmhouse and keep cows and sweet-smelling hay in the great old barn. But the fact was, more than likely the farm was going to end up being swallowed by some agribusiness giant with offices in a high-rise in Chicago or Dallas or Kansas City, and the house and barn and all the other corrals and outbuildings would stand empty and abandoned like so many places she’d been seeing lately. Until, one by one, they were torn down, blown apart by a high plains wind, or fell in on themselves from the sheer burden of their loneliness.

  Desperate to banish the images and feeling guilty for the sadness she’d brought upon them all, Lucy turned from the stove with a determined smile. “Hey,” she said lightly, “who knows? Maybe one of the grandkids…”

  Wood gave a hoot of laughter. “Grandkids? Whose? You guys having some we don’t know about?”

  Mike gave a wry snort and spread his hands wide as if to say, Don’t look at me.

  “Rhett’s got grandkids. Lauren’s two boys-”

  “Who’re way out there in Arizona on an Indian reservation. And I doubt Ethan and his rock star are going to be in any hurry to start producing rugrats.” Wood was ticking them off on his fingers. “Ellie and her husband-and weren’t the secret agent twins off in Borneo, or someplace, nabbing orangutan poachers?”

  Mike cleared his throat. “That was last year. They’re in Madagascar now.”

  “Ellie and Quinn are still in the honeymoon stages,” Lucy said defensively. “So are Ethan and his Joanna, for that matter. There’s plenty of time. Nobody’s rushing anybody.” She had a secret horror of becoming one of those mothers who’re always hinting and nagging about grandchildren, as if their children’s sole purpose in life was to provide them with some.

  “And then there’s our Caitlyn…” Wood said that on an exhalation, sitting back in his chair. He shook his head. “I honestly don’t know if Caty’ll ever get married, let alone have kids. She’s too busy saving the world.” Lucy thought that his eyes seemed sad, following his wife as she moved from place to place, quietly setting the table and that Chris seemed unusually pale, her face more than ever like a lovely porcelain mask.

  “What’s Caty doing these days?” she asked, glancing at Mike to see if he’d noticed anything out of the ordinary; if anything was amiss, he’d see it, and they would talk about it later.

  “Who knows?” And Wood added, with a rare flash of impatience, “If she shows up for Christmas, you can ask her. Maybe you can get more out of her than we’ve been able to.”

  “Wood,” Chris admonished softly.

  “I guess that just leaves Eric.” Wood was smiling, now, but too brightly. “You heard from him this year?”

  Lucy shook her head. “It’s early yet. He’ll probably call.” She opened the oven door and reached for the potholders, but Mike was already there, taking them from her and lifting the heavy roasting pan onto the counter.

  “He’ll call,” he said in a low voice, catching her eyes and holding them across the sizzling, crackling pan, through a fog of garlic and spices and oven-roasted beef. “He always does.”

  Lucy held on to the quiet confidence in her husband’s eyes and drew strength from it, as she had so many times before. And she smiled her special smile, just for him, to let him know she appreciated it.

  “So, there you have it,” Wood said, coming upright in his chair in hand-rubbing anticipation of dinner. “No pitter-patter of little feet any time soon. Personally, I’m in no hurry to become a grandparent. Hey-I don’t feel old enough to be a grandparent. I feel like I just got grown-up myself. Frankly, I’m enjoying spending time with my wife.” He reached for her hand as she slipped into the chair next to him. “Anyway, we keep pretty busy, between my classroom full of kids and Chris’s physical therapy patients.”

  “It’s not a matter of being busy,” Lucy said, in between carrying platters and bowls to the table. “Lord knows, we’ve always got plenty to do around here. It’s just-” she broke off, frowning, to survey the table, then finished it as she seated herself. “It’s just too quiet, that’s all. Earl, will you please ask the blessing?”

  He did, since she’d made the “request” in her no-arguments tone of voice, and then everyone was busy passing and serving and tasting and exclaiming about how good everything was. After that, conversation turned to the blizzard that was predicted to arrive later that night, and the new versus the old and familiar Christmas specials on TV.

  It wasn’t until later, when the taillights of Wood and Chris’s car had gone bumping down the gravel driveway to flash bright and then wink out as they turned onto the paved road, that Lucy could finally turn into the comfort of her husband’s arms. “I’m sorry,” she whispered against his chest.

  “Mmph,” said Mike in a tender murmur. “What for?”

  “I didn’t expect to feel like this-not at Christmastime.”

  “Like what?”

  It was a moment more before she could bring herself to say it. “Sad…” And then added quickly, afraid he might misunderstand, “About getting older, I mean. I always thought I’d be like Gwen, so full of laughter, right to the end.”

  “Gwen had her sad moments,” Mike said into her hair.

  “I suppose. I think-” she turned her head to one side so she could listen to his heartbeat and was silent for a moment, drawing strength from that. “I think it’s because everything’s changed, and I haven’t. I still feel exactly the same as I did when I was young, and Mom and Dad and Gwen were alive and all the kids were home and it seemed like the house was always full of people and noise and laughter. I don’t know how to explain…”

  “You don’t have to. You miss the kids. I miss ’em, too.”

  Lucy nodded. She and Mike held each other and listened to the silence together, and after a while she found that the silence didn’t seem quite as lonely as before. “It would be nice to have some grandchildren,” she said, with a laugh and a very small sigh. “To visit now and then.”

  Mike chuckled. “Maybe we could rent some.”

  She wasn’t sure what it was that woke her. She lay for a moment, blinking and disoriented, listening to the howl of wind and the dogs’ excited barking, watching patterns of light and shadows move across the walls.

  “Mike-wake up! Someone’s coming up to the house.”

  They’d fallen asleep watching television, as they often did, Mike stretched out on the couch with a book on his chest and his reading glasses askew, Lucy bundled in an afghan in Gwen’s La-Z-Boy recliner. She righted the chair with a ka
-bump and struggled out of the afghan, at the same time searching with her feet for her house shoes. “Mike! There’s a car coming up the drive. Who on earth do you suppose-”

  “Wha’ time is it?” Scowling at his watch, he answered himself in tones of disbelief. “Almost eleven?” By that time Lucy was halfway across the kitchen.

  She stopped in the service room long enough to grab a coat, which she was shrugging into as she stepped onto the back porch. The cold stabbed at her, making her gasp. The dogs were less frantic now that they’d achieved their purpose and the household had been properly roused. Lucy quieted what remained of the racket with a sharp command, then stood hugging herself as she watched the car lights drive past the front of the house and right around to the back door, the one everybody except strangers always used. Not a stranger, then.

  She had begun to shiver violently, but it wasn’t from the cold. She no longer felt the cold at all, in fact, only a strange numbness.

  The car crunched to a stop near the bottom of the steps, just where Wood and Chris’s car had been parked a few hours before. Lucy found that she was standing at the top of the steps, but when she would have started down, Mike’s arms came from behind to encircle and hold her where she was. The car’s headlights went dark. The door opened, while Max and Tippy, the two Border collies, circled close, wriggling and whining.

  Lucy wondered how she could shake so hard and still stand. She wondered how she would stop herself from bursting into tears.

  The driver-a man-stepped out of the car and slowly straightened. For one brief moment he lifted deep-set shadowed eyes toward them while his hands reached to touch the dogs’ eager, searching muzzles, buried themselves in thick, silky fur. His face was gaunt, hard-boned, a stranger’s face.

  Lucy’s breath caught in a sharp whimper. She could see that his lips were moving and knew he was speaking to the dogs, but she couldn’t hear his voice for the rushing wind inside her own head. She felt Mike’s arms around her, holding her so tightly she could scarcely breathe. She clung to his arms with icy fingers and tried to draw a breath, tried to speak-anything-just to say his name. But she couldn’t. Not even in a whisper.

  He was moving quickly now, almost at a run, not toward her, not toward the house, but around to the other side of the car. Then he was opening up the back door, and for what seemed to Lucy like a very long time he leaned into the car, bending over something inside. Suspense keened in her ears as she watched him take something bulky from the back seat and come back around the car, carrying it by a handle. Something covered with a blanket…

  Mesmerized, Lucy stared at the blanketed something as her son carried it toward her up the steps, slowly, one at a time. It could not be what it seemed to be. It couldn’t. But, two steps below her he halted, swinging the thing from his side to in front of him so that he held it in both of his hands, like an offering in a basket.

  There was no mistaking it; it was an infant’s car seat.

  Lucy tore her eyes from it, then, to gaze into the face of the hollow-eyed stranger. He smiled, though she could tell it was an effort, his teeth showing white in a beard-shadowed face.

  “Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad. Merry Christmas.”

  The breath she thought she’d lost came forth in a rush, but before she could make her lips form a reply, she heard Mike’s voice saying calmly, “You’d better come inside, son. It’s cold out here.”

  Then, somehow, they were all in the nice warm kitchen, and Eric was lifting the infant carrier onto the table. In a daze, Lucy reached out to touch, then carefully lift the soft pink-and-yellow-and-blue blanket that covered it.

  “Her name’s Emily,” Eric said gruffly behind her.

  Lucy said nothing at all. She was gazing down at the face of the sleeping baby, like a single perfect flower in a nest of thistledown.

  “She’s five weeks old,” her son went on in the hard, cracking voice she didn’t know. “And she’s mine.”

  Chapter 2

  E ric knew what their next question would be, and answered it before they could ask. “Her mother’s dead. Died when Emily was born. I’ve been looking after her.”

  And while he was saying that his eyes were moving slowly around the room, seeing it all with a strange sense of déjà vu. Weird, he thought. Not a thing’s changed.

  Not that he’d really thought anything here would have changed, but what he hadn’t been prepared for was that he hadn’t. He’d thought he’d managed to grow up in the ten years or so he’d been on his own, but damned if he didn’t feel exactly the same as when he’d last stood in this kitchen, just a kid, then, and all frustrated and misunderstood yearnings. It was as if time had stood still, as if he’d left home only hours ago, not years. He even felt the same itchy and indefinable sense of guilt.

  Maybe it was the guilt that made it so hard to look at his mother just then. Because he didn’t want to see any new lines around her eyes, unfamiliar streaks of gray in her hair. Didn’t want to see the love, the joy, the anguish he’d caused her plainly written on her face. He imagined she’d be wanting to touch him. Of course she would. She’d never been overly demonstrative, Lucy hadn’t, but she had her little ways. She’d be wanting to reach out to stroke his arm, hug him quick and tight, sniffle and cough and give him that fierce little frown she thought could hide the fact that she was crying.

  It surprised him to realize that, deep down inside, it was what he wanted, too-to feel his mother’s arms around him, soothing his fears away and mending his hurts the way she’d always done when he was a child. It was because he wanted it so badly that he wouldn’t let himself get close enough to her to give her the chance.

  Truth was, present feelings to the contrary, he knew he had changed. He was a long way from being that boy she remembered. He’d seen too much of all the bad stuff she’d tried so hard to protect him from. Yes, he’d come back to his childhood home in order to make his stand, but that had been instinct more than logical thinking, like a cornered animal looking for a tree to climb. In the final analysis he knew this was his battle and his alone, and when it came time for the showdown, he was going to have to fight it alone.

  All of which he meant to explain to them, eventually. Tomorrow. Or was it today, already? He’d lost track of time. Right now, all he wanted to do was sleep. He had to sleep. He’d tell them everything…later.

  “Son. Don’t you think you could have called?”

  Eric heard the anger, no matter how quiet his dad’s voice might be. Dad was angry with him for the way he’d hurt Mom, which was something Eric could understand. Now. In fact, he understood a lot of things he never had before, now that he’d experienced those protective paternal feelings himself, firsthand.

  He rubbed the back of his neck and felt the tiredness there creep right on down into his bones. Bracing himself, he turned to look his father straight in the eyes. “Sorry, Dad. I just didn’t think I could afford to stop. I was afraid that storm was going to catch up with me before-”

  “You didn’t stop?” Lord help him, his mother had found her voice. And it was as sharp-edged and scratchy as he remembered it. He felt an unexpected surge of emotion as she rounded on him, all puffed up like an angry hen. “You mean, you drove all the way here from…what, L.A.? With that tiny baby in the car? Without stopping? Eric Sean Lanagan, I swear-”

  “I stopped when she needed feeding or changing,” he protested. And damned if he wasn’t starting to feel like that kid again, defensive and resentful-until he caught a glimpse of something way back in his father’s eyes, something he’d have sworn was laughter. He managed a smile then, though his face felt stiff with it; it had grown unaccustomed to that particular exercise. “She’s a real good baby-took to traveling like she was born to it. I’m tired, though…” He made no attempt to cover his yawn, then felt his smile turn crooked. “What about it, Mom? Still got a bed here for me?”

  She didn’t say anything for a moment, just looked at him with her chin high and her arms folded across her chest, riled
up and breathing hard. He had the feeling she might be holding her arms like that because she was using them to keep herself together. There was a shiny, fragile look around her eyes that made him want to pull his gaze away from her-only he couldn’t. She looked so tiny…so much smaller than he remembered. He wondered if it was because she’d actually shrunk, or because he’d grown.

  Then…“There always has been, Eric,” she said in a furious, breaking voice. And there was a suspenseful little silence, like the moments between the lightning and the thunder.

  It wasn’t a thunderclap but something much smaller that broke the silence-a series of snuffling, snorting noises. Eric turned toward it-he was well-conditioned to that noise by now-but his mother was there before him, reaching into the nest of blankets in the infant carrier and making crooning sounds. Startled, he glanced at his father, but his dad wasn’t looking at him. His dad was watching his mother as she lifted the little one from her carrier and held her up so they could both look at her…and look, and look, and look.

  Eric stood and watched them all from what felt like a great distance, or-the more apt analogy came to him-as if he were seeing them through the lens of one of his cameras. There was Emily, blinking and squinting the way she did when she was getting herself waked up, working her way through her repertoire of expressions. His father’s expression he couldn’t read at all. But his mother’s…oh, man. His mom’s face was rapt, radiant, beautiful. The everpresent camera in his mind clicked madly away, and his photographer’s heart grieved for the priceless moment…the once-in-a-lifetime shot lost.

  His emotions were a mess, a hopelessly tangled, senseless knot, and because he didn’t want to begin to try to pick those emotions apart, he said gruffly, “Her formula and stuff are in the diaper bag. It’s in the car. I’ll get it.” And he fled from the warmth and love and security he’d come so far to find and plunged back into the darkness he’d grown accustomed to, the darkness and all-enveloping loneliness.