Swimming Naked

by Laura Branchflower

  “You didn’t call to check on him?” Anger bloomed within him. “I had him for five days.”

  “Mama,” Liam said, peeking out at her before once again burying his face against his father’s neck.

  “She had my number. It wasn’t like he would know if I was calling.”

  Phil bent down to a knee. “Let’s take your coat off.”

  “How was he? You kept him at your house?”

  “Mama!” Liam waved at her, something Katie had taught him to do over the course of the past few days.

  “Hi, handsome.” She crouched down beside Phil. “Are those clothes new?”

  “Do you care about him?” he asked coolly, not looking away from Liam as he removed his hat and jacket.

  “Of course I care about him. What kind of question is that?”

  “A serious one. Wait a second, buddy.” Phil balanced him against his thigh as he pulled his pants down and undid his onesie.

  “You’re going to change him right here?”

  Phil lifted his shirt and then the onesie over his head. “My wife would never have let this happen to one of our children.” He shifted Liam so she could see the teeth imprints clearly visible on his back. “What kind of woman leaves her son with a complete stranger over Christmas so she can go on a vacation?”

  Her face paled beneath her tan. “Who did that?”

  “Suddenly you care?”

  “Of course I care.” She narrowed her eyes as she looked at his back. “That woman was a licensed day-care provider. She watches children every day. And he doesn’t even know what Christmas is. How much do you remember from when you were one?”

  “Next time you plan to go away overnight without him, you tell me,” he bit out.

  “Dadda.” Liam’s brows were pulled together in a frown, and his lower lip began to tremble.

  “It’s okay.” He smiled at Liam, his anger diffusing in response to his son’s reaction. “Daddy is just telling Mommy not to be so selfish.” He ran the back of his knuckles down Liam’s cheek. “Okay?”

  “Mama,” Liam said, turning to Kim as if to make sure she was okay.

  “Hi, baby.” She pulled him into her arms.

  “I’ll see him tomorrow.” Phil came to his feet.

  “What do you mean ‘tomorrow’?”

  “Tuesdays and Thursdays. Starting now.”

  “So, do you think this is permanent? Dad bringing Liam here?” Megan asked later that evening as she sat at the kitchen island watching Lina clean up the remnants of dinner.

  “Yes. Where else would he take him? He’s part of our family now.”

  “But he’s not yours.”

  “No, but he’s your father’s. He’s also my children’s brother.”

  “He’s not the same as a real brother or sister, though. Or a real son to Dad. He doesn’t live with him. Dad doesn’t even like his mother. He regrets ever knowing her.”

  Megan was jealous of him, Lina realized. She hadn’t expected it. But it made sense. He was competition for her father, whom she adored.

  “He’s his son, Megan. Your father will love him as much as he loves the rest of you. It’s just how it is when you have children. You love them all.”

  “I don’t believe that.” Megan looked into the family room, where Phil, Katie, and Logan were watching television. “It’s going to be a little annoying having him around if everyone always has to act so goo-goo over him. It was all about him. Everyone just wanted to make him laugh or smile.”

  “He’s a baby, a baby who has had a pretty traumatic few days. Have a heart.”

  “What happens if something happens to Dad?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know. With his money,” she whispered. “Would Liam get any of it?”

  “If something happened to your father, I would get all the money.”

  “All of it?” Megan frowned. “That doesn’t seem fair. We’re his kids. You’re not even a blood relation.”

  “I’m his wife, Megan,” Lina said, narrowing her eyes at her oldest child, whose ability to say insensitive things seemed boundless. “Everything he has is mine and vice versa.”

  “But you don’t have anything,” Megan said. “You’ve barely worked.”

  “I maintained the home and raised our children so he could make a living and support all of us. It’s a partnership.”

  “I get that, but it doesn’t seem fair that it would be fifty-fifty. The mothering part is so much easier than the working part. It’s not like you have to go to school to be a mom. I could see ninety-ten or something like that.”

  “Well, lucky for me the law isn’t on my daughter’s side.” Lina continued to wipe the counter.

  “What if something happens to both of you?” Megan continued. “Would Liam get anything then?”

  “Nothing is going to happen to us,” Lina said.

  “But in the unlikely scenario it does, I just want to know.”

  “Well, considering he is a blood relation, don’t you think he should?” Lina asked.

  “No.” Megan shook her head. “Because then his mom would get it, and she doesn’t deserve anything.”

  “I see.” Lina slowly nodded. “So, you deserve it because you’re my daughter.”

  “Right,” Megan agreed.

  “But I don’t deserve anything.”

  Megan sighed. “You know what I mean.”

  “No, actually, I don’t. But if something happened to me and your father, your uncle Mike would have all the answers to your questions.” The truth was the estate would be put into a trust and ultimately split equally between Megan, Logan, and Katie, and Liam would be the beneficiary of a generous life insurance policy, but Lina had no desire to share that information with Megan.

  Lina watched Phil swipe through the pictures she’d taken with her phone during the birthday party. There were at least fifty, and a dozen were of Liam smiling as he sat on Phil’s lap in front of his birthday cake. Unlike Logan and Katie, who hadn’t liked the attention a party garnered during their younger years, Liam, like Megan, seemed to draw energy from them. He had been “on” the entire afternoon, charming every adult in the room with his contagious smile and sparkling blue eyes.

  “I wish we had more, you know, from the last year, but it’s a good start.”

  “I have a lot.”

  “You do?” Lina was surprised. He was never the picture-taking type of parent. She couldn’t remember him ever taking pictures of the kids.

  “From Kim. She used to send me one every couple of days. It stopped after the yoga studio incident.”

  “You texted with her every day?”

  “No. I rarely texted her.” He shifted to the side as he took his cell phone from his pocket. He tapped on the display a couple of times before passing her the phone. “She just sent me pictures.”

  Lina tapped away from the pictures and began to scan through old text messages. Most of the messages were from Kim to Phil, with very few going the other way. She’d sent him random updates about Liam, telling him about words he said or whether or not he’d slept through the night, mostly just general information. She sent him a new picture of Liam almost daily. Phil rarely responded unless it was a direct question and then only if it pertained to Liam. There was one text asking him if he’d gotten caught on the backup going into Baltimore after a tractor trailer capsized, spilling its contents all over 95N. There was no reply from Phil. On another couple of occasions, she’d asked him specific questions about his work, whether or not he was working on a particular case she’d heard his firm won. Again, there was no response from Phil. On a few occasions she asked him how his day had been. He handled every occurrence of a non-Liam-related text the same. He hadn’t responded. Even without a response Kim continued to ask questions, not quite daily but at least a few per week. It was as if she was having a one-way conversation, and Lina had no doubt she had been doing it to stay connected to him.
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  “She is so manipulative.”

  “What? What happened?” Phil reached for the phone.

  “I was just reading all the messages she sent you.”

  “What did she say?”

  “They’re your messages. It’s what she said over the past year.”

  “Oh.” He relaxed back into the couch. “I didn’t pay attention unless it was about Liam.”

  “She was trying to have a relationship with you. That’s what all this communication is.”

  “It doesn’t matter what she was trying to do. I wasn’t interested.”

  “It’s still wrong. She’s a terrible, terrible person.” A vision of Liam on the dirty linoleum floor flashed in her mind. “Poor Liam.”

  “I gave you my phone so you could look at his pictures. Not to upset you. Let me see it.” He took the phone and tapped on the display, bringing up a picture of Liam sitting in front of a birthday cake with one burning candle. “Here.” He placed the phone back in her hand and curved his arm around her. “Flip back through them.”

  Lina’s heart constricted as she stared at the photo of Liam with his hair neatly parted on the side. He looked so much like Phil. It had been only a few hours and she already missed him. She began to swipe back through the pictures. There were well over one hundred. There were pictures of him as a newborn, crawling, and standing, smiling, even crying and taking a bath. It was an amazing catalog of Liam’s first year of life.

  Lina blinked back tears when she came to the end. “How come you never showed me any of those? It’s his whole life.”

  “I don’t know. You never asked.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lina whispered later that night. She was lying in bed beside Phil in their darkened bedroom, trying without success to fall asleep.

  “Why? What did you do this time?” he teased.

  “I haven’t been letting you share him with me.”

  “Lina, you don’t have—”

  “No. Let me just say this. It makes me sad that you didn’t have anyone to share him with. His first step, his first tooth, his first word.”

  “We shared his first ‘no’ together.”

  “Stop. I’m being serious.”

  “I am, too. He’s a year old. We have the rest of our lives to watch him grow. You’ve been the selfless one in this relationship, Lina. You’re not going to apologize to me. I don’t accept it. Now, come here and kiss me.”

  Chapter Thirty-one

  The following afternoon Lina was logging off her computer and preparing to leave for the day when William stepped into her office. “Do you have time to make a few mods to the kitchen you sent over earlier? I want to see how it looks with the kitchen island a foot wider and a few more lights above the cabinets.”

  “Sure.” So much for getting a head start to beat traffic.

  “Also, it’s not urgent, but the stone you want for the fireplace—would you figure out if any of the suppliers we have on account carry them?”

  “Okay.”

  “You’re doing a fantastic job, if I haven’t told you.” He paused in the doorway.

  “Thank you and you have. More than once.”

  “Good.” He continued to hesitate in the doorway. He was running his tongue over the edge of his lower lip.

  Lina averted her gaze, cursing Adele in her mind for telling her about his special talent with his tongue. “I’ll get right on the kitchen.”

  “Would you do me a favor?” he asked. “Tell Adele I said hello.”

  “Bastard,” Adele fumed as soon as Lina passed on his message. She’d called her as soon as she was in her car and headed home.

  “Wha—what happened?”

  “What happened? The prick cheated on me. That’s what happened.”

  Lina’s stomach dropped. “I’m sorry. I didn’t even know you were exclusive.”

  “Clearly we weren’t. He went out with someone else.”

  “After you’d agreed not to see others?”

  “No, not officially. But I wasn’t seeing anyone else. I liked the asshole.”

  “But if you didn’t agree to be exclusive, how can you—”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Adele said. “Just tell him to go fuck himself.”

  Lina was still reeling from her conversation with Adele when she arrived home. It had been years since Adele had sounded so upset about a guy. Not even the breakups of her marriages had seemed to faze her, though of course she was the one who’d ended them.

  “Is he coming this weekend?” Logan asked when he saw her. He was standing in front of the open refrigerator.

  “He” was Logan’s code word for Liam. “Liam? No, not this weekend. But he’s going to be here tonight.”

  He frowned. “Why doesn’t Dad just take him out to a restaurant or whatever he used to do?”

  “Because he’s a baby and it’s hard to entertain him in a restaurant. It’s just a couple of hours.”

  “I hate when he’s here.”

  “Liam?” Katie asked, coming into the kitchen from the family room. “I love when he’s here.”

  “How long until dinner?” Logan asked, ignoring Katie, which Lina saw as progress, considering he normally snapped at her when she talked about Liam.

  “Half an hour.” Lina waited until Logan left the room to address Katie. “Why do you have to do that? You know talking about Liam upsets him. Why do you insist on baiting him?”

  “I’m not. I’m just trying to desensitize him to the idea of a brother. I read that if you’re afraid of something, slowly exposing yourself to it breaks down the fear.”

  “He isn’t afraid of Liam.”

  “I still think it will work.” She peered into the oven. “What are you making? There’s nothing cooking.”

  “I ordered in from that new Italian place down the street. Why don’t you set the table?”

  “Why don’t you ask Megan?”

  “Because I asked you, and it’s Megan’s last night here. She’s going back to Charlottesville tomorrow.”

  “I thought she was going back on Saturday,” Katie said.

  “It’s supposed to snow, so she’s leaving early.”

  The sound of the garage door opening alerted them to Phil’s arrival. A minute later Liam ambled into the room, saw Katie, and threw his arms around her legs.

  “Liam!” Katie lifted him into the air and planted a kiss on his cheek. “Let’s go find Knight.”

  “May I say hello to him?” Lina called out as Katie began to leave the room.

  “Sorry.” Katie crossed the kitchen to Lina.

  “Hi, handsome.” She kissed his cheek.

  “Mama.” He smiled and held out his arms.

  “Lina,” she corrected.

  As soon as she took him, Knight trotted into the room, tail wagging. Liam struggled to get down. “Daw!” he yelled. “Daw!”

  Lina set him on his feet, and he instantly went to Knight, blinking his eyes as he averted his face from Knight’s licking tongue while still attempting to pet him.

  “Down, Knight,” Phil ordered as he came in from the mudroom. Knight immediately complied, dropping to his haunches and ceasing his licking.

  “Liam likes to be licked,” Katie said.

  “It’s dirty.” Phil set his briefcase just inside the door, dropped a kiss on Katie’s head, and crossed to Lina. “How was your day?”

  “A little longer than I expected.” She touched the side of his face when he leaned in and pressed his lips to hers. “William has a terrible habit of giving me assignments at the end of the day. I had to order takeout again.”

  “Tell him to stop, that you have a family to take care of.”

  “No, I’m not going to do that. It’s my job. Balancing that with my family isn’t his responsibility. How would you react if one of your lawyers blew off something you wanted them to do so they could get home earlier? And don’t say it’s different because it’s me.”<
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  “It is different. You don’t need this job.”

  “But I like working.” Before he could walk away, Lina hooked her finger into the waist of his suit pants. “I think we can suffer through takeout occasionally.”

  “It’s fine.” He kissed her again. “I’m going to change. Do you have him?” he asked Katie, nodding at Liam, who was touching Knight’s nose.

  “Yep.”

  “I thought Dad would be in a bad mood because of Logan’s history grade,” Katie said as soon as Phil was out of hearing distance.

  Lina’s stomach sank. “Did he get his report card?”

  “I don’t know,” Katie answered, avoiding her eyes. “Come on, Liam.”

  “Katie? What do you know?”

  “Nothing.” She left the room with Liam in her arms.

  Lina ran her hand over her forehead. Logan had told her he’d pulled his history grade up. “Oh, Logan,” she whispered aloud moments later as she sat behind the computer in Phil’s study, scanning the report card that had been e-mailed to her that afternoon. He’d received a D in history. Phil was going to be furious.

  ***

  Two hours later, the sound of Liam wailing greeted Phil when he joined Katie in the kitchen. “What happened?”

  “Nothing,” Katie answered, continuing to help Liam into his coat. “I think he’s sad to be leaving.”

  He continued to cry when Phil lifted him into his arms. “Don’t cry.” He kissed Liam’s forehead. “You’ll be back in two days.”

  “Maybe he knows I’m leaving,” Megan said. “Are you sad because you aren’t going to see me for a few months?”

  Liam responded by burying his face against Phil’s chest.

  “What’s all the crying?” Lina asked, coming from the front of the house.

  “He started as soon as he saw his coat,” Katie said. “He doesn’t want to leave.”

  “Aw.” Lina’s lips turned down. “Come here, Liam.” She held out her arms.

  Phil was surprised when Liam willingly went to Lina, resting his head on her shoulder as he continued crying. As he watched Lina consoling him, he thought of the time Kim left him crying hysterically, opting to go for a run instead of comforting her son.