Hagar's Mother (The Bridge Daughter Cycle Book 2)

by Jim Nelson

  “Vaughn,” Hanna whispered. She felt the floor drop out from beneath her.

  “Miz Driscoll,” the man said, still grinning.

  Hanna turned to Deborah Jess. “Don’t listen to him.”

  “Mr. Brubaker petitioned for custody of Ruby,” she said. “The opinion of our office is that he is the most suitable custodian until Ruby’s permanent guardian can be determined.”

  “Vaughn—”

  “Baby,” Vaughn said, his wide grin never wavering. He reached for Ruby. “I’m here for you.”

  Twenty-two

  Deborah Jess motioned toward the green-haired man behind the glass window, who then picked up a phone. A moment later, a uniformed police officer entered the lobby. Ruby remained pressed up against Hanna’s leg.

  “How can you?” Hanna said to Deborah. “He abandoned us six years ago.”

  “You are still married,” Deborah said.

  “He left us,” she said. “He’s not their father!”

  “Mr. Brubaker has demonstrated his financial commitment to the family,” Deborah said, “as well as a biological relationship to Ruby.”

  Hanna grew aghast. The money he’d sent—the checks she’d cashed, absently thinking a little extra pocket money couldn’t hurt and surely would help—she’d never imagined those checks came attached with such taut strings.

  “I pay for their education,” Hanna said. “Rent, food, doctor’s visits. I earn every penny this family needs—”

  “Mr. Brubaker’s contribution is substantial,” Deborah said. “Last year, he provided you with nearly fifteen thousand dollars.”

  The number stunned Hanna for a moment. She never appreciated the sum, only spending the slivers and shards as they arrived.

  “He contributed nothing else,” Hanna said weakly. “Not an ounce of…parenting.” A fleck of spittle flew from her mouth. It sounded like a therapeutic word, the mealy-mouthed terminology of TV child experts, but Hanna grasped for any shield she could wield. “He abandoned us,” she said to Vaughn, knowing nothing would chill the infuriating grin across his face.

  “Abandonment is not cause for divorce in this state,” Deborah said patiently. “He remains your husband and the rightful guardian of your bridge daughters.”

  “I am their mother,” Hanna said. “I am the best person to raise Ruby.”

  “You’ve just been released from police custody for taking your bridge daughter to a Shur Spring,” Deborah said. “In the eyes of this office—”

  “I’ve been through that already. I gave a statement—”

  “We have to factor in all details,” Deborah said.

  Hanna’s father approached her. He touched her arm. “Honey,” he said, “we can fight this, but we can’t fight this right now.”

  “Yes, we can fight this now,” she snapped. “We can fight this right here.”

  “I spoke to Ms. Jess while you were asleep,” her father said. “We need a lawyer.” His touch became a grip. “He has a lawyer,” he said.

  Hanna, wide-eyed and grim, pulse thumping her neck, simmered. Vaughn’s hands were deep in his jeans pockets, elbows akimbo, the hem of his corduroy jacket flared out. His grin signaled his amusement at the display before him. Entertainment, Hanna thought. This is amusing.

  In return of her glare, he shrugged. It was a shrug she’d seen many times. His swagger, his brashness, a cockiness she once confused with self-confidence—when she was young, he made her mouth water. Now she felt the fool for ever getting involved with the man.

  “I talked with Dad,” Ruby said.

  Hanna lowered to one knee. “What did your father tell you?”

  “He has a big house now with a big swimming pool,” Ruby said. “He lives near the ocean. We can go for walks on the sand whenever I want to.”

  Hanna took that in for a moment. It seemed an out-and-out lie. All her time with Vaughn, she never knew him to keep more than five dollars in his pocket thanks to his spendy ways and his constant quest for a big payoff. It was Hanna’s signature on the apartment lease, it was Hanna’s signature on the car loans, it was Hanna’s signature on the financial paperwork for Coit New Bridge School. She had the sterling credit rating—nearly tanked by his inability to pay off the most paltry of debts. She couldn’t imagine Vaughn carrying a home mortgage, certainly not a mortgage for beachfront property. He’s shameless, she thought, telling Ruby this tale.

  But where did he get the money he sent them? The first cashier checks Hanna received she destroyed under the assumption he’d stolen or embezzled the money. Soon, when finances were tight, she deposited the checks in a separate savings account to distinguish them from her earnings. Within a year, she quit using that demarcation and dumped his money into the checking account. Before those checks, Hanna could never keep the account above a few thousand dollars. With his assistance, she thought she might actually be able to save for a better apartment, but new bills always seemed to present themselves, medical bills for the girls, an end-of-year charge from the school to pay for a new roof, and so on. Vaughn’s checks carried them through, always arriving in time for the next unforeseen expense. Now she cursed herself for not shredding every last one of them.

  “I am always your mother,” Hanna told Ruby. “I will always be there for you.”

  Ruby leaned in and whispered in Hanna’s ear, “Father has a girlfriend.”

  “Does he now,” Hanna said aloud, looking up at him. “I’m sure he has a few.”

  “I think it’s only one,” she whispered.

  Hanna gently placed her hands on Ruby’s egg-shaped midsection, feeling the warm child within her womb.

  “I’m going to fight to get you back,” Hanna said. “No matter what he tells you, you remember that.”

  “I don’t want to die,” Ruby whispered in her ear.

  “Repeat what I said,” Hanna said to her.

  Deborah and Vaughn hovered nearby. Hanna resented their pressure, their eyes and ears upon them, the sensation that she must hurry to say these words.

  “Don’t let me die,” Ruby whispered again.

  “What did I tell you?”

  Ruby’s eyes watered up. “I’m so scared,” she whispered with a sticky voice. “Will you help me?”

  “With every breath I have in my body,” Hanna said. “This isn’t over.”

  Hanna hugged her daughter one last time and rose to her feet. Without hesitation, Deborah took Ruby by the hand and escorted her three steps to Vaughn’s side. He mussed Ruby’s hair.

  “That’s my girl,” he told her. “You’re so big now. How many months until your finality?”

  “Five weeks,” Hanna told him. “And you’d better take good care of her.”

  “Are you hungry?” he asked Ruby.

  “I want to go home,” Ruby said. “I want to go back to the farm.”

  “The farm is not a safe place for bridge daughters,” Vaughn announced. He winked at Hanna’s father. “Isn’t that right?”

  Deborah spoke to Hanna. “There will be a hearing in one week to determine Ruby’s legal guardian. That ruling will carry force until Ruby’s finality. Your husband will then have an opportunity to appeal for guardianship of your birth child fifteen days after delivery.”

  Vaughn offered Deborah a handshake. “Thanks for everything.”

  Without another word, he started for the exit with Ruby at his side. Only then did Hanna notice the woman lingering in the hallway, an older woman in a professional skirt and heels holding a designer handbag. She approached Vaughn and Ruby with a warm expression. She wore too much jewelry for Hanna’s tastes, and she imagined the same would be true for her perfume. Out of earshot the woman knelt and spoke to Ruby, presumably introducing herself.

  “Wait—” Hanna called out. “Can he take her out of the city?” she said to Deborah.

  “Ruby can’t leave the state until the hearing is completed,” Deborah said carefully. “That’s the only limitation.”

  Hanna sputtered and looked to her f
ather for help.

  “Can we at least have an address?” he said. “We don’t even know where he lives. We don’t have a phone number.”

  Deborah made a soft frown and adjusted her glasses. It indicated to Hanna she’d made her decision without knowing this basic fact, the absolute and utter distance Vaughn had placed between his life and theirs.

  “You’re required to provide contact information,” Deborah said to Vaughn.

  Vaughn grimaced for the first time since he’d come through the admitting doors. He reached into his inner jacket pocket for a billfold. He produced a crisp white business card and walked it to Hanna’s father. “Phone’s on the front, home address is on the back,” he said. “And yours?”

  “You know how to reach me,” Hanna said.

  “We’re at the Grand Hyatt,” Hanna’s father offered.

  Vaughn looked about the room to make sure everyone was satisfied. Hanna, flustered, was unable to formulate another objection, anything to delay him taking Ruby from her.

  Vaughn made a slight harrumph from the back of his throat. He took his partner by the hand and led her and Ruby toward the elevators. Ruby looked back as they walked down the hallway. She waved goodbye to Hanna.

  Twenty-three

  When Hanna entered the hotel room, her mother’s astonished face made Hanna look down at herself, as though she’d left her blouse unbuttoned.

  “My God,” her mother murmured. “What have they done to you?”

  Exhausted, Hanna mustered the necessary energy to explain to her mother and Cynthia what had transpired at Bridge Protective Services. It tore her up going over the details again. As she went over the details, her father filled in bits here and there. Cynthia unpacked the take-out Mexican food they’d procured earlier that evening. She heated up each carton in the room’s microwave oven.

  “You need to eat,” Cynthia told Hanna. The log-shaped burrito rolled on the hotel plate as she carried it to Hanna.

  “You listen to your bridge daughter,” Hanna’s mother said. “You look emaciated.”

  Wolfing down the carne asada burrito and chicken nachos, both unevenly hot, Hanna felt ashamed. A good mother would not be stuffing her mouth with food at this moment. A good mother would be working on a plan to get her child back from a negligent husband. A good mother would be phoning lawyers or reading legal self-help books; anything to move her closer to her child. A good mother would be grief-stricken, now as disconnected from her child as an amputated limb. Instead, she was pushing forkfuls of beans and rice into her mouth.

  She did not start crying outright, but she did find herself tearing up between bites. Obsessed with the loss and lost in thought, feeling rooked by Vaughn, she did not sense the other three seated about the room silently watching her eat. She ripped away chunks of burrito with her teeth. She swallowed the soggy nacho chips with only one or two bites. She tasted nothing of the meal. A knot of glutinous matter welled in her gut. She knew a stomach ache was coming on. She continued devouring the food.

  Crying and eating was an experience she’d not had since college. She and Vaughn took a few breaks in dating while she was at Berkeley. She used the time to experiment dating the kind of men she assumed were out of her reach. Although she considered herself strong and levelheaded, she was surprised how much the one-night stands and weekend flings affected her. She cried into many dorm-room meals, alone in the dark, thankful her roommate was at the cafeteria or the library.

  Crying and eating ended after college, though. She didn’t even go through it when Vaughn left them six years ago. Angry and eating is a better description of the first meal she had after he abandoned them. She and the girls ate delivered Chinese food and watched The Empire Strikes Back on DVD. The girls rooted along while Hanna picked at her food, her emotionless face made the color of granite by the flickering of the big-screen TV.

  Her mother asked Cynthia to make some coffee. Soon the hotel room’s four-cup drip machine was gurgling and steaming. Hot coffee soothed her swollen stomach. Hanna pushed away the foil wrappers and compostable packaging, sighed, and looked to her family. Only then did she realize they’d been watching her.

  “What do I do?” she asked.

  “We hire a lawyer,” her father said.

  “Do you think Vaughn will try and take Cynthia?” her mother asked. An open box of tissue was on the bed before her. Although the worst of the cold had left her, she still needed to blow her nose and dry her eyes now and then.

  “He might,” her father said. “This custody hearing would be a good time to press his advantage.”

  “Can he do that?” her mother said to him. “Can he use the hearing to take both of them away?”

  Her father shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s why we need a lawyer.”

  “I don’t want to go,” Cynthia said. She sat in the desk chair with her swollen feet up on the bed. She massaged her distended belly with a muscular hand. “He’s not my father.”

  “We’re going to do everything we can to keep you both,” Hanna told her. She leaned forward and put her hand on Cynthia’s side. “How does it feel?”

  “Feels like any day now,” Cynthia said.

  “It’s just some soreness,” Hanna’s mother said. “You’ll be fine.”

  Hanna gathered the remains of her meal and wiped the crumbs off the table with the last napkin in the bag. Only then did she realize she’d eaten her father’s meal, and the small meal intended for Ruby as well. Her father told her not to apologize, he would order something from downstairs.

  Cynthia heaved her feet off the bed and rose to take the trash away.

  “I’ve got it,” Hanna said. “You rest.”

  “I’m still your bridge daughter,” Cynthia said.

  “You look beat,” Hanna said, waving her to remain seated.

  “Hanna,” her mother said firmly.

  Feeling detached from the hotel room surroundings, she watched Cynthia clean off the table and pour her another cup of coffee. Cynthia topped off Hanna’s father’s cup too, then asked if she should brew another pot. He told her it was fine.

  “Get a good night’s sleep,” Hanna’s father told the women. His room was across the hall. “Tomorrow morning, we’ll call a lawyer and get the ball rolling.”

  “Cynthia,” Hanna’s mother said, “help your grandfather turn down his bed.”

  When the door latched with a secure click and they were alone, Hanna’s mother said, “Why does he want Ruby?”

  “I’m clueless,” Hanna said. “After all these years?”

  “Do you think it’s a ploy for money?” her mother said.

  “He talks like he has money,” she said. “He told Ruby he has beachfront property.”

  “He’s lying.”

  “Mom,” Hanna said carefully, “he’s been sending me fifteen thousand dollars a year for the past two or three years.”

  Hanna’s mother gasped. “I thought you were talking pocket money.”

  Hanna searched the pile of detritus that every hotel occupant gathers when only staying a night or two, the pile of paper and trash pulled from one’s pockets and thrown on the surface beside the phone and television. In the pile stood the room bill, credit card receipts, and electronic key cards and the paper envelopes they were issued in. Assorted loose change and junk food wrappers rounded out the mess, remnants of Cynthia’s sporadic but voracious appetite, true for every bridge daughter in the last weeks of pons anno.

  She found Vaughn’s business card in the pile. Hanna held it under the shade of the bed stand lamp to better read the small print. It was a four-color print job on expensive card stock; one of Hanna’s duties at the cosmetic company was to design business cards. “Vaughn H. Brubaker” it read in the bottom left-hand corner. “Upwards Consulting, Inc.” was printed below it, followed by a web site, email address, and multiple phone numbers. A Pacific Palisades address was printed on the back of the card, presumably his home.

  She typed the web site address on her sm
artphone. A professional web site materialized on the small screen. The site featured high-quality stock photography of young beautiful people in business attire standing before whiteboards and presenting charts in meetings. Everyone bore the same white-toothed smile, generic businesspeople engaged in generic business duties. Hanna despised stock business photography and its bland, sterile depiction of corporate life. A corporate job could be bland and sterile, yes, but no one smiled so widely and no one was quite this beautiful.

  “If it’s not about the money,” her mother said, “what is he up to?”

  “Dear God.” Hanna lowered the phone to stare across the room at her mother. “He’s a motivational speaker.”

  Vaughn spoke at sales conferences, corporate events, business seminars—any professional setting whose attendees sought an edge over the competition. Vaughn’s gift of gab had finally landed him a paying job. Vaughn was paid tens of thousands of dollars to talk while roomfuls of people listened. He’d found his dream job.

  “Do you think he planned this?” Hanna’s mother said.

  “What’s that?” Hanna said. She’d returned her gaze to the web site.

  “Do you think he mailed you those checks as a kind of, I don’t know, insurance?” her mother asked. “Look at what those checks gave him. He could present the stubs to a court or an agency as proof he was still supporting his family.”

  “Even though he was nowhere to be found,” Hanna said, nodding. “If he’s making as much money as I think, a thousand or two a month might not be much.” She laughed a sterile laugh. “Vaughn Brubaker, motivational speaker.”

  “I know you don’t want to hear this,” her mother said, “but Vaughn has Ruby now. He might try and take Cynthia away from you too. But remember, their finalities are in four weeks. Those girls are going to pass away no matter what the judge decides.”

  Hanna, drained, near-empty, and exhausted, sat on the bed beside her reclining mother.