The Mother of His Child

by Sandra Field

  Marnie went into the kitchen, wrapped the trout in foil and put them in the freezer. Then she mopped up the floor by the front door.

  On Saturday morning at four minutes past eleven, Marnie turned down the curving driveway to the cedar-shingled bungalow on Moseley Street. She was wearing cream-colored trousers and a matching crocheted sweater; her hair shone, and she’d put on more makeup than usual to shore up her confidence. Her heart was jouncing against her ribs like a jackhammer.

  She had absolutely no idea what she was going to say to Kit. Anything she’d tried to rehearse had sounded fabricated, condescending or sentimental.

  She’d wing it. She’d have to.

  That she also had to face Cal this morning she was choosing to ignore. Cal, who a couple of days ago had driven a hundred miles to apologize to her and to ask for her help. One thing at a time, she thought, and got out of the car.

  The fog had rolled back out to sea only an hour ago; little drops of water clung to the pine boughs, sparkling in the sun, and the grass was wet with dew. Early tulips, pink and white, mingled with the dwarf junipers that flanked the stone walk to the front door. Had Jennifer planted them?

  Then the door opened and Cal stepped out into the sunshine. “I thought I heard your car,” he said easily. “How are you, Marnie?”

  He made no move to kiss her or even take her by the hand. Of course not, thought Marnie. Because she was on his turf now. His and Kit’s. And wasn’t that the heart of the dilemma? Kit didn’t want her at all. Whereas Cal wanted her only on his terms: a secretive affair, nothing in the open. She said succinctly, “I’m scared. How about you?”

  “Kit just got up. She’s making pancakes. Why don’t we go inside and join her?”

  “I asked how you were, Cal.”

  “I like that sweater. It has holes in interesting places.”

  Trying hard not to blush, Marnie said, “How are you isn’t a very complicated question.”

  “I’m fine,” he said blandly. “I like the color of your lipstick, too.”

  “It’s called Juicy Tangerine.”

  “It clashes with the tulips.”

  The words were out before Marnie could stop them. “Did Jennifer like to garden?”

  “She did,” he said expressionlessly. “Come on in, I’ll show you around the downstairs before we join Kit.”

  His whole face had closed against her. Marnie stalked past him into the sunlit entrance hall, which led into a living room centered around a fireplace built out of rough-edged beach stones and flanked by bookshelves. The carpet was Oriental, the furnishings an eclectic mix of antique and modern, and the few paintings ranged from landscapes to abstracts. The room looked lived-in, comfortable and welcoming.

  To Marnie, it was infused with the past, with the spirit of a woman who had died too young. In a poignant moment of truth, she sensed she would have liked Jennifer. And perhaps Jennifer would have liked her.

  She couldn’t share this with Cal.

  Cal was discussing the collection of miniature ivory sculptures on the mantel, behaving as though she was a stranger. She could have been a real-estate agent, or someone who’d dropped in for coffee, Marnie thought with an inappropriate spurt of anger.

  He didn’t look nervous. He didn’t look upset. He didn’t even look human, for heaven’s sake.

  And she couldn’t do one thing about it. Not here. Not now.

  “What a lovely room,” she said, and followed him into a dining room whose cherry wood furniture was far from new, yet very beautiful. Absently, her fingers rubbed a nick in the edge of the oval table, on which stood a tall vase of daffodils.

  “Kit did that,” Cal said. “Bashed it with her garden trowel.”

  Marnie’s fingers sprang away. History, she thought, Kit’s history. This house holds everything I’ve missed. Then her gaze fell on an array of family photos on the sideboard. She flinched away from them. “Where is Kit?” she asked, and was proud that she sounded so nearly normal.

  For a moment, she thought Cal was going to comment on her reaction. Then he said formally, “This way. Watch the steps. Our cleaning lady likes to wax the floors until they’re slippery enough to skate on.”

  The stairs led past a sunroom that overlooked the water and was charmingly furnished in bamboo and lavish with plants. Marnie would have liked to sit there with a good book and a cup of coffee, soaking up the sunshine that filtered through the pines. On impulse, she walked into it, admiring the lush fronds of a fern that hung from the roof beam, and the pink waxy petals of a cluster of begonias. Again she was aware of Jennifer’s presence, a presence as welcoming as the house.

  She turned to face Cal, wanting very much to share this with him. But there was something in his stance that made the words die on her lips. She was instantly certain that for him her presence in Jennifer’s house was an intrusion, a reawakening of grief. Marnie’s presence only served to emphasize Jennifer’s absence. Simple. And hurtful in a way that horrified her.

  With every ounce of control she possessed, she said, “Another beautiful room.”

  “Let’s go find Kit.”

  That’s why you’ve come here. Not to invade my personal space. That’s what he meant.

  Fine, thought Marnie, and walked past him down a hallway into the kitchen. So when she came face-to-face with her daughter, her head was held high and her eyes were brilliant as the sunlit sea.

  The kitchen was at the front of the house. Kit was perched on a stool at the counter, a teen magazine propped up in front of her as she poked at a pile of pancakes swimming in a pool of melted butter and syrup. Marnie’s breath caught in her throat. With an inward prayer for wisdom, she said, “Hello, Kit.”

  Kit ignored her almost to the point of rudeness, then mumbled, “H’lo.”

  Cal said, “Coffee, Marnie?”

  “Thanks.” There was a photo on the magazine cover of the latest male heartthrob. Marnie spent five days a week with teenage girls; she began to talk about the blue-eyed icon in the photo, trying to give Kit time to get used to her presence.

  Then she asked Kit’s opinion of his latest movie. “It wasn’t bad,” Kit said, then took another mouthful of pancake.

  Cal put a mug of coffee in front of her. Marnie poured in cream and added sugar. “Were you and your friends able to get tickets for Céline Dion?” she asked. “I heard kids were lined up outside Metro Centre for three days.”

  “Six of us are going,” Kit said, and stirred her syrup with the tines of her fork.

  Kit had yet to look Marnie in the eye. Marnie labored on. Cal, who seemed to have decided that this was between herself and Kit, had picked up the Saturday paper and was making a pretense of reading it. A normal family in their kitchen on a spring weekend, Marnie thought crazily. Whom are we kidding? There’s nothing remotely normal about this. And I’d feel a whole lot better if Cal would get lost. She said, “I’d like to see your room, Kit. Would you show it to me?”

  Kit had just finished the last bite of pancake. “It’s a mess.”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  “Okay,” the girl said grudgingly, and pushed back the stool so it scraped on the pine floor.

  Not looking back to see if Marnie was with her, Kit went out of the kitchen and down a passage that led into another wing of the house. Marnie followed, her thoughts in such a jumble she didn’t notice that Cal, soft-footed, was behind her. Was she pushing Kit too hard? Not hard enough? Should she never have come here, despite Cal’s urging?

  She rather prided herself on her skill in handling adolescents. Today would certainly keep her humble, she decided, and in a single quick glance saw through a partly opened door a bedroom that must be Cal’s—the room he would have shared with Jennifer. Wide bed, view of the cove, the softest of pale rose carpets.

  She wasn’t here today because of Cal. She was here to try to get through to Kit, to build some kind of relationship with her daughter.

  So why should the sight of Cal’s bedroom bother h
er so much?

  CHAPTER NINE

  KIT’S bedroom, although large and sunny, was indeed a mess. A collection of teddy bears was plumped on every available space; posters of rock groups and movie stars were pinned on the walls. The desk was layered with papers, scribblers and books. Marnie looked down at the cover of the book on top of one of the piles. She said, her voice quivering a little in spite of herself, “I read that book when I was the same age as you.”

  “We have to read it. For school. I hate it,” said Kit.

  She had stationed herself against the bookshelves. Back to the wall, thought Marnie, and said in deliberate challenge, “You use that word rather a lot. Hate, I mean.” Kit shrugged. Stubbornly, Marnie persisted, “I’m just trying to get to know you a little, Kit, that’s all, but I guess I shouldn’t have asked to see your room.”

  “I don’t care,” Kit said.

  “I don’t think that’s true. I think you do care.”

  “Think what you like.”

  Marnie said quietly, “You’re behaving atrociously, you know that, don’t you?”

  A flicker of what could have been shame passed through Kit’s deep brown eyes, which were so like Terry’s. Then it was gone, leaving Marnie to wonder if she’d imagined it. She walked over to the shelves with their small array of framed color photographs, her hands clenched into fists as she forced herself to look at them one by one. Kit as a baby in Cal’s arms, a younger and happier Cal, his wife leaning against him. Jennifer. Pretty, as dark-haired as Cal, her smile very sweet. Kit starting school in a little blue dress, her face solemn. Kit and Cal in a canoe, waving their paddles at whoever was taking the picture. Jennifer and Kit at a picnic table, giggling together with an intimacy that hurt Marnie deep inside.

  Looking at the last two more closely, Marnie said, “Those photos were taken at Sandy Lake Park, weren’t they?”

  Kit said, “We always go there the long weekend in May.”

  “So do I, with my friend Christine,” Marnie said, then wondered if it would have been better or worse to have bumped into Kit three years ago, when Jennifer was alive. “I’ve missed so much of your growing up—there’s so much I can never know.”

  Kit pounced. “That was your choice, wasn’t it?”

  “It wasn’t my choice, no,” Marnie said in open contradiction.

  Then she gave a nervous start as Cal spoke from the doorway. “Why don’t you tell Kit what happened, Marnie? About your mother.”

  So he’d been standing there the whole time. Spying on her. She said, “I don’t think Kit wants to hear it. Any more than she wants me in your house.”

  “I think she needs to hear it,” he said.

  She was caught between a rock and a hard place, thought Marnie, glancing from his implacable slate eyes to Kit’s defiantly tilted chin, so like her own. But what did she have to lose? Nothing, by the look of Kit. And everything to gain if only she could break through to her.

  “Cal, I wish you’d get lost,” she said fretfully. “I’m nervous enough as it is, without you listening to every word.”

  “I’m staying. This is about the three of us.”

  “There isn’t any three of us,” Kit cried. “I don’t want her here, Dad!”

  Her. Perhaps that was the unkindest cut of all, Marnie thought, to be nameless. As though she didn’t exist. She said flatly, “My name’s Marnie. I do realize Ms. Carstairs doesn’t cut it and Mother’s definitely out.”

  “And watch your manners, Kit,” Cal said sharply.

  “Sorry,” Kit mumbled, and kicked at the carpet with the toe of her sneaker. She looked very unhappy.

  Marnie had known ever since the confrontation with Cal in the parking lot that in the past thirteen years she’d never stopped loving her daughter. She now was faced with a recalcitrant adolescent rather than an innocent and adorable baby, but that didn’t matter two hoots. She loved Kit. As naturally as the leaves on the trees and as unstoppably as the tides. How could it have been otherwise?

  That was why she was here. And that was why she’d once again tell her story, this time to Kit, the one the story most concerned.

  She did her best. Terry, Charlotte Carstairs, sixteen-year-old Marnie, she described them all, striving to bring them to life in some way that would engage Kit’s sympathies. But her voice sounded wooden, and even to her own ears, her story was just that: a story, fabricated and unconvincing. She saw thinly veiled scorn on Kit’s face and knew in pure panic that she was failing at something that was desperately important to her.

  Twisting the hem of her sweater, she finished awkwardly, “I hardly ever talk about all this, so I’m not used to—all I’m trying to do is show you that I didn’t abandon you, Kit. I couldn’t try to trace you or get you back. Dave would’ve been fired from the only kind of job he knew and he had four sons and a wife to support. And Terry would’ve been beaten up. I couldn’t risk that—don’t you see?”

  “Dad and Mum brought me up to take responsibility for my actions,” Kit said with adult precision, for the first time looking Marnie in the eye. “Not to make excuses and tell lies.”

  “You think that whole story was a lie?”

  “You gave me up! I bet you feel real guilty about that. So you’ve got to square it somehow.”

  “You and your father certainly think alike,” Marnie said tightly. “That was his first reaction, too.”

  “I wish you’d go back to Faulkner Beach and stay there! Dad and I are doing fine on our own. We don’t need you. We never did and we don’t now.”

  “If you didn’t need me, Kit, you’d be indifferent to me,” Marnie said strongly. “The one thing you’re not is indifferent. And if you think I’m going to lie down on the floor like a—a hooked rug for you to wipe your feet on, you don’t know me very well. I’m darned if you’re going to walk all over me! You were taken from me without my knowledge or consent, and it broke my heart—so much so that I haven’t as much as looked at a man since then.”

  Kit tossed her red curls, so like Marnie’s, although when she spoke there was an edge of uncertainty in her voice. “Don’t tell me you’re not after Dad. Every woman for ten miles around thinks I need a new mother and he needs a new wife.”

  “This is about the two of us. Leave your dad out of it. And I know exactly what we’re going to do. Next weekend, we’re going to Conway Mills, you and I, and I’ll show you the town where it all happened, and you can talk to people who knew my mother, knew what she was like. Maybe then you’ll believe me.”

  “I’ve got a basketball tournament on Friday and Saturday.”

  “Then we’ll go on Sunday!”

  “I’ll go, too,” Cal said in the kind of voice that brooked no argument. “Kit’s my daughter, Marnie. She’s not going to meet her grandparents—because that would have to happen, wouldn’t it?—without my being there.”

  Dave and Marylou…how could Marnie have forgotten them?

  Because she’d let her emotions get out of hand, that’s how.

  “We can’t go,” Marnie said, defeat thinning her voice. “They were so good to me, so kind. I can’t turn up on their doorstep after all these years with a granddaughter who hates me.”

  “Why don’t you drive there tomorrow and tell Dave and Marylou, and then we’ll all go next Sunday?” Cal suggested. “That way, they’d be prepared.”

  “That way, you can get your stories together,” Kit jeered.

  Marnie glared at her daughter. “That’s enough! Dave and Marylou are as honest as the day is long and far too smart for me to pull the wool over their eyes. Where’s the telephone? I’ll see if they’re home tomorrow.”

  Unexpectedly, Cal started to laugh. “If only you two could see yourselves,” he said. “You’re as alike as two peas in a pod.”

  “Oh, shut up,” Marnie snapped.

  “I’m not like her,” Kit cried.

  Cal crossed the room, put an arm around each of them and pulled them unceremoniously over to Kit’s mirror. Faithfully, it r
eflected two sets of tangled red curls, tip-tilted noses and defiant chins. Smiling unwillingly, Marnie said, “I guess you’re right. Although your eyes are just like Terry’s, Kit.”

  For a moment, open curiosity shone in Kit’s brown eyes. Then it vanished. “Australia’s halfway around the world,” she muttered. “No way he’s getting involved with me.”

  “It’s as near as a jet flight,” Cal said. “But how about one thing at a time—Conway Mills before Australia. Let’s go into the kitchen and you can phone from there, Marnie.”

  His arm was still snug around Marnie’s waist. Although her timing was atrocious, she found herself wondering what it would be like to lean on him the way Jennifer had leaned on him in the photo in the living room, to take strength from him and give to him her own strengths. Comfort him and be comforted.

  Love him and be loved?

  A risk she’d never taken. A risk she’d be a fool to take with Cal, so wedded to his memories of his sweet-faced wife, so protective of his red-haired daughter.

  She pulled free of him. “I’ll have to call information for their number.”

  A couple of minutes later, she was standing in the kitchen listening to the phone ring in a house in Conway Mills, the house that had given her love and companionship while she was growing up. Someone picked up the receiver and a man’s voice said, “Hello?”

  Marnie paled, her free hand gripping the edge of the counter. “Terry?”

  “Yeah…this is Terry.”

  “It can’t be you—you’re in Australia.”

  “Marnie! Great timing. I was going to call you later today and see if we could get together. How are you?”

  “Okay,” she said. “How long have you been home?”

  “Just got in yesterday. Flying to Montreal for meetings all next week, then back on the weekend. After that, Vancouver and Hong Kong.”

  Terry’s energy had always outstripped Marnie’s; he wasn’t one to sit and contemplate the roses. She said, “You haven’t changed.”

  “It’s been five years, Mar,” he said, using her old nickname. “Can we get together? I should’ve written after your mum died, but you know me and letters.”