The Mother of His Child

by Sandra Field

  Marnie bit her lip, her mouth suddenly dry. “That’s why I was phoning, to see if I could come up tomorrow. Or maybe even today. Terry, something’s happened…the baby, the one we had…she’s here. In the room with me. I—”

  “Spill the beans,” Terry said.

  Using just those same words he had elicited from her all her joys and woes when she was five and ten and fifteen. Frantically, her gaze flew around the sunlit kitchen. Kit was glued to the floor, her mouth hanging open. Cal was standing like a statue in a patch of shadow, tense as a predator. Picking her words, Marnie gave Terry an edited version of the past three weeks.

  “Kit’s upset,” she said. “It’s not that long since her mother died. So we thought it might help if we all came together to see your parents. But I was going to come this weekend to tell them about Kit. I can’t just arrive with her and her father. I wasn’t expecting you to be home.”

  “They know,” Terry said.

  Again Marnie felt the floor heave under her. “They know?”

  “I told them—”

  “We agreed you wouldn’t!”

  “Stop interrupting. To be accurate, Mum sat me down one time and asked me if you’d had a baby all those years ago. It was on my first visit home after you’d told me, actually.”

  “She asked?” She sounded like an echo, Marnie thought faintly; her wits seemed to have flown clean out the window.

  “Marnie, my parents aren’t dumb. They knew you and I were a number. They knew you disappeared and never came back. Mum was talking about how many of her friends had grandchildren, and then right out of the blue she popped the question about the baby. You know me, I never could lie to her.”

  “Why didn’t they mention it when I saw them last month?”

  “They were waiting for you to bring it up.”

  “Oh, God,” Marnie said.

  “I’ll tell ’em you’re coming. If it’s any comfort, they gave me hell. About the baby, I mean.”

  It was no comfort at all. “If they already know about Kit, I won’t come until next weekend. I hate going back to Conway.”

  “That figures.” Then Terry’s voice changed. “If you come next weekend, I’ll get to meet her, too. Kit, I mean.”

  Marnie hadn’t even thought of that. Her head whirling, she muttered, “Terry, I can’t handle this…I’ll call you back in a few minutes.” She crashed the receiver down and stared blindly at the dark green ceramic tile on the counter; she was breathing as fast as though she’d been running.

  Then Cal was beside her, taking her by the shoulders. He said roughly, “What’s wrong, Marnie? Tell me what’s wrong.”

  Her body shuddered in his grasp. And then she did what she’d been longing to do ever since she’d arrived here; she leaned her whole weight on him and closed her eyes. “Hold on to me,” she whispered. “Just for a minute.”

  Through the tangle of emotion that was racketing through her frame, Marnie was achingly aware of his warmth and solidity, of the clean male smell of his skin through his shirt, of his quickened heartbeat. For the first time in her life, she sensed that she’d truly come home. That this was where she belonged. Right here in Cal’s arms.

  If only she could stay here forever.

  She had to call Terry back.

  A plate scraped on the counter. She looked up. The hostility on Kit’s face could have cracked any number of plates; Marnie pushed herself free of Cal. “S-sorry,” she faltered, not looking at him, “that’s not like me—”

  “Don’t apologize,” Cal said harshly. “You’ve carried too much on your own for too long.”

  “Terry’s home,” she said in a voice she hardly recognized as her own. “And Dave and Marylou have known I had a baby for the past five years.” She sank onto the nearest stool and put her head in her hands. “They’d guessed, so they asked Terry. I haven’t seen him for five years, so I didn’t know.”

  “How long is he home?” Cal asked.

  It was, of course, a crucial point. Marnie looked over at Kit. “He’s leaving tomorrow for Montreal. But he’ll be back in Conway next weekend before he heads out to Vancouver. You could meet him, Kit.”

  Kit’s hostility had given way to pure panic. Somewhat heartened, for panic made Kit seem more vulnerable, more like the twelve-year-old she was, Marnie added, “But only if you want to.”

  Kit’s gaze flew to Cal. “Dad?” she said uncertainly.

  “If we’re going to Conway, we might as well go the whole hog,” Cal said, his smile not quite reaching his eyes. “Grandparents and a father…it’ll be quite the weekend.”

  Kit blurted, “What does he look like?”

  Marnie said, “He’s tall, almost as tall as your dad—he was our high school’s champion basketball player. He’s nice-looking, with brown hair and eyes just like yours. His mind is like a steel trap when it comes to numbers and he’s got tons of energy. He’s a good man, Kit.”

  “Are you going to marry him?”

  Marnie said evenly, “No. We were the best of friends for years, but I never loved Terry that way.”

  “You had me, though.”

  Searching for the right words, Marnie said, “We were young and we’d been at the school dance and a harvest moon was shining on the lake—it can happen like that, Kit. It also ruined the friendship. That’s why we were out of touch for years.”

  Cal made a restive movement. “Why don’t you call him back, Marnie? Say we’ll arrive Saturday evening—the basketball tournaments usually end around three. There must be a motel where we could stay.”

  That word “we” again, Marnie thought in a panic every bit as real as Kit’s. Whether she wanted it or not, events seemed to be picking her up and carrying her along like a roller coaster. With a strange sense of fatality, she dialed again.

  “That you, Marnie?”

  “Yes…sorry about that. Could we come late next Saturday?”

  “Sure. I spoke to Mum and Dad. You can stay here, there’s lots of room.”

  “Cal had thought a motel—”

  “Since the new highway went in, the motel went out of business.”

  So that was that. “Okay,” Marnie said. “We’ll see you then. Say hello to your mum and dad for me.”

  “Will do. Stay out of trouble.”

  It was a phrase from their shared childhood. She said with asperity, “That’s just what we didn’t do.”

  He was laughing as she put down the receiver. She said rapidly, “Cal, the motel’s closed. We can stay with Dave and Marylou.”

  “Well, that’s certainly plunging in the deep end,” he said, his features inscrutable. “Kit, I don’t know how you’ll concentrate on your game next weekend. And now, how about if we rustle up something for lunch?”

  Marnie said with a touch of desperation, “I can’t stay. I feel as though I’ve been run over by a truck. I need to go home and walk the beach for a while.”

  “There’s a perfectly good beach below the house.”

  “Please, Cal…” Marnie said, and saw a flash of triumph on Kit’s face. Kit was glad she was leaving. Exhaustion washed over Marnie like a tidal wave. She said thinly, “Goodbye, Kit, I’ll see you next weekend. Good luck with your games.”

  Kit gave her an inimical look. Cal said, “I’ll see you out.”

  Marnie would have much preferred he didn’t. She headed for the front door and hurried past the tulips, which had opened their pink and white cups to the sun. But as she reached for the car door, Cal stopped her, his hand on her arm.

  “Don’t be in such an all-fired hurry.”

  “I need to be alone!”

  “I know Kit’s behaving badly. But my gut tells me that meeting her father and grandparents will be good for her.”

  Marnie said forcefully, “Terry is her father in name only—you’re her real father.”

  His face was shuttered. “She wants to meet him.”

  “I spent an hour on the lakeshore with Terry. You’ve spent thirteen years with Kit. No con
test. You don’t have a worry in the world.”

  “I’m not worrying!”

  She managed a small smile. “Yes, you are. You’re afraid of losing her, and guess what, we’re arguing again. Maybe I’ll go home and paint some vertical stripes.”

  Cal gave a choke of laughter. “A whole wall full of them. I want you to do me a favor.”

  “What?” she said warily.

  “Are you free Wednesday evening?” She nodded. “Kit’s staying with Lizzie that night…the teachers have a training session the next morning. Let’s go to Halifax. Have dinner, see a movie, talk about anything and everything under the sun except my daughter, your best friend Terry and Conway Mills.”

  “A date,” Marnie said uneasily.

  “You catch on fast.”

  “Cal, Kit can’t stand the sight of me, you hated my being in your house, and I’m scared of men. And you’re talking about a date? Give me a break.”

  “What’s the alternative? Play it safe? Put your canoe in at the top of the rapids and then head for shore? Maybe that’d work for other people, Marnie. But not for you and me.”

  Was he right? Certainly the thought of spending a whole evening with Cal filled her with the same excitement she felt stemming a chimney in a granite cliff. “Then we’re crazy.”

  “Probably.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Look at it another way. You and I will be seeing a lot of each other from now on because of Kit. So we might as well get to know one another.”

  “You’re rationalizing!”

  “I’m trying to get through to you,” he grated.

  “I have to build my own relationship with Kit—one that’s got nothing to do with you.”

  “Get real, Marnie,” Cal muttered. Then, moving too fast for her to evade him, he stepped closer and kissed her, a fierce, demanding kiss that set her blood surging through her veins as rampantly as any rapids. “How’s that for an argument?” he said.

  “So I go off like a firecracker whenever you kiss me,” she fumed. “Are you planning on getting me into bed on Wednesday since Kit has a sleepover—step one in your campaign for a fifty-miles-apart affair?”

  He looked every bit as furious as her. “When we go to bed together, it won’t be because one of us planned it. It’ll be because we both want to.”

  “Count me out, Cal. That’s one cliff I have no intention of climbing.”

  “Let’s try another metaphor. You’ve made celibacy into a very comfortable little cage, and now you’re busily throwing away the key.”

  “It isn’t a cage! Anyway, you’re the one who said you didn’t want to get involved again because of Jennifer.”

  “Then I’m making a liar out of myself.” He looked around at the tall trunks of the pines as if he wasn’t quite sure where he was, then turned back to Marnie. “I loved my wife,” he said unevenly. “But I never once in all the years of our marriage felt as though I’d die if I couldn’t make love to her.”

  Marnie’s face was blank with shock. “But—”

  “You and I…it’s different from what it was with Jennifer, that’s what I’m getting at. There’s no comparison. So I don’t know the rules. Don’t know what the devil’s going on.”

  Marnie said with painful intensity, “You’re telling the truth, aren’t you?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “I don’t understand!”

  “You think I do?” He hesitated. “Let me tell you something else, Marnie. I knew the day we met in the thunder-storm that at some deep level I needed you in my life. Sure, I wanted you. Still do. But I’m talking need. Nothing to do with Kit and everything to do with me. It half killed me that afternoon to send you away. That’s probably where my jackass suggestion about an affair came from. Please…just give us a chance to get to know each other, that’s all I’m asking.”

  Shaken by his plea, for he wasn’t a man to use words carelessly, Marnie whispered, “If we go out on a date and you don’t have to go home afterward, we’ll end up in bed. I know we will. I’m too scared, Cal!”

  “I’ll make sure we don’t—I swear.”

  “It doesn’t really make any difference, don’t you see?” she said passionately. “Kit doesn’t want me anywhere near you. That’s why I have to establish my own relationship with her. And I won’t risk being hurt again by a man, I won’t.”

  “I’d never intentionally hurt you.”

  I’m afraid of falling in love with you…. The words echoed in Marnie’s brain; she had no idea where they’d come from. “No, Cal,” she whispered, “I can’t.”

  She was right, she knew she was. Every nerve in her body was screaming at her to run from Cal as fast as she could. Cage or no cage, she was right. But somehow she had to end this before she started blubbering like a baby.

  “I’ll see you Saturday,” she said. “Call me when you’re ready to leave.”

  “You’re doing yourself a disservice as much as me,” he said tightly.

  “I don’t agree.” He was standing very still, his face masked by shadows. He was, she thought unhappily, far too civilized a man to force her and much too proud to plead again. “Goodbye,” she mumbled, and got into her car. To her infinite relief, it started like a charm and drew away from the bungalow in fine style.

  She didn’t pull over on Moseley Street to cry her eyes out and she didn’t cry when she got home. Why cry, when she’d done what she knew was right? But her house, which usually welcomed her, did indeed feel like a cage.

  She phoned a couple of her buddies and went canoeing on the LaHave River, ending with a barbecue at dark. On Sunday, she and Mario scaled the north buttress at Paces Lake. Marnie loved climbing because it required the utmost in concentration, agility and nerve. She kept her focus on the buttress because she was first leader; but when they did some bouldering on the way home, she slipped twice, grazing her knee and her elbow.

  She couldn’t tell Mario what was the matter. She couldn’t tell anyone. Christine, she knew, would urge her to go on the date with Cal. So she wasn’t going to tell Christine how unhappy she felt; how the image of Cal’s shadowed face had intruded itself between her and the rock face and caused her to lose her balance, her foot skidding from its toehold.

  She played with Midnight on the beach on Sunday evening, then jogged for half an hour, ignoring the pain of her scraped knee so she’d be tired enough to sleep. On Monday after school, she went on a ten-kilometer hike with a couple of the teachers, then invited them in for a late supper, drank too much wine and spent most of Tuesday feeling absolutely rotten.

  As Marnie walked home from school that afternoon, a thick mist had blurred the horizon, gentling the harsh outline of the rocks along the shore. The waves rose and fell. Out beyond the point, the marker buoy, invisible, clanged on the swell; the foghorn on the lighthouse boomed its repetitious warning.

  Warning of danger.

  What was she going to do this evening? Run three rapids and climb a couple of mountains? Then jog a marathon? She’d done nothing but run—one way or another—ever since Cal had asked her for a date.

  Ever since she’d turned him down.

  She went home and fought against the temptation to phone someone—anyone—who’d keep her too busy to face all her fears and her unease. Instead, she cooked supper and ate it alone, gazing through the window as the fog came closer, her circle of vision getting smaller and smaller.

  Isn’t that what she was doing with her life? Constricting it? Sure, she had wonderful friends and she could scale a 5.9 pitch and go solo down the Penobscot River; she also loved her job and knew without vanity that she did it well.

  But none of that was enough. Not since she’d met Cal and Kit.

  She could only hope that the visit to Conway Mills would somehow break through Kit’s distrust; even the most tentative of friendships with Kit would be enough for Marnie. She loved her daughter. She wanted her in her life.

  And then there was Cal, with his deep voice and his powerful body and his admission that h
e needed her.

  She wanted him, too. Wanted to make love with him. Against all her fears, through all the walls she’d built around herself for so long, she longed to be in his arms and face with him what seemed like an insurmountable danger. He’d help her…wouldn’t he?

  She paced up and down. She took out her paints and produced a canvas where dark and light swirled together, inextricably entangled. She put a defiant blob of yellow paint bright as any sunrise right in the middle of the swirls, then took a shower and got dressed in jeans and a purple mohair sweater with dangly copper earrings and her new leather sandals.

  Then Marnie got in her car and drove to Burnham.

  CHAPTER TEN

  IT WAS half past ten when Marnie turned left onto Moseley Street. She drove past Cal’s bungalow; lights shone in the kitchen, and the Cherokee was parked in the driveway. She went a couple of hundred feet farther along the road, did a U-turn and parked her car, locking it before walking back along the shoulder of the road to the bungalow.

  She had no idea what she was going to do when she got there.

  The light was still on in the kitchen, which was empty. She could ring the front doorbell. But what if Kit answered?

  In sheer terror, Marnie stopped in her tracks. The worst thing in the world would be for Kit to find Marnie skulking around the house in the dark.

  She shouldn’t be here.

  But then the image of Cal’s face, strained and unhappy, dropped into Marnie’s mind. It hadn’t been easy for Cal to tell her he needed her.

  If only she could have both of them. There was room in her heart for both, surely. Yet right now Cal had to be her priority, she knew that instinctively. And Kit was almost certainly asleep; it was a school night after all.

  Giving her head a little shake, Marnie padded around the end of the house, ready at the slightest sign of life to run for cover. Her feet were cold, and her toenails, which she’d painted purple to match her sweater, were already wet from the grass. She stood still under the pines, breathing in their fragrance as she tried to orient herself by assigning rooms to the windows. As far as she could tell, both bedrooms were in darkness.