She walked swiftly across the brick patio. She’d eaten everything on her plate, but she was still hungry. Hungry for more than food.
BIANCA FLED straight to her room and called Franny, asking her to bring the baby to her. Bianca needed comfort, and in the past few months she’d learned that there was nothing more comforting than the adoration on her daughter’s face when she looked up and saw her mother.
After Franny had left, Bianca nuzzled Tia’s dimpled cheek. “Mommy has missed you,” she crooned. “Mommy has missed you so much!” It was true; in her everyday life she was never far away from Tia even when she was working. Bianca always scheduled frequent work breaks in order to feed Tia, and she bathed the baby herself even though the nanny insisted that it was her job, not Bianca’s. Bianca liked taking care of her baby. A baby was someone to love who loved you back. A baby was family, and to Bianca, who had never had a stable home life, Tia was a chance to establish one at last.
This afternoon Tia was in fine form and apparently recovered from her jet lag. She laughed out loud when Bianca playfully kissed her feet. Bianca held those two small feet in her hands; the webbed toes were a distinctive Bellamy characteristic. She’d always thought it pointless to attribute a baby’s features to one parent or another, but she’d changed her mind once she had a baby of her own.
She traced Tia’s brows with a forefinger. “These are like your uncle Eric’s,” she said. She touched Tia’s chin. “I see your grandma Viv right here.” She feathered her fingers down Tia’s nose. “And this fine straight nose—well, that’s so much like your daddy’s,” she whispered to Tia, who cooed as if overjoyed with this information.
Of course, Tia owed her pale hair, finespun as moonglow, to Bianca. And her eyes were blue like Bianca’s, not dark like Neill’s. Tia was a compilation of her parents’ best traits. It was too bad that Neill would never know her.
When, after three hours together, Tia began to tire, Bianca opted to take her back to the Ofstetlers for a nap. And then Bianca headed for the swimming pool. She thought that perhaps an hour or so in the sun would provide a slight tan to offset the ugly pink of the bridesmaids’ dresses. Oh, yes, and to provide a contrast with those cute little short white gloves Genevieve had chosen to go with them.
Neill had said he planned to go into town, so at least Bianca didn’t have to worry about his showing up this afternoon. But as she entered the fenced swimming pool area, Neill Bellamy was the first person she saw. Caught off guard, her heart swooped into the pit of her stomach and back up again.
He was wearing black swim briefs, which showed off every rippling muscle in his torso. And even though he was talking with a group of Lizzie’s friends, he left them immediately and sauntered over to Bianca, who was arranging herself on one of the lounge chairs and wishing she’d gone for a long walk instead. Neill’s very presence engendered a prickling excitement that she tried, by her very casualness, to dismiss.
“I thought you were going to town,” she said as he approached.
“I changed my mind. Guess what?” he said brightly. Too brightly, it seemed to Bianca, and the smile on his lips was negated by the calculated manner in which he sat down on the chair beside her and narrowed his eyes.
Her heart started to hammer against her ribs. She coolly removed a bottle of suntan lotion from her tote bag. “I can’t imagine,” she said as though she couldn’t have cared less.
Neill’s lips curved into a thin smile. He leaned closer, invading her personal space. His eyes seemed to burn holes in her own.
“I had a little chat with Doris Ofstetler after you left the restaurant. And guess what?”
“What?” Bianca said, her voice no more than a whisper.
“Her daughter’s name is Franny. And you know what else?”
Bianca didn’t speak.
“She doesn’t have a baby. Bianca, what the hell is going on?”
Chapter Six
The bottle of suntan lotion toppled onto the hard surface of the pool surround. Bianca bent to pick it up, grateful for the fact that Neill could not see the anguish on her face. This was it Bianca wondered if Meryl Streep ever got sick to her stomach when she was about to act a big scene. And this was probably the biggest scene in Bianca’s whole life.
“I never told you Franny had a baby.” She was so cool that butter wouldn’t have melted in her mouth. She was way beyond cool.
Neill subsided into what Bianca decided was shocked silence. She’d diverted him. But before she got to feeling too smug, she’d divert him a little more.
She rolled over on her stomach. “I don’t suppose you could rub suntan lotion on my back,” she mumbled.
She kept her eyes closed, but she heard Neill picking up the lotion, and in a few moments she felt his fingers administering the smooth cool liquid to the skin between her shoulders.
“So, Bianca, exactly what does Franny have to do with that baby you were toting around?” His tone was conversational, but he was rubbing her back too hard.
She made herself draw a deep breath. “You can put the lotion away now. Just drop it in my tote bag. Thanks, and now I’m going to clear my mind of everything, including this wedding and you.”
Neill’s deep voice had a hard edge to it. “You didn’t answer my question. How about if we play twenty questions? You and Eric always used to like that game.”
Twenty questions! He wasn’t going to let her wiggle out of this. Her mind raced like a rat in a maze, frantic because it kept flinging itself up against painful dead ends. Neill already knew Franny wasn’t Tia’s mother. But he didn’t know that she, Bianca, was. If she refused to tell him Franny’s involvement in this mess, his curiosity might be so piqued that he’d start asking other people.
Okay, so no one except Eric knew that she, Bianca, had given birth to a baby. But Petsy might have suspicions. And Petsy didn’t like her. On the other hand, no one in the wedding party had actually seen Tia since yesterday. Bianca, if pressed, might be able to make a good case for the baby’s being someone’s besides Franny’s. But whose? And if Neill later caught a glimpse of Bianca with the baby, that would only inflame his curiosity even more.
Conclusion, reluctantly reached: she couldn’t lie. He’d catch her.
A long silence, then longer. Finally, “Franny’s the baby-sitter,” Bianca said helplessly.
“If there’s a baby-sitter, she must have been hired by the baby’s parents. Or perhaps grandparents. And as far as I know, no one here is showing anyone else baby pictures. People do that, you know. So what we have is one baby, one baby-sitter, and no parents. Correct me if I’m wrong, Bianca, but I think I smell a rat.”
He was right about that. The rat was still running the maze. And there were still no outs.
Bianca squeezed her eyes tightly shut. Suddenly the sun seemed too warm, the sound of the children playing in the pool seemed too loud, and Neill seemed too. . .there.
She had been a fool to think this would work.
“All right,” she said, keeping her eyes closed. She couldn’t think of the best way to word this; she couldn’t think, period.
“All right what?”
“The baby is...” she said, but the words stuck in her throat.
Neill snorted. “The baby is. An unrefutable fact. She’s a lovely baby. But whose baby is she?”
“Mine,” Bianca said in a small voice.
Neill didn’t speak. Bianca kept her head hidden in the crook of her arm. The piña colada scent of the suntan lotion that he had spread on so liberally threatened to make her throw up.
Neill let out an explosive long breath, more than a sigh, less than an exclamation. He stood and began to pace to and fro.
“The baby is yours.”
“Yes.”
She could see his bare feet and characteristic webbed toes through the spaces between the woven ribbing of the lounge that now seemed to be cutting into her hips, her breasts, the tender skin of her ankles. She heard his quick indrawn breath and lifted he
r head to the red glare of the sun. Neill had stopped pacing. He was staring at her in disbelief, his eyes a flash of dark fire.
“You had a baby?” he said incredulously.
Through the buzz in her ears she said, “Don’t say it quite so loudly. I wasn’t planning on announcing it to everyone at this pool. I wasn’t planning on announcing it at all.”
“And whose baby is it?”
The words echoed in the hollow place in her heart.
“Mine,” she repeated.
This brought about a long silence.
“Right,” Neill said at last “It used to take two to make a baby. I’m aware that scientists are cloning sheep and frogs and who knows what else, but I think I can safely assume that you didn’t clone your daughter. That brings up the inevitable question: Who’s the father?” He stood before her, his hands resting on his hips, his eyebrows drawn together in an expression of intense scrutiny laced with something else—bewilderment.
It’s your baby, stupid! Bianca’s vision exploded into a crimson blur as the words careened through her head, and for a moment she thought she might have screamed them at him. How could he be so dense, how could he not know? And yet even as her mind grappled with the complexities of the situation, she knew that when she’d walked away from Swan’s Folly a year ago, when she’d refused to have further contact with him, when she’d decided not to tell him that he’d fathered a child, she had let Neill Bellamy off the hook. Maybe he should suspect, but clearly he didn’t.
“None of your business,” she said flatly.
Neill raked a hand through his hair. He blinked, then shook his head as if to clear it. “I suppose you’re right,” he said finally. Bianca laid her head back down and willed him to go away. To get out of her space, out of her life. To let her experience her pain the way she’d been experiencing it all along—alone. Utterly, completely, and awfully alone.
“Does Eric know?” he asked in a low, urgent tone.
Bianca squeezed her eyes tight against the pain behind her eyelids. “Yes,” she said.
“He never—” but Neill was interrupted by Rhonda of the teased and over-frosted hair, his father’s present wife, who dashed up and clutched his arm.
“Neill, oh Neill,” she said. “I have to run back to the hotel for a few minutes. Budge asked me to call his assistant and tell her to fax him some important papers, and I forgot all about it. Will you keep an eye on Fawn and Lambie? They’re paddling around in the shallow end of the pool, and you promised you’d show them some secrets about swimming. I’ll only be gone a few minutes.” Rhonda looked harried; it was well-known that she was eternally grateful to Budge for promoting her from her position as his personal secretary to that of his fifth wife, and she always seemed to be trying extra hard to measure up to the role.
“All right,” Neill said, anything but eager.
“Thanks, Neill. Fawn adores you. Lambie, too. Hi, Bianca. Maybe we can chat later,” Rhonda added over her shoulder as she clomped away on her expensive European clogs, which were definitely at odds with her short polyester pool cover-up.
“And maybe we can chat later too,” Neill said pointedly to Bianca.
“There’s nothing to talk about,” Bianca returned, injecting as much frostiness into her tone as possible.
“In my opinion there is.” With that, Neill squared his shoulders and marched toward the swimming pool.
Bianca buried her face in her hands. Neill had taken the news as well as could be expected, but what in the world would she say when he wanted to discuss the situation further? She felt depressed just thinking about it; there was no doubt in her mind that Neill would guess the truth. He must already have some idea that Tia was his child. Unless he had forgotten what happened in the gazebo that night.
Or unless...
Unless he thought he couldn’t father a child.
Bianca’s heart stalled, caught in a cage of memory, lost in a flurry of what ifs. Bits and pieces of forgotten conversation began to surface, floating to and fro in her mind like so many feathers.
There had been feathers on that day, and Ursula had forbidden the household help to assist in the task of stuffing them back in the couch pillows. Bianca and Eric had engaged in a no-holds-barned pillow fight earlier that morning, buffeting each other with the cushy down pillows from the couch, and one of the pillows had ripped open at the seam and filled the elegant living room with what seemed like buckets of white feathers.
Ursula had been furious, and Bianca and Eric had contritely gone about the task of cleaning up. When they had stuffed most of the feathers back inside the pillow, Bianca, who could sew in a rudimentary way, took upon herself the task of repairing the seam, and Eric had disappeared in search of a vacuum cleaner for rounding up the last little bits of white fluff from furniture, carpet and draperies.
That was when Viv, Neill and Eric’s mother, had stopped by.
Viv and Ursula were friendly, and Bianca was accustomed to seeing Viv around the house, especially when Viv came to pick up Eric for the weekends that he often spent with her. But this time, instead of chattering about Neill’s accomplishments at Harvard or Eric’s latest scrape, the two women had carried their cups of coffee into the library and begun talking in hushed tones.
Bianca listened unashamedly. And what she’d heard hadn’t seemed like any big whoop. She’d already been disappointed to learn that Neill wouldn’t be home from college for spring break because he was sick. He had the mumps. Big deal, Bianca thought. Mumps was a silly childhood disease and hardly anyone got it anymore. All she could think about at the time was that it was a stroke of bad luck for her that Neill wouldn’t be home. She’d been counting on the chance to impress him in hopes that he’d be interested in her for once.
“He said he feels fine,” Viv was saying to Ursula, “but Neill rarely complains.”
“I’m sure you did the right thing by telling him to stay at school,” Ursula replied in her slightly accented English. “After all, we wouldn’t want Eric to get mumps, too.”
“I thought both boys were vaccinated when they were little, so I never dreamed that either one of them was susceptible,” said Viv. “Now I find out that Eric was immunized but Neill wasn’t. And I worry because mumps can be so serious in a man.”
“Ah, but Neill, he’s very strong. I think there will not be any problem.”
Viv bent closer. “I knew someone who had mumps as a teenager. He never could father children.”
“Of course, there might have been some problem with his wife’s fertility.”
“No, no, the doctor said it was his low sperm count.”
“But Vivian, the disease must spread to—well, you know, a certain part of a man’s anatomy—in order to affect sperm count.” Ursula, though not prudish, had an aversion to naming specific male body parts, at least in English. She said they sounded better in German.
“It has spread. Both sides,” and here Viv’s usually strident voice dropped so low that Bianca couldn’t hear the rest of the conversation.
This was the first Bianca had ever heard of mumps affecting a man’s fertility. But the hush-hush aspects of the conversation had aroused her curiosity so much that she’d immediately looked up this fascinating sexual fact in a health encyclopedia from Budge’s library. She’d learned that in men and postadolescent boys, mumps could spread to the testicles and cause problems with sperm production later.
Of course she’d confided in Eric about what she’d overheard and about looking it up in a book; of course Eric had thought Viv and Ursula were making much ado about nothing.
That summer Neill had come home and divided his time between their house and Viv’s for a couple of months, and no one even referred to his bout with the mumps. Bianca hadn’t thought of it since.
Well, now she knew he wasn’t infertile. He was the only man who could have fathered her child.
But did Neill think he was incapable of having children? A thought occurred to her, one that was staggering
in its implications. Maybe Neill’s attitude toward family life wasn’t only the result of his father’s many marriage failures. Maybe he didn’t think that having a family was an option for him and so he had either consciously or subconsciously chosen to avoid putting himself into a position where he’d have to prove himself.
In that case, she was dealing with a lot more here than she’d originally thought. And how she handled the situation would determine the outcome of her life and Tia’s on so many levels that the implications were mind-boggling.
While she’d been running her mind through these hoops, Neill had been dealing with another kind of hoop. When Bianca finally lifted her head, she saw Neill coaching Lambie in the proper way to toss the basketball into the floating net.
He’s good with kids, she thought in surprise. Somehow deep down she’d known this, but she’d never actually seen evidence of it. The fact made the situation—or what she now suspected the situation to be—even more poignant.
Lambie was standing on the wide pool steps, squealing every time he threw the ball. A determined Fawn was paddling nearby, oblivious to everyone else. Neill said, “Fawn, you’re doing great. We’ll practice breathing later, okay? Then you’ll be ready to learn a new stroke.”
“Okay,” Fawn said, heading for the opposite side of the pool.
“I’m tired of basketball. I want to swim,” Lambie said.
Neill relieved him of the ball and stowed it in the basket. “Just remember to kick hard, Lambie. If you do that, you’ll be as fast a swimmer as Fawn.”
“I’m going to be faster, not like yesterday in the pond when I fooled Joe,” Lambie said before pushing off from the steps. Although he churned up the water like a hurricane, he was clearly not as proficient as Fawn, who was attempting something approximating a breaststroke.
While Fawn and Lambie swam, an older boy poised and prepared to dive from the high diving board at the opposite end of the pool. “Watch me, Mom!” he hollered at the last minute, and a woman watching from a chair nearby said, “Take it easy, son,” as he flung himself into the air. Bianca’s attention, like everyone else’s, was riveted on the boy as he dived arrowstraight into the water. Bystanders clapped, and the lifeguard, who seemed to be a friend of the diver’s, bent over to give him a congratulatory lift up the ladder.
RSVP...Baby Page 9