by Pamela Bauer
“Then where do I find them?”
“Avery said a simple DNA test would prove whether or not you’re Megan’s mother.”
Faith remembered Avery mentioning a medical test that could be done to determine whether a biological relationship existed between two people. Because she was exhausted both physically and emotionally, she’d had difficulty following his explanation of genetic coding and he’d told her not to worry because they would talk about it again if it was necessary.
“By finding out who you’re not, you’ll at least have one answer,” Marie continued.
Faith nodded, biting on her lower lip as she mulled over what Marie said. “It’ll take a while to get the results.”
“And you’re in a hurry,” Marie stated with an understanding smile. “You want the answer now, don’t you?” When Faith nodded she added, “Maybe you don’t need a DNA test.”
Faith frowned. “What do you mean?”
“You could go straight to Megan Novak. You said last night that her father hadn’t seen her mother recently. Megan, on the other hand, saw her daily. Even if she is only six, she should be able to identify her own mother,” Marie reasoned. She tapped a finger against her forehead. “Amnesia has affected what’s inside here, not your physical appearance. I doubt Megan’s forgotten the sound of her mother’s voice or the feel of her hands.”
“You think she’ll be able to tell right away?”
“Don’t you?”
It was something Faith had contemplated last night as she’d tossed and turned before falling asleep. Right or wrong, Megan believed Faith was her mother based on an encounter they’d had while she’d been sedated. She no longer suffered the effects of anesthesia. The next meeting between them could very well force Megan to accept that she’d been mistaken, that Faith wasn’t her mother.
As Faith showered, thoughts of the six-year-old continued to occupy her mind. Be responsible. A man’s voice echoed in her memory, startling her. She had no idea from what part of her past the voice had come, but there was no denying its presence. She shut off the water, hoping to hear other voices, but there were none. Briefly she closed her eyes, willing her mind to remember the time when she’d heard that voice, but all she saw was darkness.
Answers. She wanted answers, which was why when she arrived at the hospital she didn’t go to the day-care center but took the elevator to the second floor and went straight to the nursing station. When she asked which room Megan Novak occupied and if she was allowed to have visitors, she learned that Adam Novak had spent the night in his daughter’s room. Butterflies began to flutter in her stomach.
Just the thought of seeing him again sent a delicious shiver of anticipation through her. She remembered how those dark eyes had pierced her with an intensity that had made her go weak at the knees.
When she reached room 217, the door was open but a curtain had been pulled around the bed. Faith could hear voices—a child’s and an adult’s. The adult’s voice belonged to a woman. Faith paused outside the room, not wanting to intrude.
Within a few minutes, a nurse came out. When she saw Faith she said, “Are you here to see Megan?”
“If you think it’s all right if I visit her. I work downstairs in the child-care center,” she answered. “I don’t want to intrude if she’s with her family.”
“There’s no one in there but Megan.”
“I thought her father was here?”
“He was but he must have stepped out. Go on in,” she urged Faith. Before scurrying off down the hallway, the nurse poked her head back into the room and called out, “You have a visitor, Megan.”
Faith stepped tentatively into the room, wondering if she shouldn’t have waited for Adam Novak to be with his daughter when she approached her. Then she heard a tiny voice call out, “Is anybody there?” and she pushed her doubts aside.
The nurse had raised the back of Megan’s bed so that she was almost in a sitting position. Her eyes widened when she saw Faith and a smile spread across her face.
“It’s you!” she said on a delightful note.
“Yes, it’s me.” Faith wasn’t quite sure what else to say. “How are you feeling?”
Megan didn’t answer the question but said, “I knew Adam was wrong. He said people can’t come back from heaven, but I told him I saw you and now you’re here.”
“I’ve never been to heaven, Megan,” she said gently, noting that she’d referred to her father by his given name instead of calling him Dad or Daddy.
“Then where have you been?” Blue eyes looked at her with an innocence that tugged at Faith’s heartstrings. They grew cloudy as Faith moved closer to her. “You are my mommy, aren’t you? You look like her.” Uncertainty crept into her voice, replacing the joy that had greeted her arrival.
Faith gazed into blue eyes that begged her to answer the question with a yes. Faith wished she could. The last thing she wanted to do was destroy the hope this beautiful child harbored, yet until the answers to her own questions were found, she had no choice but to be candid.
She pulled a chair close to the bed and sat down. “I don’t know if I’m your mommy.”
Megan frowned, her eyes losing some of their sparkle as she looked in bewilderment at Faith.
“You’re probably wondering how a mommy can not know that she’s a mommy, but if you’ll listen, I’ll try to explain it to you, all right?” Faith said calmly.
“All right,” the small voice answered.
“Megan, you came to the hospital to have an operation, didn’t you?”
She nodded. “My appendix was broken.”
“Yes, and it was making you feel badly, wasn’t it?” Again she nodded and Faith continued. “I have something inside me that’s broken, too.”
“Are you going to have an operation like I did?”
“No. What’s broken inside me can’t be fixed by being in the hospital.”
“Then how can it get fixed?”
“That’s the problem. The doctors aren’t sure how to make it work again.” She tapped her forehead with her finger. “My broken part is up here in my memory. Because it’s not working, I forget things I should know. Like my name.”
Megan’s blue eyes widened. “You don’t know your name?”
Faith shook her head. “Or where I live or who my family is.” She lifted her wrist with the leather bracelet on it. “Everyone calls me Faith because of this, but I can’t remember if it really is my name. I could be someone named Faith or I could be another person with a different name.”
Megan fingered the leather band and Faith asked, “Do you remember seeing your mother wear a bracelet like this?”
She shook her head. “Uh-uh. Who gave it to you?”
“I don’t have the answer to that question,” she answered honestly.
“Can’t you remember?”
“No, I can’t. It’s another one of those things—like my name—that’s been put in a place inside of my head where I can’t find it.” She leaned forward. “I want to find all those things I can’t remember. That’s why I came to see you. I think you might be able to help me.”
“How?”
“I want you to tell me why you think I could be your mother. Would that be okay with you?”
Megan nodded vigorously, her innocent eyes showing her eagerness to please.
“Great.” She gave her a big smile, then shoved her hands out in front of her, palms down. “You said my face looks like your mother’s. What about my hands?”
Megan reached for them, her tiny fingers turning them over. Her touch was soft and warm as she studied them as if they were of utmost importance. “They kinda look like my mommy’s hands, but you’re not wearing the mommy ring and your nails are a mess.”
Faith passed on the criticism of her short, stubby fingernails, focusing on the missing jewelry. “What’s a mommy ring?”
“It’s a ring that mommies wear. Uncle Tom helped me pick it out for my mommy’s birthday. It has a heart on it and a blue diamond cuz t
hat’s my birthstone.”
“And your mother wore it all the time?”
“Uh-huh. She said she was never going to take it off because every time she looked at it she would know I love her.”
Faith had to swallow back the emotion that wanted to lodge itself in her throat. She glanced at her bare fingers, wishing she’d been found wearing such a ring. Of course the fact that she wasn’t wearing one didn’t rule out the possibility that she was Megan’s mother. She could have lost the ring or it could have been stolen.
“You said my fingernails are a mess,” Faith reminded her.
Again Megan nodded her blond head. “Doreen would have a hissy fit if she saw them.”
“Doreen? Who’s that?”
“Mommy’s best friend. She works at the Cut and Curl except she always comes to our house to do our nails because it cost too much to go to the beauty parlor. She made little flowers on mine one time. Lori doesn’t know how to do flowers. See?” She held up her hands and Faith saw each tiny nail had a coating of dark purple.
“They’re very pretty,” she commented, wondering who Lori was. “Does Lori live here in the Twin Cities?”
“Uh-huh. Her house is just around the corner from Adam’s, which is good because that means I can go to her house after school. She’s going to have a baby. She’s this fat.” She extended her hand out in front of her stomach as far as it could reach.
“Is she your day-care provider?”
“I don’t go to day care. I go to Lori’s.”
“And Lori is?”
“Her aunt,” a male voice answered, startling Faith.
She turned to see Adam Novak looming behind her, looking even more attractive than he had the last time she’d seen him. He was not happy to see her with his daughter. That much was evident by the narrowness of his dark eyes.
“Hello,” she said weakly. “I was just talking to Megan.”
“I can see that,” he observed dryly.
“I’m helping her fix what’s broken,” Megan declared in her small voice. “She can’t remember she’s my mommy.”
“She’s not your mother, Megan,” Adam stated firmly, his eyes daring Faith to contradict him.
She wouldn’t have even if she disagreed with him, but Megan did. “She looks like Mommy.”
“We’ll talk about this later,” he told his daughter, then turned to Faith. “I’d like to speak to you out in the hall.”
“You’re not leaving, are you?” Megan’s face fell at the possibility.
She wanted to say no, but from the look on Adam’s face she knew he really didn’t want her to stay. “I’m sorry, but I have to go to work in the child-care center downstairs,” she told Megan.
“But you’re coming back, aren’t you?” she asked, looking at Faith with an appeal in her eyes.
Faith didn’t dare glance at Adam as she said, “If you want me to.”
“I do,” the small voice pleaded. “I don’t want you to go!”
“I’m sorry, but I have to.” Faith gave her a smile, said goodbye and hurried out of the room.
Adam Novak followed. He nodded toward the lounge at the end of the hallway.
Wanting to get the conversation over, she walked briskly down the corridor. In her haste, she didn’t notice the hospital worker pushing a laundry cart. It was only because Adam reached out and caught her by the arm that she avoided a collision with the cart.
It was in that split second that her world changed. No longer was she in the hospital but standing with a suitcase in hand, watching cars whiz by on a highway. So startled was she by the flash of memory, that she gasped and took a step backward, trying to pull her arm away from him. “No!”
Adam reacted immediately to her protest. He released her, raising his arms in the air, palms outward, his entire body language acting as an apology.
From the look on his face she knew he thought she’d been offended by his touch. “It wasn’t you….” She started to explain but then stopped. What could she say? That she’d recoiled from his touch because she’d had a sudden memory that had caught her off balance? How could she explain something she herself didn’t understand?
“I was only trying to keep you from colliding with the cart,” he told her.
“I didn’t think you were trying to do anything else,” she said. “It’s just that—”
He waved a hand in the air. “No explanations necessary. Look, would you be more comfortable if we communicated through our attorneys?”
“I don’t have an attorney.”
He ran a hand across the back of his neck and sighed. “Then I guess we’d better sit down.”
“DID YOU FIND OUT anything about…?” Faith didn’t finish the sentence. They both knew to what she referred.
“I’ve spoken to the attorney who handled Christie’s estate,” he answered.
“And?” She stared at him with a look in her eyes that reminded him not of Christie’s impudence but rather Megan’s innocence. For Adam, who’d spent the past eighteen hours trying to convince himself that Faith couldn’t possibly be Megan’s mother, it was unsettling. He didn’t want to feel anything toward her and especially not protectiveness.
“He doesn’t believe you’re Christie, either.” The tiny glimmer of hope that had been in her eyes disappeared.
“Oh.” The word was barely audible.
An unwanted wave of sympathy for her unfurled inside him. “Why did you go see Megan?”
“Because I had to. Do you have any idea what it’s like to get out of bed each morning and feel as if you’re living someone else’s life? I don’t know who I am, where I live, if I have a family, or even how old I am. Until yesterday, everyone I met looked at me as if I were a stranger. Then you came along and told me about your daughter and for the first time I had the hope that someone might be able to help me answer all the questions I have about my past.”
“Megan doesn’t have the answers,” he stated.
“You don’t want to believe she does.”
“Are you saying she said something to make you believe you could be?”
“You heard her.”
“She’s confused.”
Faith rubbed her temples, her face weary. “So am I.”
Again he felt the stirrings of sympathy, but he pushed them aside. He didn’t want to be drawn to her on an emotional level. It was enough that he had to fight the physical attraction that existed between them. And that in itself was strong.
“If the doctors haven’t been able to help you overcome the amnesia, what made you think a conversation with a six-year-old girl would?”
Faith shook her head and looked down at her hands. “I guess I hoped that maternal instinct would be stronger than whatever it is that has robbed me of my memory. I thought maybe something she said would trigger a memory. When your entire life history consists of twenty-seven days, you don’t have a lot of options.”
She was making this about her situation and it wasn’t. It was about Megan. “I told you yesterday I would take care of resolving this matter.”
“Yes, and I appreciate that, but I’m the one without an identity here. I feel as if I’ve been running through this long dark tunnel without even a hint that there could be a light at the end.”
“Megan isn’t that light.”
“You don’t know that for sure,” she said, refusing to agree with him.
He could see that beneath the shy, vulnerable exterior there was a bit of a stubborn streak. He wanted to be annoyed but unfortunately it only made her all the more attractive to him. “Megan doesn’t need a reason to continue to believe in this fantasy she has that her mother is alive.”
“I didn’t give her one.”
“Did you tell her you’re not Christie?”
“No.”
“Then you didn’t discourage her, either, did you?”
She sighed. “I think it’s best to always be honest with children so I told her the truth. That I don’t know who I am.”
“I also suggested she try to notice things about me that are different from her mother.”
“And did she find anything?”
“Yes. I’m not wearing a mother’s ring—apparently Christie always wore one. And Megan also said my nails are a mess.” She held up her hands, her fingers splayed.
Adam looked at the long fingers with their short unpolished nails. Despite the fact her hands were a bit rough, they were beautiful.
“There may have been other differences Megan could have pointed out had we had more time,” she said pointedly.
“It really doesn’t matter. The reason I wanted to talk to you is that there’s a fast and easy way to prove you’re not Megan’s mother. A DNA test.”
Her delicate eyebrows drew together. “Dr. Carson mentioned something about some kind of a lab test last night.”
“Then you already know it’s fairly simple to do. You don’t have to have any blood drawn. The sample can be taken from your mouth with a cotton swab. It’s so simple they even sell home kits so people can do it themselves.”
“You’re saying that by putting a stick in my mouth you’ll be able to determine if I’m Megan’s mother?” She eyed him with suspicion.
“Yes. I thought you said Dr. Carson explained it to you.”
“He just briefly referred to it.”
She looked bemused by his explanation, which he thought was unusual. He thought it rather odd that she would be unfamiliar with the procedure. One could hardly turn on a television crime show or watch a murder mystery in the theater without there being some reference to DNA testing.
“There are several labs in the Twin Cities that do this kind of testing,” he told her. “If you can take time off from work I can see that it gets done today. If not, I’ll get one of the home-test kits and you can do the swab sample yourself. Either way, we’ll have the results in three to five days. You need to tell me which you prefer.”
She thought about it briefly before saying, “First I would like to talk to Dr. Carson about this.”
He didn’t understand why, but he didn’t object. “All right, but the sooner this matter is resolved, the better it will be for everyone.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out his business card. “Here’s the number where I can be reached. If you get my voice mail, leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.”