Father Found

by Judith Arnold

  And as for Samantha…Well, she’d have the intact family she deserved. A rich father, a rich grandfather, a flaky mother, and if none of them was up to the task of raising her, their money would buy a nanny to do it.

  Jamie could hire a nanny, too, of course—but damn, he’d only just turned thirty. He was a guy. What did he know about nannies?

  What did he know about babies?

  “Let me think about this,” he told Russo, rotating his chair so he didn’t have to look at Samantha anymore. His heart had stopped pounding and was now plummeting, dropping so fast it seemed to be pressing down against the soles of his feet.

  “All right,” Russo said. “I’ve got Hugh Pierson’s address and I’ve got his lawyer’s number. If he really wants the baby, he’s not going to disappear on us. We’ll sit on it until you decide what you want or until Pierson or his lawyer pushes. If we’ve got to bring charges against the mother, we will. But for now…We could wait a day or two. The baby isn’t in any danger.”

  “Right.”

  “Meanwhile, you’d better take good care of her,” Russo said.

  “I will.”

  “Take care of yourself, too.” With that, Russo ended the call.

  Jamie lowered the phone. His heart was still in a free fall, below his feet, below the floor, below the surface of the earth, down where hell was alleged to be.

  He forced himself to rotate back to Samantha. She had stopped grunting, which he knew meant she’d probably finished filling her diaper with digestive waste. But she looked so serene in her stroller, he could almost forget about her diaper and think she was perfect.

  For a whole lot of reasons it would be better for her to go to the Piersons. If she did, she would soon forget all about Jamie. She might have a strange blur of memory covering a few weeks of her life when things took an odd turn, but other than that, he would be nothing to her. She would be back with her mother and her birth certificate. She would live a nice, normal life as a daughter of privilege and power.

  Really, he told himself, giving her back to the Piersons was the wisest thing to do.

  Turning away from her, he slammed his fist against his desk so hard the pain brought tears to his eyes.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  MARGARET, THE NEONATAL unit’s nursing supervisor, swept into a hectic birthing room and tapped Allison’s shoulder. “They want to see you downstairs in Human Resources,” she announced.

  Allison almost didn’t hear her. She was assisting an understandably foul-tempered woman through the final stages of labor. The small room was crowded with a hospital bed, an isolette, a row of warming lamps, a fetal heart monitor, an obstetrician, a practical nurse whose job it was to run and fetch bowls and towels, and the pregnant woman’s husband, who fancied himself the next Francis Ford Coppola. While the wife grunted and panted and vented language more colorful than the rainbow, the husband swooped and circled, aiming his video camera every which way and offering directorial advice.

  “Could you look this way, honey?” he asked, aiming the camera at his wife’s face.

  “Stick it in your ear,” she roared, and then, “Aaargh! Another contraction!”

  “You look gorgeous, sweetheart,” the husband cooed. “Do that breathing thing, okay? I’d like to get you in profile doing that breathing thing.”

  Allison held the woman’s hand and counted breaths for her while she got through the contraction. “You’re doing just fine,” she assured the woman.

  “It hurts!”

  “I know.”

  The woman groaned. “That lady who taught the birthing classes? She said we weren’t supposed to think of it as pain. Well, I’ve got news for her. It’s pain. Have you ever been through this?”

  “Not yet.” But she hoped to go through it someday in the not-too-distant future. She hoped to go through it with a man she loved, creating a child they would both love.

  A picture of Jamie floated through her mind, causing her to smile.

  The woman yanked on her arm as if to pull her back down to earth. “You don’t want to go through this, ever,” the woman told her. “It stinks. If God were a woman, we’d be designed with zippers. You’d just unzip the pouch and pull the baby out None of this pain. I want a drug.”

  “No, you don’t,” her husband scolded, darting to the other side of the bed and photographing her sweat-streaked face in close-up. “Drugs might damage the baby.”

  “I’m going to damage you if you don’t—aaargh! Another one!”

  “Keep breathing,” the auteur reminded her. “We’re doing this scene in one take.”

  “Allison?” Margaret repeated. “They want you downstairs in Human Resources.”

  Allison managed a smile for Margaret. “Can it wait a few minutes? We’ve got a baby to deliver here.” Before Margaret could answer, Allison turned back to the woman, who was reciting expletives in an assortment of foreign languages. The woman’s face was flushed, her skin beaded with perspiration. Allison pulled the blood pressure cuff from the its wall bracket and strapped it around the woman’s upper arm.

  “HR said it was important,” Margaret nagged, clearly peeved about being ignored.

  Allison held up a hand to silence her, then put on her stethoscope and squeezed the pump.

  She didn’t know what the bureaucrats in the Human Resources department could want with her, unless it was to fire her. She’d done nothing to deserve termination, but the bean counters were always looking for ways to save the hospital money. One of their favorite ways was to lay people off. They’d save less money laying off four nurses than one unproductive executive earning a six-figure salary, but it always seemed to be the nurses and orderlies they went after with the budget ax, the folks earning the least and working the hardest.

  The possibility that Allison might be downsized out of a job ought to have upset her. But she was too busy helping a baby into the world to worry about it right now. And she was too happy.

  She was in love.

  Ever since she’d said goodbye to Jamie Sunday evening and gone home, he had been a part of her, a permanent resident in her mind, a constant presence in her heart. Jamie, a fiercely passionate lover and a doting, devoted father. A family man. A man who had proven his willingness to rise to any challenge, to accept his responsibilities, to try his hardest to do what was required and all the while to keep his sense of humor. A man who had managed to make her feel things—more than just physical things—that no man had ever made her feel before.

  Oh, yes, she was in love—so blissfully in love, she couldn’t imagine anything upsetting her. Not even getting laid off.

  Losing her job would be a calamity, of course. She couldn’t live off Grammy’s meager pension. She would have to find another job, and Arlington General was the only hospital in town. She might be able to get a job with a doctor in private practice, but that would mean less variety in her work, less patient contact and fewer opportunities for advancement.

  All right, then. Having to see the folks in Human Resources was not a good thing. But she’d worry about it later. Right now, she was going to bring a baby into the world, and she was going to let the exhilaration of loving Jamie energize her.

  “This is killing me!” the laboring woman announced, although her vital signs indicated otherwise. “This is ridiculous! Why don’t you just give me a C-section and get it over with?”

  “You’ve been in labor all of four hours,” the obstetrician noted. “I think you can stick it out a little longer.”

  “You’re beautiful when you’re in labor,” the father purred, zooming in for a close-up of his anguished, impatient wife.

  “Trust me,” she confided to Allison. “You really don’t ever want to go through this. Kids aren’t worth it—aaargh! I’m having another one!”

  Allison rubbed the nape of the woman’s neck and counted breaths with her. She did her best to move out of the way when the father-to-be complained that she was blocking his shot. She checked the fetal heart monit
or, conferred with the obstetrician and allowed herself to believe that for this moment, at least, everything that mattered in the world was located right in that birthing room.

  A half hour later, the father was filming his son’s very first moments of life. The mother, her eyes awash with tears of relief and happiness, was cooing and babbling as if no curse had ever crossed her tongue. The pains of labor and delivery had mysteriously been forgotten in a deluge of joy.

  After congratulating the exultant parents, Allison left the room. In the time it took her to remove her scrubs and wash up, she realigned her brain to the real world. A strong, healthy baby had been born, his parents were thrilled and Allison was as much in love with Jamie as she’d been an hour ago, two hours, two days. Whatever the Human Resources department wanted to do to her, she could handle it.

  On her way to the elevator, she glanced at Margaret, who had resumed her usual post behind the desk at the nurses’ station. Allison searched her supervisor’s face for a clue about what to expect. Could the hospital fire her without Margaret’s input? Could Margaret have recommended her for dismissal? She and Allison weren’t the best of friends, but they got along well enough, and Allison was a good nurse. She’d never even come close to harming a patient, let alone losing one. She’d never mixed up a med, never misidentified a baby, never let a problem go undetected. If the hospital planned to fire her, they’d better have a good reason—and a damned good separation package.

  As usual, Margaret’s expression implied that she’d been sucking lemons for the past two years. Sighing, Allison told her she was heading downstairs to the business offices and then summoned the elevator.

  Don’t worry, she ordered herself as the car descended to the first floor. You’re going to be fine. Jamie loves you and you love him. Everything’s going to work out.

  She entered the HR department and gave her name to the secretary. “Allison Winslow. Right. Please follow me,” the woman said ominously. Why had she recognized Allison’s name so quickly? Why was she ushering her into the office of the director of Human Resources without even announcing her? How bad could this thing be, anyway?

  Allison glanced at the name on the plaque beside the door the secretary opened: Ronald Katsakis. If it was as bad as she was beginning to fear, she wanted to enter his name in her memory bank so that when she raced in hysterics to the only attorney she knew—Molly’s sister Gail—she would be able to identify the villain. Of course, Mr. Katsakis was probably only following orders, firing her because someone truly villainous—Margaret? The hospital’s chief of nursing?—had offered Allison up as Sacrifice of the Month.

  “Ron?” The secretary stepped across the threshold and motioned for Allison to follow her. “This is Allison Winslow. You know, the nurse from neonatal.”

  Allison entered the office. It wasn’t particularly large or luxurious. The narrow window overlooked the parking lot, and the furniture—a broad desk with two tweed-upholstered chairs set across from Mr. Katsakis’s matching tweed chair—might have come from an office furniture discount store. She took some satisfaction in the understanding that personnel directors weren’t living high on the hog while she was about to get laid off.

  Expecting the worst wasn’t like her, though. Why was she assuming that a trip to Human Resources was a trip to the professional gallows? Maybe Ronald Katsakis was about to give her a raise, or a promotion, or both. Maybe he’d summoned her to his office because the hospital’s board of directors had decided to rename the place Arlington-Winslow Hospital. Or maybe he wanted to give her an award for her after-hours work on—

  “Ah, yes, the Daddy School,” said the man behind the desk as he rose from his chair. He looked to be on the far side of middle age, his black hair and mustache streaked with silver, his eyes framed with crinkly skin. They were benign eyes, Allison told herself. Smiling eyes. Not the eyes of a hatchet man.

  The secretary left and Ronald Katsakis gestured toward one of the chairs across the desk from him. Allison sat, trying to quell her nerves as he shuffled some papers. “How are you doing?” he asked familiarly.

  “Okay,” she said. “We just delivered a boy upstairs.”

  “Really?” Katsakis shuffled some more papers. “Everything go all right?”

  “Everything was perfect. The baby was eight pounds, two ounces, and the parents named him Peter.”

  “Peter. Nice name.” Apparently he found what he was looking for, because he stopped rooting around the clutter on his desk and smiled at her. “It’s been brought to my attention that you run an off-site program for young fathers.”

  Off-site did not bode well. He was probably going to chastise her for devoting so much of her professional energy to a program not directly affiliated with the hospital, or at least one from which the hospital couldn’t profit. “Not all the fathers are young,” she explained, thinking of the oldest student in her class. If Jamie were here, he would put her at ease. He would whisper in her ear that Katsakis had nothing on her, that he was just a paper pusher, that nobody needed him the way the Daddy School students needed her.

  “I guess I should have said new fathers,” Katsakis clarified.

  Allison nodded, holding her breath and waiting for the guillotine blade to fall across her neck.

  He skimmed a sheet of paper in his hand as if to refresh his memory. “I understand you’ve been informed that your program has lost hospital funding.”

  She nodded again.

  “Well, it seems someone somewhere doesn’t like that. A private benefactor would like to pay to keep the program going. We’ve received a phone call and a fax to confirm that if Arlington Memorial will endorse the program and provide auxiliary supplies and so on, this benefactor will donate the funding to keep the school going.”

  She breathed deeply, as if she were in labor. Unlike Peter’s mother, Allison wasn’t in pain. But she was definitely uncomfortable. This couldn’t be happening—not unless someone somewhere had done something.

  Jamie McCoy.

  Allison had told him she didn’t want him bailing her out. She didn’t want him flinging his money around to keep her program alive. It was a worthwhile program, an exceptionally good program, and it deserved to be funded legitimately. She didn’t want it to turn into a gift from an affluent man to his current sweetheart

  “May I ask who this benefactor is?” she asked.

  “Actually, it’s not a ‘who.’ It’s a ‘what.’ The Arlington Gazette.”

  “The newspaper?” The spasm of discomfort passed but left behind a waning ache. Jamie used to work for the Arlington Gazette, didn’t he? He must have pulled strings, twisted arms, called up friends and said, “Do this for my girlfriend.”

  “The newspaper maintains a special benevolent fund. They underwrite the city’s annual road race for cancer, you know, and they sponsor local athletes for the Special Olympics every year. They have a college scholarship program and so on. I’m sure you know about these things if you read the paper. They’re always tooting their own horn about their good deeds.”

  “And they want to pay for the Daddy School out of this special fund?”

  “They do indeed. We received word this morning that they’re willing to make up the hospital’s shortfall. They feel this is an essential program for young fathers.”

  They aren’t all young, she almost blurted out again. She tried to shove aside her uneasiness. What Ronald Katsakis was telling her made sense. The Arlington Gazette was involved in many community programs. The newspaper’s charitable works bought goodwill; they provided the paper with a public relations bonanza. Arlington’s citizens benefited from the Gazette’s generosity and they showed their appreciation by buying the newspaper.

  Ronald Katsakis was rambling on about the financial support the newspaper would give, and the support in kind the hospital would contribute to the program. If the city’s premier newspaper believed this was a valid program, by golly, the hospital wasn’t going to pull the rug out from under it. Details n
eeded to be ironed out, paperwork attended to. The hospital would like to explore other venues for the next class—perhaps the high school instead of the YMCA. Perhaps several classes at once, in different locations, on different nights. Call it outreach, a way to introduce youngsters not only to the pleasures and challenges of becoming fathers but also to the fine facilities at Arlington Memorial.

  It occurred to Allison that this would be a good time to negotiate for more. If the hospital was prepared to support her, perhaps they would also support the toddler class Molly wanted to teach. Allison ought to request the additional support now, while Katsakis was talking about money and paperwork.

  But she was having difficulty concentrating. Below the placid surface of the discussion, a tide whirled and tugged, dragging at her, trying to suck her under.

  Jamie had done it. She couldn’t escape that certainty—and she couldn’t escape her uneasiness about it.

  Maybe Molly was right. Maybe there was something wrong with her that she was constitutionally unable to accept help from others. Except that she could accept help. She’d been very happy to accept the hospital’s support for the first Daddy School class. It was Jamie whose help she didn’t want to accept.

  Why?

  Because she was already too vulnerable to him. Because she gave her love freely and she didn’t want to feel as if he were trying to buy it. Because she didn’t want him doing favors, making things easy for her, flaunting his clout.

  She had the presence of mind to stop Katsakis before he got too caught up in his monologue on the paperwork she would need to do. “I’m very grateful to the newspaper—and the hospital,” she remembered to add. “I think the Daddy School is important, and I’m glad it isn’t going to fold. But as far as the details…Well, I’ve just helped deliver a baby and I’ve got a lot of other things on my mind—not least that I’m teaching a Daddy School class tonight. So maybe we could discuss the paperwork another time. That won’t jeopardize the program, will it?”