"Mom, I'm not the rebellious teenager I was eleven years ago," Jayne said, alarmed that her parents might try to keep Becca. "Besides, you and Dad had moved."
"Uncle Clay had our information," her mother replied. "You could have checked with him."
"He lives in New Jersey!" Jayne said, and at once regretted raising her voice. It would not get her any closer to having custody of her daughter.
"We won't even go into that," her mother clipped. "If you'd wanted to find us, it would have been that simple."
There was a giant rift between her and her parents, Jayne realized, so she suspected it would have carried over to Lydia as well, but it didn't have to carry over to Becca. "Mom, I'm really sorry for all the grief I cause you and Dad, and I'm going to try to make things right. Just please don't try to keep Becca from me. I never wanted to give her up in the first place. It was the worst possible moment of my life. Being put in prison was nothing compared to having my newborn baby ripped out of my arms and taken away from me for forever. But now I'm capable of taking care of her, and of being a good mother. I hope you'll give me that chance."
Jayne's mother eyed her guardedly, and said, "Let's just take one thing at a time."
...one thing at a time...
One thing being facing Lydia after walking out of her life, ten years ago.
Another, meeting the daughter she was forced to give up for adoption.
Her mother knocked lightly and stepped back, leaving Jayne standing facing the doorway. When the door opened, a small, brown-eyed young woman with a striking resemblance to their mother stared at her. With her breath caught in her chest, and her voice trapped in her throat, Jayne was unable to speak. Tears filled her eyes, and before she knew it, Lydia wrapped her arms around her and the two sisters held each other.
Through a blur of tears, Jayne looked at Lydia, and said, "Look at you. You're all grown up, and so pretty."
Lydia smiled sadly. "I missed you, Becky. You never came back."
"I know. I'm sorry, honey. I've made a major mess of everyone's lives, but I'll try to be a better big sister from now on."
"I'm married," Lydia said, which was almost comical, since it had been no secret, but Jayne knew Lydia was struggling for things to say, just as she was.
"You must have been a beautiful bride," Jayne said. "I want to see all the pictures of the wedding, and I'm looking forward to meeting your hubby. Mom and Dad have told me all about Denny. They're very proud of him, and you. At least one of the Hamilton girls knows how to make the right decisions." That brought a laugh from both of them, which helped.
Jayne caught a movement in the background and looked beyond Lydia to see a child with big brown eyes and dark wavy hair standing behind a chair, hand gripping the back, staring at her. Releasing Lydia, Jayne walked over to Becca, took her hand from the back of the chair and pulled her around, and said, "You're as pretty as I always imagined you'd be, honey. I'm your mom, and there hasn't been a day since you were born that I haven't thought about you."
Becca stared at Jayne, saying nothing. Then her brow creased with a small frown, and her lips compressed, and her chin quivered a little, and she said, "My mother isn't well. She has MS."
"I know, honey, but at least she had you for ten years. That must have made her very happy," Jayne said, hoping she was saying the right things.
The child nodded. "She's in a wheelchair now. I used to take care of her before she had to go to the home. "
"Then she was lucky to have you," Jayne said. "You are a very special little girl."
Becca smiled. "That's what Mama says. I could fix her dinner in the microwave and make her tea and bring her things, but that was before she started shaking so bad. Then she had trouble talking and swallowing and had to go where they could take care of her. She's there now."
Jayne glanced back at her mother, who had been joined by her father, and said, "Is Becca's mother around here?"
Jayne's mother shook her head. "She's in a care home in Portland. We can talk about it later," she said, giving Jayne a look that told her not to pursue things right now.
Jayne understood, but she also wanted to talk to the woman who'd had Becca for the first ten years of Becca's life. Turning to Becca, she said, "Well, you can take comfort in knowing your mother's being well cared for, and I know she'll be happy that you'll be well taken care of too. You'll be living with me now, and you'll go to school, and everything will be fine."
Jayne didn't look at her parents because she'd just defied them... again. But she wanted to make it as difficult as possible for them to deny Becca's living with her. Planting the seed in Becca's head that she'd be living with her birth mother was a start, although Jayne didn't know where they'd be living. She didn't even know how she and Becca would get from the bus station in Seattle to the ranch to pick up her things. By now, everyone there would know she had a child she'd never mentioned, which would put Sam in the awkward position of trying to explain why he didn't know. It would also give Jack another ax to grind. But for now, her focus was on Becca, who was staring at her with an intensity that was unusual for a child so young.
"Honey, you have a question don't you?" Jayne surmised.
Becca nodded. "Your eyes are kind of greenish, and mine are brown." Her words almost came out as an accusation.
Jayne refused to bring Vince into the mix, even though she could see Vince's dark intense gaze in the eyes of their daughter, but that would never be an issue for her because this child was very precious just as she was. But Becca had such a curious look on her face, Jayne felt a need to explain. "Our family is a mixed breed. We have African in us, which gives us our wavy black hair and you your dark eyes, and Eastern Indian in us, which gives us our narrow noses, and Filipino in us, which gives you your smaller stature, and British and Irish in us, which gives me my greenish eyes and light skin. But now that I'm looking at you, I see that our noses are alike, both straight and slender, and our faces are both oval, and we both have pointed chins, and our mouths curl up at the corners, and I think we are very pretty, don't you?"
Becca smiled, and said, "I think you're pretty."
"Then that's the best compliment I've had my entire life," Jayne replied, feeling like she and Becca had just made an important connection. "Now, I want to hear all about you. What you like to eat. What you like to do. What your favorite subjects in school are."
Becca talked almost non-stop until it was time for her to go to bed, which for this particular night would be in the RV with Jayne's folks, while Jayne would sleep on the couch in Lydia's apartment. Jayne's father brought in Jayne's bag, but sometime after her parents and Becca had returned to the RV for the night, and while Jayne was visiting with Lydia and Denny, they were startled to hear a rapping on the door. When Lydia opened it, Jayne looked beyond her and saw Sam standing in the doorway.
"Yes?" Lydia said.
Sam looked beyond Lydia and caught Jayne's eye, and said, "Do you mind if I come in. Jayne works for me and I need to talk to her for a few minutes."
"I'm sorry but there is no Jayne here," Lydia said. "You must have—"
"It's okay, Liddy," Jayne cut in. "I haven't gone by Becky or Rebecca since I left the women's... that is, since about four years ago." She looked at Sam, and all she could think of was how much she wanted his arms around her and the assurance that he still loved her. Instead, she said, "Hello, Sam. Is there a problem at the ranch?"
Lydia stepped aside for Sam to pass, but for a few moments Sam stood in the doorway and stared at Jayne, as if not knowing what to do next. Then he said, "You rushed off before we had a chance to square things away, and I need to talk to you in private. Maybe we could go somewhere, a restaurant or a pub."
Jayne knew Sam had just driven over two-hundred miles, and he looked tired and troubled, and she wanted to smooth the worry from his face, and cuddle up against him and have him put his arms around her and tell her everything would be alright, even though it wouldn't be, after he learned what she'd
done, but they did need to have the talk she'd been dreading.
Turning to Lydia, she said, "Why don't you give me a key to the apartment and you and Denny can go to bed when you're ready and I'll let myself in later."
Lydia glanced from Jayne to Sam, and said, "You say my sister works for you?"
"Yes, she's the guest ranch manager at our ranch, the Dancing Moon Ranch." Sam dug into his pocket and pulled out his wallet and removed a business card. "This is our place," he said, handing the card to Lydia.
Lydia gave Jayne a sheepish smile. "I'm sorry," she said. "I just wanted to be sure that... well, things were okay."
"I understand," Jayne replied. "Maybe it would be better for me to stay in a motel since your place is so small, and I never did do very well on a couch. There must be something close by."
Lydia's gaze shifted between Jayne and Sam, as she said, "Well, actually there is a motel just a few blocks from here. It might be better."
Jayne knew Lydia was apprehensive. A man with a day-old beard showing up unannounced, and looking for her big sister, the jailbird, who wanted a key to the apartment, would give anyone pause for thought. She also realized it would take time to rebuild her family's trust, but that was the price she'd pay for what she'd put them through.
"That will be fine," she said. "I'll be back first thing in the morning. We still have some catching up to do."
"Yes, we do," Lydia replied. "I'll tell Mom and Dad you're staying nearby." When Jayne stood, Lydia walked her to the door and gave her a hug, and said, "I'm sorry, Becky. I hope you don't feel unwanted here."
"Absolutely not," Jayne said, "besides, you and Denny are newlyweds. You don't need a big sister camping out on your couch, so I'll see you tomorrow." She looked past Lydia to where Denny was standing across the room, and said, in a quiet voice, yet loud enough so Denny could hear, "And that guy of yours is a real catch. You're a very smart young woman, and I'm so proud of you." She saw Denny smile, and felt like a tiny piece of the barrier separating her and her family, which now included a brother-in-law, had chipped away. It felt good.
Once inside Sam's car, Sam said, as he wheeled the SUV into traffic, "I have a room at a motel a few blocks from here. You can stay with me tonight."
Jayne wasn't sure what to say. Sam had obviously come to terms with the fact that she had a daughter she'd given up for adoption, but he didn't know the rest. Or maybe he did. Until now, he hadn't touched her, not even when they walked from the apartment down the stairs. But when she didn't respond, Sam placed his hand over hers, and said, "Honey, we need some time together. We have a lot to sort out."
Of course he was right. "Okay then," Jayne said. "I'll stay on one condition. Before we share a bed I'm going to tell you everything I've wanted to tell you since the day we met."
"I already know everything," Sam said, returning his hand to the wheel in order to turn the car into the parking lot of the motel.
"No you don't," Jayne insisted. "You know I have a daughter I gave up for adoption, but you don't know why."
Sam didn't respond, but once he'd parked the car and they were behind the closed door to his motel room, he leveled his gaze on her and said, "I know you spent time in prison. Susan told me when she came for Ricky. She'd heard it from Lauren."
"Who else knows?" Jayne asked. If Maureen, and Jack and Grace knew, there was no way she could face them.
"Jack was with me when Susan told me," Sam said. "It was pure vindictiveness on Susan's part because I'd been calling her stud a stud."
"What did she tell you?" Jayne asked. Although Lauren had been in prison three of the five years Jayne was there, it was only the last year of Lauren's stint that they became acquaintances. Jayne had been taking online classes in hotel management for three years by then, and when Lauren started talking about the guest ranch her ex-husband and his brother owned, then went on to talk almost incessantly after that about Jack and how much she loved him, and how there were times when she just wanted to die because she missed him so much, Jayne felt a certain amount of empathy for her, but after she learned that Lauren killed their baby, she couldn't bring herself to feel anything for the woman.
"Susan claimed you drove a getaway car during an armed robbery."
The moment of truth, Jayne realized. "Susan wasn't lying," she said, "but I didn't know the father of my child had just robbed a convenience store. He'd had a few drinks and asked me to drive him and a friend to the store for cigarettes, so I did, and I waited in the car. Then they came rushing out and told me to get going, so I did. We'd only gone a few blocks when police cars came from all directions, and then I was face down on the pavement, and a policeman had his foot in the middle of my back, and I was crying and telling him I was pregnant and he might hurt my baby, and the next thing I knew I was handcuffed and in a police car..."
And then the dam burst.
Jayne hadn't cried over the incident in years, but in an instant, years of bottled-up tears seem to be flowing down her cheeks, and her lungs felt trapped for air, and she couldn't get her breath, and the sobs started coming, wracking her entire body as the whole hideous scene began to unfold in her mind, as if watching a rerun of it in slow motion.
"Honey, it's okay, it's all over," she heard Sam saying, although his voice seemed far away, at least it did until she realized it only seemed far away because she was making so much noise with her sobbing and snorting and sniffling.
Sam reached for a box of tissues on the bedstand and offered a fistful to her, and she blew her nose, then took another from him and mopped her eyes, then blew her nose again and said, "After Becca was born I only saw her for a few minutes before they took her away..." The tears started again, and the heart-wrenching sobs, and she felt tears running down her face.
Sam continued to hand her tissues until her crying was finally spent and she settled back in his arms and sniffled softly, and said, "You have no idea what I put my family through before all that happened, which was why I didn't call them from prison when I was given a chance to make one call. I couldn't. My father would have spent all his money on an attorney for a daughter who had defied him to run off with a man who wasn't worth a plug nickel, and was everything my parents claimed he was, and I wouldn't listen to them because—"
"Honey," Sam interrupted her diatribe. "It's over now so catch your breath, breathe, and finish telling me what happened so we can finally put it behind you."
For the next half hour Jayne relived the darkest moments of her life. She poured out the entire episode—one mortifying detail after another—about how she met Vince while working at a guest lodge in eastern Oregon during the summer between her junior and senior years in high school. And how she'd been completely taken in by Vince, who worked in the kitchen—'trying to make money for college,' he'd told her, the first of many lies. And how her parents had forbid her to see him after he'd come to her house to visit at the end of summer. One of her father's credit cards had gone missing after Vince left, but her father didn't discover it until after Vince ran up over three-thousand dollars in electronic equipment, which he sold. Then in the middle of her senior year in high school, four months pregnant but not yet showing, she took money from her mother's purse, bought a bus ticket, and in the face of her father's threat that if she walked out the door, not to come back, left and went after Vince.
"Until I met him I'd been a good student and a role model for my little sister, but after everything was over, I knew my family was better off without me so I never went back, at least not that they knew about. From time to time I'd go by the house just to see them, but I didn't want them to see me until I could pay back the money Vince took." When she'd finally run out of things to say, she looked at Sam and waited for his response.
He cupped her chin with his hand, and said, "Can we make love now?"
"Why?" Jayne asked.
Sam kissed her, and replied, "Because I love you." He kissed her again, "and because it's what we both want, am I right?"
"Yes,"
Jayne said, "but what about Becca? Where do we go from here?"
"Back to the ranch," Sam replied. "She can stay in the bedroom down the hallway from yours, and she can go to school with Ricky."
"I suppose that will be okay until the end of school, since it's only a few weeks away now," Jayne said, "but after that, I'll need to find another job and get Becca settled in a place of our own because there's no way we could possibly blend our families now. As long as I live in the same community with Susan and Lauren I'll always be known as the woman who drove a getaway car in an armed robbery, and if I happen to become Ricky's step-mother someday, he'll be known as the stepson of a jailbird."
When Sam said nothing, Jayne knew there was nothing more for him to say, because she'd hit on the whole ugly truth. No matter how innocent she was of the crime of driving a getaway car, Rebecca Hamilton was, and always would be, a jailbird. And from the bleak look on Sam's face, that fact had finally settled in.
CHAPTER 9
Shortly after dawn, the following morning, Jayne awakened in Sam's arms, with her hand draped over his chest, and opened her eyes to find him staring at her. They'd made love the night before, but not with the abandon Jayne had imagined they would have, before Sam learned the truth about her. Nor had Sam said he loved her again, and Jayne understood why. Sam's first obligation was to Ricky, and a troubled boy with a mother who had a live-in boyfriend didn't need his life complicated further by having a jailbird for a step-mother.
As she looked at Sam, unspoken words hovered between them, and there was definitely a cloak of uncertainty surrounding them. "I'm sorry I disappointed you," she said. "This has changed my life as much as it has changed our relationship, but I still want to make love this morning. I hope you do too."
Living With Lies Trilogy (Books 1, 2, and 3 of The Dancing Moon Ranch Series) Page 53