Second Time's the Charm

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  That morning’s MRI had been postponed until that afternoon. Which left her with a whole morning to herself.

  She could make her normal rounds at the day care, after all. Be on call at the clinic. Work on a papoose design that would allow toddlers’ feet to be free, so that they didn’t overheat if they were crying while in restraints for procedures. She’d tentatively sold the design to a company she’d worked with at the children’s hospital in Phoenix. They’d been expecting a prototype for over a month.

  There were any number of things she could be doing that morning, but she was a firm believer in fate. And she knew that there was something else she had to do with her suddenly free morning.

  She didn’t call ahead. She knew what time and where. She just had to get herself showered. Dressed in a pair of black slacks, a white silk blouse and a black linen jacket, she slipped into her expensive pumps and headed out to her car.

  In the beginning, she’d gone every day. Sometimes twice a day. Then once a week. Eventually, at the suggestion of a therapist she’d been seeing since before Braydon was born, she’d only allowed herself monthly visits. For the past two years, it had been only once a year—on the date of his birth.

  She went to remember her whole self. And to promise her son that they would be together again someday.

  Taking the second driveway in, she turned and turned again until she arrived at the row bearing the Henderson family stone.

  Two other cars were there. Kirk’s convertible and a nondescript dark-colored sedan, which she assumed was the minister’s.

  Seeing the middle-aged man standing in a long cloak, she was glad to see that Kirk had been honest with her at least. There was no fanfare. He hadn’t brought anyone else with him. This day was between him and the son he’d betrayed.

  He introduced Lillie to the minister and, without any small talk at all, the short service was under way. Standing next to her ex-husband, not touching him, Lillie listened to the Scriptures. She bowed her head for a prayer. She heard Kirk’s words of sorrow and grief to his dead son and his pleas for forgiveness.

  “My promise this day and for every day of my life is to live a life that will honor you, Braydon Thomas. You will be the basis upon which every decision in my life is made from this moment forward.”

  Her throat caught. She was not going to cry. She had no tears left.

  * * *

  HAVING BEEN UP so late with Lillie Wednesday night, Jon overslept Thursday morning for the first time in the nine years since he’d left prison.

  Whether he forgot to set the alarm, or just didn’t hear it go off, he didn’t know. He was driving Lillie to the hospital to have his baby, and heard sirens coming up behind him. They got louder and louder but he couldn’t see them in his rearview mirror. Couldn’t find them at all.

  Until finally they woke him up.

  The baby monitor was wailing at him—the siren ringtone he’d chosen to indicate movement in Abe’s room. A tone that escalated in volume the longer it played.

  Throwing off the covers, his gaze jerked first to the tablet monitor on his nightstand, studying the scene intently, looking for signs of Abe. Or an intruder.

  That was when he realized it was already well into the morning. The sun was shining through the closed blind in Abe’s room. And through the drapes in his room, as well.

  And he realized something else. Abe’s crib was empty.

  “Abe!” Running to the room next door to his, he looked around and found nothing.

  No sign of the boy. No mess.

  “Abraham!” Heart pounding, he ran down the hall. “Abraham!”

  Nothing. No sound. No little boy. Rounding the corner of the living room, Jon stopped cold. There, sitting in the middle of the floor, his pudgy fingers carefully lining up rows of cars, was Abraham. Playing just like he would have been if Jon had gotten him out of bed and set him down while he made their breakfast.

  Abe was having a regular morning.

  With the exception of two things.

  He’d climbed out of his crib on his own―something Jon had known was coming but hadn’t yet seen.

  And...

  “Abe?” He moved close behind the toddler and raised his voice up another octave.

  With a jerk, the little boy turned around.

  The monitor, his own calls from down the hall—Abraham hadn’t heard them. Or him.

  * * *

  “WALK WITH ME?” His hands in his pockets, Kirk waited for Lillie’s nod, for her to fall into step beside him as he started across the crisply manicured cemetery lawn.

  His suit jacket was unbuttoned, his red-and-black tie askew, and he didn’t seem to notice that the wet ground was marring the tips of his shiny black shoes. He stepped carefully, slowly, making it easy for her to keep up with him unassisted in her high heels.

  “I have no excuses, Lil,” he said to her. “Over the past couple of years I realized something was drastically wrong with me.”

  She listened. She couldn’t feel. She’d done too much of that. “Actually, I knew before that, but I couldn’t believe it. For a long time it was always someone else who just didn’t get it. Or something that couldn’t be helped and for which I wasn’t to blame.”

  He could have been referring to any number of things. His first affair could have been construed as her fault for not agreeing to be more sexually adventurous with him when he’d asked her to. Braydon’s illness had been something that couldn’t be helped, and maybe he thought his feelings for Leah fell under that category, too. She didn’t know and didn’t ask.

  “I can’t tell you that there was a specific moment, or any one thing that happened, that changed the way I saw things. There were no ‘aha’ moments or a particular time when the light came on.”

  They crossed a gravel drive to a paved path that wound around the base of the mountain. A couple of hikers passed them, heading toward the dirt path that led up the mountain. The desert’s fall colors were in full bloom: prickly pear cacti with their brightly colored fruit ready to be picked. Saguaro and ocotillo looming along the path and in the distance.

  “It’s like the knowledge was always there and just took a long time to surface,” Kirk was saying.

  He needed this. For Braydon’s and Ely’s sakes, she’d give it to him.

  “Leah thought I was losing it. The day I told her I couldn’t marry her, that I was moving out, she thought I needed to see a psychiatrist.”

  Lillie wasn’t as willing to go there with him. Her own wound was too raw. Would always be too raw. The way Kirk had summoned her to his office in her advanced state of pregnancy, hearing that he was having a healthy son while she carried the one who would most likely not live to see his childhood...

  Her foot came down on a little rock on the path and she stumbled. Kirk grabbed her elbow and steadied her. Held on.

  She pulled her arm away.

  “The truth is,” he continued with a look of sorrow on his face, “I lost it the day I heard about Braydon. I couldn’t do it, Lil. I wasn’t as strong as you. As good as you. I just didn’t have what it took to go through the pregnancy, the birth, only to have him die.”

  In fairness, she hadn’t been sure she had what it took, either, except that she’d had no choice. The baby had been inside of her. Wherever she went, he went.

  Until he didn’t.

  “At first, I was in denial. The doctor was wrong. Or the problem wasn’t what they’d first thought. But as your pregnancy progressed, as they did more tests, the situation only got worse and was further confirmed.”

  “Papa told you that?” Because Kirk had certainly not been there himself. Not since the first day they’d heard there was a problem.

  “The doctor told me that. I went to see her after every one of your appointments.”

  He
r head jerking to the side, Lillie stared at him. “She never told me that.”

  Was this another of Kirk’s tricks? A way to insinuate himself back into her heart—her life?

  “I told her not to,” Kirk said. “At that point I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to be the husband you deserved and needed me to be, and I figured the one decent thing I could do, rather than popping in and out of your life, was to leave you alone.”

  It might have been nice if she’d had a say in that decision. While, ultimately, their marriage would have ended, it still would have been nice to have had Braydon’s father around to share the unique burden they’d been given.

  At least she would have had someone to talk to who really understood.

  Who cared about the baby as much as she did.

  “I’m not proud of myself, Lil. At all. But if I’m going to get anything right in my life, I have to be honest with you. After I was sure Bray wasn’t going to get any better, I told myself that it was meant to be that way. And that my life would still be just as great as I’d always envisioned. I could move on to have the family I was meant to have.”

  To Leah. He’d moved on to Leah.

  And had Ely.

  Lillie had seen pictures of the boy. When she’d visited Papa and Gayle. At first, they’d removed all signs of their grandson whenever they knew she was coming over. But when she’d stopped in unannounced one day and seen the photos, she’d told them they didn’t have to hide them.

  That, in fact, it was wrong, unfair to an innocent little boy, for them to deny his existence in any way.

  “Ely looks like you,” she said now. “He’s got Leah’s light coloring, but he has your bone structure. Your nose and mouth.”

  Shoulders hunched, Kirk shook his head. It took a moment for her to realize he was crying again.

  “I never saw my son, Lil. He was on this earth for sixteen days, fighting for his life, and I wasn’t there. He never heard my voice.”

  It was something he was going to have to live with for the rest of his life. They both knew that.

  “There was nothing you could have done,” she had to tell him.

  Because the one thing Lillie couldn’t bear was to allow someone to suffer if she could help alleviate their distress.

  “There were no tough decisions to make, Kirk. No choices. They did everything they could, but he didn’t have enough of a heart to sustain him and its absence had already affected his other organs too much to allow for any possibility of a transplant. He arrived. He lived sixteen days. And he left us.”

  “But you held him.”

  The picture. The one on the gravestone that Kirk had just minutes ago lifted by himself from his car to place on the ground above their son’s tiny casket.

  “He was so tiny,” she said, daring for once to remember details. “Just under six pounds. And too thin. But they let me feed him. Every time.”

  She’d had to learn to nurse him surrounded by tubes and monitors, but they’d managed just fine. She’d have continued on forever if Braydon had been able to sustain life.

  “My father tells me he had your eyes.”

  Braydon had had his own eyes. Big and bright and filled with recognition when she talked to him.

  Over the next hour she relived those days, sharing memories, things that stood out, with the man who should have been there back then, sharing it all with her.

  “I’m so sorry I wasn’t there for you, Lil. You had to do all the hard work alone,” Kirk said again as they sat down on a bench at the foot of the mountain. The midmorning sun shone brightly down on them, taking the chill off.

  Maybe a little piece of Braydon wrapping his parents in his warmth.

  “You know,” Lillie said softly, giving Kirk a sad smile. “I’m not as sorry as I was,” she told him, feeling better, lighter, than she had in forever. “I’m realizing that I was the lucky one of the two of us,” she told him. She’d known Braydon. Had held him, smelled his fresh baby scent, even in the midst of all of the medicinal hospital surroundings. She’d seen his gaze as he stared trustingly up at her.

  “Thank you for introducing him to me.” Rubbing his hands together, Kirk looked over at her. “I didn’t deserve it.”

  Life wasn’t about people getting what they deserved. Otherwise, Braydon would be five years old, healthy and happy.

  Her parents would still be alive.

  And Abraham would have a mother.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  DR. HILLCREST, ABRAHAM’S pediatrician, had offices at the clinic where Lillie worked, but as it turned out, he only saw patients in Shelter Valley two days a week―Monday and Wednesday. Jon wasn’t waiting four days to have his son’s hearing checked.

  Hanging up the phone half an hour after flying out of bed late Thursday morning, he poured a little more farina in Abe’s bowl, made sounds behind the boy’s back to see if he’d notice and dialed Mark Heber. Abe didn’t notice. Hopefully Mark would find someone to cover Jon’s shift at the plant. He could access any schoolwork he missed through his student portal online.

  After leaving a message for Mark, Jon washed the pan he used to make Abe’s cereal. A voice on the other end of the line, as opposed to a recording, would have been nice.

  Assurances that his son was going to be fine would have been better.

  Abe going deaf? He couldn’t fathom it.

  But if it was true, they’d deal with it. Together.

  Putting the box of cereal back in the cupboard, he remembered the day he’d purchased it. The way Abe had screamed bloody murder when he’d ducked under the shelf to retrieve that last box in the back. Right after he’d told him what he was going to do.

  Abe hadn’t heard him. He’d screamed because he’d thought Jon was gone.

  Lillie had been right. She’d seen the signs that Abe had been giving them.

  He hadn’t.

  As soon as Abraham finished breakfast, Jon took the boy into the shower with him, cleaned them both up, got them both dressed and carried his son out to the truck.

  The doctor would tell him what to do next.

  * * *

  LILLIE HAD JUST come from the MRI and was heading toward her office when she was paged to the clinic’s waiting room.

  An emergency? Usually they came through the urgent care wing.

  Her hair falling out of its ponytail, she pushed through the doors. Jon was standing there, Abraham on his hip.

  “Illie! Illie!” The toddler reached out to her and Lillie took him automatically.

  Was it only that morning that she and Jon had decided they wouldn’t be “friends” anymore?

  The little boy placed a wet kiss on her cheek. “Abie baby.” She nuzzled her nose against his neck, calling him by his father’s pet name before she realized what she’d done. Not that it was the first time. It just seemed too personal now.

  Thankfully, that late in the afternoon, the waiting room was empty. There was no one there to notice how long she and Jon stood there, staring at each other.

  “Illie eat,” Abraham said.

  “You can’t possibly be hungry,” Jon said to the boy. “You just had ice cream an hour ago.”

  Jon looked directly at Abe, moving in closer to get the boy’s attention. He also spoke louder than normal.

  “Abe had ice cream in the middle of a Thursday afternoon?” she asked, frowning. Ice-cream day at Little Spirits was on Friday.

  For a second, she thought she had her days confused. Was it Friday, not Thursday? Having had so little sleep and after experiencing the emotional hell of the past twenty-four hours, she couldn’t be positive.

  But...

  “You’re not at work,” she said to Jon. Because of her? Because she’d kept him up half the night? No. Jon would go to work on no sleep
at all if he had to.

  “Abe and I have just come from Dr. Hillcrest’s office in Phoenix,” he told her, his face serious, but not grim.

  Lillie’s heart pounded. “Is something wrong?”

  “I had his ears checked.”

  She wasn’t sure she’d heard him correctly, but only because she so badly needed to hear him say what he’d just said.

  “And?” she asked. Please, God, let it be something fixable.

  “His ear canals have narrowed,” he said. “We saw an ear, nose and throat guy in Dr. Hillcrest’s office. He spent an hour and a half with Abe. He’s not sure what’s caused the narrowing, but he assures me that if he puts tubes in Abe’s ears, the situation will reverse and correct itself.”

  “He’s not going deaf.”

  “He could have, if we hadn’t caught the situation in time. But no, there’s nothing wrong with his eardrums. Once the canals are opened, he’ll be fine.”

  Unprofessional tears sprang to her eyes. Boundaries, she reminded herself.

  “We’re scheduled to have the procedure done here on Monday afternoon,” Jon said. “I’d like to ask you to be there, Lil. To support Abe.”

  For a split second she wondered if this was just an attempt by Jon to get her back into their lives, but she knew better. He wasn’t Kirk. Jon was who he was—up front and open. She could trust him.

  Which was why she cared so much about him.

  “Of course I’ll be there,” she told him. And with a last hug, she handed Abraham back to his father and retreated to her office to add his procedure to her calendar.

  * * *

  WITH THE CO-PAY of Abe’s upcoming procedure and the possibility he would need to take time off from work if there were any complications, Jon picked up extra hours over the weekend. Mark called to say that Addy and Nonnie would be happy to watch Abe so that Jon could go in on Sunday.

  They’d had a line go down overnight on Saturday and Mark had been in on Sunday, too, helping to get a conveyer back up and running so they wouldn’t miss Monday’s shipment.