Mr. Elliott Finds a Family

by Susan Floyd

  Beth Ann took a deep breath willing herself not to panic. Iris had good days and bad days. On good days, she was an older version of the same woman who had single-handedly raised two unruly, prepubescent girls during a time when her peers were enjoying their retirement. On Iris’s bad days, Beth Ann could only mourn the woman Iris had been, a small part of Beth Ann dying with every subsequent episode Iris experienced. At those times, Beth Ann was partly grateful Carrie wasn’t present to see Iris’s decline and partly resentful that she now bore the burden alone. She bore many of Carrie’s burdens, the least of which wriggled impatiently on her hip.

  After having surveyed the boundaries of the acre parcel, looking up in all the fruit trees, checking the storage sheds—all of Iris’s favorite hiding places—Beth Ann realized with a sinking heart that Iris must have left the property to hit the high road. The isolated country road was a long one, nearly three miles, but at the end was a major east-west freeway that connected Highway 5 with 99. With a rapid walk, she hauled Bernie to the street at a half trot, hoping to get a glimpse of the direction Iris would take. With a leaping heart, Beth Ann thought she saw a flash of pink, but wondered if it were simply the play of light off the fog.

  Trying not to become disoriented, Beth Ann gingerly made her way in the direction of the truck and breathed a sigh of relief when it came into focus. With practiced hands, she stuffed Bernie into the car seat, digging the car keys out of her jeans pocket and willing her heart to stop beating so fast so her throat could open up. Beth Ann held her breath as she turned on the low beams and carefully backed out onto the road. She couldn’t see more than ten feet in front or behind her and the last thing she wanted to do was unwittingly knock Iris over. It was ludicrous to drive in this stuff. But it was even more ludicrous to try to chase Iris down on foot.

  She cranked the steering wheel left and had no visibility as she shifted from reverse to drive. She slowly, slowly pulled onto the road, driving as far right as she could, creeping at five miles an hour, praying Iris would come into sight. The muted screech of tires and a blunted scream sent shivers down Beth Ann’s back and she resisted the urge to accelerate, her heart pounding in her ears and dread shooting up her neck. She didn’t want to become a victim or, worse, add to any injuries.

  Bernie sat unusually silent as if she knew something was wrong, terribly, terribly wrong.

  “Nana?” she whispered.

  “We’re going to get Nana,” Beth Ann said reassuringly, hoping it wasn’t nearly as bad as it sounded.

  “Nana, okay?”

  “I hope so.”

  “Nana, careful?”

  “Maybe not so careful this time.”

  “Careful, careful,” Bernie told her, her large blue eyes solemn.

  “I know, Bernie-Bern-Bern, careful, careful.”

  It seemed to take forever to get to the accident, the headlight beams of a car were angled awkwardly off the side of the road. Miraculously, Iris was still standing when they arrived at the scene, the right side of a chrome bumper just inches from her bony legs. Beth Ann pulled over, unhooked Bernie, her back and shoulders feeling the strain of Bernie’s weight. She shifted the toddler onto her hip, snagged an old zip-front housecoat that she’d learned to keep in the truck for just these episodes and hurried to Iris.

  “I wet myself,” Iris said, looking down at her soaked bunny slippers.

  Beth Ann nodded sympathetically. “If I were almost hit by a car, I’d wet myself, too. Here, sweetie, put this on. It’s freezing out here.”

  “I want to wear my pearls.”

  “You can wear your pearls when we get home. But put this on now,” Beth Ann repeated, deliberately keeping her voice low and soothing.

  “Nana, put on,” Bernie echoed insistently, as Beth Ann pulled the housecoat over the frail woman with one hand and then shifted Bernie further up her hip. Thank goodness, Iris was being cooperative today. She obediently put one arm in the blue sleeve and then the other, then looked down to find the zipper. With shocked horror, suddenly aware of her state of undress, she pulled the zipper all the way up to her chin. Her thin, pale cheeks flushed with embarrassment.

  “Beth Ann, what am I doing out here?” she asked, anxiety crowding her voice. She looked around, searching for something familiar in the landscape but the fog obliterated any view at all.

  “Going for a walk, I imagine,” Beth Ann said equably, her heart rate finally slowing. At this point, she couldn’t even look at the driver who had reversed and straightened the car, a Jaguar no less, and had gotten out. Now that the crisis was over, Beth Ann felt absolutely drained, not inclined to explain anything to anyone, her mind only focused on holding down the fort until Glenn got there.

  “Is she okay?” the tall stranger called, the deep timbre unfamiliar, the annoyed tinge in his voice belying how shaken he was.

  Beth Ann nodded with a casual wave and a quick glance over her shoulder, and said with a dismissive nod, forcing her voice to be cheerful, “She’s fine, thanks. Sorry about that.”

  “She shouldn’t be wandering about by herself.”

  Beth Ann could hear his condemnation mixed with agitation but said nothing as she led Iris to the passenger side of the truck.

  He continued walking closer, his voice now with a sharp edge of authority to it. Beth Ann took a deep breath, bracing herself for the onslaught of words. “I could’ve killed her. Are you sure she’s all right? Maybe you should get her checked out by a doctor.”

  Beth Ann sighed and nodded, impatient to have him on his way. Then she opened the passenger side of the truck and helped Iris clamber in. When she had safely belted the older woman in, closed and locked the truck door, Beth Ann called as brightly as she could, “She’s fine. Not a scratch on her. I’ll get her home, clean her up and she’ll be as good as new.”

  “Bethany Ann Bellamy?”

  Her head snapped up in surprise at the formal use of her name, her eyes narrowing with dread as he came closer out of the fog. She was startled by his bearing and presence. She shouldn’t have been. Carrie always favored the austere type.

  “Yes?” Beth Ann deliberately made her voice clipped, masking her recognition.

  “Do you know me?” he asked.

  With long easy strides, the man walked toward her, looking her over from head to toe. She returned his assessment with cool detachment. He was dressed impeccably. Buff-colored casual linen slacks, well-fit to his long legs, a button-down light green cotton shirt and fine brown leather jacket accentuated his lean, powerful frame. She looked down at his feet, not surprised by the expensive shoes. They matched the look of the vintage Jaguar. She could smell a rich, spicy cologne and swallowed hard as she met his compelling gray eyes, eyes the color of fog and just as chilly. She glanced at his left hand. He still wore his wedding band.

  The best defense was a good offense.

  “No,” she lied, badly at that, her voice trembling. “I have no idea who you are.”

  Christian immediately stopped in his tracks when the woman glanced at him nervously, tightened her hold on the child and then looked furtively at the truck, ready to disappear into the fog. He studied the angles of her pixie face, her narrow chin, the damp brown, almost red, curls made unruly by the wet of the fog, searching for a resemblance to Caroline.

  He found none.

  While Caroline had been tall, nearly five-ten, with model-like proportions, the top of this woman’s curls would probably just brush the bottom of his chin. Maybe, if he stared at her hard enough, he could see some likeness around the nose and forehead. Her eyes were unfathomably dark, so dark that he couldn’t tell where her pupils ended and her irises began. So unlike Caroline’s sky-blue eyes. Maybe they shared the same nose. But, then again, maybe that was just the fog, his nerves or wishful thinking.

  “Who are you?” Beth Ann repeated, her tone tough and uncompromising, even a shade rude for a woman so petite.

  Christian cleared his throat. “Christian. Christian Elliott. Caroline’s hu
sband.”

  Beth Ann stared at Carrie’s husband, scanning his face. Her pulse thudded at the base of her throat. Even though she’d had a week to prepare for this meeting, she felt as if she were being choked and the shock made the back of her eyes water. For the briefest of seconds, she believed if she looked around this tall, remote man, she would see Carrie hiding in the car, laughing and saying her death was all just a big joke and Beth Ann shouldn’t take her so seriously and these past two years had only been a terrible dream. Her heart thumped against her chest in anticipation, as she shifted around, trying to peer through the fog at his car. But the Jag was empty.

  She glanced up at the man, her bottom teeth plucking at her top lip, biting down hard to keep the tears back.

  “You’re early,” she said, wincing at the roughness of her tone. Beth Ann put Bernie down, keeping a firm grip on a wiggling wrist as the toddler immediately tried to break free. Then Bernie looked up, way up, into the face of the handsome stranger and with a fit of shyness, turned away to clasp her arms tightly, very tightly, around Beth Ann’s knee almost buckling her leg as she buried her face in Beth Ann’s thigh. Beth Ann straightened herself and loosened Bernie’s squeeze as she smoothed back the little girl’s brown curls.

  Christian stared at both of them, then surprisingly retreated two steps to put a more comfortable distance between them. He stared hard at Bernie, who ventured a peek and then dug her chubby cheeks deeper between Beth Ann’s legs.

  “I didn’t know how long it would take to get here,” he said by way of explanation, then added, awkwardly, “Your directions were good. But the fog and all.”

  Beth Ann blinked.

  “Oh,” she said abruptly. “Well, come on. I have coffee ready.” She picked up Bernie again, who remained uncharacteristically silent, as if she sensed Beth Ann’s rising panic. Beth Ann turned to get into the truck.

  A firm voice added behind her, “Carrie’s husband is always welcome at our house.”

  Iris, the real Iris, had returned, her gray head poking out of the truck window, the confusion gone from her face, the authority back in her voice. She gave Beth Ann a matriarchal look of reproach. Beth Ann breathed a sigh of relief with Iris’s return to reality. Perhaps it wasn’t going to be that bad a visit.

  “Yes,” she agreed quietly, finally remembering her manners as she shifted Bernie higher up her hip and opened the driver’s side door. She glanced at him, noting how out of place he looked standing in the middle of the road, the fog just beginning to clear around him. He belonged behind a teak desk in a penthouse office in San Diego, not on a dirt road in Mercy Springs with newly plowed fields surrounding him. “Carrie’s husband is always welcome at our home. Follow me. It’s just down the road.”

  With Bernie strapped into her car seat, Beth Ann noticed her hand shook so badly she could barely put the key into the ignition. She felt a reassuring pat on her shoulder.

  “All is well,” Iris said, her voice soothing and clear. “This is just what is supposed to be happening.”

  Beth Ann gave her a watery glance and a half smile, wondering how many times Iris had said that to her, until it had almost become Beth Ann’s personal mantra. All is well. All is well. Beth Ann took a deep breath and tried to remember what peace felt like. All was well. But it wasn’t well. If it were, Bernie’s adoption would be signed and sealed and Christian Elliott wouldn’t be sitting twenty feet behind them in a car that cost twice her annual salary.

  “He can’t have Bernie,” Beth Ann said tightly, as she started the engine.

  “He doesn’t want Bernie. He wants Carrie,” Iris responded, her voice clear and unperturbed. And then she said, the focus in her eyes drifting away again, “I want to wear my diamond tiara today. I want you to put my hair up.”

  Beth Ann glanced in the rearview mirror as she guided the truck onto the road. Christian Elliott was looking down, his thumb and forefingers pressed between the bridge of his nose and his eyes. Then he looked up and blinked rapidly before following her.

  When Beth Ann turned into the driveway, Christian pulled in neatly beside her. Unhooking Bernie from the car seat first, she took the toddler and scrambled to get Iris who had opened the truck door. By the time she got around to the other side, another surprise. Christian, with a small formal bow, cordially offered his arm to assist Iris down, his large hand wrapped securely around Iris’s frail one, giving her complete support, catering to her as if she were a queen disembarking from a horse-drawn carriage rather than a faded pickup truck. He murmured something in her ear that made her laugh, her embarrassment miraculously forgotten.

  They all trooped silently into the house, then across the living room and through a swinging door that led into the kitchen. Beth Ann immediately put Bernie down and said to Christian, taking advantage of another adult, “Do you mind watching her for a minute, while I go help Iris?” It was easier to watch Bernie when she was confined to a limited space.

  Christian shook his dark head, his gray eyes unreadable. “Not at all.”

  Bernie was furiously digging in a pile of toys. “Stay with this nice man, Bernie,” Beth Ann instructed the back of the toddler’s head. “Fluff is under the chair. Remember, where you threw him? Why don’t you read a book to him?”

  She looked up and politely addressed Christian as she opened the creaky baby gate that blocked the kitchen’s open entry to the hall, using her head to indicate the room directly across that hall. “We’ll be right there, never out of hearing. Call if you need anything. I’ll be back in a minute.” She carefully secured the gate behind her and followed Iris into the bedroom.

  Christian shoved his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels, looking around and seeing much wear on the old bungalow, more evident by the clutter that had the stamp of decades of habitation on it. A far cry from Bella Grande, his family’s estate, which he had left just the day before. Even when he was young, the only decoration in the mansion besides the art on the walls was the great vase of flowers his mother arranged every morning in the cathedral entryway.

  No clutter anywhere. Not even snapshots of the family unless one counted the looming oil portraits of his grandfather and father, so creepy that Christian had avoided walking down those particular halls until he’d learned not to look at them. He shook his head. Why was it that his mother had never allowed the natural paper trail of life in the house? The memorabilia young children might collect, like the first edition Superman comic book that had cost him three weeks of kitchen duty in military school. Christian’s throat closed at the arbitrary memory, indignation rising like bile. It should have been safe next to his father’s evening paper. She never discarded his father’s paper.

  Now as he looked around the dilapidated kitchen covered with happy scrawls, predrawings if one could call them that, on the refrigerator, bundles of herbs dangling upside down over the kitchen sink, an edge of bitterness caught in the back of his throat. The warm aura of the disarray was powerful. He clearly remembered Caroline telling his mother, right after she met him that she had no living family, then backtracking hastily when her sister had showed up at his office unannounced.

  The timing of Beth Ann’s unexpected visit those many years ago couldn’t have been worse. He’d been in the middle of closing a two hundred and fifty million dollar acquisition that wasn’t being acquired as neatly as he had expected, his staff of lawyers and accountants scrambling to tie up the loose ends of a poorly constructed contractual agreement, which he was loathe to blame on his longtime school friend and executive vice president, Maximilian Riley. When the deal had been finalized a day later, he specifically asked Caroline about taking Beth Ann to see the sights, because he remembered her mentioning that she would be in town until the end of the week, but Caroline had coolly replied that he was mistaken, her half sister, emphasis on the half, was only in town for the day.

  Now, Christian Elliott studied an old photograph propped up on a shelf that held an assortment of well-used cookbooks stuffed fu
ll of pieces of aged paper and felt a small ember of anger in the pit of his stomach add to the bitterness in his throat. He focused on the photograph, squelching, as he’d been taught so effectively, the residual resentment toward his mother and his wife, willing himself to see Caroline in the past. He barely recognized her, her long dark hair in crooked braids, her dress too small, her bony wrists sticking out from the cuffs, her front teeth much too big for her mouth. Caroline must have undergone intensive orthodontia.

  In this picture, Beth Ann was substantially taller, her clothes too loose, her arm draped protectively around Caroline’s thin shoulders, her curls bushy with frizz. Caroline hadn’t grown up under even modest circumstances, he noted dryly, wondering how Caroline had managed to transform herself, allowing others to believe she had come from an affluent family, carrying with her the taste and confidence of the very rich. Yet another lie. Christian nodded, the bitter taste still in his mouth. Apparently, his money had supplied her with all the props she’d needed to carry off that confidence.

  “Go ’way!” A loud voice startled Christian out of the past. He looked down at the little girl, no taller than the top of his kneecap, who stood poised in the middle of the room, her finger in her mouth, staring up at him with great dislike. She glanced around and when she saw that Beth Ann was not in the kitchen anymore, shrieked, “No!” and ran to the baby gate. “Mommy!”

  “It’s okay, sweetie,” Beth Ann crooned from across the hall. “Mommy’s helping Nana. I’ll be right back.”

  “Noooooo! Want come.” The wail was mournful, heartbreaking. Bernie started to climb the baby gate, which moaned and creaked under her weight. Christian moved to pull her off the old gate, convinced it would collapse with Bernie on it.

  “Stay right there,” Beth Ann told her sharply, then said, “Why don’t you ask, uh, Uncle Christian to read you and Fluff a book.”

  Christian smiled uneasily. He had never been around very many children, especially of this stature. What could Fluff be? He looked around the room and deduced the well-used bear—though more matte than fluff—forlornly stuck on its side under a weathered kitchen chair must be Fluff. With a quick swipe Christian retrieved the bear and said in the most reassuring voice he could muster, “That’s okay, uh, Bernadette. Your mom’ll be back soon. She’s just helping your grandmother. I’ll read you and, er, Fluff a book. Which book would you like me to read?”