Another Man's Baby

by Dyanne Davis

  “I always knew, Eric,” Gabi whispered.

  “I should have known too, baby.”

  “Is that why you blamed me? But you never knew of my prayer until now.” She blinked. “What’s the real reason?”

  He groaned. “It was my loving you that was the problem. All I could think about was you, coming home to you. I wanted to be able to fall asleep every night with you in my arms. After what happened, I doubted myself, doubted if I’d done the best for my men. A tenth of a second, Gabi, I swear that’s all it was.”

  “Do you think it was your thinking about me or the…the…you know, the other incident.” She stopped as Eric flinched.

  He closed his eyes and pulled her close. A tremor began in his body and he couldn’t stop it. “I know that it was considered justified, but I keep seeing it over and over. I keep wondering about the guy’s family, his kids, his parents, his wife. Maybe the guy had a wife he loved as much as I love you. Maybe he wanted to return home to her as badly as I did to you. What right did I have to come home alive when he didn’t? What right did I have to come home alive and just continue life the same as before when some of my men didn’t make it back, when some of my friends didn’t?”

  Sobs raced through Eric and he tried to stop them, tried to mentally order them to return to the deep recesses from which they’d come. Damn it, he was a marine.

  Buy it was as though a damn had broken. He sobbed until there was nothing left. Eric was holding onto Gabi so tightly that he knew he had to be hurting her. But he couldn’t let her go. She was his lifeline and he’d almost lost her. He unburdened all the horrors that he’d seen and done, telling her finally of the babies, holding her so tightly in his arms that she moaned in pain.

  “Baby, Eric, I’m so sorry you had to go through that, that I’ve added to your pain by demanding you tell me. I didn’t know. I’d read some of the stories in the papers but…to have seen it. I can understand why you didn’t want me to get pregnant,” she said softly.

  “But I had wanted babies with you, I was dreaming of our having babies when the truck came.”

  “It makes sense, Eric, even blaming yourself and blaming me. I can see why you hesitated about our starting a family.”

  Eric pulled back to gaze into Gabi’s eyes in disbelief. She understood. He couldn’t believe it. Every horror that he’d seen came to his mind and he told his wife everything, leaving nothing out, not trying to make the things he’d done better or worse, just telling her what had happened. And all the time he stared into her eyes and found no condemnation, just love and understanding. “I’m sorry I unloaded all of this on you.”

  “And I’m sorry you didn’t do it sooner. I was a little jealous that you were talking to your father and the therapist and not me…but now…now I’m so glad you had someone to talk to.”

  “I didn’t.” Eric hesitated. “I never really talked to my father about the things that happened. Some he guessed because of having been in Vietnam. We dealt with some of the same things. We never had long conversations about any of it. But I never told the therapist. I wouldn’t do that to you. I wouldn’t give someone else what I wasn’t giving you.” He kissed her shoulders repeatedly. “I didn’t want to give you this horror, but I see your shoulders are big enough. I wish I had told you sooner.”

  “So do I, baby, so do I. We’ve always worked well as a team. You should have never had to shoulder this pain alone. She closed her eyes tightly. “I feel such sorrow for you, the troops and the Iraqi people. I can’t begin to imagine the pain involved in sacrificing an innocent baby.” Her hand slid down to her abdomen in a protective manner and tears slid down her cheeks. “I can’t…the grief the parents must have felt. I can’t begin to tell you that I understand what you went through, but it makes me more grateful than ever that you came home to me, that God saw fit to save you for some greater purpose.”

  “Why, Gabi? I don’t pray. I don’t even know if I believe. Why me? Even you, Gabi, you don’t go to church and you’re not always on your knees. Why us, what’s so special about us? It can’t just be our love, baby.”

  “I don’t care what it is,” Gabi answered, smoothing her hand over his bald head. “I’m just thankful you came back alive.” Her own sobs hitched in her throat. “When you were…when I thought you were cheating, when I found the panties and the condom I wished….” She licked her lips.

  “Yeah, you don’t have to say it. I wished it too. I wished I had died there when you put me out. I don’t know how the hell I could have hurt you like that.”

  Gabi was once again pulling away and Eric knew why. He held her, shaking his head. “Gabi, that wasn’t a confession, that’s not what I meant. I didn’t sleep with Jamilla. I promise you I didn’t. And it was Jamilla’s panties. I saw her a couple of nights ago at the club. She wanted to take up where she thought we left off,” he said quietly. “I got her to admit the panties were hers, that she’d put them in the car. She said it was a joke.”

  “A joke,” Gabi muttered between clenched teeth. “Destroying our marriage was a joke to her?” She pulled back from Eric with renewed anger for the incident in her eyes.

  “We’re talking, baby. Remember, this is the forgiving part. Will you forgive me for hurting you?”

  A sigh fell from Gabi’s lips. “If you can give me a good reason. I don’t understand, even with the guilt. I don’t understand why you would risk us. I don’t know why you would start chasing other women. I don’t get it.” Her shoulders came up. “It’s going to be really hard for us to trust each other again.” She watched as his eyes fell to her abdomen. “Did you really mean our ‘baby’?”

  “Yeah, the baby is ours.” He hesitated. “Can you accept that from me, for now, without asking for more?”

  “Meaning can I accept that even though you don’t believe it’s yours, can I accept that you’re willing to claim it?”

  Eric looked down. “Yes, that’s what I mean.”

  “Why do you think the voice keeps whispering to both of us to have faith?” Gabi stared at her husband and smiled slightly. He didn’t answer and she was aware she was pushing him to believe more than he could at the moment. She would take what he was offering. After all, Gabi didn’t have a doubt in the world that she would be able to prove the baby was Eric’s. “Okay. I can handle that for now. But, Eric, you still didn’t answer. Why all the whoring around?”

  Eric stared at her, taken aback. Okay, he wanted back in his wife’s good graces. Matter of fact, he wanted to ensure she remained his wife. He’d take whatever she was dishing out.

  “Whoring around is a bit strong, but I knew what I was doing, so I won’t fight you over your word choice.” He pulled her close. “I don’t know, baby. I have no idea what got into me. It was like I was playing this role, trying so hard to find the right fit. Nothing was working for me. I hated having to see troops leave, to give them a pep talk. And the enlistments center…” He shuddered. “You have no idea of the hellish job that is. There are millions of Americans that support the war. And they all support the troops, but when you go to their homes and ask to take their sons and daughters…” Eric sawed his lips with his teeth and shook his head.

  “For over a year now I’ve been so damn conflicted and afraid to say so. To say so means I’m unpatriotic or a coward.” He swallowed. “But it’s getting harder and harder to see more Americans go off to fight. I’m having a hard time believing in the rightness of this war. I know people on all sides die. I know that, Gabi, but I also know the Iraqi people have lost many innocent lives. Even the ones that weren’t innocent, they had families.”

  He pulled her even closer, wanting to crawl into her skin if he could. “I killed a man, Gabi, an innocent man and nothing anyone says can make that right in my book.”

  “You didn’t know.”

  “No, I didn’t know, but it doesn’t do a damn thing for the hurt in my belly. It doesn’t make it go away.”

  Gabi was feeling some of the agony her husband had gon
e through. She wanted to help him. She touched his heart with the tip of her finger. “Did you ask for forgiveness?”

  “You mean him? Did I ask the man I killed for forgiveness?” Truly, Gabi had no idea what she was saying. Eric was trying to be patient with her. “How was I going to ask a man I killed to forgive me?”

  He frowned at her. “Did you think I was going to go and ask his family? Damn, baby, that scene played out as duty. You dig? I gave an order, he disobeyed. It was duty, baby, I’m a soldier.”

  “If that’s true, why are you still carrying the guilt?”

  “Because underneath the soldier was a man with frailties and weaknesses. I can’t forget.”

  “You don’t have to forget, but you can be forgiven.”

  “Gabi.”

  “Will you forgive me for hurting you, for using Reggie to make you crazy, for pushing you over the edge? I didn’t know what you were dealing with. Will you forgive me for giving tit for tat?”

  “I know what you’re doing, Gabi. It’s not that easy for me to be forgiven for what I did.”

  “But it’s the first step.” She clasped Eric’s hand. “Ask,” she said.

  “I can’t.”

  “You don’t have to do it out loud, but do it, baby.” She held his gaze. “Do it for me, for us. Do it so we can have a fresh start and this won’t come between us again.”

  Eric groaned and let out a breath. He closed his eyes and held Gabi in his arms as the words ‘please forgive me’ raced through his mind. He didn’t direct the words toward anyone, just allowed them to be thought. “I don’t feel any different,” he said when he opened his eyes.

  “Forgiveness doesn’t happen that quickly. It takes wanting it.” Gabi shook her head. “It takes thinking you deserve it, it takes lots of hard work. Baby, you did a heck of a lot more good over there than you did bad. Just you remember that. You went there to fight for freedom for the Iraqi people. It doesn’t matter if you no longer believe that. When you went, you believed it. Even with the kids you’re ordered to recruit, you can’t tell me that you’re not proud to be in the military. You’re not trying to get these kids to give up their lives, you’re trying to get them to share in your passion, your commitment. You believed once in what you were doing and if you don’t believe now that’s okay.”

  “But that makes me a hypocrite.”

  “It makes you human.”

  “But look at you, baby. You believed in something and you took a stand. When you didn’t fill out those papers for that patient’s abortion you weren’t a hypocrite, you stood by the power of your conviction.”

  “I also am not a soldier. No one can order me to do something. Besides, there are other people in my office that see it as their job. Eric, if you and I were divorced and I was raising our baby alone,” she said, emphasizing the our, “who knows what I would do if I were told to. If it meant I couldn’t feed our child, who knows? No one ever knows what they can or can’t do. We can’t say until it comes to us. Just like the war, Eric, we can say we support it until we have to give up our babies. Life is hard. Like that old saying, ‘Don’t judge until you’ve walked a mile in another man’s moccasins.’” He grinned and so did she. “Even if you didn’t tell her about the things that happened in Iraq, that therapist really got you to open up.”

  “It wasn’t the therapist.” Eric gazed at his wife, looking at her lips, wondering when she would think they’d talked enough, wanting badly to kiss her, to suckle her breasts, to bury his head between her thighs, to plunge his fast growing erection into her wet heat.

  Startled, Gabi’s mouth opened with a small gasp. “No? Then who?”

  “You, baby. I couldn’t just let you walk out of my life without trying everything. You wanted me to tell you what had happened, and I had to try. I worried that you might hate me for it, but still I had to try.”

  “Hate you, baby? I want to kiss you and every other soldier who protects our country. You’re all true heroes in my book.”

  He was still staring at her lips. But he knew there was so much more they needed to say, so much more Gabi needed to hear.

  “Eric, I didn’t sleep with Reggie.”

  Eric sucked in a breath, his eyes lowering as he pulled his lip between his teeth and sawed it gently back and forth.

  “I didn’t sleep with anyone, baby, but I’m not going to ask you to go on blind faith. This one will be an easy one to prove.” Gabi held his gaze. “In four months I can prove that to you.”

  “I’m not asking for proof, not any more.”

  “But I’m going give it to you. This is not going to be between us. This won’t be one of the things you will have to forgive me for.”

  He played with his hands. “What about Jamilla? Do you believe me? Are you willing to forgive me?”

  “If I weren’t I wouldn’t be sitting here with you right now.”

  “You don’t have to worry about Tracie though. She was at the club, she saw me turn Jamilla down. She smiled her approval at me. What the hell was I thinking?” Eric covered his head with his hands.

  “Yeah, what were you thinking?” Gabi hit him several times over the head, then moved in closer and gave in to the look in her husband’s eyes. Why shouldn’t she? She wanted to kiss him also. They would be alright. It would take time but thank God their marriage would survive.

  ANOTHER MAN’S BABY 229

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Eric lay next to Gabi in their big bed. She’d finally drifted off to sleep but he was unable to. He was running everything through his mind, all the confessions, all the doubts, everything. His body still burned from their passion. They’d made love nice and slow, taking the time to get lost in each other the way they always had, not going for the release but the soul connection, and they’d found it.

  Now Eric lay just looking at Gabi and the round mound in the center of her body. An electrical energy emanated from Gabi and touched him. He put out his hand, feeling it and was awed by the power.

  “Have faith.”

  “I’m learning,” Eric whispered.

  “The baby is yours.”

  Yes, Eric thought, the baby would be his. Regardless of the biological father, the baby would be his.

  “You don’t understand, Eric. The seed is yours. Have faith.”

  Just like that, the voice was gone as well as most of the strange, powerful energy. Eric stared around the darkened room. This was getting to be a bit spooky. He wasn’t insane, had never been prone to imagine things. He smiled. It was the first time the voice had called him by name. It was also the first time the voice had actually had a conversation with him telling him more than to have faith.

  Eric had wondered for over a year who the voice belonged to. Now he knew. It had to be Gabrielle’s guardian angel. For a moment he wondered if hearing the voice just then had been wishful thinking. What the voice had said was impossible. He was still sterile.

  Eric kissed Gabi’s forehead, then bent lower and planted a kiss on her abdomen. The electrical energy returned and appeared to be centered right there in Gabi’s womb. In that energy there was a knowing. It started slowly. Something worked its way from the soles of his feet, and inch by inch traveled through his body and rested in the crown of his head before it made the downward journey. Eric blinked, a smile breaking out on his face. In that instant he felt a connection to the fetus in his wife’s womb. His eyelids fluttered and a pounding began in his chest, rapid and prolonged.

  Damn. This was his baby. He wasn’t just saying the words anymore for Gabi’s benefit. He didn’t know how, but it was his. Eric spooned his body around Gabi and laid his hand gently on her abdomen as the energy radiated through his palm and throughout his body. “You’re mine,” he whispered as he fell asleep.

  ***

  Three months later Eric made his decision: He was leaving the military. He had a teaching degree and he’d try to influence the minds of children for better. He looked at Gabi’s swollen belly. There had to be a better way and
he had to have something more to give to his son or daughter.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  Eric grinned at Gabi. “It’s been so long in coming I never thought it would ever happened but today I woke up and for the first time I didn’t feel guilty. I didn’t dream last night about Iraq.”

  “Did you dream?”

  “Yeah, about you and our baby, about all the other kids we’ll have.” He watched Gabi’s face, saw the tears and shook his head at her. “Don’t cry, baby, not this time, not about this.”

  “Am I hearing you right?” Gabrielle asked, her voice almost a whisper, the hope shining from her voice.

  “Hell, yes. I should have known all along. You know something, Gabi,” he said, going to her, lifting her and seating her on his lap. “I kept thinking the words ‘have faith’ meant something else. I didn’t know what. But I think I finally have a glimmer of the meaning.”

  He put his forehead to hers. “This is our baby, Gabi. I know that. I don’t mean that it’s a baby I’m laying claim to because it’s yours. I know that it’s mine, my flesh and blood.

  “And I know we’re going to have more. It’s not that I’m being macho, thinking that I wasn’t shooting blanks. I wasn’t. I’ve thought about it. I know the moment we made that baby. I felt it, there was something different in our lovemaking.”

  Eric tapped Gabi’s forehead. “Aside from your calling out another man’s name there was more. There was a life forming. I felt this electrical energy leave my body and enter yours. I didn’t know it was a baby at the time but I do now. And your guardian angel only confirmed it for me.”

  “What about all the reports?”

  “I don’t have the answer to that, but they’re wrong. I know that as surely as I know I love you.”