Brought Together by Baby

by Carolyne Aarsen

  “I’ve been taking care of Gracie since she was a newborn. I’ve said it before but it bears repeating, that while she looks good from a physical standpoint, she is still considered medically fragile. If we can keep her healthy for the next few years, then I know she can turn the corner. If not, we are looking at far more serious medical problems.”

  Rachel made a quick note, but Eli could see a faint tremble in her hand.

  “What kind of medical problems are you talking about?”

  “Fluid build-up in her brain that would necessitate a shunt. And with shunts come further infections and more problems.” Okay, maybe he was laying it on a little thick, but she needed to know. The more information she had, the better decisions she could make.

  And if he were to be perfectly honest, he was trying to goad her into reacting. Into being more than a cool, self-contained woman who saw Gracie as a duty. He wanted to know that she cared. That Gracie, who he had to admit was special to him, was going to be in good hands.

  He handed her a card. “This is the hospital emergency number, my home number and my pager number. If you need me, call.”

  Rachel drew in a long, slow breath, as if absorbing the information with it. She slipped the paper in her briefcase and the card in her purse. “Okay. I’ll see how this goes, then,” she said, standing. Then, to his surprise, she reached across the desk to shake his hand. “Thanks for your time, Dr. Cavanaugh. I’m sure we’ll be in touch.”

  He took her hand, surprised at how cool it felt.

  Just like the rest of her, he thought.

  She slipped her briefcase over her shoulder and Eli strode around the desk to open the door for her. But this time, as she passed him, she glanced up at him.

  Their gazes met and held, and for a moment Eli felt it again. That tug, the age-old signal of two people attracted to one another in spite of circumstances.

  He didn’t know where it came from. She certainly had not encouraged it and he certainly wasn’t looking. He was building up his practice, working on his house, paying off his loan, keeping his life ordered and on target.

  He almost laughed as he watched her leave, putting down that flicker of awareness to the basic reality of his life. Though he casually dated, he knew he could not devote himself to a full-fledged relationship. And not with someone like Rachel Noble. Besides, he was devoted to his work.

  Too devoted, according to his last serious girlfriend. She had other issues, he had found out, but she chose to make his job the main reason for the split. He found out afterward that her family had discouraged her from dating him mainly because they did not know what his background was. They did not know his biological parents, did not know what possibly sinister secrets lay in his genetics.

  With a light laugh at the melancholy drift of his thoughts, he grabbed his helmet, left the office and headed for home.

  The phone was ringing when he entered the house and a glance at call display made him smile.

  “Hey, Mom, how are you?” he asked, tucking the phone between his shoulder and his ear as he bent over to pick up a shirt he had left lying on the floor. He knew his mother couldn’t see the state of his house, yet he felt guilty.

  “I’m just fine. Where were you all morning?” Peggy asked. “I tried a couple of times.”

  It wasn’t hard to hear the expectant tone in her voice, which made Eli feel even more guilty.

  “Ben and I had a Sunday morning football game and I got called to the hospital.” He threw the shirt on a pile of laundry to be brought to the cleaners and slipped the DVDs he’d been watching the other night back in their cases.

  “Ben was there, too?” He recognized the mixed message in her disappointed tone. It was as if she was saying that Eli’s defection from church was difficult but not unexpected. That Ben, the apple of their eye, was heading down the same path seemed harder to take. Ben’s reasons to stay away from church made perfect sense to Eli. Losing his beloved wife Olivia to cancer had pushed Ben away from God.

  “It was his idea.” As soon as he spoke the words, he felt like a heel. He was an adult. He didn’t need to play these silly “he did it, too” games that he and Ben had grown up with.

  It was just that his relationship with his adoptive parents always held undertones of his not fitting in. It hadn’t helped that he had come to them as a child of six, after being orphaned by a car accident that took his only living relatives away from him. Ben, their other son, also adopted, had come as a newborn baby with no extra baggage. No mother, no father, no family that he knew of. The Cavanaughs had been able to start with a clean slate with Ben, whereas with Eli there was always a measure of friction. He had wanted to know about his parents but the Cavanaughs could tell him nothing.

  Or would tell him nothing. Last year he had found a box of photos in the attic when he and Ben had helped their parents clean up. He had never seen them before: they were of him and his natural parents. Peggy and Tyrone had had them since he was young. When confronted with them, Peggy had said that the pictures had always made him very upset, so they put them away, then forgot about them. It seemed plausible; however, since then their relationship had become more awkward.

  “You said you got called to the hospital,” Peggy was saying. “I hope it wasn’t anything too serious.”

  Eli thought of Rachel and Gracie and rubbed his forehead with his finger. “Not with my patient. She fell, but she’s okay. How are you and Dad doing?”

  “Good. But I was hoping we could come up sometime and help you and Ben finish the house.”

  “That’s okay, Mom. I don’t want you and dad to trouble yourselves. It’s too far to travel from Florida to Richmond just to pound a few nails.”

  His mother’s moment of silence created another twinge of guilt. “I see. Well, we will be up Labor Day. I hope we can see you then.”

  “Of course.”

  Peggy asked a few more general questions as the conversation drifted into the final goodbye.

  Eli punched the button to end the call and tossed the phone aside. Then he sat and leaned his head back against the soft leather of the couch as he looked around the house. Much as he did not want to admit it to his parents—or his brother Ben, for that matter—he’d been wondering more and more if buying this house wasn’t a colossal mistake. All his life he had wanted a place of his own. A place that he could build up himself. It wasn’t something he could easily explain to Peggy and Tyrone, much less to himself. Not even Ben understood why a confirmed bachelor wanted to tie himself down to a mortgage when he was still single.

  But then, Ben did not have the memories of family that Eli had. And it was those vivid memories of a previous life that he clung to in the traumatic first year after witnessing his parents’ lives snuffed out in front of him. He had loved his parents and it was that love that had caused some misunderstandings with Peggy and Tyrone Cavanaugh when he first went to live with them. It was as if they did not quite know what to do with a child who came with other memories.

  So they never talked about his parents. Never mentioned them.

  Eli had accepted that. Until he found the pictures.

  He had taken the box of photos back with him, and now and again took them out as if trying to discover who these people were, these people who had given him life and had taken care of him those first few years.

  Unconsciously he rubbed the scar on the back of his hand, a mute reminder of the accident.

  He thought of Gracie Noble. She was young enough that she would not have any memories of her mother. As far as he was aware, the Nobles had encouraged contact with Gracie’s mother, but the woman had left town as soon as she had put Gracie up for adoption.

  Eli had been Gracie’s doctor since she was born and it was really amazing that the child was as healthy as she was. Of course, she’d spent most of the first year of her life in and out of the hospital—whenever her mother seemed to think she needed a break from the demands of taking care of a handicapped child, which was every weeken
d and often during the week, as well. Eli had been the one to contact Pilar Estes, a social worker with Tiny Blessings—and a friend of Rachel’s, he’d later discovered—with his concerns. Thanks to his intervention, Gracie had found a stable and loving home with the Nobles.

  As Eli pushed himself up from the sofa, he thought of Rachel and wondered again if she was the best person to be taking care of Gracie. She had the same attitude Gracie’s mother had had toward the child’s handicaps. Though Rachel had tried to hide behind a cool facade, he had noticed the fear in her face when she first entered the hospital room.

  He would have to see how she managed. If he had any doubts at all about Gracie’s care, he would get her put into a better place.

  “Reuben, I want you to leave Mrs. Binet to me,” Rachel said, accelerating through a yellow light as she spoke on her hands-free cell phone. “If we push too hard, she could easily end up throwing it to some questionable organization. I’m going to be seeing her tonight and I want to advise her to wait.” Provided Pilar could still baby-sit Gracie.

  “We just need to find the right combination for her and I think I found one,” said Reuben.

  “Which one?” This was news to her. Last time she and Reuben had spoken to the woman, LaReese was still undecided.

  “It’s a new one that I’m investigating.” He gave her the name, and Rachel frowned in puzzlement.

  “Never heard of them.”

  “It is like a Make-A-Wish foundation and the focus is children of prisoners.”

  Rachel glanced at the clock on the dashboard of her car and stifled panic. She was already fifteen minutes late and the day care where she had brought Gracie this morning was another ten minutes away.

  She slowed down, stuck behind a bus that was trying to make a left turn across two lanes of traffic. She glanced behind her and saw two lanes of traffic bumper to bumper behind her. This was not looking good. Today was the second day in a row she was going to be late.

  “Doesn’t sound like a match to me, Reuben,” Rachel said, tapping her fingers restlessly on the steering wheel.

  “From our last meeting I got the impression that Mrs. Binet is looking more closely at health issues, rather than social ones.”

  “I think we could get her excited about this group. So far they seem on the up-and-up.”

  “The ink must barely be dry on their license. Why don’t you give me what you’ve got? I’ll see about showing it to her tonight.”

  “You don’t trust me?”

  Rachel glanced past the bus and saw a hole in the on-coming traffic she could slip through.

  “It’s not that I don’t trust you…” The bus made the turn. Rachel accelerated through a yellow light, swerving around a car trying to make a last-ditch turn across her lane. She drew in a steadying breath. She was never this reckless. The sensible thing would be to pull over and finish the conversation. But time was her enemy.

  “I feel personally responsible for seeing that Mrs. Binet is happy with our choice. If this works, she has more money earmarked for charitable donations.”

  “You put this on my desk, Rachel. Why are you micromanaging?”

  Because that’s how this Foundation got to where it did, she thought, stifling a sigh. People like Reuben thought that because her parents’ wealth formed the backbone of the Foundation, money flowed easily in and out of the coffers.

  Very few people, other than her closest assistants, realized how important relationships were in this business. Relationships, trust and a keen business sense. Money flowed out far more quickly than it flowed in.

  When Rachel had taken over management of the Foundation, the books had not been anywhere near as healthy as they were now. Funds had been mismanaged and her parents, though good hearted and kind, had trusted the wrong people.

  It had taken Rachel a few years and some hard decisions, but she had slowly brought the Foundation around. Now it enjoyed a healthy bank balance and had earned the trust of not only established and respected nonprofits who relied on them to organize fund-raisers, but also a vast number of wealthy patrons who trusted the Foundation to make good choices for them. However, in the past few months she had lost a few donors which made her nervous. She didn’t want to have all her hard work fall away again.

  “Reuben, I can’t talk about this now. I still need to connect with Lorna and then pick up Gracie from day care.”

  Mrs. Binet was taking up far too much of her time, but she did not dare pass the woman on to Lorna or Reuben. LaReese Binet had specifically come to her, and the money they would be dealing with was enough to justify the personal hand-holding.

  And somehow, in all of this, she had to figure out how to spend some so-called quality time with a little girl that still made her nervous. Is this what mothers did all the time? she wondered as she disconnected the phone. This juggling of time and need?

  She took another corner, then realized she had turned too soon and desperately tried to find a place to turn around.

  Fourteen minutes and thirty-five seconds later she pulled into the parking lot of the day-care center with a screech of tires. She grabbed her purse and keys and jumped out of the car, knocked her knee against the edge of the door and limped up the sidewalk of the day care, trying to ignore the ringing of the cell phone from her car.

  She did not have time for this, she thought as she pulled open the glass doors of the day-care center. But her promise to her father and the faint challenge in Eli Cavanaugh’s eyes kept her committed to Gracie’s care. More importantly, Gracie was her sister. And no matter her discomfort, family takes care of family.

  Gracie was waiting for her in the arms of the day-care worker, who looked pointedly at the clock. Her prim mouth and narrow eyes did not bode well for Rachel.

  “We made our policy very clear when you enrolled your daughter in our program,” the woman said.

  “I understand…Mrs. Nelson,” Rachel said, glancing at the woman’s name tag. “And I want to apologize for picking up my sister,” she put extra emphasis on the word, “so late.” She bent down and retrieved Gracie’s diaper bag and then reached out for Gracie.

  “We tried to contact you sooner.” Mrs. Nelson looked down at Gracie and frowned. It was only then that Rachel noticed the girl’s flushed cheeks and damp curls. “Gracie has not had a good day. The nurse took her temperature and it is elevated. She recommends that you take her to see her doctor as soon as possible.”

  “Like now?”

  Her question made it sound like Gracie was just another chore shoe-horned between making a living and living. Note to self, Rachel thought as she took her sister in her arms, think before you speak.

  “What I meant to say was, how urgent is this? Should I go immediately to the hospital, or should I monitor her situation?”

  Mrs. Nelson lifted her shoulders in an exaggerated sigh as she gently brushed a curl away from Gracie’s forehead. “I would suggest immediately. With Gracie’s C.P., you need to be extra vigilant.”

  Which was why I brought her here and did not keep her at home.

  “Then I’d better go.” She could feel the heat of Gracie’s body through her clothing. She did not dare look at her watch for fear of appearing even more insensitive. She was thankful that the hospital was not far from the day-care center.

  Chapter Five

  Twenty minutes later she pulled into the parking lot of the hospital, and as she hurried through the doors of the emergency room, the memories came rushing back.

  She glanced down at Gracie, who lay slumped in her arms, and a new fear took over. As she strode to the intake desk, she wondered again how in the world she had thought she was capable of doing this.

  For the past eight years she had battled feeling inadequate and out of control. Now she was holding a drooping child while answering the questions of a harried intake nurse juggling phone calls and questions from patients, nurses and doctors.

  When she was done she walked back through the busy waiting room, fighting old
and new fears, smelling the too-familiar odors peculiar to hospitals. She swallowed down a quiver of panic. She had to focus, for Gracie’s sake.

  Gracie whimpered in her arms, the heat from her body seeming to grow with each sweep of the minute hand over the clock. The nurses were busy with what nurses do, striding around looking capable and in charge. None of them glanced at Rachel.

  Other people sat in the chairs, some bent over, others with dull, glazed looks on their faces. They were each caught up in their own misery and sorrow; they didn’t care about Rachel and the toddler who seemed to be burning up in her arms.

  Then Gracie stiffened, and panic clawed up Rachel’s throat. If she believed that God would do anything, she would be praying by now.

  But God hadn’t paid attention to her before, and He wouldn’t now.

  She was relieved when Gracie relaxed again, moaning. She looked up at Rachel, her soft brown eyes holding a trust that Rachel felt she had broken. Rachel felt her heart skip in reaction. Then she looked away. Gracie was a duty. She could not afford to let this child wrap the tentacles of love and affection around her heart. Growing attached to a child like Gracie meant opening her heart to the potential of pain and loss.

  And she wasn’t going to do that to herself again.

  After what seemed like hours, a nurse came and escorted her to a curtained-off cubicle. Rachel set Gracie on the gurney.

  The nurse ran through a checklist of questions, allergies, medication. Rachel answered as best she could.

  When she was done, the nurse inserted a thermometer into Gracie’s ear just as a doctor came striding down the hallway toward them. His white coat flared out behind him as he flipped through a chart, a pen clamped between his lips, a stethoscope draped over his neck, reading as he walked. He looked capable. In charge.

  It was Eli.

  Rachel’s heart skidded in relief.

  He glanced sidelong at the intern who was keeping pace with him, talking. He stopped by the cubicle, nodding at what the intern was saying, made a few notes on the chart, then handed it back to the intern. As he did, he glanced around the room and his gaze caught Rachel’s.