A Heartwarming Thanksgiving

by Amy Vastine

  The only photos of the reopened hospital were from newspaper articles describing the abduction of a baby Ramon Salazar. Before heading to bed, Shainey wrote down the names of the doctors and nurses mentioned in the articles.

  Shainey picked up the phone. It might be nothing, but Debby deserved to know that another stolen child had returned home and an elderly great-aunt suddenly had spilled secrets.

  * * *

  The next morning, Shainey fixed breakfast for herself and Agatha. Her great-aunt seemed to have aged during the night but was willing to talk. Though she was still cagey about the answers she gave.

  “Nate’s a good boy. I’m glad he’s out of prison. That ex-wife of his didn’t deserve his loyalty. Still, I know why he did it. He always thought he could fix things, fix her, but some people are too broken.”

  “Where is she now?” Funny, after last night’s and forth about missing children, she had completely forgotten the reference to Nate being in jail.

  “She’s still in prison and will be for a long time. Hopefully, she’ll get help for her addictions there. I’m sure Nate tried everything he could think of.”

  Shainey knew from the news articles she’d read online last night that Nathan’s ex-wife had battled addiction. As a doctor, she’d seen even the mightiest fall to drugs. She’d watched people try again and again to reclaim friends and family members, bring them back to who they used to be. Her heart went out to Nathan.

  Agatha spoke again about the baby she’d given up, about how she’d always wondered where her child was and how she was doing. And about how her parents had thoroughly convinced her to never bring the subject up: ever.

  “It feels good to talk about her,” Agatha said. “She weighed seven pounds when she was born. I saw her for a few minutes, but the nurse wouldn’t let me hold her.”

  Once Agatha settled down in front of the television, Shainey left for work. She got to the clinic at nine and prepped for her first patient. The clinic was a tiny house in a residential area, and it was a far cry from the beige and stainless steel practice she’d worked at in Phoenix.

  Doc Thomas had converted three bedrooms into exam rooms. He’d given each room a decor. One was the Elvis room, one was the Star Wars room, and the last was the Rose room, named after his late wife.

  Her first patient for the day was tiny Catherine Murphy, whose mother Meredith seemed more pained by the shot than Catherine.

  After that, Shainey had a two hour stretch of free time. Locking up the clinic, she grabbed her laptop and drove by the address Nathan had given her the day before. His truck wasn’t there. Gesippi wasn’t a town where one could get lost easily. She headed down Main Street and soon stopped at the Drug and Dine, a local restaurant that served both as a convenience store and restaurant.

  “I hear you had little Catherine in,” Keith Warner, the owner of the Drug and Dine, said as he walked her to her favorite table.

  “Cutest baby in town,” Shainey teased.

  “After our granddaughter,” Keith teased back.

  When she spotted Nathan, she stopped. “I’m joining him.” She pointed, but Nathan didn’t even look up.

  “I’m glad. Nate could use a friend.”

  “You know him?” Shainey said, surprised.

  “He helped us out a few years ago when he was still a cop. Someone kept stealing copper. They took it from our plumbing, our air conditioning unit, you name it. Nate caught them and made sure our stuff was returned. Saved us hundreds of dollars. Doesn’t matter what people say. He’s a good guy.”

  Shainey thought about Nate’s sad history. In an attempt to save his ex-wife, he’d been caught withholding evidence and impeding justice. He’d not only been stripped of his police badge but served time. Two whole years. He’d been released just one week ago. Shainey figured he’d served enough of a sentence for trying to help a person he loved.She set her purse on the table and pulled out a chair. “Mind if I join you?”

  He gave her a hooded look, but said, “Be my guest, especially if you can tell me more about the Garcia baby. Everything I’ve heard points to Deidra Garcia being taken from O’Grady, Arizona, by her father.”

  Keith delivered her standard order of a coffee and cinnamon roll.

  From the moment Shainey woke up this morning she felt as if she had an invisible companion, some unseen phantom whispering, “Something’s wrong.” Nathan’s words only cemented the notion.

  He continued. “I remember the cops saying they believed the father probably took Deidra with him across the border to Mexico. Several witness heard him threaten to do it. “

  “Debby’s mom never lost touch with her ex-husband, Javiar. She visited him. He visited her. They looked for Deidra for years, with no help. He didn’t take Deidra.”

  Nathan looked intrigued. “And you met this Javiar?”

  “More than once. Agatha even let me go on vacation with them. She said I was safer with Debby’s family than anyone else. Debby’s mom never let her out of her sight.”

  “Because she’d lost one child.”

  “Debby’s mom couldn’t get any one to believe her. People said she was just hoping that people would take pity on her and send her money.”

  “Did they?”

  “Yes, strangers even, and she used all of it to pay a private detective. He never found anything.”

  “What was his name?”

  “I don’t know, but I can find out. I called Debby last night and told her about you.”

  “What did she say?”

  Shainey finished the last bite of her cinnamon roll, pushed the plate aside, and said, “She said she was happy for your mother, but didn’t think your story and her sister’s story were the same.”

  “How come?”

  “Because you were snatched from a hospital and her sister was taken from their home. Your family had money and her family did not. Your abduction garnered national attention and her sister’s did not.”

  “They lived pretty far from a hospital or good-sized town, right?” Nathan queried.

  “Yes. Debby’s grandmother delivered Deidra in the family home. Then, a few days later, someone came in their house during the night and took the baby from her crib. End of story, according to Debby.”

  He glanced out the restaurant window at a town in the middle of a slow pre-noon Tuesday, and said, “Some stories never end.”

  Looking across at him, Shainey got the feeling he was talking about his own story, how the pages were turning but he still didn’t know fact from fiction. She reached out and covered his right hand with hers, noting the warmth of his hand, the ruggedness.

  Last night, she’d been determined to help Debby. Now, Shainey was just as determined to help Nate.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Nathan took his hand from under Shainey’s. She’d surprised him by reaching out to him, curling her fingers around his and offering comfort.

  She offered something he didn’t deserve but maybe he needed: a friend. Only he wasn’t sure he knew how to trust again. He’d fallen for a beautiful woman once before. Could he trust this one to be as beautiful on the inside as she was on the outside?

  Right now, though, she was all he had.

  He clasped his hands on his lap. “I still feel like Nathan Williamson, son of Evelyn and Thomas Williamson. Yet now I’ve met my brother, and I have a birth mother who can’t seem to stop touching my hand, brushing imaginary lint from my shoulder, or whispering the name Ramon…”

  Nathan doubted he’d ever self identify as Ramon Salazar.

  To his surprise, Shainey said something that made sense. “When I spoke with Debby last night, all she relayed was anger. Her sister was taken forty-five years ago, and the family has never stopped grieving.”

  “I can relate to anger,” Nathan said, thinking he’d rather be talking to an angry Debby than to gentle-touch Shainey who was making him consider other things besides hunting for his past.

  “Look,” she said, “I can’t even imagine how betra
yed you feel. But my Aunt Agatha cried last night. You want to know the last time she cried?”

  He didn’t respond.

  She continued. “Never. I’ve never seen her cry.”

  “You’ve only been here a few months,” Nathan pointed out, revealing that he’d researched her just as she’d researched him. Outside of her medical experience and a Facebook page that seemed to center on music and a love for rock climbing, she had a very limited social media presence.

  Smart woman.

  “I spent plenty of summers here,” she continued, “just Agatha and me. That’s how I became friends with Debby.”

  “That’s—”

  Shainey wasn’t ready to stop. “Do you remember what Agatha said right before the tears started falling?”

  Nathan frowned, sifting through last night’s conversation.

  “She said you weren’t the only baby that didn’t go home with the mother who loved him.”

  He didn’t say anything, just stared at her, his mind generating probabilities. He was no longer a cop, but he still had a cop’s mind—analytical, probing—and he could produce a dozen worst-case scenarios in under a minute.

  “My great-aunt,” Shainey said, “thinks that something bad happened in Gesippi, to more than one family.”

  “She could just be overwrought,” Nathan argued, half-heartedly.

  “Not my great-aunt.”

  He sighed again. Shainey busied herself with stirring a tiny bit of water left in her glass. Being open and honest with her would make things a lot easier.

  Reaching in his shirt pocket, he brought out a folded newspaper article. It was a copy of the original with words highlighted and a few notes in the margin, dated December forty-two years ago.

  “So,” Shainey said, after she finished reading it, “basically you’re birth mother was over forty, high risk, and supposed to deliver in Phoenix. It was a fluke you were in Gesippi at all. No way could your abduction have been premeditated.”

  “Right,” Nathan said. “My birth mother tried for twenty years to get pregnant. They stopped trying, but a few years later, she wound up pregnant with me. She and my father took every precaution. They left Scorpion Ridge on Monday morning, heading for Phoenix.”

  “She left home when she felt the first contraction?”

  “No, she left a week before I was due. They’d arranged for a place to stay just minutes from the hospital.”

  “So, she went into premature labor.”

  “Right. They were heading for Phoenix but only got as far as Gesippi.”

  “And this would have been during that brief period when the mine was open and the hospital operating?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you spoken to anyone who worked at the hospital then?” Shainey queried. “I found a few names online.”

  “Both doctors are dead. Of the two part-time nurses, one is also deceased and I haven’t been able to find the other one. The full-time nurse, though, is still alive and answered her phone when I called.”

  “Willing to talk?” Shainey raised an eyebrow. “Interesting. Most doctors and nurses are taught to be pretty closed-mouth about patients.”

  “Yes, but the patient in this case is me. Patsy Kidd—the nurse—said that in the late seventies, Gesippi Hospital only had three functioning units: obstetrics, pediatrics and central. They only had one full-time nurse, her, and two doctors. Once she figured out who I was and why I was calling her, she got all weepy.”

  “It is a unique way to lose a patient,” Shainey said.

  Nathan hadn’t thought about it that way.

  She glanced back at the newspaper article. “What else did the nurse tell you?”

  “That she was helping with a surgery when I was taken. She said she hadn’t been able to check on my mother for over two hours. When she came back in the room, she noticed the baby wasn’t there. They didn’t have a nursery, so I would have stayed in my mother’s room the whole time. She assumed I was with my father, who’d taken me for walks before. It wasn’t until later when my birth mother woke up and asked for me that they first suspected something was wrong.”

  “I’m so sorry, Nathan. It’s unbelievable.”

  “My mother remembered a nurse coming in and taking the baby for some test. Back then, nurses wore the same kind of uniform and their hair was under a cap. All my mother could recall of this woman was that she was heavy-set and had blond hair, though she could have been wearing been a wig. Wigs were big in the seventies.”

  And just like that he was five years old, getting picked up from kindergarten and running toward his mother—the one who’d raised him.

  “Nathan,” Shainey said softly, “you don’t have to continue. We—”

  “My mother had a wig.” Nathan said. “The one she wore the most was dark brown, russet she’d called the color. After her death, one of her friends told me she’d favored the wig because it made her hair the same color as mine. She loved that wig.”

  “My mother was more of a flower child,” Shainey shared. “Today she still has long hair past her waist.”

  “Same color as yours?” Nathan asked.

  “Exactly the same.”

  It was only over the last two years, after he’d met his brother and mother, that Nathan started to think about looks. The two brothers were nothing alike.

  He continued, “They searched for the nurse but it was as if she vanished into thin air—and me along with her. Afterward, all the police and my birth family had was a picture taken a few hours after my birth.”

  * * *

  Nathan didn’t tell Shainey that he’d actually worked with his brother Rafael for years. He just hadn’t known the man was his brother. Except for their appearance, they had a lot in common. They’d both been struggling students, valued rules, went through boy scouts all the way to Eagle, and who’d joined the police force and quickly rose through the ranks.

  Only Nathan had fallen in love with a woman who played hardball with drugs and destroyed both her life and his. She was still in prison.

  * * *

  But though he’d been released, he couldn’t get past the fact that his whole life had been a lie. He had no idea where to go, who to trust, or how to forgive.

  CHAPTER SIX

  She had a noon patient and only ten minutes to get back to the clinic. Walking away from Nathan Williamson had been a lot harder than she expected. So much so that she’d forgotten to pay for her coffee and cinnamon roll. She owed him now.

  The woman in her wanted to soothe the poor man. No one deserved the pain he’d been dealt. But, he’d not acted like a man wallowing in self pity.

  She appreciated that.

  The doctor in her wanted to fix things, make him well. But he wasn’t broken. No, he looked like he could walk into any combat and come out the victor.

  He was so different from anyone she’d ever met.

  Shainey spent the next few hours dealing with insurance companies on the phone, treating ailments that afflicted the elderly, and stitching up another finger. This time the finger belonged to a local farmer, Danny Murphy, who’d had a close encounter of the wrong kind with his tractor. He wasn’t quite as stoic as Nathan. His ouches were accompanied by words that would make Great-aunt Agatha blush.

  It was after six when she locked up and closed down the clinic. On her way home, she drove by the brown house on Third. The lights were on and she could see Nathan’s silhouette in the window.

  How alone he must feel, torn between the memory of the family who raised him and the reality of the family who’d been robbed of the opportunity.

  She thought of Aunt Agatha, who’d never married but had been such a mother to all the Fitzsimmons. Agatha was alone, too, and maybe by circumstances she couldn’t control.

  Like Nathan.

  Shainey remembered how alone she’d felt when Jared left. Similar to Nathan, she had filled the hours with work.

  It had never been enough.

  * * *

 
Wednesday morning, Agatha was back to her usual self. Shainey hoped it was a good time to question her a bit more. She put together a breakfast of blueberry pancakes and casually mentioned, “I shared an early lunch with Nathan yesterday at the Drug and Dine. You’re right, he’s a nice man.”

  Agatha took a bite of pancake and said, “His grandfather, Arnold Herbert, was a year ahead of me in school. Played baseball. We all thought he’d leave and really be someone. Instead, he stayed here and really was someone.”

  “When did he die?”

  “Oh, thirty years ago, come June. Patsy could tell you the exact date.”

  “The house has been empty that long?”

  “No, Evelyn came back and lived in it awhile. She died about ten years ago. I’m pretty sure it was left to Nathan. Not sure why he didn’t want it. Adobe Hills isn’t that far away. But then, he was a cop, and maybe he needed to be close to his community. His wife was a bit too colorful for this town, or so she believed.

  “Aunt Agatha, you said Patsy would know about what happened to Nathan. Isn’t she the nurse who was on duty when Nathan was taken?”

  “Yes, for years Patsy was the town’s nurse. We sat on some committees together. She never married, though she wanted to. She always talked of having children. At the end, she was a home health care nurse. Even took care of Nathan’s grandfather. Called herself a home healthcare provider. She retired a good twenty-five years ago. I’ve been thinking about retiring.”

  “Aunt Agatha, you already retired.”

  “Oh,” Agatha giggled. “You’re right. How could I forget?”

  Since Agatha was in good spirits, Shainey took her to the senior center and dropped her off in the main room. There’d be bingo and crafts. All things Agatha enjoyed.

  Shainey’s first patient appointment wasn’t until noon, so she went searching for Nathan. He wasn’t at the Drug and Dine, so Shainey headed for his house. He answered on the second knock. He stood in the door looking like he’d just woken up, with tousled hair and wearing a simple T-shirt and jeans. It occurred to her that he always seemed, well, somehow to be in uniform.

  “Something you need?” he asked.