A Father's Promise

by Marcia Evanick

  Ellis reached for the tray before she could lift it. "I'll carry that, Sydney. Why don't you just lead the way."

  She frowned at the three lone cups on the wooden and ceramic-tile tray. "Wait a moment." She hurried to the refrigerator and pulled out a bowl overflowing with green and red seedless grapes. "My father didn't eat a lot of his breakfast. He might be hungry." She pulled two bowls out of a cabinet, filled them with the sweet chilled fruit and placed them on the tray. "There, that's better." Without saying another word, she walked out of the kitchen.

  Ellis carefully balanced the tray so the coffee wouldn't slosh over the rim of the cups, and followed Sydney from the room. His gaze once again immediately went to her jean-clad bottom and he admired the view. A man had to be dead and pushing up daisies not to have noticed such a tempting sight. Sydney St. Claire's back view was as enticing as her front. And her front was spectacular.

  He was still amazed at how strangely the mind works. One part of his mind childishly resented Sydney because she had been adopted by Thomas. His own father had taken in some stranger's child when he wouldn't even acknowledge his own flesh and blood. He knew the resentment should be, and most of it was, directed at Thomas and not Sydney, who had only been ten when she'd come to live with Thomas. But still, in some deep dark corner of his mind the question was still being shouted, Why Sydney and not him? What was wrong with him?

  The other part of his mind was remembering how long it had been since he had been with a woman. He glanced again at her rounded backside as she opened the door and stepped into the den. It had been too damn long and he silently cursed the direction his mind had taken. He had more important things to think about than the way Sydney's short-sleeved green sweater clung to her nicely curved breasts or how denim lovingly adhered to her every curve. Sydney St. Claire was one distraction he could do without.

  He took a deep breath and stared at the doorway in front of him. His father was less than ten feet away. He was about to come face-to-face with the man who had abandoned him and his mother thirty-two years ago. He was about to meet the man who had never wanted him.

  The heat of desire that had been building low in his gut turned to a solid block of raw, jagged ice. The thought of Trevor bravely battling a deadly disease gave Ellis the strength to follow Sydney into the room and meet Thomas St. Claire.

  "Dad, you have some company," Sydney said.

  Ellis stared at the man sitting in the dark brown leather recliner. Thomas St. Claire looked older than his fifty-three years. His hair was dark gray and on its way to becoming white. A pair of dark sunglasses covered his eyes. His face was pale and slack. From the way his clothes bagged, he could tell the man had lost a lot of weight recently. Thomas had the faded appearance of once being a big robust kind of man. Now he sat slouched in his chair silently, obviously fighting his inner demons.

  "Tell whoever it is that I'm not up to company." Thomas turned his face away as if his words settled the matter.

  Ellis hated to disillusion the man. He wasn't about to be pushed away just because Thomas was still depressed. With as much noise as possible he placed the tray down in the middle of the empty coffee table positioned in front of a brown plaid couch. A big-screen television and what appeared to be at least a hundred framed pictures of Sydney taken over the years dominated the far wall. He looked away from the reminder of who was Thomas's child and back to the man. Thomas's head was tilted slightly toward the left and he looked to be staring right at him. Only he wasn't. The detective's report had been brief but accurate. Thomas St. Claire would never see again.

  "I'm sorry you're still not up to company Mr. St. Claire, but this is important."

  Sydney glanced between the two men and he watched as she tried to instill some normalcy into the situation. "Dad, this is Ellis Carlisle." Her green-eyed gaze landed on him in a brief warning and he saw her possessive look. "Ellis, this is my father, Thomas St. Claire."

  He had picked up the emphasis on the my father part, but chose to ignore it. He wasn't here to take her father away. He was here to save his son. "You don't know me, Mr. St. Claire, but I believe you knew my mother, Catherine Carlisle." Ellis sat on the couch and tried to read Thomas's expression. He couldn't gauge any reaction at the mention of his mother's name, but it was hard to tell since he couldn't see Thomas's eyes.

  "Catherine Carlisle? I don't believe I…"

  "Go back thirty-three years." He didn't want to hear that Thomas couldn't even remember his mother's name.

  Sydney placed her father's coffee on the small table next to his chair and lightly took one of his hands and rested it near the cup. "You were only twenty, twenty-one at the time, Dad."

  Thomas tilted his head farther, as if he was thinking hard. "You mean Cathy?"

  He had never heard anyone refer to his mother as Cathy. She had always been Catherine. But "Cathy" made sense. "I guess she could have gone by Cathy back then. She was two years younger than you."

  "Right. She lived next door to us back then." Thomas's head turned in his direction. "How is your mother?"

  "She died twelve years ago."

  "I'm sorry to hear that." Thomas sounded both sorry and a touch confused. "What is it that you need from me? Since you obviously convinced my daughter that your business is of the utmost importance, I can only assume that it is. Sydney isn't easily swayed."

  Ellis really didn't know how to start this conversation now that he was here. The important part wasn't that Thomas was his father. The major element was that Thomas might, and it was a very slim might, match Trevor's HLAs. The ideal donor is a tissue-matched family member, usually a sibling. But since Trevor didn't have any siblings, Ellis was reaching far out on the limb of possibilities and making sure every blood relative was tested, including his own biological father.

  He glanced at Sydney, who was staring back at him waiting to hear what he was going to say. He knew the concern in her eyes was for her father, and perhaps a touch of it was for his son. The sympathy Sydney had expressed for Trevor had been genuine. But Trevor didn't need sympathy, he needed a match.

  "Mr. St. Claire, what I need from you is a blood sample."

  Thomas's head jerked slightly at such an outrageous request. "Pardon? I know my eyes went, but I didn't think my ears were bad, too."

  "Your ears are fine. What I need from you is a blood sample," Ellis repeated. He clasped his hands together to stop their trembling and silently prayed for strength. Every time he had to tell someone about Trevor's illness it tore at his soul. It brought back those first unbelievable days when his son had been diagnosed. It also made him face the possibility of Trevor's death should a donor not be found in time.

  "What possible reason could you have for needing a sample of my blood?"

  "I have a five-year-old son named Trevor, Mr. St. Claire. Last summer Trevor was diagnosed with leukemia." He took a couple of short shallow breaths because the pain that was inside him wouldn't allow for anything deeper.

  "Being a father, myself, I can only imagine what you are going through." Thomas reached for his cup of coffee and carefully raised it to his mouth. He took a few sips and slowly lowered the cup to his lap. "But I still don't see the connection between your son's illness and your desire for a sample of my blood."

  As far as Ellis was concerned, Thomas St. Claire didn't know the first thing about being a father. The first rule of fatherhood is to be responsible. Thomas had failed on that one royally. Ellis forced away his negative feelings toward Thomas and concentrated on the issue at hand. The issue was his son's health. "Trevor has been in remission for nearly four months now. He hasn't been healthier or in higher spirits in a long, long time. Now is the best time to do a bone marrow transplant. I need your blood to see if your marrow will match my son's."

  Thomas shook his head. "I still don't understand. Why would you want my old blood?"

  "Thirty percent of all bone marrow transplants are done from finding a match within the family. The other seventy percent are fr
om unrelated donors. There are no unrelated donors who match Trevor so I'm tracking down every one of his blood relatives."

  "Now I'm really confused. I wasn't related to Cathy. We were just neighbors."

  "I agree, you weren't related to Cathy Carlisle. You're related to me. You're my father." He watched as Thomas's hands jerked and spilled some coffee on his jeans. "That means you are Trevor's biological grandfather and that means there's a slight chance that you—"

  "Hold up there, Ellis!" Thomas's voice exploded in the room as he hastily set the cup back onto the table next to him. "Go back to the part about me being your father. Where in the hell did you get such an idea?"

  "From my mother, Catherine Carlisle." Thomas shouldn't have appeared so shocked. Thomas had known Catherine was carrying his child when she left town. "She told me that you refused to marry her or accept the responsibility of the child you helped create."

  "She named me? She told you Thomas St. Claire was your father?"

  "No, she never mentioned you by name." He didn't like playing this game with a blind man. He wished he could see Thomas's eyes from behind those dark glasses. He was a firm believer in the eyes being the window to a person's soul. "I got your name from my birth certificate."

  "Sydney, do you believe him?" asked Thomas to his silent daughter.

  "I believe he believes you are his father. I've also seen his birth certificate and your name is listed under 'father.' I told him he could speak to you and see if you could shed any more light on this situation." Sydney sat on the opposite end of the couch and fidgeted with the handle on her cup.

  "I see." Thomas seemed to study his daughter for a long time before turning back to Ellis. "I'm sorry, Ellis, but I am not your father. I don't know why Cathy named me as the father of her child, but I can assure you that your mother and I couldn't have conceived a child together. We were never romantically involved. We were friends and neighbors, that's all."

  "No offense, but I really don't care if you're my father or not. I've managed to get by in life extremely well without one," he said. "But I do care if you're Trevor's grandfather or not. I don't want anything from you besides a vial or two of blood. We'll discuss the transplant later, once we know if there is a match." If he'd learned one thing in business it was that every man had his price. If there was a match, he was confident he would find and meet Thomas's price.

  "You have it all neatly planned out, don't you?"

  "No, Mr. St. Claire. The only thing I've planned out in the past nine months is the best way to make Trevor well again. How I achieve that is inconsequential. Only that I achieve it matters."

  "It doesn't matter to you that your mother named the wrong man as the father of her child?"

  "I don't think she did." He studied the man his mother had claimed fathered him. He couldn't see any notable resemblance. Catherine Carlisle had had dark brown hair, brown eyes, and had been only five foot three. It didn't take a genius to know that his dark blond hair, gray eyes and six-foot-plus frame had to have come from his father's side. Thomas St. Claire might have had brown hair at one time, it was hard to tell now that it was all gray. The color of Thomas's eyes were hidden behind the dark lenses he wore. As for his height, he would take an educated guess that Thomas stood about six feet. Thomas could be his father.

  "Your daughter also mentioned the same possibility, Mr. St. Claire. I honestly have given it some thought, but I can't come up with one reasonable explanation as to why my mother would have done that." He thought of something he hadn't thought of before. "You knew my mother when she was eighteen. Can you think of one reason why she named you as my father instead of my real father?" Ellis took a sip of his coffee and smiled. "Supposing you aren't my real father."

  "There's no supposing on my end, Ellis. I'm not your father. I couldn't be your father and I will take any test you want to prove it. I would have never left Cathy, or any other woman, alone and pregnant with my child."

  Ellis didn't want to argue with Thomas. The man represented Trevor's last hope. Arguing wasn't going to solve anything. Getting Thomas to take a blood test might, though.

  "If I remember correctly, Cathy left home right after she graduated from high school." Thomas rubbed his chin.

  "That's correct. She was already four months pregnant with me. She delivered me in Philadelphia when she was only nineteen."

  "She must have been terrified and so alone." Thomas's thumb slowly stroked his jawline as he obviously remembered back and Ellis could see where an electric shaver had missed a couple of spots.

  "I imagine she was." Ellis didn't want to think about his mother being scared and alone in a strange big city. He didn't want to think about being the cause that forced her to leave the safety of her parents' home.

  "Her father was the minister of the local Methodist church and her mother was the organist. She was very active in the church." Thomas's thumb stopped its stroking as he tilted his head in Ellis's direction. "They left town about three years after Cathy took off. They seemed very upset with her leaving. I think, if I'm remembering correctly, they moved to Texas."

  "They did."

  "You know them then? Cathy got in contact with them?" Thomas seemed pleased that the family had been reunited.

  "No, I never met them. I never even knew I had grandparents until after my mother died. I tried tracking them down then, but I was too late. They both had been killed in a plane crash in the Andes Mountains when I was about twelve. They had been on a missionary trip at the time."

  "So there had been no reunion?"

  "Not that I'm aware of." Reunion, hell! He had spent the first twenty-five years of his life not knowing what a complex, twisted unit a family really was. He discovered that fact after he had married Ginny and was baptized into a family by the way of hell's fire. Owning his own freight business had left him wide open for a multiple of favors. First her brother needed a job. No problem there until he started coming in drunk. Then there was this unemployed cousin, and then that cousin. Soon it went from jobs that never worked out to loans that were never repaid, to downright handouts. As far as he was concerned, the entire institution known as "family" should be abolished.

  "That's a shame. A real shame." Thomas sadly shook his head. "Family is sacred. One's family should never be fractured beyond repair."

  "Then you understand my need for your blood sample." There was no way he could control the tremble in his voice as he said, "Trevor is my whole family." He felt the burning of tears behind his eyes but refused to allow them to show. Tears were a sign of weakness. Right now, Trevor needed his strength.

  "I'll give you as many blood samples as you want to try to match your son's, on one condition."

  "Name it." At this point he was willing to pay any price Thomas named. He was out of options.

  "I want you to be fully aware that I am not your father and that the chance of a match is nil. You'll have better luck hitting the lottery than having my blood match your son's." Thomas's voice broke and he had to take a moment to compose himself. "I wish I could tell you differently, Ellis. I wish I were your father so that I could offer you a small section of hope, but I can't."

  Ellis ignored the stab of pain that pierced his heart. Thomas sounded sincere and he couldn't afford for him to be telling the truth. "But you'll still give the blood sample?"

  "Yes, Ellis, as soon as you want it. I might not be able to see you, but I can hear the love you have for your son in your voice. That alone would compel me to do it."

  He felt as if the twenty-pound weight that had been resting over his heart had been lifted. Thomas St. Claire had agreed to the blood test. The first hurdle had been cleared and he was at a loss for words. All of Ginny's relatives had wanted to know what was in it for them should there be a match. He gave the man who he believed fathered him a simple, "Thank you."

  "Your mother and I shared quite a few good times together," Thomas said, "but not what you are thinking. We were friends. I never did understand why she hadn't
said a word to anyone about leaving. One day, during church services, she had packed one suitcase and was gone. No one, that I know of, ever heard from her again. In a way, I was angry with her for doing that, Ellis. No calls, no letters, nothing but silence. We never knew. But she was my friend and Trevor is her grandson. I'll do whatever I can to help."

  "Mr. Carlisle, would it be all right if I give a sample, too?" Sydney asked.

  He turned and looked at the woman who had been quiet throughout most of the conversation. "You want to be tested too?"

  "Yes. You said seventy percent of the transplants are done using an unrelated donor. I'm unrelated but I have a feeling that my chances of a match are the same as my father's."

  "Will you allow the national registry to keep your results on file?" Over the past nine months he had met more kids with leukemia than he had ever wanted to meet. All of them were praying for miracles. Sydney just might be someone's miracle.

  "Yes."

  He felt a smile tug at the corner of his mouth. She looked ready to save the world. If only life were so simple. "Thank you, Sydney."

  He turned back to his father. "Thank you, Mr. St. Claire. I'll make the arrangements and get back to you both as to where and when." He stood up. His mission for the day was complete; Thomas was getting the blood test.

  "Where you are staying?" asked Thomas. "I'm presuming you don't live around here."

  "I live in Jenkintown. It's outside of Philadelphia. I'm registered at the Starry Night Motel out on the interstate." He started toward the door. It was time he left, before Thomas could change his mind.

  "Know the place well," Thomas muttered. "I have a favor to ask of you."

  Ellis felt his whole body stiffen at Thomas's words. Here it comes. The question he had been waiting for: What do I get out of it if my blood matches? He stopped in the middle of the room and stared at the man. "What's that?" He knew whatever the favor was, he was going to grant it. He wasn't in the position to refuse Thomas St. Claire a thing.