Man of His Word

by Cynthia Reese

  As she debated whether to ring the bell again, a postal delivery truck rolled to a stop in front of the house. The driver hopped out of the vehicle and trotted across thick grass in the direction of the mailbox by the front door.

  “Looking for Gail?” the woman asked her as she jammed a thick stack of mail into the narrow confines of the box. “You might try in back—she’s liable to be giving their camper a good cleaning. She does that when they first get back from a long trip.”

  “Thank you, I’ll try that.” Kimberly gave her a grateful smile. Then she wound her way around the house and under the attached carport that barely housed a large extended cab pickup. On the truck’s dented steel bumper, to the right of a towing hitch, a bumper sticker proclaimed, If You Can Read This, I’ve Lost My Trailer.

  The backyard was dominated by a large camper, white with green stripes. The windows and doors were thrown open, and Kimberly had solved the mystery of where the noise was coming from: faint music filtered out over the hum of a vacuum cleaner.

  She pulled herself up on the metal grate that served as the camper’s doorstep. An older woman was bent over a vacuum cleaner in the back of the trailer.

  Kimberly rapped her knuckles against the door frame. When the woman didn’t respond, she knocked again, louder.

  The woman whirled around, her eyebrows sky-high on a wide forehead. The hand still gripping the vacuum’s cord flew to her chest. “Oh! You gave me a fright!”

  She turned and switched off the machine, then stretched over to the tiny kitchen cabinet and jabbed a button on the radio. The trailer fell silent.

  “You must be Kimberly. Is it ten o’clock already? I thought for sure I could give the camper a good going-over and have time left before you got here. Oh, well.”

  “I didn’t mean to scare you—” Kimberly began.

  Gail shook her head. “No need to apologize. Harold says that when I get to cleaning, it’s as though I’m on another planet. And after two weeks with this place jammed with our grandkids, I wish I were on another planet. You want to go inside? Or we could just sit here.”

  “Here’s fine. Unless you need...er, the file? I’ll try not to take up too much of your time.”

  Gail collapsed into the cramped dining nook built into the camper, indicating that Kimberly should sit across from her. She adjusted a scarf tied in her hair, and after assuring herself that it hadn’t slipped, she blew out a breath. “I did look at the file again. Pauline faxed me a copy. I wish I could share it with you, but I talked with Judge Malloy and he said that he’d have to make a ruling on it, and any copy would have to go through him.”

  “I know. He spoke with me this morning. He’s approved it so that I can get a copy of my daughter’s medical files.”

  “Much good that will do you,” Gail muttered. “There’s not a lot there, I’m afraid.”

  A bubble of hope popped in Kimberly’s heart. “Really? I’d expected—”

  “Honey, a dozen years ago we didn’t even have an ob/gyn that delivered babies at this hospital—one had retired, and the other had moved that summer. So we were diverting all but emergency deliveries to other hospitals. Boy, was I glad when they finally found a couple willing to open up a local practice again.”

  “I don’t understand. What does that have to do with Marissa’s medical records?”

  “Well, everything, don’t you see?” Gail settled back against the banquette. “Your daughter was getting the absolute basic care—that stupid ER doctor didn’t even realize there was a problem until I hounded him about it.”

  “A problem?” Kimberly kicked herself for sounding more like an echo chamber than an intelligent human being.

  “Sure. When we did have an ob/gyn, I’d been in L and D—that’s Labor and Deliveries. But when we shut down our maternity ward that spring, they moved me over to the ER and put me in as a charge nurse. I’d have rather caught babies with screaming mamas all day and all night long than have to put up with whiny contract ER docs who aren’t even from around here. Worst cost-saving measure our hospital big cheese ever did, you want to know my opinion. But they didn’t ask me.”

  Kimberly still didn’t quite get the connection between the status of the hospital and the paucity of Marissa’s records. She remained quiet, though, and waited for Gail to tell the story in her own way. Now that the woman had been primed, she seemed to relish reliving those times.

  “So of course I knew that babies come out of their mamas bruised up. Fifteen years of catching babies, you bet I did. And I knew when something was wrong—your little girl was just covered in bruises. They looked like some sort of pox. And then her umbilical cord, which we’d stopped all the bleeding from at first, started bleeding again—”

  “Oh, Gail, this is information I really needed,” Kimberly interrupted, unable to stop herself. “It sounds like the medical records will help.”

  “No, they won’t. Because all that isn’t in there. It’s up here.” Gail tapped her salt-and-pepper hair. “That idiot doctor wouldn’t believe me at first. Said I was making too big a fuss over nothing. But then the girl—whoops.”

  She put her fingers to her lips and said nothing at all for a beat. All Kimberly could focus on was the cobweb of cracks in Gail’s dry, reddened hand as the woman considered what to say next.

  When Gail did begin speaking again, her words were more circumspect with a touch of self-recrimination. “The judge warned me not to say anything about the birth mother. And here I go, a regular chatty Cathy. Anyway, suffice it to say that other developments finally got that blasted doctor to see that maybe I wasn’t some hot-air know-it-all. So we transferred the baby out by helicopter.”

  Kimberly could pick up the story from there, based on the records of the hem/oncs Marissa had seen over the years. Most every test doctors had ordered had come back normal, and in the very first years, they had even debated whether her earlier bleeding issues had been a fluke.

  But the nosebleeds and other incidents had continued—without a clear explanation until one specialist had speculated that maybe Marissa’s disorder was related to a PAI-1 deficiency.

  “So how old was she when you adopted her?” Gail asked instead of continuing with her story.

  “Oh, Marissa was a baby—she was still in the hospital. They called me out of the blue—I was diagramming gerund phrases on the blackboard for my students, and the principal walked in and said I had an emergency phone call. The social worker wanted to know if I’d be willing to foster a baby with known health issues, that they didn’t have any other foster parent willing to take her.”

  “And you said yes?”

  “Yes. The minute they put her in my arms, I knew...she was the one. She was mine. I wouldn’t have cared if she had two heads—she was my miracle baby.” Kimberly blinked back stinging tears at the memory of holding Marissa for the first time.

  “Oh, my, it must have been something,” Gail breathed.

  “You have no idea. I was in a panic. The social worker took me up to the NICU and showed me Marissa, warning me not to get my hopes up—she had been there a few days by then, and they still had no clue what was wrong with her.” Kimberly fixed her eyes on the granite pattern of the Formica tabletop and clenched her fingers together. She remembered with crystal clarity the tiny bundle in the clear plastic bassinet, dwarfed by a host of mystifying equipment standing at the ready.

  Gail nodded vigorously and took Kimberly’s hand in a firm grip. “That NICU, it’s a scary place for parents. But you stuck with her.”

  “I did. And she stuck with me. But Gail...I have to find out. I have to know what’s wrong. How can I help Marissa, keep her safe, if we don’t have a sure diagnosis?”

  “You said they might have one?”

  Kimberly recapped the possibility of PAI-1, and when she got to the bit about the insurance company not being willing to pay for a German lab to do the DNA testing, Gail blew a raspberry of disgust.

  “Insurance companies! Telling us what we ca
n and can’t do for patients. Ties doctors’ hands, I tell you, because they work for the hospital, and the hospital has to keep its doors open. Oh, hon, I wish I could help you. I wish I could tell you all you need to know. You need to find that birth mama. You need to. That would answer so many of your questions. Why, I’ll bet—” Here she bit off her words again and shook her head regretfully. “All these rules and regulations, I know they’re there for a purpose, but...”

  For a moment, Kimberly dared to hope that Gail would toss caution to the wind and blurt out what she knew.

  She didn’t, though. Biting her lip, Gail remained silent, giving Kimberly a regretful shake of her head. “I can’t. The judge was really, really clear. Right now, the only thing I can talk about is your little girl.”

  “Do you—do you think if I requested the birth mother’s records, Judge Malloy would release them?”

  “Now, that, well, I don’t know. You’d have to file a petition, I think. And they’d have to run a notice in the paper—wherever they had good cause to think the birth mother would be. And that still doesn’t give you any guarantee that the judge would rule your way. He’s a stickler for these things. Follows the law.”

  Kimberly swallowed. It nearly tore her apart to know that once again, a person sitting across from her had vital information that could help her daughter.

  She recalled how Tim had thrown her a crumb about the tow-truck driver.

  “Is there...anything you could tell me? Did...did anyone visit the baby while she was at the hospital here? Maybe if I could track them down, they’d know something and could tell me.”

  Gail drew her brows together in contemplation. “Hmm. That’s a good question. Let’s see...I do recall a few people coming in, but the girl... Whoops. Get me to talking, and I just blather on and on about things I’m not supposed to. Okay, let’s put it this way—the hospital bigwigs finally weighed in and said that since it was a safe-haven surrender, Judge Malloy had said that we couldn’t let anybody know who the mother of the baby was. And if the mother of the baby was still in the hospital—” she winked broadly “—well, nobody could tell any of her visitors that she’d even had a baby. So...no, there was nobody around who asked specifically to see the baby, no.”

  Kimberly nodded, hopes dashed. It had been a long shot.

  Then Gail brightened. “Oh, wait! There was a visitor—Daniel Monroe. He came by, wanted to hold the baby. Marissa. The birth mom—well, I guess you know this, so I can say—had named her Marissa. So Daniel—gosh, he was so young back then! And just starting out with the fire department. He wanted a picture of him holding her. Most precious thing I ever did see.” Gail beamed. “He was the one who delivered her, you know.”

  “Yes. He’s showed me the picture. It’s beautiful.”

  “Well, why hasn’t he told you all this, then? I mean, good gracious!” Gail sat forward in excitement, her face wreathed in a relieved smile. “He’s not bound by the safe-haven law like I am or the hospital staff is. The fire department can’t take babies here in Georgia. That girl wasn’t covered by the safe-haven law until she got into that ambulance. Daniel could tell you everything you need to know. Everything.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  MARISSA YAWNED AND stretched her free leg to work out a kink. The boards of the tree-house floor dug into her backside through the blanket she’d spread out.

  “Hold still!” Taylor ordered. “Or I’ll smear it.”

  “Aren’t you almost done?” Now Marissa sat up, careful not to jostle Taylor. Her friend’s blond head was still bent over Marissa’s left foot, a fine-point nail-polish pen in her hand.

  “Almost...but if you want it like the one you did on mine, you’re going to have to give me a few more minutes. You’re better at this than I am.” Taylor returned her focus to the pedicure.

  Marissa gazed around the leafy green confines of the tree house. She and Taylor had taken over the place, bringing up some of Ma’s old blankets and cushions, really jazzing up the place. They’d also found a big plastic bin to keep their stuff out of the rain. Taylor had come up with the idea of rigging up a pulley to lift their haul—otherwise, Marissa couldn’t imagine getting all that stuff up here.

  To her far left, in the neighboring pasture, she could see Taylor’s aunt Maegan working with a kid on the big gray mare. Something in her shriveled at the sight of a kid, way smaller than she was, and with a disability, too, on the back of that horse.

  Marissa had let Daniel bring up the possibility of learning how to ride. Her mom hadn’t given her an outright no...but she’d had that flat look of hers and said, “We’ll see,” which Marissa knew was Mom-ese for “never in a hundred years, but I don’t want an argument about it right now.”

  She should be on that horse. All the Monroe kids knew how to ride, Daniel had said.

  And she was a Monroe.

  “Hey,” she called over to Taylor. “You got any ideas about what I talked about? About Daniel and my mom?”

  Taylor raised her arms in a V, causing a small spray of white droplets from the paint pen to cascade on the weathered boards. “Woo-hoo! Done! Ow! My neck!”

  Marissa inspected the final artwork. Yes, the flower was a little lopsided, but it still looked pretty good for a first-timer. “Not bad,” she told Taylor.

  “How’d you get so good at doing nail art?” Taylor capped the pen and leaned back on her palms.

  Marissa snorted. “Are you kidding? It’s about the only thing my mom will let me do. Painting nails doesn’t involve sharp objects, the risk of falls or sudden stops.”

  “You are so right. We’ve got to do something to help your mom, you know, chillax.”

  “Yeah. I think if we could just fix her and Daniel up...”

  Taylor nodded enthusiastically. “They’d be perfect together. And that would mean you could live down here, and we could go to school together, and now that Libby Danvers has moved, we’ve got a spot on the cheer squad, and I could ask Coach if you—”

  “Don’t even bother. My mom would never, ever let me cheer. She’d swear I’d get mortally injured.”

  “You don’t know that. I mean, you wouldn’t have to be a flyer. You could be a base.”

  Taylor had a way of saying things that persuaded Marissa to believe, if only for an instant, that they could happen. She was so certain.

  “Maybe,” Marissa replied, still harboring doubt but wanting desperately to believe her. It would be so cool to start the school year in a place where nobody knew about her bleeding—or at least, the ones who did know didn’t make such a big deal out of it.

  Still, she’d learned that if you didn’t wish really, really hard for something, it didn’t hurt so bad if you didn’t get it.

  She had a long list of things she hadn’t gotten because of that stupid bleeding disorder.

  “So what’s your plan?” Taylor asked. “Get Uncle Daniel to ask her on a date?”

  “Yeah, right.” Marissa rolled her eyes. “You don’t know my mom. She’s the queen of excuses—she can say no in a hundred different ways, believe me. If Daniel asked her out, she’d just put him off. No, I’ve got to figure out a way to get them together, by themselves, so they can talk. Because...”

  She found herself not wanting to talk to Taylor about seeing Daniel and her mom together. There’d been a connection between them, an unvarnished honesty. It was as if her mom had felt comfortable enough to reveal her true self to Daniel—something Marissa had never seen her do with anybody. Her mom was so strong, so independent, so we’ll-get-through-this.

  Plus, she’d sounded so lonely. Marissa didn’t want her mom to be all alone. She wanted her to be happy. Her mom deserved to be happy.

  “Shoot, that’s easy,” Taylor proclaimed. “Get Uncle Daniel to take her horseback riding—you know, to show her how gentle the horses really are. That’s a win-win, because then maybe she’ll let Aunt Maegan teach you how to ride.”

  “She doesn’t ride, either. I don’t think she’ll go fo
r that.”

  They sat there, the breeze rustling around them, both lost in thought.

  “So is there anything she really likes to do? You know, that would tempt her?” Taylor asked.

  Marissa tested the white flower on her bright pink toenail. It was dry. She eased herself into a cross-legged position and hunched forward as she considered Taylor’s question. What did her mom like to do?

  “She likes picnics,” she said finally. “She’s always after me to go on a picnic, but it’s so much trouble, and then you get there and all you have are ants and no Wi-Fi for my iPod. Mom thinks all I do with is listen to music, but you’ve got to have Wi-Fi for the web and text messaging and for—well, everything.”

  “I know, right? Why not eat at home where you can get a decent internet connection?” Taylor lifted her hands in a “duh” gesture. “And with air-conditioning. Grown-ups...they like to think about the old days, I guess.”

  Something about Taylor’s words sparked a lightbulb moment for Marissa. She snapped her fingers. “That old mill house! Is that a good place for a picnic?”

  Taylor shrugged her shoulders. “I guess. We’ve done it—taken a sack lunch and gone down there for the day to fish. The millstone makes a pretty good table, and you can prop your poles out the open windows while you eat. It’s got big old oak trees with lots of Spanish moss over the millpond. I guess it could be, you know, romantic. It’s not the Eiffel Tower or anything, but...yeah. I could see it.”

  “What if...” Marissa hopped up and paced around the confines of the tree house.

  “You are so like Uncle Daniel. He has to pace around when he needs to think out a problem, too.”

  Marissa grinned at Taylor. “You think so? Am I like him?”

  “Hey, cuz, you are a carbon copy of all the Monroe kids, twisty elbows and all.”

  “Yeah, but you don’t have the bleeding disorder,” Marissa muttered.