“Like hell,” he said, regarding her from hooded eyes. “But I wouldn’t have made it an excuse to live a lie for the past however long it is since you sneaked your way into my house.”
“How do you know? How can you say what you’d have done if you’d felt, as I did, caught up in a tragedy beyond human understanding and left with only a child to connect you to a part of your past—a child, I might add, entrusted to the care of a stranger who had no idea you even existed?”
“All you had to do was tell me.”
“And you’d have believed me?”
He swirled wine around in his mouth contemplatively, and swallowed. “Naturally, I’d have asked to see the proof but if I’d been satisfied you were who you claimed to be, I’d have accepted you.”
She sat back in the chair across from his and watched him a moment. “If that’s so, then I did you a great injustice. But allow me to remind you that I’d suffered a terrible shock, that day I came to your house for the first time. I wasn’t thinking clearly. The only thing I knew was that I needed to be near Tommy. I needed to be able to touch him, to hold him. To watch him sleeping, to know how his hair smelled after his bath, to listen to him breathing.”
She waved her hand, frustrated by her inability to put into words all that had prompted her to act as she had. “I’m not saying this very well but if you’d ever suffered a loss, you’d know what I mean.”
“I have,” he reminded her. “I lost a cousin who was like a brother to me, in case you’ve forgotten. And you might like to think you’re more closely related to Tommy than I am, but quite frankly, I don’t see it that way. I’ve known him since he was born—not as well as I’d have liked, perhaps. The Navy doesn’t take family occasions into too much account when it assigns a man to duty—but some connections run deeper than blood ties and mine to him is one of them.”
“Which is exactly what I was afraid you’d think if I’d admitted to who I was when I first met you. You’d have seen me as a threat and that was the last thing I wanted. But if you and Jim were as close as you say, you have to agree there’s something about another person’s physical presence that nothing else can quite equal. You might have needed Tommy, but I needed him, too, to help me heal. And I truly believed I could help him to heal, too.”
“This is all very fine,” Pierce said, in that flat, unemotional voice that chilled her despite the fire’s leaping warmth, “but if you and Arlene were all set for such a grand reunion, how come she never mentioned it to me? We were practically next-door neighbors, after all, and it certainly wasn’t the kind of news she needed to keep hidden.”
“We’d agreed to keep quiet about our relationship, at least for the first few days. We needed time alone together to get to know one another again before we let the rest of the world in on the secret. Jim knew that, and he agreed with us. I have letters to prove it—for the three months before I came out here, I corresponded and talked often on the phone with my sister. I even knew about you.”
His glance flickered over her. “So you were primed before you even got as far as my front door. No wonder you knew which buttons to push.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Pierce, stop looking for ulterior motives where none exist! I knew Jim had a relative who lived close by, and that was just about the extent of it. Believe it or not, we had more important things to talk about than such nitty-gritty details as your shoe size and favorite brand of toothpaste!”
He grimaced a little, as if he found that morsel of news somewhat indigestible. “I guess I deserved that.”
“I guess you did. And if you’re disappointed in me for not being honest with you from the start, let me tell you I’m not exactly impressed with the way you’re dealing with things now that they’re out in the open. If you can’t offer me forgiveness, the least you could do is show a little understanding. I made a mistake, but I’m not a criminal.”
He got up to add another chunk of wood to the fire, then straightened to his full height and arched his back, massaging the lower vertebra as he did so. “Are you hungry?”
How could he think about food at a time like this? “No,” she said. “And even if I was, there’s hardly anything left over from lunch.”
“There’ll be canned food, and probably stuff in the freezer, too. Arlene usually stocked up on supplies each spring when she and Jim came to open the cottage up after the winter.” He collected the wine bottle and glasses, and jerked his head toward the kitchen. “Come and fill me in on more details while I rummage around.”
Her heart gave a little lurch of hope at his invitation. Perhaps they were making some progress, after all. At least they were talking and if he didn’t always say what she’d most like to hear, anything was preferable to his silence. “What else do you want to know?”
“How you found out about Arlene, how come you both ended up being adopted, why it took so long for the two of you to make contact again.”
“You’re asking for the story of my life.”
“So?” He piled canned soup, crackers, coffee, powdered milk and frozen cannelloni on the kitchen counter. “It seems a fair exchange, wouldn’t you say, considering all you know about me?”
“Why don’t you just read the letters in the envelope?”
“I’d rather hear it from you,” he said, topping up their wineglasses. “If you recall, from the day you applied for the job of nanny, I’m not particularly impressed with paper credentials. They might support a person’s story, but they never give the whole picture. So start at the beginning, Nicole, and this time, don’t leave anything out.”
CHAPTER TEN
“YES, sir, Commander!”
Pierce paused in the act of unwrapping the plastic on the cannelloni and favored her with a sideways look loaded with warning. “Don’t push your luck,” he advised her quietly.
She shrugged, uncowed. She had no more shameful facts to reveal, so if he hoped to trick her into revealing any, he was in for a disappointment. “I grew up knowing I’d been adopted just before my fourth birthday because my natural father had abandoned my birth mother and she found she couldn’t cope with single parenthood.”
“That must have been tough to accept.”
“No. My adoptive parents are wonderful. They fought hard to get me and never for a moment regretted the sacrifices they made. I adore them both. They gave me all the love and security any child could ask for.”
“What sacrifices? Either they wanted to adopt a child or they didn’t.”
“They were in their mid-forties and considered too old to go through the usual channels, so they paid a private agency to find them a child they could take into their home and love.”
“You mean, they bought you?”
“If you want to call it that, yes,” she said, irked by his tone. “I prefer to think of it as their wanting me badly enough that they refused to let anything come between them and me.”
“Much the same way that you didn’t let anything come between you and Tom,” Pierce said, thrusting the cannelloni into the oven as if he’d have liked to shove her in after it.
“I won’t tolerate your insulting my family, Pierce,” Nicole said flatly.
“No,” he said after a pause, “nor should you. I apologize. But you say you didn’t know you had a sister until recently and that strikes me as odd. I find it hard to believe a four-year-old would wake up one day and not notice that her family, as she knew it, had disappeared practically overnight. Tom certainly remembers his mother and father, as we both know to our cost,”
“I had some fragmented memories, yes,” Nicole acknowledged, perching on a tall stool and sipping her wine. “I remember a woman whom I presume was my birth mother, but I don’t remember the color of her eyes, how tall she was, or whether she was fat or thin. But I vaguely recall her voice—worried and high-pitched—and retain a blurry sort of image of her standing at a kitchen table and pushing her hair away from her face. And I remember waking up in a small, dark room, and the sound of s
omeone crying in the night.”
“Arlene?”
“Or our mother. She was only sixteen when I was born—not much more than a child herself.”
“You never heard from her again.”
“Not a word, until last August.” Slipping down from the stool, Nicole went to the table in the dining room and extracted the familiar worn envelope from the clutter of other papers scattered over the surface just as Louise had left them. “On my twenty-ninth birthday, my parents gave me a large sealed package which contained all the details of my adoption. They thought I should have it so that I could look through everything if and when I felt ready to do so. They’d debated leaving it for me in their estate but decided they wanted to give it to me while they were still alive, in case I had questions which only they could answer.”
All the time she’d been talking, Pierce had been working around the kitchen, putting together a makeshift meal which smelled surprisingly good. But when she lapsed into silence, he turned from stirring a pot of soup and noticed her standing in the doorway, the small dog-eared envelope in her hand.
“Well? What did you find?”
“Mostly lawyer’s records of the adoptive process, and copies of the reports written by the social workers who assessed my parents’ suitability to take on a child. But also these.”
She tipped two items from the envelope and laid them on the kitchen counter. “This,” she said, smoothing out the creases from the sheet of lined paper torn from an old exercise book, “is a letter written by my birth mother, one of the two things I have left of her. The other...” She touched the faded old snapshot lovingly. “...is this picture of two little girls holding hands and standing side by side in long grass in a sunny garden.”
As though unwilling to admit to any curiosity, Pierce hesitated a moment before putting down the spoon and coming to stand beside her, though not so close that he had to touch her. “May I see?”
She shrugged assent, and he picked up the photo. He looked at it intently, focusing first on the children, one blond, one dark, then shifting his attention to the shabby house in the background, and the porch which sagged at one end, and the washing hanging from a clothesline. Finally, he turned it over and read the inscription on the back: Nicole and Arlene. South Dakota, July.
Then he looked at Nicole again, and for the first time she saw a glimmer of sympathy in his blue eyes. “She didn’t have much, did she?”
“No. And what she did have, she gave away. Would you like to read the letter?”
“I—” He raised his hand as if to touch her after all, perhaps to stroke her hair or offer some other gesture of comfort, then changed his mind and went back to stirring the soup. “I’m busy. You read it to me.”
“All right.” She picked up the sad, hopeless message which she knew by heart, right down to its bad spelling and misused punctuation. “There’s no salutation or date. It just begins, ‘I am giving my babies away because they’ll never amount to anything if they stay in this hellhole of a town, I’m 20 and my husband, has run off with another woman, I have’nt got no money nor education and I am tired of people felling sorry for me and leaving care packuges on my back porch as if there afraid I won’t feed my babies right. Or something. I am going away to start out fresh where nobody knows me. Even though I love them, I know my little girls will be better off without me and the socail worker is sure they’ll be put in good homes. Signed, Susan Mary Little.’”
When she’d finished, Nicole raised her eyes and looked at Pierce. He stood transfixed at the stove, his expression shaken. “Oh, brother!” he muttered.
“Or sister,” she said, turning away from his pity. “I won’t bore you with an account of my emotions at reading this for the first time. Suffice it to say I was overwhelmed to realize that, somewhere, I had a sister. We were siblings who had grown into women without knowing each other. We had lost twenty-five years of being friends, of sharing each other’s joys and heartaches. And I made up my mind that I wouldn’t let another year go by without finding her.”
“How did your parents feel about that?”
“They had no idea about my birth mother’s letter and were as shocked as I was. They understood completely and offered to do everything they could to help me. It grieved them terribly to think of two such young children being separated, especially since they would gladly have taken both of us, had they known. But as I eventually discovered, Arlene was quickly adopted by a couple who, like most, wanted someone younger than a four-year-old, who often comes with too much history and too many problems. I was the difficult one to place which is why my parents were able to get me, despite their age.”
“It’s a funny thing, but Arlene never mentioned her - adoptive parents much,” Pierce said. “They didn’t even bother to come out for the funeral and they show no interest at all in Tom.”
“She wasn’t close to them and I can understand why. When I went to see them, they flatly refused to help me find her. They claimed she’d always been a difficult child, never properly grateful for their having taken her in when her own mother had, as they so charmingly put it, ‘dumped her.’ They seemed very bitter that she’d chosen to many and move to Oregon. They thought she should have stayed to look after them in their old age. The way they saw it, that was the only reason to have children in the first place.”
“Good God, no wonder she hadn’t much use for them! In light of their attitude, how did you manage to track her down?”
“Through a private investigator. The trail led straight to her door and when I wrote to tell her about me—about us, she was as thrilled as I was.” Nicole blinked and stared out of the window at the lightning still forking the sky. This part of the story never got any easier. “When I learned that she had a son who turned four in May—the same age I was when she and I were separated—it was as if, despite our separation, fate or God or however you want to describe it, had taken a hand in coordinating our lives so that we wouldn’t feel like total strangers when we finally met again.
“In my case, what made everything even more special was the comfort it gave my parents to know that, when they died, I wouldn’t be left completely alone. They encouraged me to take a leave of absence from the Clinic and spend as much time as possible getting to know my other family.”
Pierce topped up his wine again and asked, “How do they feel about the scam you pulled on me?”
Realizing nothing she’d said had persuaded him to forgive her, Nicole suppressed a sigh. “They were worried. Their advice was to tell you the truth immediately, if not sooner.”
“Pity you didn’t listen to them,” he said.
“Yes. Hindsight is famous for its twenty-twenty vision, and if I had to do it all over again, I’d change things. But this is now.”
“And unfortunately, you can’t turn back time. The clock goes only one way.”
“Exactly. Life goes on and I’ve had nearly three months to adjust. The anger isn’t as acute and the sadness... well, it gets easier to bear. I’m able to think more clearly about it all now. But the day I knocked on Arlene’s front door and found strangers packing away her things was different. I had no premonition of tragedy and was totally unprepared to deal rationally with it.”
Another flash of sympathy darkened his eyes. “Exactly how did you find out?”
“When I asked for Mrs. Warner, the woman who answered the door told me I had the wrong address. ‘You mean Commander Warner,’ she said. ‘He’s the one who’ll interview you but he’s at the other house. We’re just here to close this place up.’
“‘Close the place up?’ I said, fumbling to put the pieces back where they belonged and where they’d been for the last seven or eight weeks.
“‘Well, yes,’ she said. ‘There’s no point in keeping it open. The child, poor little mite, has gone to live with his uncle and the movers will be here first thing in the morning. I daresay the Realtor’s sign will go up as soon as they’re done, and I expect the place will sell quickly. Water
front properties are scarce around here and very desirable.’
“‘Uncle?’ I said, clinging to that word, still hoping it meant that I’d come to the wrong house after all. Because the rest of what she’d said had nothing to do with my reason for being there. And that’s when I learned that Arlene and Jim were dead and that you’d been named Tommy’s legal guardian. I hadn’t suspected a thing before then because Arlene had told me, the last time we spoke before I left home, that she and Jim were going to California to a wedding the week before I was due to get here.”
“Tom was supposed to go with them but they decided at the last minute to leave him with me and Janet. Hell!” Pierce slammed the spoon on the stove and glared at her. “If you’d had the guts to tell me the truth at the outset, we could have helped each other get through that terrible time.”
“Well, I didn’t have the guts. All I knew, was that you were a bachelor but probably wouldn’t remain one for long and that, in the meantime, you needed help looking after Tommy. I was desperate, shocked, bereaved, frightened. Then I met Louise and realized she was the lady in your life and that when you married her, you wouldn’t need a nanny. So I buried any doubts I had about what I was doing and grabbed at the only chance I could see of forging a connection between me and Tommy, foolishly believing that if I established myself in your eyes as a decent, compassionate woman, you’d find it easier to accept my assuming a more permanent role in his life after you married.”
“So when did your plan change, Nicole?”
“Change?”
He filled two bowls with tomato soup. “When did you realize it would suit your purposes much better if you became Mrs. Pierce Warner?”
“Is that what you think this is all about?” she asked incredulously.
“You have to admit, it all hangs together. You supplant Louise, step in as my wife and thereby become Tom’s stepmother. That way, you get everything you wanted, and then some.”
A Nanny in the Family Page 16