by White, Jade
And all the things that could happen to Brenton himself, and his pride, and their people, because of a little werelion cub, thrown to the human race. It was unspeakable—unthinkable.
Brenton roared again with all the breath in his quasi-lion lungs. He would never let any of it be. He would never let any of it happen—not to Daniel, and not to Tara.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Brenton thought of everything and had it all covered. The pilot came to O’Hare and arrived at Tara’s apartment in a car that Brenton paid for. Tara had her bags and Daniel’s packed when the pilot arrived, and with Daniel sleeping in a sling against her bosom, she climbed into the car with the pilot, and off they went back to the airport and from there on a night—time flight to Napa. The flight was the most nervous, anxious trip that Tara had ever had in her life.
Hugging her sleeping baby close to her aboard the plane, she was terrified, frightened to death that he would awake, and on awakening he would change again to the other thing that he was; the other thing that his father was. And there she would be, holding a lion cub in her arms, beset with his paws and his snout and his little lion fangs, and she feared it would be all she could do not to melt down or spin into another panic.
And perhaps he would sense her apprehension and fear and start to claw at the baby sling, ripping away at it the way he had done his training pants in the playpen. What if she couldn’t control him? What would she do then?
Tara felt different claws slashing away at her at from all these thoughts: the claws of guilt. What kind of mother was she, after all? What kind of mother fears her own child? What would that do to her, and to her relationship with her baby? Would she end up rejecting little Daniel, who was the most innocent thing in the world and not responsible for any of this? Would she be afraid to touch him, afraid even to go near him?
Brenton’s words over the phone returned to her: Just hold him and pet him and love him. He knows you’re his mother. He won’t hurt you, I promise. He knows your voice and your touch and your scent; he won’t hurt you. He’s still your baby.
She continued to hold him close, fearing to let him go as much as she feared what might happen while she held him. Tara’s tears flowed freely again. She softly sobbed at him, “I’m sorry, Daniel. Mommy’s sorry, baby. You didn’t do anything wrong. You’re Mommy’s perfect boy. Mommy just didn’t know. Mommy doesn’t know what to do about any of this. Oh, baby…my baby. Mommy’s so sorry…”
_______________
Brenton was waiting for them at the same airport where he and Tara had said their goodbyes. He greeted them and while the pilot took Tara’s and Daniel’s baggage to Brenton’s car, Brenton sat with Tara and his cub in the same waiting lounge where he and Tara sat the last time they saw each other. Tara did not take Daniel from the sling, again for fear of waking him, but Brenton sat beside them and looked at the sleeping child. Tara watched Brenton’s reaction and saw that handsome face melt into the warmest, purest love she had ever seen anyone show in her life.
“My God, look at him,” said Brenton, captivated and humbled. “Look at that face. Look at those little hands. He’s incredible. He looks too perfect to be real. I can’t believe that. And he’s really ours. We made this, Tara. We made him. Can you believe he’s real?”
He looked up into Tara’s eyes and saw the layers of meaning in his question. Can you believe he’s real, indeed. Brenton saw in her eyes and on her face what he had heard on the phone, the struggle that Tara had been having these many hours with the “reality” of her child. He was sorry he asked the question, and returned to gazing in wonder at the little boy cuddled up in the sling.
“Even his name is perfect,” he said. “Daniel. Oh my God, I just realized how perfect that name is for him. Daniel—like ‘Daniel in the lion’s den’…” Too late, he shut his mouth, regretting the words as quickly as they escaped. He looked back at Tara apologetically.
“Can we just go to your house now, please?” Tara asked.
_______________
With no time to buy anything and no time to prepare for the arrival of his son, Brenton had improvised sleeping arrangements. They would have to embark on a major shopping trip tomorrow to get things for Daniel’s needs and comfort, but for now he had taken a coffee table from the living room and set it up in the master bedroom suite where he expected he and Tara had likely made up for the boy. He emptied out a large drawer from his bureau and set it on top of the table with pillows and sheets and blankets, creating a makeshift baby bed.
It was the best he could do at the moment. Resigned to the situation, Tara let Brenton take the child from the sling and hold him. She watched Brenton sit down with him on the foot of the bed and cradle his son in his arms. On Brenton’s face was the same look he had worn at the airport: an all-warming, all-possessing love; the love that only a father can see when looking on an infant son.
Daniel yawned in his father’s arms and peered sleepily up into Brenton’s adoring face. Brenton returned a Christmas morning smile to his cub. “Hey, little guy. Guess who I am. I’m your dad. Yeah, you’re mine. You’re my little cub. God, you’re so perfect. How did I get to be the dad of anything as perfect as you?
How is that? I know I wasn’t there when you were born. I wish I had been. I wish I’d been there for your first breath. And the first time you opened your eyes. I didn’t get to see your first step. I wish I did. And I didn’t get to see you change for the first time. Yeah, Dad missed all that. I’m sorry, Daniel. I wish I knew; I would have been there for all that…”
Tara, standing nearby, took in this entire scene, watching and listening. Brenton was right about that much, at least. By not telling him that she was having his cub—no, his baby—she had cut him out of all those moments and so many others. She felt guilty about that too, a different guilt than the way she felt about her reaction to Daniel’s change. She was sorry now that she had not given him a chance to be a part of the first year of Daniel’s life. Brenton, she could see, would have been the most loving and doting of fathers. He still would be that kind of father now. It almost made her want to cry again.
But Brenton still had some things to answer for. They were still going to have some words, and they were not going to be as sentimental as the words being said from father to son at this moment.
Daniel made a sound at Brenton, a noise like the sound he made when he cried, but softer. Brenton’s eyes actually lit up all the more brightly to hear it. “What’s going on there?” he asked. “What’s that about? Do you know I’m Dad? You know, don’t you? You know me. I think I know what you want.” He looked over at Tara. “Can we get him out of his clothes?”
“Is he wet? Did he poop?” Tara asked. “I’ll get a fresh diaper…”
“No,” said Daniel. “It’s not that. I think it’s something else. I recognize the way he feels now, from holding my nieces and nephews when they were little. We need to get him out of his clothes.”
“Oh no,” said Tara, feeling as if a stiff breeze could knock her over. “You don’t mean…”
“Yeah, there’s a feeling that little cubs give off. He needs to be ‘changed,’ but not like that. Let’s put him down on the floor and get him out of these things.”
Forcing her apprehensions to one side, Tara went to help Brenton, who left the bed and put Daniel down on the bedroom carpet. They slipped him out of his human baby clothes and Brenton sat himself down in front of the little boy, who got down on his all-fours. And Tara, on her knees beside them, watched while Brenton fixed his eyes on Daniel’s identically colored pupils and said, “Okay, little guy. Show Dad what you've got. Come on.”
For all her misgivings and anxieties about the nature of her baby and his father, Tara had a sensation of seeing something magical in what came next. Staring at Daniel, Brenton began to purr. She realized it was the same sound that she imagined hearing him make at times when they were in bed, which she had dismissed when she heard it then. It was one more piece falling into place now. He w
as purring, this time at his little boy.
The sound of his father’s purr seemed to cast a spell over Daniel. The baby boy started to purr back at him. “That’s it,” said Brenton. “You can do it. Do it for Dad. Come on…” And he resumed his purring, encouraging the lad.
A second later, it happened. The little boy’s body morphed and shifted, human limbs and head transforming to feline, fur growing all over and a tail unfurling at his bottom. As easily as taking a breath, Daniel presented himself to his delighted, beaming father as a lion cub. He sat down on his little lion hindquarters and raised his paw at Brenton as if to salute him.
Brenton clapped his hands and laughed, a loud and hearty laugh. “There! That’s it! That’s Dad’s boy!” He touched the extended little lion paw in a gesture like a high-five. “Look at that! Look at Dad’s boy!” Still sitting on the floor in front of Daniel, Brenton peeled off his shirt and tossed it to one side, rendering himself nude from the waist up, and released his upper body, head, arms, and hands to lion form, his mane cascading over his shoulders the way his human hair once did. In a rumbling lion version of his human voice, he chortled, “What a boy! Look at that! What a boy Dad’s got! Come here, son…”
He reached out his lion forelimbs and paws and scooped up little Daniel. The cub squirmed and made little cub growls and snarls at his father, showing his little cub fangs. “That’s Dad’s boy!” Brenton rumbled at him, pulling him close. And he chortled more deeply as Daniel pawed at his face and arms, his growls melting back into purrs, playing with his father for the first time.
Brenton held Daniel against his chest. Daniel rubbed his snout and jaws against his father and purred and yowled at him, squirming a bit in Brenton’s arms before his whole little cub body settled down except for the excited twitching of his tail. “Oh, you're a scrappy one, aren’t you?” Brenton said, almost drunk on a father’s love. “You’re gonna get into all kinds of trouble, I can tell. You’re gonna be just like Dad when he was little. Yeah, you’re gonna be a little handful. Dad and Mom are gonna have to be running around behind you, getting you out of all kinds of stuff. You hear that, Mom? We’ve got ourselves a handful here. Mom…?”
Curiously, Brenton noticed that Tara had not made a sound through any of this. He shot a glance over in the direction where she had been sitting, calling to her, “Mom, did you hear me? We’ve got…”
He stopped in mid-sentence at what he saw just a few steps away. Tara was still there—sprawled out on the carpet where she had fainted dead away.
CHAPTER 12
“Oh, crap,” said Brenton to the purring Daniel, “I think this was too much for Mom.”
He put Daniel back down on the carpet and shook the digit of a lion paw at him. “Stay right there and don’t move, son.” Whether or not he could understand his father’s words, Daniel started to feel tired again. He yawned widely, toppled over onto one side, flexing his paws and twitching and thumping his tail.
Brenton morphed back to human and, not bothering to put his shirt back on, went to Tara’s side. He picked her up from the floor, carried her to the bed, and gently laid her down on one side of it. Then he returned to Daniel and picked him up. Daniel squirmed a bit, but did not resist. He let Brenton carry him to the pillows-and-linen-filled drawer on top of the coffee table and set him down in it.
Now shaking the finger of a human hand at the cub, he said, “Be a good boy for Dad and stay there. Daniel settled himself down in the makeshift bed with his tail on the pillows where his head should have been, and looked, blinking, at Brenton. He was a good boy; he did not move.
Climbing onto the other side of the real bed opposite where he had put Tara, Brenton tenderly took her hand in his and began to stroke and rub at it. Softly he called to her, “Tara…wake up, Tara. It’s all right. It’s okay; wake up, please. Tara…?”
Tara inhaled and stirred. She blinked, slowly coming awake again. Her eyes focused on Brenton. She felt her hand in his, felt his insistent touch. Suddenly, as if jolted by the touch of a live wire, Tara pulled her hand from him and bolted upright on the bed. She fixed him with a wide-eyed, frightened, almost panicked look, and gasped out, “Brenton! Brenton, oh my God! Daniel changed again; I saw him change! And you…you…I saw you…!”
She scrambled backward against the headboard and kept her eyes on him, nervously. “Oh my God, Brenton, you did it! You changed! You turned into…you had a…” She started to gesture wildly at her head and shoulders. “You had…your head was…and your hands, and your body… You were…”
“I know,” Brenton said. “That’s what I am. What else I am. That’s what we are, Daniel and me. Tara, I won’t hurt you. Daniel won’t hurt you and I won’t hurt you.”
All at once Tara’s mind went flying and tumbling back in time, to a moment when she and Brenton were getting out of his hot tub. She returned to a moment when she told him, You’re like…a man and a beast. This big, stalking beast that came out of some jungle. And I’m like your prey that you hunted down and carried off… Once again in her mind’s eye she saw the way he reacted to that, the way he backed off from her, nervous and skittish, and she recalled how she could not understand him suddenly being that way after they had spent days being as intimate as two people could possibly be.
He had said to her, The truth is, Tara, I am like an animal inside… He had told her that he felt …like a wild animal, like something out of control. I am a beast, Tara… This is how I am.
Tara looked at him now as if she were seeing him for the first time, which perhaps in a way she was. “You almost told me once,” she said. “There was a time when you almost told me—when I said you were like some incredible beast.” She leaned back and shut her eyes and a tear squeezed itself through one eye and traced its way down her face. “That one day, I half-guessed the truth and didn’t even know it, and you almost told me.” She opened her tear-filled eyes to him again. “That’s what that was, wasn’t it? Me almost guessing the truth and you almost telling me—but you didn’t.”
“No, Tara, I didn’t. I couldn’t,” Brenton admitted. “I couldn’t tell you at first because you wouldn’t have believed it unless I showed you, and then you would have been terrified of me and we would have both been in trouble. And I didn’t tell you then, when we were here, because we’d been in and out of bed and everywhere else for so long, and been doing everything.
I couldn’t tell you what you were sleeping with because I didn’t know what the shock of it would do to you, except it wouldn’t have been anything good. And then we would have been in probably worse trouble because you would have known that the man humping you for days and days was…” he finished carefully, “…what you just saw. There was no way to tell you. And neither of us knew it would come to anything like this.”
He glanced over his shoulder at Daniel, still in lion cub form, who had put down his head on his forepaws and still twitched his tail, oblivious to everything. “How could we have known? All I knew was what the truth would probably do to you.”
“I’m surprised it hasn’t driven me out of my mind now,” Tara said.
“I think neither one of us gave the other enough credit,” Brenton replied.
Tara felt deathly tired. Everything she had been through today was catching up with her and the change of time zones was not helping. “I made the best decision I could, Brenton,” was all she could say.
The expression that Brenton gave her then told Tara that he was restraining his feelings, that he had been in a turmoil of his own since her phone call and was barely holding it all in. It came to her that she had as much to answer for as he did, and she was in no shape to answer for it.
“That was your best decision, for what’s been almost two years now? Your best decision was not to tell me you were pregnant, to keep from me that I was going to be a father? Not to tell me that you'd had my cub? That was really your best decision? Tara, look, let’s just try for a minute to look past the fact that I missed the first year of my cub’s life,
which is hard as hell to do, I don’t mind telling you. Let’s just try to look past the fact that there were all those moments I didn’t get to be a part of, that I didn’t get to see; things I would have loved to be there for.
I’ll never experience any of that, but put that to one side just for a minute. Tara, damn it, I could have helped you. Do you really think my political career mattered more to me than being Daniel’s father? Do you really think my damn campaign meant more to me than being there for him, taking care of him—taking care of you? Seriously? You actually thought I was the kind of insensitive jackass who would put running for a little public office ahead of being a father? Damnit, Tara, what did I do to make you think that about me?”
Tara opened her mouth to say something, but nothing came out. She only looked away. All the arguments that Felicia had made with her were now returning to haunt her, and Brenton’s pain was piling on top of them. And none of the arguments that she’d made back to Felicia seemed equal to the task of defending her now.
Feebly, Tara said, “You told me the way you wanted your future to be, Brenton; what you wanted your life to be. I wanted you to have that. I wanted your life to be the way you saw it. Being a father was something you never brought up. And I didn’t know what you really are.”