Angel's Baby

by Pamela Browning

  He planned to tell Fitz about the baby during the two weeks they’d be at the old family beach house in the village of Siasconset on Nantucket Island. He expected Fitz, who was to be his best man, to be happy for both him and Valerie. After all, Fitz had grown up with Valerie, too; she was like a sister to him. Back when they were all kids, Fitz had tagged along with Valerie and Stuart on every expedition they’d launched during those all-too-short Nantucket summers. Later, Fitz had taken a devilish pleasure in cutting in on Stuart and Valerie at Miss Beatrice’s dancing school, and Valerie had even flirted with Fitz occasionally when she thought that Stuart wasn’t paying enough attention to her.

  Not that Stuart had ever thought those early flirtations amounted to much. He and Valerie were a pair, always had been, and when they both turned thirty, they’d decided not to wait any longer. They’d get married, they agreed, and treat their hometown of Boston to the biggest society wedding of the summer.

  In that first week in June two years ago, Valerie had arrived on Nantucket sporting a new Takawa Tsunami, which hadn’t yet been cited as the most dangerous new road vehicle of the year. On that first night on the island, she’d called Stuart up at the big gray-shingled house that had belonged to Adamses for generations.

  “I’m at the Whale Tail Lounge,” she’d said over the roar of music and loud voices at the favorite watering hole of all the young regulars on Nantucket. “Want to meet me here?”

  Fitz had his car on the island, so he drove both Stuart and himself down to the Whale Tail. The brothers were in a rare mood that night, exhilarated at the prospect of two glorious weeks of sun and sand and sailing. After a couple of hours spent renewing old friendships with other people they knew at the Whale Tail, the air inside had turned blue with cigarette smoke, and along with some friends, they’d trooped outside for a breather. They naturally ended up in the parking lot to admire Valerie’s new Tsunami.

  “Want to take her for a spin?” Valerie said. “Put her through her paces?”

  “Nah,” Stuart said, because he hadn’t seen Valerie in over a week. He’d been overseas on business and had just returned to Boston the night before; he couldn’t wait to get Valerie alone someplace, just the two of them.

  “Why not see what this baby’s made of?” Fitz had said over the rhythmic rock beat floating out of the lounge. He thunked the fender of the Tsunami with his knuckles.

  Valerie jingled the keys. “We’ll drive out the old road to the Perkins place. We haven’t done that for years,” she said, jumping in. Fitz had climbed in beside her, and so Stuart, not liking the seating arrangement but deciding that it wasn’t worth an objection, slid into the back seat. Their friends wandered back inside the lounge, drunk with the prospect of another lazy summer and too much booze.

  Valerie, her foot heavy on the accelerator, struck out along the deserted unpaved road toward the far end of the island where the Perkins house stood abandoned by its owners. Halfway there, Valerie unexpectedly said, “Let’s put the four-wheel drive through its paces.” She wheeled off the road onto a rutted trail leading down to the beach.

  “Slow down, Val,” Stuart said when she whizzed across a wooden bridge, the boards rattling in protest, and Fitz, his teeth white in the moonlight, grinned at him over the top of the front seat and said, “What’s the matter, are you chicken?”

  “Stuart, chicken? Never,” Valerie said gaily, and she laughed, the sound captured and flung out to sea by a rising wind that was stirring up the sand. Stuart wished he had suggested that he drive, and he was on the brink of doing just that when Valerie, swooping the Tsunami around a sand dune, suddenly clapped a hand over her left eye.

  “I’ve got something in my eye,” she said abruptly, screeching to a stop so suddenly that the tires bit into the loose sand.

  “Hey, watch it!” Fitz yelped, grabbing onto the side of the Tsunami. “You’ll dig the tires in so deep we’ll have to call a wrecker.”

  Valerie was pulling her top eyelid down over her lower one. “Must have picked up a grain of sand. Fitz, will you drive?” she said as Stuart handed her his handkerchief.

  “Sure. Scoot over,” Fitz said, and Stuart interrupted to say, “I’ll drive, Fitz. You were drinking Scotch, and a lot of it.” He himself had drunk only one beer.

  “Your turn’s next. Anyway, I’m always drinking lots of Scotch. Take after my old man.” Fitz laughed and threw the Tsunami into gear, gunning the engine so hard that sand flew up behind them and Stuart was thrown backward in his seat.

  Valerie, meanwhile, was blotting at her eye. “There, I’m okay,” she said, handing Stuart’s handkerchief to him across the back of her seat. “See what she’ll do on the curve, Fitz.”

  The Tsunami lurched around a dune, and they came out on the beach into the full moonlight. The scene was surreal—the moon so bright, Valerie’s laugh so shrill, the Tsunami roaring along at the edge of the rolling gray ocean.

  “Hey, Fitz, slow down! I’d like to live to tell about this,” Stuart said, but Fitz only howled like a wolf, an eerie sound in the night, and turned sharply to the left.

  “Whee! It’s a roller coaster!” cried Valerie, clinging to Fitz’s arm so that she wouldn’t be flung out the open side of the vehicle. In her hurry to change seats, she hadn’t fastened her seat belt.

  “Watch this!” Fitz yelled as they came upon a rise, and Stuart started—too late—to say, “Look out for the rocks!” because he remembered that they were there and Fitz couldn’t have or he wouldn’t have shot over the lip of land so unheedingly.

  And then Stuart felt the rocks tearing at the bottom of the Tsunami with a horrendous crunch, and they were lofted into the air for what seemed like an eternity, flying silently toward the moonlit path on the water. After that there was a sickening crash followed by a searing pain, and pressure on his back, and the wail of sirens far away.

  When he came out of the coma, he was in the hospital, the cut on his back bandaged. They told him that Valerie, his Valerie, had never had a chance. She’d been thrown out of the vehicle, which had landed on top of her, crushing the life out of her and their baby—the baby that they had both wanted so very much. Stuart couldn’t remember the accident at all, and Stuart’s doctors told him that people often forgot those things that they couldn’t bear to remember. As he lay in the hospital, weak and helpless, Stuart could only try to recall a scene that seemed just out of the grasp of his memory.

  But Fitz, the only witness, had made sure that Stuart remembered. Fitz told the police that Stuart had been driving the Tsunami. Valerie’s death—and their unborn baby’s—was Stuart’s fault.

  Now Stuart woke up and sat bolt upright, rocking the hammock violently. He remembered now. He remembered all of it. All this time, for the past two years, he’d been unable to recall anything that happened after the three of them left the parking lot of the lounge in the Tsunami, and now he knew. He knew.

  “Stuart?” Angel, wearing an apron, appeared in the doorway to the kitchen, concern written all over her face.

  He only stared at her, shaken by his knowledge. It hadn’t happened the way Fitz said. His brother had lied.

  Angel crossed the floor and stood before him, touching a gentle hand to his face.

  “Stuart? Is everything all right?”

  “I didn’t kill them,” he said hoarsely. “I didn’t kill them.”

  Angel knelt beside him on the hard porch floor, her forehead knit with anxiety. “Kill whom? What are you talking about, Stuart?”

  “Valerie. The baby. I didn’t do it!” He buried his face in his hands.

  “Tell me,” Angel said, resting her hand on his knee. And, haltingly, painfully, he did.

  * * *

  IT WAS DARK OUTSIDE by the time he finished talking.

  “They charged me with involuntary manslaughter, and I pled guilty,” Stuart said in a broken voice. “Because I’m an Adams, I only had to do community service work and was on probation for a year. You’d be surprised what money and priv
ilege can accomplish.” He said it bitterly, although he hadn’t been bitter at the time. He hadn’t, after all, had to go to jail. He knew he’d been more useful to society by doing what he did, which was to teach boatbuilding classes to disadvantaged youth, some of whom were now serving apprenticeships with the family firm.

  “I’m so sorry,” Angel said. “So very sorry, Stuart.” She was holding his hand. She had held it the whole time he was talking.

  “All this time, I thought I’d killed Valerie and our baby, and it was Fitz! Fitz was driving. That son of a bitch,” he said. He still couldn’t believe it. An Adams was supposed to be a man of honor, and Fitz had violated the unwritten code to save his own skin.

  “He’s your brother,” Angel reminded him quietly.

  “I hate him.” Stuart stood up and paced from one end of the small porch to the other, his head aching, his heart hammering. He felt like pounding something, like tearing something apart.

  “He’s all you have in the world,” Angel said in a soft tone of voice. “He’s the only member of your immediate family who’s left. If I had a brother or a sister, I could never hate him or her. Never.”

  “You’re not like me, then. I’ll make him pay, Angel. I’ll find some way to hurt him, to make his life a living hell.”

  Angel stood up and walked to the place where he stood. She placed a gentle hand on his arm.

  “And would that bring Valerie and the baby back?” she said.

  He stared down at her. “No. But it sure would make me feel better,” he said harshly. He shook her arm away, but, to his surprise, she merely moved closer and slid her arms up around his neck.

  “You must feel terrible,” she murmured.

  His first impulse was to push her away, but he didn’t. She smelled sweet, and she was pressing her body against his. He took comfort from its warmth and its closeness. Without thinking about it, he slid his arms around her waist and buried his face in her hair. It smelled like her shampoo, and suddenly he didn’t want to hit or hurt or destroy. He wanted someone to soothe his pain, to make the memories go back into the dark recesses of his mind.

  “Angel,” he said.

  “I know. Your brother did a horrible thing to you. It’s natural for you to feel angry.”

  “I wouldn’t have done what he did,” he said.

  She was stroking the back of his neck, and he felt himself relax. He still wanted to destroy Fitz, but at the moment it didn’t seem like the most important thing. The most important thing was murmuring comforting words in his ear, was caressing him gently, was reminding him that there were other things to do besides plotting revenge.

  “Stuart, come to bed,” she said, taking his hand. She had to tug at it for a few seconds before he was able to move his feet; he walked like some weird kind of robot, unable to think, knowing only that Angel was offering solace and that he’d do well to avail himself of it.

  In the darkened bedroom he felt her unbuttoning his shirt and slipping it down his torso, and then she unzipped his pants so that all he had to do was slide them down his hips and step out of them. He was shaking by this time, shaking so hard that his teeth chattered, and she was talking to him, easing him down on the mattress.

  He threw an arm across his eyes to blot out the images of Valerie in those last moments when he’d seen her tossed through the air, and he would have covered his ears if he’d thought that would muffle her last scream. Oh, he’d been better off when he didn’t remember, much better off. Now he knew that memories of that night would haunt him for the rest of his life, waking and sleeping, no matter what. The memories ground into his guts. How could he live with this?

  Angel slipped into bed beside him and tucked herself close to his side, sliding an arm over his chest and resting her head on his shoulder. She was so much smaller than Valerie, and so sweet. Sweeter than Valerie, who had never had a serious thought in her life. He reached for Angel’s leg, resting his hand on the soft inner skin of her thigh.

  He felt unaccustomed tears pooling behind his eyelids. He hadn’t killed them. It had been Fitz. The tears were about his sadness and also his release. He had been charged and he had paid his debt to society, but who was going to pay society’s debt to him? He had lost two years of his life because of a crime that he hadn’t committed.

  All right, so he wanted a pity party. He wanted someone to say, “I’m sorry.” And, of course, someone had. Angel had.

  “Angel?” he said quietly. “Are you awake?”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  “After Valerie died, I wanted to die, too.”

  “I can understand that,” she said.

  “I thought that my life wasn’t worth living without her.”

  For a long time, Angel didn’t speak. Then she said, “I can understand that, too.”

  Her voice had a strange quality to it, one he’d never heard before. He mulled that over and decided that what Angel had said was merely the kind of remark anyone would make under the circumstances. Chances were it was nothing more than an expression of sympathy.

  “I don’t think it’s possible for one person to understand what another person has been through, but thanks for trying,” he said.

  She lifted her head and looked at him, her face pale in the darkness. “It’s true that I wasn’t there when this happened to you, and I suppose you’re right—no one can ever fit inside another person’s heart or mind or body to feel the exact same emotions or fears or whatever. But I’m no stranger to loss,” she said.

  “Do you want to tell me about it?” he said. He suddenly knew that this was the key to Angel, to the reason she hid away on this faraway island, to her desire to have a baby without the interference of the father.

  “I never wanted to tell anybody,” she said truthfully. “When I came here, I left it all behind. But now I’d feel comfortable telling you. I think you might understand.”

  He slid his arm under her head and kissed her temple. “I’m a good listener,” he said.

  Angel stared up at the brown water stain on the old ceiling, barely visible in the faint light. She took a deep breath. “I loved a man,” she said. “Howard. He was a professor at the university.” And then the entire story of her love affair, her pregnancy, her breakup with Howard and the loss of the baby spilled out, the words tumbling over each other to release the hurt that had built up inside her for so long.

  “I always thought I was special until I knew Howard, and after I gave him the gift of myself, he threw me away, wounding my pride and, even worse, my heart,” she said. Her eyes held the ache of dammed tears, and when she turned toward him blindly, he took her in his arms and held her close. The telling of her story left her feeling like an emotional wasteland, lost and bleak, the way she had felt right after Howard left her. On Halos Island, the pain of her anguish had subsided into an ache and then a stillness in her heart; the anguish had been revived in the telling of this bit of history that she wanted to forget.

  “So you’ve been pregnant before,” he said, sounding as if he were in shock.

  “Yes,” she said. She felt numb, but was relieved that he knew her history. “Does it matter?”

  “I was almost a father myself,” he said, tightening his grip on her shoulder. “We’ve both lost a child, and we’ve both been running.”

  “For similar reasons,” she added, with a kind of wonder. She had never imagined that the two of them might have the same kind of tragedy in common, and she felt bonded to him as she never had before.

  “I was running from the pain of what I thought I did to Valerie and our child. Now that I know I wasn’t responsible for their deaths, I don’t want to run anymore. I want to make Fitz face up to what he did.”

  “It was an accident, Stuart.”

  “I want him to pay the price. To have to leave his career like I did and pay a debt to society. To admit what he did so the whole world will know I didn’t do it. Is that so much to ask?” His voice held a barely contained fury.

  �
�I don’t know, Stuart. Is it?”

  “Why should he have a wife and child and a life to be proud of? Why should Fitz have what I deserve?” He was sick of paying for what his notoriously irresponsible brother had done. He was angry, and rightfully so. He’d never get over it. Never!

  “You have a wife,” Angel told him gently, reminding him of who she was and why he was with her. He had been so caught up in his own feelings of hatred that he hadn’t thought about how she must feel as she listened to what he had to say.

  Suddenly he was overwhelmed with the twists and turns his life had taken since the accident on Nantucket. He realized now that he had taken a wife as a defiant gesture, a kind of thumbing his nose at the world he knew and all its conventions, and in so doing he had involved Angel in the mess his life had become. For the first time, he regretted bringing Angel into this. He should have sailed for the South Seas after all; this baby-making scheme had been a ridiculous idea. Angel had suffered enough already, because of that miserable creep Howard.

  Thank goodness she wasn’t pregnant yet. They could separate amicably, admit the folly of this contrived marriage and obtain a quiet, no-fault divorce. He’d settle a fair amount of money on her to express his gratitude.

  The air in the room had grown stuffy, and Angel sat up to open the shutters, pushing them to the far sides of the window so that her shape was limned in bright moonlight. He was about to get up when she said quietly, “Stuart. Look.”

  He leaned toward her, carefully avoiding touching her. Over her shoulder he saw what she was looking at—a tiny deer, no more than twenty inches long, browsing amid the gumbo-limbo trees at the edge of the clearing.