Blessing in Disguise

by Danielle Steel

  “You’ll be back soon,” he whispered and she nodded.

  “I miss her so much sometimes,” she said softly. “She’s the sweetest of my children. I hope he appreciates her.”

  “I’m sure he does, he just comes from a very male-dominated world. His brothers and father are the same way.” She nodded agreement, wishing that Oona had fallen in love with an American and lived closer to home.

  She was quiet on the flight to Paris, and when they got to the Hotel George V, Jack was in awe of the elegance of it and the spectacular flowers in the lobby. He’d had a wonderful time in Rome too, though on a much smaller scale, and had stayed at his friend’s apartment off the Piazza Navona. In Paris, Isabelle took him to galleries and auction houses and the Louvre. He had been to Paris before but not in such lavish circumstances. He learned more about art on the trip. She cheered up once she was busy in Paris, and they had several remarkable meals, at wonderful restaurants. She enjoyed going with him and said that otherwise she wouldn’t have gone out alone at night.

  It was over much too quickly, and they were back on the plane, headed for New York. They’d been away for three weeks, and it was already mid-January.

  Isabelle was quiet on the trip home, thinking of the treatments she had to resume for her eyes. The time in Europe had been a nice respite from them, but now she had to face real life again.

  The recent shock she’d had about her vision had made the trip even more meaningful to her. She kept thinking how terrible it would be if she could never see her daughter again, or her grandsons, or the twins who were about to be born. Every moment was more precious now, worrying that it would never come again. She had thought about it a lot in the last three weeks and it had brought her to another decision, which she knew was long overdue. There were things she felt she had to do now to make her peace with the past. She was going to ask Jack to help her, but she didn’t want to say anything to him until they were back in New York.

  He took her to the house and settled her in before he went home. She was feeling very proud of herself. She hadn’t fallen once at the farm, in spite of all the steps everywhere. She was more careful than she’d been previously. And it felt good now to be home, although she had loved her visit with Oona.

  “You don’t have to hang around,” she said to Jack as he lingered. “You must be eager to get home to your sister.”

  “I’ve been calling her every few days. She’s doing fine. Thanks for a great trip,” he said. It had been one of the best in his life.

  “I’m glad you enjoyed it. See you tomorrow,” she said and heard the front door close a few minutes later. She looked around the room and thought of Oona and her children. They seemed a million miles away now. And she’d only heard from Xela and Theo on Christmas, and not in the three weeks since, and hadn’t been able to reach them. But there was someone else she had to see now. It was all she could think about. She knew she should have done it sooner. And suddenly it seemed so important, before it was too late, and while she could still see him.

  She went to bed, thinking about it, and woke up early the next morning, still on European time. She was already at her computer when Jack came to work. He had woken up early too, and he came in to see what she was doing. She was looking frustrated.

  “Can I help?”

  “I thought I could do it myself, but I can’t.” She concentrated very intently on the screen.

  “What are you looking for?” He’d never seen her work so hard on her computer.

  “A man named Charles Anderson, in Providence, Rhode Island. Except his name may not be Charles Anderson anymore. They…he might have changed it. If it’s changed, I won’t be able to find him.” But she knew she had to try anyway. A force greater than her was pushing her now.

  “Do you know what he might have changed it to?”

  She shook her head.

  “Do you know his address?” She shook her head again. “There might be a lot of them by that name.” He pulled up a chair to sit next to her, and she turned the computer toward him so he could do it for her.

  “I have his date of birth.” She gave it to him, the man she was seeking was forty-three years old.

  “Let me play with this for a minute. There are search engines to locate people, like old classmates or lost relatives, or first girlfriends. It’s not that complicated.” He re-entered the information, came up with nothing in Rhode Island, and broadened the search to include the Boston area, and ten minutes later, he had five of them by that name, including one with the right date of birth. He increased the size of what he was looking at to fill the full screen and turned it toward her. Charles Henry Anderson, in Danvers, Massachusetts. They were looking at his driver’s license. She stared at it for a long time, leaning forward, examining his face in minute detail, without saying a word. Her whole body was tense as she looked at the image on her computer.

  “Do you know him?” Jack asked, watching her. She nodded at first, and then shook her head.

  “I haven’t seen him in a long time.” He didn’t look like anyone she’d known, and he was close to Jack’s age. “Thank you,” she said in a whisper, and jotted down the man’s information, with his address and phone number. And Jack stood up to leave. He could see that it was important to her, but she didn’t explain why.

  She sat staring at the photograph for another hour after Jack left the room. She looked like she’d been transported to another time, another place. And then she picked up the phone on her desk and called. She had no idea what to say when he answered, or what kind of message to leave if he didn’t. He might not want to talk to her after all this time. She had waited his entire lifetime to reach out to him.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Charles Anderson was in the garage of his home in Danvers, twenty miles out of Boston, tinkering with his car, which he loved to do on weekends. His son, Steve, answered the phone, hung out the kitchen door, and yelled to his father in the garage.

  “Someone on the phone for you, Dad.”

  “Who is it?” His hands were covered with grease and oil. He was working on an old Mustang that was his pride and joy. He had a sixteen-year-old son, an eleven-year-old daughter, and a wife who was a teacher. Charles was a sales rep for a publishing house in Boston, and wasn’t crazy about his job.

  “She didn’t say, it’s a woman,” Steve called back to him, and Charlie wiped his hands on a rag, walked up the kitchen stairs, and picked up the phone. There was silence when he answered, and he thought it was a prank and was about to hang up when she spoke.

  “This call is long overdue. I’m not even sure if I should be calling you, or if you’d want me to,” she said, sounding nervous. “I’m your birth mother, Charles. I’ve wanted to call you for forty-three years. I dreamed of this. But I didn’t have the courage, and I didn’t want to upset you.” He was stone-faced as he listened.

  “Why now?”

  “Because time passes and one day we won’t have the opportunity. If you don’t want to talk to me, I understand. But I wanted to reach out in case you’re curious about me, or there’s anything you want to know.” She wanted to know about him too, and if he’d had a good life without her. She had wondered that for all of her adult life.

  “Yeah. A lifetime of questions in one call. Why did you give me up?” he asked, sounding hurt even forty-three years later.

  “I was fifteen, a sophomore in high school, I got drunk with a senior at a dance, and he didn’t want to know when I found out I was pregnant. I didn’t even realize it myself for several months. He was seventeen, and he left for college in New Mexico before you were born. I never heard from him again. I couldn’t bring up a baby by myself.” Although in the end she had with all of them, but she’d been older then and not a child herself. “My father wouldn’t let me keep you. He said he wouldn’t help me if I did. I didn’t have a mom, she died when I was three. I ha
d no choice and no way to take care of you, nowhere to go. I was just a kid. So I let my father force me to give you up. He said it was the right thing to do for you. I’ve regretted it every day of my life ever since.

  “I tried to find you once, when I turned eighteen, but I didn’t know where to look. The adoption agency wouldn’t tell me where you were or even your name. I named you Charles when you were born, and I thought your new parents would change it, but I guess they didn’t. A nurse in the hospital told me their last name was Anderson. That was all I knew, and your birthday. I managed to hide that I was pregnant till the end of sophomore year, my father sent me away to some nuns for the summer, and I had you at the end of August, and gave you up in the hospital. I went back to school to start junior year two weeks later. No one ever knew. I’ve never told anyone, but I never forgave myself.”

  “How did you find me?” he asked, curious in spite of himself, wanting to run away and to talk to her at the same time.

  “It’s easier to find people now,” she said quietly. “Your driver’s license, and it turns out your name is the same, which I didn’t think was possible. Someone helped me with the Internet an hour ago and there you were. I should have tried years ago, but I never thought I’d find you, and I figured by now, it wouldn’t matter to you, and maybe it doesn’t. But I’ve thought of you every single day of my life since you were born.” And then she asked him a question that nearly stopped his heart. “Would you like me to come to Boston and meet you sometime? I live in New York.” There was no easy answer to that after all this time.

  “Maybe. I need to think about it.” He was angry and excited all at once. Even all these years later, he felt shaken by hearing her, but had always wanted to and fantasized about it all his life, that one day she would just show up. And now she had. She gave him her phone number and told him to call whenever he wanted to, if he wanted to.

  “I know I have no right to walk into your life now. And it took me a long time to feel ready to find you. I never forgot about you. I was afraid you hated me. But I thought about you every single day.” It had the ring of truth to it.

  “I did hate you for a long time,” he said honestly. “I didn’t know you were that young. My birth certificate has my adoptive parents on it, and nothing about you. I have a sixteen-year-old son, and an eleven-year-old daughter. I can’t imagine either of them with a child at fifteen,” he said fairly, and then wondered something. “Do you have other kids?” She almost hated to admit it to him, it seemed like such a betrayal after giving him up.

  “Three girls.” She had had Theo because of him. She couldn’t bring herself to give another baby away, or have an abortion. She knew she would have abandoning him on her conscience forever. One was enough.

  “Do they know about me?”

  “No, they don’t. No one does. But I’d like to tell them now. They have as much right to know they have a half-brother as you do to know about them, and meet them if you want.”

  “I’ll have to think about that too.”

  “And I’d like to meet your children too,” she said gently, “if you’ll let me.” She had two more grandchildren.

  He was still shocked by her call when he went back to the garage, picked up the grease-stained rag, threw it against the wall, and burst into tears.

  * * *

  —

  Isabelle thought about her call to him all night. She wasn’t sure she would have done it if she hadn’t been told she might go blind. A giant clock was ticking now, somewhere in her head. Everything mattered, more than it ever had before. She wasn’t dying but she wanted to tie up the loose ends in her life. It was time, and Charles was the biggest one of all.

  She couldn’t sleep, she was wide awake and finally got up, and went back to her computer. She wanted to know more about him, but all Jack had found on the Internet was his driver’s license. Thank God he had found that, or she could never have called him. She wanted to do something to distract herself then. She needed to calm down.

  Just for the fun of it, she put Jack’s name into the same search engine she had seen him use that morning, and she knew his date of birth from their employment contract. She had no idea what would turn up, probably his most recent employment with Senator Douglas, or something from when he worked as an assistant producer on TV, or the radio show. It was just an experiment to see if she could do it.

  She had barely finished putting in the information when an image leapt onto her computer screen. It was the front page of the sports section of a newspaper from twenty-one years before. There was a photograph of Jack with longer hair, and he looked like a kid. It said he was twenty-five years old, and the headline made her eyes open wide. “Tragedy on the Court: NBA MVP Jack Bailey suffers compound fracture in last eight minutes of championship game.” She read on past that to the descriptions of the accident when another player collided with him, hit him at just the wrong angle with his full weight, and the article said that fans were standing on seats crying as they took him away. Other sports pages flipped onto the screen after it with the same story, with photographs of him, and one of him being carried off the court on a stretcher, with the coaches running alongside crying. Another headline said “Heartbreaking End to a Brilliant Career.” Tears filled Isabelle’s eyes as she read the articles about him. Almost every writer called him a legend and said he had been basketball history in the making. There were other articles from several months later, mourning the seriousness of his injury and the impact on his life. His brilliant career and future in basketball had ended that night.

  There was an article ten years later, one of those grim “Where is he now?” pieces that followed his career path since, as sports radio show announcer, his assistant producer job in sports on TV. She had read it all in his CV but the vital information had been left out that he was one of the biggest basketball stars that ever lived, drafted right out of college, and felled at the end of a championship game they’d been winning and lost in the final minutes once he was injured. His teammates had been too devastated to focus. The article lost track of him in his days as a DJ. She felt sick as she read the articles about him, and, unable to stop herself, she pressed the arrow for the video that actually showed the hideous accident. The bone was exposed in his shattered leg as he lay there, and they estimated the speed at which the other player had hit him. She felt like throwing up as she watched.

  She was crying when the video ended, like the people who had seen it happen. And he had never told her he played in the NBA. It explained his height and passion for sports. She wondered if he was bitter about it, or resentful, or still cried about it. He’d been a boy then, and was a man now. But his life had never been the same again. What would it have been like if he’d been able to continue playing until he retired?

  She was shocked when she finally walked away from her computer and stood staring out the window. She wondered how he had managed to get through it, get over it, and been able to go on, knowing what he had been, and could have been if fate hadn’t turned against him. It made her wonder about the cruelties of life, with his leg being shattered, and her facing the possibility now that she’d go blind. It made her want to tell him how sorry she was, but she knew she couldn’t. He had never said a word to her about it, and he obviously didn’t want to talk about it, nor want her to know. He was a brave, proud man and didn’t want her pity.

  After reading all the articles, she felt as though it had just happened, and the video made her feel as though she’d been there. She wanted to put her arms around him and comfort him, but she couldn’t. She wondered who had been there for him. A girlfriend? His sister, the one he was taking care of now? Her heart ached for him as she went back to bed, heartbroken over what had happened to him. If she’d been a sports fan she might have recognized his name when he came for the interview, but she wasn’t. And the woman at the agency hadn’t said anything either. Twenty-one years was a long
time, and maybe people had forgotten.

  She didn’t fall asleep until the sun came up, and when she woke up four hours later, she was groggy and instantly remembered what she’d seen and read the night before. She could hear Jack downstairs in the kitchen, hammering something, and she didn’t know what to say to him now. She felt hungover from the sorrow she had read of the night before, and wished she could tell him she was sorry. He didn’t deserve that, no one did, to have all their dreams shattered in an instant. She remembered the sickening injury on the video.

  She looked somber when she went downstairs half an hour later and walked into the kitchen, and Jack noticed it immediately.

  “Are you okay? Did something happen last night?” She looked terrible and wanted to say “No, it happened twenty-one years ago and I’m sick for you about it,” but she just shook her head.

  “I’m just jet-lagged,” she said vaguely and took a sip of the coffee he set down in front of her.

  “Did you call that guy we looked up on the Internet yesterday? Did he threaten you in some way?” He’d looked a little rough in the photo, but most driver’s license photos looked like mug shots. Jack thought his own did too.

  “No, no, nothing like that,” she reassured him. “I called him, and he was fine. How’s your sister?”

  “She did okay while I was gone. She missed me.” He smiled. “It’s nice to know someone does.” She wondered if his accident was why he had never married. It had to take a toll on him psychologically, but he seemed so peaceful and kind and easygoing. Somehow he had managed to live with it, but his recovery and the early years must have been brutal, knowing what he’d lost. She sat quietly thinking about it, and then went upstairs to work, while he hammered some nails into a shelf that had gotten loose. She sat at her desk, thinking about him and her son, and then finally forced herself to concentrate on some catalogues she had to go through. She was making good headway on the collection she was putting together for the oilman.