Kathleen Creighton - The Black Sheep’s Baby

“Wha’ time is it?” Scowling at his watch, he answered himself in tones of disbelief. “Almost eleven? ” By that time Lucy was halfway across the kitchen.

She stopped in the service room long enough to grab a coat, which she was shrugging into as she stepped onto the back porch. The cold stabbed at her, making her gasp. The dogs were less frantic now that they’d achieved their purpose and the household had been properly roused. Lucy quieted what remained of the racket with a sharp command, then stood hugging herself as she watched the car lights drive past the front of the house and right around to the back door, the one everybody except strangers always used. Not a stranger, then.

She had begun to shiver violently, but it wasn’t from the cold. She no longer felt the cold at all, in fact, only a strange numbness.

The car crunched to a stop near the bottom of the steps, just where Wood and Chris’s car had been parked a few hours before. Lucy found that she was standing at the top of the steps, but when she would have started down, Mike’s arms came from behind to encircle and hold her where she was. The car’s headlights went dark. The door opened, while Max and Tippy, the two Border collies, circled close, wriggling and whining.

Lucy wondered how she could shake so hard and still stand. She wondered how she would stop herself from bursting into tears.

The driver-a man-stepped out of the car and slowly straightened. For one brief moment he lifted deep-set shadowed eyes toward them while his hands reached to touch the dogs’ eager, searching muzzles, buried themselves in thick, silky fur. His face was gaunt, hard-boned, a stranger’s face.

Lucy’s breath caught in a sharp whimper. She could see that his lips were moving and knew he was speaking to the dogs, but she couldn’t hear his voice for the rushing wind inside her own head. She felt Mike’s arms around her, holding her so tightly she could scarcely breathe. She clung to his arms with icy fingers and tried to draw a breath, tried to speak-anything-just to say his name. But she couldn’t. Not even in a whisper.

He was moving quickly now, almost at a run, not toward her, not toward the house, but around to the other side of the car. Then he was opening up the back door, and for what seemed to Lucy like a very long time he leaned into the car, bending over something inside. Suspense keened in her ears as she watched him take something bulky from the back seat and come back around the car, carrying it by a handle. Something covered with a blanket…

Mesmerized, Lucy stared at the blanketed something as her son carried it toward her up the steps, slowly, one at a time. It could not be what it seemed to be. It couldn’t. But, two steps below her he halted, swinging the thing from his side to in front of him so that he held it in both of his hands, like an offering in a basket.

There was no mistaking it; it was an infant’s car seat.

Lucy tore her eyes from it, then, to gaze into the face of the hollow-eyed stranger. He smiled, though she could tell it was an effort, his teeth showing white in a beard-shadowed face.

“Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad. Merry Christmas.”

The breath she thought she’d lost came forth in a rush, but before she could make her lips form a reply, she heard Mike’s voice saying calmly, “You’d better come inside, son. It’s cold out here.”

Then, somehow, they were all in the nice warm kitchen, and Eric was lifting the infant carrier onto the table. In a daze, Lucy reached out to touch, then carefully lift the soft pink-and-yellow-and-blue blanket that covered it.

“Her name’s Emily,” Eric said gruffly behind her.

Lucy said nothing at all. She was gazing down at the face of the sleeping baby, like a single perfect flower in a nest of thistledown.

“She’s five weeks old,” her son went on in the hard, cracking voice she didn’t know. “And she’s mine.”

Eric knew what their next question would be, and answered it before they could ask. “Her mother’s dead. Died when Emily was born. I’ve been looking after her.”

And while he was saying that his eyes were moving slowly around the room, seeing it all with a strange sense of déjà vu. Weird, he thought. Not a thing’s changed.

Not that he’d really thought anything here would have changed, but what he hadn’t been prepared for was that he hadn’t. He’d thought he’d managed to grow up in the ten years or so he’d been on his own, but damned if he didn’t feel exactly the same as when he’d last stood in this kitchen, just a kid, then, and all frustrated and misunderstood yearnings. It was as if time had stood still, as if he’d left home only hours ago, not years. He even felt the same itchy and indefinable sense of guilt.

Maybe it was the guilt that made it so hard to look at his mother just then. Because he didn’t want to see any new lines around her eyes, unfamiliar streaks of gray in her hair. Didn’t want to see the love, the joy, the anguish he’d caused her plainly written on her face. He imagined she’d be wanting to touch him. Of course she would. She’d never been overly demonstrative, Lucy hadn’t, but she had her little ways. She’d be wanting to reach out to stroke his arm, hug him quick and tight, sniffle and cough and give him that fierce little frown she thought could hide the fact that she was crying.

It surprised him to realize that, deep down inside, it was what he wanted, too-to feel his mother’s arms around him, soothing his fears away and mending his hurts the way she’d always done when he was a child. It was because he wanted it so badly that he wouldn’t let himself get close enough to her to give her the chance.

Truth was, present feelings to the contrary, he knew he had changed. He was a long way from being that boy she remembered. He’d seen too much of all the bad stuff she’d tried so hard to protect him from. Yes, he’d come back to his childhood home in order to make his stand, but that had been instinct more than logical thinking, like a cornered animal looking for a tree to climb. In the final analysis he knew this was his battle and his alone, and when it came time for the showdown, he was going to have to fight it alone.

All of which he meant to explain to them, eventually. Tomorrow. Or was it today, already? He’d lost track of time. Right now, all he wanted to do was sleep. He had to sleep. He’d tell them everything…later.

“Son. Don’t you think you could have called?”

Eric heard the anger, no matter how quiet his dad’s voice might be. Dad was angry with him for the way he’d hurt Mom, which was something Eric could understand. Now. In fact, he understood a lot of things he never had before, now that he’d experienced those protective paternal feelings himself, firsthand.

He rubbed the back of his neck and felt the tiredness there creep right on down into his bones. Bracing himself, he turned to look his father straight in the eyes. “Sorry, Dad. I just didn’t think I could afford to stop. I was afraid that storm was going to catch up with me before-”

“You didn’t stop? ” Lord help him, his mother had found her voice. And it was as sharp-edged and scratchy as he remembered it. He felt an unexpected surge of emotion as she rounded on him, all puffed up like an angry hen. “You mean, you drove all the way here from…what, L.A.? With that tiny baby in the car? Without stopping? Eric Sean Lanagan, I swear-”

“I stopped when she needed feeding or changing,” he protested. And damned if he wasn’t starting to feel like that kid again, defensive and resentful-until he caught a glimpse of something way back in his father’s eyes, something he’d have sworn was laughter. He managed a smile then, though his face felt stiff with it; it had grown unaccustomed to that particular exercise. “She’s a real good baby-took to traveling like she was born to it. I’m tired, though…” He made no attempt to cover his yawn, then felt his smile turn crooked. “What about it, Mom? Still got a bed here for me?”