Joan Kilby - Beach Baby

“You should call Jim and Elaine, let them know where you are and that you’re safe,” he said, stalling. “They must be worried to death.”

“If I do that, can I stay?”

She looked so desperate Reid wondered if she’d used her last dime to pay for the bus ticket out west. “Of course,” he relented. “You’re welcome in my house for as long as you want.”

“Thank you, Reid. This is going to be so cool.” Amy jumped up and hugged him. “There’s another reason I came out west.”

“What’s that?” he asked.

“Elaine told me I was born in Vancouver and given to them in a private adoption,” Amy replied. “She wouldn’t tell me who my biological parents are but I’m going to find them. I’m going to find my mother and father.”

God help him, Reid thought. He ought to tell her the truth right now. That he, who’d followed her progress from hand puppets to art-house productions, was the father she was seeking. He ached to tell her. But she wouldn’t see the truth his way. She would run from him, too, if she found out he’d also lied to her all her life. Where would she and Beebee go with no money and no friends or family to stay with? On the street, in a shelter?

Later, he’d tell her, when she’d settled in, when she wasn’t so fragile and hurt. He just hoped he found the right time before she discovered who he was.

And before she found Nina.

“NINA, HONEY, THERE’S something I have to tell you.” Dora Kennerly wiped her sudsy hands on a tea towel and sat opposite Nina at the kitchen table. Her tired hazel eyes appeared anxious but a hopeful smile played about her lips.

“Good news?” Nina took off her suit jacket, having gone from her air-conditioned BMW to the sweltering heat of her parents’ tiny bungalow on Vancouver’s east side. Today the temperature had climbed into the nineties—almost unheard of in Vancouver.

“I think so.” Dora wore a cheap cotton housedress and thin leather sandals, and dyed her graying auburn hair herself yet she had a serenity and an optimism that decades of low income couldn’t extinguish. “I mean yes, it’s wonderful news.”

Nina produced her weekly gift of a box of her mother’s favorite chocolates and handed it across the table. “Have one of these to celebrate.”

Dora peeled the cellophane off and lifted the lid. Eyes closed, she breathed in the rich chocolate aroma then gave Nina a beatific smile. “You spoil me.”

“You deserve it,” Nina said. Her mother and father had a hard life with few luxuries. They wouldn’t accept Nina’s offers of trips or clothes or a new car, so she gave them small treats like Belgian chocolates and Cuban cigars, specialty teas and subscriptions to magazines. Without asking, she’d had their old water heater replaced and paid to have the house painted. They’d made sacrifices to give her an education and she wanted to repay them now that she was able to.

Dora chose a chocolate and popped it whole into her mouth, then pushed the box across the table.

Reluctantly, Nina waved it away. “I’m on a diet.”

“You’re already thin,” Dora scolded, her voice thick with chocolate. “I don’t know when you eat. While other people are having dinner, you’re in the studio. Would you like me to heat up some cabbage rolls?”

“No, thanks,” Nina said. “You know I can’t stomach food before I go on air.” She picked up a drugstore flyer to fan her face, lifting wisps of blond hair away from her damp skin and made a mental note to have an air conditioner delivered. “You were about to tell me something important.”

Dora reached across the table to take Nina’s hands in her cool dry fingers. “It’s about your baby. Can you believe it’s been nineteen years?” She shook her head. “Time goes so fast.”

Nina tugged away and rose to go to the cupboard for a glass. Memories flooded back—a scrunched face, tiny fingers, a weightless warmth against her breast. For a few minutes she’d known pure joy…then the nurse had taken her baby away and Nina had signed the adoption papers with tears blurring her vision. Now she ran the water till it was cool, then filled the tumbler and drank. When she was sure her voice wouldn’t shake she said, “What about her?”

“She’s living forty miles south of Vancouver in Beach Grove,” Dora said softly.

Nina lost her grip and the glass dropped into the sink with a clatter. The adoptive parents had moved across the country to Halifax. For years afterward Nina had ached for her lost child the way an amputee aches for his severed limb. Through sheer effort of will she’d put the whole painful episode behind her. Now her child was nearby and Nina’s heart quickened as if her daughter were in the next room. “H-how do you know?”

“Her mother, Elaine Hocking, called me,” Dora said. “Apparently the girl has run away and is looking for her biological parents.”

Elaine and Jim Hocking, the wealthy older couple Dora had cleaned house for who couldn’t have a child of their own. Nina sat down with a thump. She used to fantasize that this day would come but had never dared to truly hope.

“I know this is a shock,” Dora said. “This wasn’t supposed to happen. The Hockings never wanted their daughter to know she was adopted.”

“I never understood that,” Nina said. “Why not?”

“Apparently Elaine Hocking was herself adopted into a family who had tried for years unsuccessfully to have a child,” Dora explained. “No sooner had they got Elaine than the woman became pregnant. Elaine says she was treated diffrerently from the biological child and never felt as loved or as special. She didn’t want her adopted daughter to feel in the slightest way second rate so they let her believe she was theirs in every way possible.”

“I should never have given my baby up,” Nina said. “I should have tried to keep her somehow.” But at the time she’d felt she’d had no choice.

The summer after she’d finished high school, she’d worked at a golf course in the same beach community where her daughter was now. That’s where she’d met Reid Robertson, the father of her child and the love of her life. When the summer was over, he’d left his lifeguard job and gone back to Yale with a pledge of love and a promise to return. But when Nina had found herself pregnant, Reid’s mother had stepped into the picture.

Serena, smoothly coiffed and impeccably groomed, had craftily treated Nina as an equal collaborator in her determination to do what was best for Reid. Nina had been swayed by her arguments, too young and inexperienced, too in awe of the Robertsons’ wealth and social standing, to realize how controlling Serena was.

Maybe if Reid had been closer to home and he and Nina could have talked face-to-face, things might have turned out differently. He called her every week but that wasn’t enough to counteract Serena’s intimidating personality. Over a formal luncheon for two at the Robertsons’ mansion in Shaughnessy, Serena calmly, rationally, kindly, explained how Nina was ruining her son’s life.

“He says he’s going to quit university and find a job to support you and the baby,” Serena said. “Naturally, I only want what’s best for you both but such a course of action would be a terrible waste of his potential, don’t you agree?”

“Yes, of course.” Nina watched Serena to see which fork and knife she used on the radicchio salad served by a uniformed maid. “He loves Yale. I don’t want him to give it up.”

“Just imagine the scenario that would follow,” Serena went on. “He’d end up in some dreadful job for minimum wage, in a fast-food joint or washing cars. Probably he’d have to work two jobs just to make ends meet without a spare moment to write his stories. Within a year or two he’d resent you and the baby. Oh, he wouldn’t say anything, not Reid, but you would know how he felt deep inside. You would feel responsible.” Serena drank from a crystal water goblet then delicately blotted her mouth with a linen napkin. “I’d hate to think what that would do to your relationship.”