Elizabeth Bevarly - Father On The Brink

The nurse stared at him as if he were something she’d normally vacuum up from the carpet. She pulled her clipboard toward her, and crossed her arms over it and her chest. Then she cocked one dark eyebrow at him, and he knew he wasn’t going to like one bit whatever she was going to tell him.

“Ms. Brennan checked herself out of the hospital this morning. If you had been here to meet her like you were supposed to, you would have realized that.”

Cooper had intended to be there earlier this morning. Not because he’d thought Katie was going to be leaving, but because he’d wanted to check on her and Andrew and make sure they were okay. Actually, he’d planned to return the night before, but he’d wound up making runs until nearly midnight. By then, hospital visiting hours were over. So he’d waited until this morning to come by. Hey, he’d needed the sleep anyway. And judging by the strange reality to which he’d awakened, he obviously still hadn’t gotten enough.

“Let’s start all over here, okay?” he asked hopefully.

The nurse opened her mouth to say something, but he lifted a hand, palm out, to stop her.

“Yesterday,” he said, “right around lunchtime, I arrived at this hospital in an ambulance with a woman who had just delivered a baby. Am I right about that?”

The nurse nodded. “Of course. You—”

He held up his hand again, and the nurse bit off whatever she had been about to say. “And the woman’s name was…?” he asked, letting the question trail off so that the nurse would answer it for him.

She pulled her clipboard away from her chest and glanced at it only slightly before telling him, “Katie Brennan.”

He released a sigh of relief. “That’s right. Katie Brennan. And her son’s name?”

The nurse studied the clipboard again. “Andrew Cooper Brennan Dugan.”

Cooper nodded his head as she revealed the first three names, then quickly switched to shaking it at her recitation of the last. “No, that’s not right. It’s Andrew Cooper Brennan. Period. No Dugan. His name ends at Brennan. Right?”

The nurse turned her clipboard so that Cooper could view it. “No, she said she wanted to have both her last name and yours as part of the baby’s legal name. So it’s Andrew Cooper Brennan Dugan. Says so right here on the birth certificate application. Ms. Brennan did get that much filled out, anyway.”

“Let me see that.” The request was just a formality, as Cooper had already snatched the clipboard from the nurse’s hand.

“Hey!” she objected.

But he ignored her. For there, enhanced with Katie’s delicate, scrawling signature, were the documents in question, filled out exactly as the nurse had told him they were. Katie had named Cooper as Andrew’s father on the birth certificate application. In black and white and triplicate. For all the world to see. She had made her son his son, too. In the eyes of the law and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, anyway.

“This doesn’t make any sense,” he muttered. “Why would she do something like this?”

“Check out early?” the nurse asked, obviously misunderstanding the question. “Because she has no insurance, that’s why. I mean, your policy will cover the nursery charges, of course, because the baby is your dependent. But since you haven’t married the baby’s mother, ” she added, placing emphasis on the last part of her statement clearly to indicate her disapproval of Cooper’s moral misconduct, “the bills for her portion of the hospital stay will have to be out-of-pocket. So she checked out early to save you both some money.”

“No, I mean—”

“Naturally, she didn’t want to leave without the baby, so she checked him out, too,” the nurse continued, ignoring Cooper’s interjection. “Since you didn’t show up to meet her this morning, she took a cab home. And frankly, Mr. Dugan,” she added, “I thought better of you than to do something like that.”

“But…” Cooper’s voice trailed off again, before he completed his statement. His head was buzzing with confusion, and all he could do was stare at the hospital chart in his hands.

“Your girlfriend was all ready to go when I went in this morning,” the nurse continued. “Her doctor wanted her to stay longer, but since there were no complications with the delivery, and since she and the baby were perfectly healthy, and since it’s not at all unusual to be released so quickly, nobody had a problem with letting her go.”

“But…but…but what about me?” Cooper finally asked, his mind still reeling as it tried to process so much misinformation. “I might have had a problem with it.”

The nurse snatched back her clipboard. “Then you should have been here this morning when your girlfriend was ready to leave.”

“But—”

“Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go file these forms.”

“But—”

“Go home to be with your new son, Mr. Dugan,” the nurse told him as she sifted through the collection of forms. “And not that it’s any of my business, but you might want to think about marrying that woman. Make yourself a proper family. Do the right thing.”

With that, Cooper found himself alone, without the nurse in the raspberry-colored scrubs who had become the booming voice of moral integrity. And even though he had done nothing wrong where Katie and her son were concerned, even though Katie was the one who had overstepped the boundaries of reason and propriety, Cooper felt guilty and duly taken to task. Why? He couldn’t begin to imagine. But for some reason, he suddenly felt as if he were the one who needed to set things to right.

For some reason, he suddenly felt like he really should do the right thing and marry Katie, thus making his son legitimate. Thus making the three of them, as the nurse had said, “a proper family.” Even though Katie was still a virtual stranger. Even though Andrew was in no way his son.

The only problem was, Cooper had no idea where the other members of his newly formed family could be.

Normally, Cooper couldn’t get out of the supermarket fast enough Normally, he stood in the check-out line shifting his weight restlessly from one foot to the other, and shaking his head in amazement at the headlines that screamed out from the tabloid racks about alien Elvises, mutant gerbil children and man-eating dieffenbachias. Normally, all he wanted was to escape the legions of slow-moving blue-haired ladies, screeching, whiny toddlers and single guys like himself who knew of no other aisle outside the frozen food section.

But he hadn’t been feeling normal for some time now, and today he didn’t mind lingering behind the woman ahead of him in line. And not because of her cascade of blond hair or the slim, tanned legs extending from her tight cut-offs, either, although he had noted those things about her right off. What held Cooper’s attention now was the woman’s baby.

He had no idea how to gauge the age of the infant strapped into the carrier that had been settled in the seat part of the grocery cart ahead of him. Nor did he have a clue as to the baby’s gender. It could be a two-week-old boy or a seven-month-old girl for all he knew about babies. Hell, before today, the only time he’d been this close to one had been the night he’d delivered—

But he wouldn’t think about that. He wouldn’t think about Katie and Andrew Brennan and the fact that the two of them still haunted his dreams nearly two months after he’d last seen them. He wouldn’t think about how he’d gone back to Katie’s house in Chestnut Hill—at least, what he’d thought was Katie’s house in Chestnut Hill—only to find it inhabited by an elderly couple who’d called the place home since 1958, and who had never heard of any family in the neighborhood named Brennan.