Home Before Dark (16 page)

He saw the moment comprehension dawned. Jessie's face expressed shock and sadness and finally, when she glanced at Amber, a deep and genuine appreciation. She made him remember the hard choices he'd been forced to make. They could deliver the baby immediately and remove Karen's life support, leaving him a widower with a premature infant. They could let Karen die, taking the baby with her. Or they could keep Karen alive as long as possible in the ICU, monitoring the baby's progress until it was healthy enough to be delivered, probably six to eight weeks down the road. But despite options for the baby, there was no hope for Karen. Dusty's world had blown apart. He'd hated his promise to her, and maybe he'd even hated the baby a little for prolonging his grief.

“I wasn't real civil to the duty nurse who kept talking to me about the baby. I yelled at her, a lot. And the whole time, I'm sitting there holding my wife's hand.” He paused, swallowing and looking off into the distance again. The forest fringe along the lakeshore trembled and blurred, but not with tears. His tears were private. This story was going out into the world.

He looked back at Jessie. He could read her heart by the tender set of her mouth, the tremble of her eyelashes. He suspected nothing in her experience approximated what he'd endured with Karen, yet he saw something in Jessie's face. He regarded her with a peculiar and heightened awareness, feeling a tremendous affinity for her. She was a stranger, yet her heart
seemed to him like familiar territory. It was the oddest sensation. He knew it with the same powerful intuition that guided his pilot's hand when he flew. Since the incident, women had tried to console him, to share his pain, to seduce him into numbness, but it never worked. Now, without seeming to be conscious of the fact, Jessie offered something different. An acceptance of his hurt, and somehow, the unspoken promise that healing was possible.

Arnufo came out of the house and picked up Amber, taking her out to the middle of the yard to play with a bright red ball. Neither woman moved.

“My wife was pronounced legally dead,” Dusty said. “For two months, I visited her every day, talked to her as though she were actually there, played the music we used to dance to. They kept telling me she was dead, gone. But she was warm, and beautiful, and I sometimes let myself believe she was only sleeping. When I held her hand, I could feel her pulse. And the whole time, in the back of my mind, I knew they would come for her. They would take the baby, and Karen's organs, and then they would take her away from me.” He'd gone a little crazy, watching Karen's stomach grow as her lifeless body gave life to a tiny, unseen stranger. The long goodbye had passed in a blur of agony.

“When the time came, her O.B. supervised the whole business, start to finish. It was a marathon, keeping everything monitored. The doc let me listen to the baby's heart sounds and told me how it would all play out. But nobody told me how you survive something like that.”

The moment he held his newborn, he realized the wonder of his sacrifice. He named the baby Amber, the color of Karen's eyes. He would have called her Karen, but he didn't know if he'd ever be able to say the name without sadness. He pinched the bridge of his nose, taking a deep breath. This was
a tell-all, so he might as well tell it. “At one point I considered giving the baby up for adoption.”

Jessie gasped as though she'd burned herself. Cheeks flaming, she fumbled with something on her camera.

“Why didn't you?” Blair asked.

“Actually, I came pretty close. But…my heart wouldn't let go. It was something I had to do, was meant to do, hard as it was going to be. Giving her to someone else to raise wouldn't work.”

Amber's early months were a sleepless haze in Dusty's mind. He didn't drink, because drinking only made him sadder, but he felt like he had a constant hangover. Grief and fury and even resentment tangled his heart until sometimes he couldn't breathe, until he had his hand on the phone, ready to call the lawyer he'd spoken to about a private adoption. But he never made that call. The baby's utter dependence on him kept him going, sometimes only minute to minute. It was a way to get through the night, and then the months, and now almost two years had passed.

In the silent wake of his story, he felt raw and exposed, but also…lighter. It was absurd. He knew almost nothing about this woman, yet he'd found himself glad he'd met her. She had come to invade his privacy, but she looked as raw and exposed as he felt. Phony compassion emanated from LaBorde, but not Jessie. Jessie's reaction was far more interesting to him. She wasn't staring at him with pity in her eyes. She was looking at Amber. And she was smiling.

Though she couldn't know it yet, she was a new element in his story, not just a hired gun who'd come to document the baring of his soul. She was a stranger who had stepped into his world, and for some reason he could look at her and life looked good to him once again.

There were simply no words. Jessie felt as though a vise had grabbed her heart and squeezed. She pictured Dusty seated at his wife's bedside, playing music, holding Karen's hand and talking endlessly, as though she were still there. The image haunted Jessie. How would it feel to love someone like that? To lose her? To know the precise date and time her breathing would stop and her still-warm heart would be lifted from her chest and given to a stranger?

She couldn't bear the terrible, compelling way he was watching her, so she turned to Blair LaBorde, with anger burning in her eyes.
You didn't tell me…
She'd been told only that he was a widower returned from Alaska to raise his child, not some tragic figure forced to endure the unendurable.

“Excuse me,” she said, getting up from the table. Checking her film load, she walked across the lawn to Arnufo and the baby. This was why she photographed tree specimens, rock formations, ancient mosaics, monuments of lost civilizations. She never should have taken this assignment. She'd never be able to do justice to this man and his suffering. The shots
she'd taken earlier of Arnufo and Amber were inadequate. She knew that now. Her work lacked that indefinable real quality it would have had if she'd taken the time to see with her heart as well as the camera's eye. She had to try again.

As she approached, the baby hid behind Arnufo's knee. Jessie didn't know much about babies, but she did know they could sense a person's mood. Maybe, like horses, they could sense fear. Slowing her steps, she composed her face into a warm smile.

“Does Amber like having her picture taken?” she asked Arnufo. As she spoke, she switched lenses and added an extension tube.

“Of course,” he said with a fond grin at the little towhead. “She is used to it. She has a lot of admirers.”

Jessie sank down on one knee. “Is she used to strangers?”

“Not so much, now. But she likes people.”

“Hello, little one,” Jessie said in a soft voice, holding out her hands. The doll-like face was, for a moment, as mild and bland as a full moon. Jessie considered what she now knew—that this child had been delivered from a dead woman's body. She was a product of both love and sacrifice; her very existence was a mystical gift. She put her hand into Jessie's, and her tiny fingers fluttered like the wings of a bird. Jessie imagined Lila at this age, and she inadvertently closed her hand.

Amber's face contorted with apprehension, and she howled. Arnufo waved at Dusty to let him know things were fine. Then he picked up the baby and motioned for Jessie to follow. Speaking over the child's cries, he said, “In this way, she is not a bit like her father. She won't let you get close until she trusts you.”

She glanced at Dusty. “How is that different from her father?”

“He lets everybody close. He trusts everybody until they prove otherwise.”

It took a certain kind of bravery to be that way, Jessie thought. Or a willful innocence. Both of which she surely lacked. She remembered Dusty's face when he said Karen's friend sold the story of his wife's death to a tabloid. The sense of betrayal had been milder, actually, than the sheer surprise of it.

Turning her attention to the more cautious Amber, she thought of the portrait wall in Luz's house and wished she'd studied her sister's technique more closely. But like much about Luz, her technique was invisible. The resulting deeply layered studies of the children's faces, open and revealing, were fresh and uncontrived. Arnufo was right—trust was the key. She couldn't treat this kid like a statue of Napoleon or a Tuscan vineyard, for Lord's sake.

“I wouldn't mind taking a few more shots of you,” she said. “Or don't you trust me, either?”

“I am too old to trust such beauty,” he said, “and too foolish not to.”

“God,” she said with a laugh. “Where have you been all my life?”

“Raising five daughters as beautiful as you.”

She turned away to hide her expression. Rarely in her life did she feel the lack of a father, but sometimes it hit her like a hammer.

“We are ready,” said Arnufo. Shifting the baby to the side, he stared directly at the camera and struck a curiously old-fashioned, almost military stance. She knew a posed portrait would be an unorthodox choice, but there was something deeply appealing in the composition of this steel-haired, mustachioed older man holding the baby like a delicate flower. The contrast of his leathery skin with her petal softness em
bodied the difference between youthful innocence and hard experience.

She fired the shutter several times, savoring the decadence of burning film. Years in remote places with a fully manual camera had trained her to be careful with her compositions and stingy with her shots; she no longer had to do that.

Yet in this case, as soon as the shutter clicked the first time, she knew she'd gotten lucky. The portrait would be a stunner. She took a number of shots, gaining confidence as she went. She captured Arnufo surveying the property from a lawn chair. With the big sky behind him, he resembled a Spanish hidalgo from another age. The baby gradually got used to her, and even seemed to like her a little, bringing her found offerings—a twig, a feather, a fallen leaf. Jessie followed along, motor drive purring. There was an unpredictability to the child's movements that she found intriguing, even charming. She got a shot of Amber laughing at the little brown-and-white terrier, and several others of her standing at the water's edge, pointing out the sky. The child's wonder lent a sense of freshness to ordinary things, and once again, a sense of loss stabbed at Jessie, the missed chances of choices not taken. Raising a child was one adventure she had never experienced, and perhaps it was the grandest adventure of all.

“I get worried when she wanders near the lake.”

Jessie straightened up, turning to see Dusty Matlock coming toward her. “Sorry.”

Arnufo said something in Spanish she didn't catch.

The baby let out a squawk of greeting and headed toward him.

“I've got her,
jefe,
” Dusty said. “Go and fix some iced tea for the lady with the big hair.” He grasped the baby under the arms and picked her up. “You like kids, Jessie?”

The question caught her off guard.

He grinned at her hesitation. “It's not a hard question, ma'am.”

She lifted the camera to her face. “I've never spent much time with kids.” She squeezed the shutter even though it was a nothing shot. She needed to put something between her and Matlock. Everything about him challenged her, including the fact that he'd actually considered putting his baby up for adoption, then dismissed the idea. Though he didn't know it, they were the flip side of each other's experience.

She watched his hands. Squarish, strong, sure of themselves in all things…except when it came to holding his baby. The lacy dress rubbed up against his chest, the scalloped hem brushing his chin. Dusty Matlock looked as lost as a man who had inadvertently stepped into the ladies' room at Neiman Marcus. He was ill at ease, yet at the same time, his face bore a look of helpless adoration. She tried to capture that, rucked-up dress and all.

“She's beautiful,” Jessie said. “I bet people tell you that all the time.”

“They do.”

This wasn't working. The chemistry was all wrong. And Jessie knew exactly why. “Mr. Matlock—Dusty—before we get started, I want you to know how sorry I am about your wife.”

“People tell me that all the time, too.”

“Does it help?”

“No.”

“Does anything help?”

“Yeah.”

She held in a breath of relief. If he'd said no, she'd know for certain the guy was a walking, talking ride to nowhere. Not that it should matter to her, but it did. “Amber, right?”

“Yeah. And other things. Lately.”

“Could you…maybe elaborate on that?”

There was magic in his slow, deliberate smile. He got under her skin with his unpredictable ways, his shifting moods. He was like the weather on the lake, stormy and bright, choppy and smooth. And right then, she found the picture she was looking for. He had that knee-melting smile on his face, Amber was gazing up at him as if he had invented the sunrise and, at that moment, the sunlight glanced off the baby's head. Jessie got off one shot, and it was all she needed. But even after she lowered the camera, he was still grinning at her.

On a rainy afternoon, Luz and Jessie went into town together, but they were on separate missions. Jessie wanted to use the dye sub printer at the local computer shop to create some digital images from the photo shoot. Luz was going to visit Nell Bridger.

Luz put the car in gear, then rolled down the window. “You boys mind your sister,” she yelled. Owen, who was playing on the porch swing, waved at them.

Jessie fastened her seat belt. “Does she baby-sit a lot?”

“She's the oldest. It's her job.”

Jessie bit back her opinion that Lila needed time to be a kid. It wasn't her call. She listened to the hiss of the rain outside, the occasional rumble of thunder rolling and cracking across the countryside. Shifting uncomfortably in her seat, she indicated the parcel beside her. “Another casserole for your friend?”

“Yep. Lasagne.”

Luz's compassion for Nell was both genuine and powerful, and Jessie felt proud to have a sister who cared so much. Luz
didn't just care, but she acted on that compassion, heading straight into the center of the crisis, knowing she'd probably suffer bumps and bruises along the way but willing to take on other people's burdens. Had she always been that way? For as long as Jessie could remember, she had. “She's lucky to have you as a friend,” Jessie said.

“Well,” said Luz, “I appreciate the vote of confidence, but I don't know what good it will do Nell. There is nothing I can do or say to fix this for her.”

“It isn't yours to fix, Luz. Have you thought about that?” She bit her lip, then added, “Not all problems can be fixed.”

“I know that. I'm not naive. I'm doing what I can to make things better.”

And that was what Luz was all about, Jessie reflected. That was why Jessie couldn't bring herself to tell Luz what was happening to her. She'd try to fix it, she'd knock herself out doing everything she could. She'd never let Jessie learn to live on her own.

Shifting again, Jessie forced herself to gather the courage to tell Luz what she really wanted. Wind combed through the weedy roadside chaparral, scaring a jackrabbit from its hiding place. A red hawk circled, perhaps hoping for an easy meal of roadkill, but the rabbit veered deeper into the field. “I need to talk to you about Lila.”

Luz stared straight ahead, watching the wet pavement, pocked by large raindrops. Damp, moldy-smelling coolness blew in through the air conditioning vents. Her arms stiffened as though she were bracing herself for impact. “What about Lila?”

Her defensive tone rang with an unspoken warning. Luz was not going to make this easy. Well, fine, thought Jessie. It sure as hell wasn't easy. But for once in her life, she wasn't going to back down from her sister. “When you told me
about the accident, one of the first thoughts I had—when I could think at all—was that she might need blood, or tissue or something that would show—”

“I thought about that, too,” Luz confessed.

“And?”

“And I'm relieved the issue didn't come up.”

“But it might have.”

“It didn't.”

“What about tomorrow? The next day? The day after that?”

“What about the past fifteen years?” Luz clipped off the words in the bossy, big-sister way Jessie had always hated.

Then she caught Luz's anguished expression and amended, “I mean, things can change at the drop of a hat. Chances slip away and you can't get them back. I've been thinking long and hard about who Lila is. And whether you like it or not, I'm part of her.”

The approach to town was heralded by tall, bony pecan trees, their drying leaves astir in the wind. A few ripe nuts pelted the car as they passed under the arch of branches. Luz pulled in a shaking breath. “Of course you are, Jess. There's so much of you in her. She's our sunshine, she always has been. You know that. Even when she's out going crazy and doing dangerous things in cars, she's still our Lila. We couldn't love her more if—” She stopped, searching.

“If you had given birth to her,” Jessie supplied.

Squared shoulders again. Stiff arms. Defensive posture. But what, Jessie wondered, was Luz defending herself against? Hurt? Betrayal?

“Would you argue with that?” Luz asked.

Tension thrummed between them. “Of course not.” She could tell her sister wanted to end the discussion, but she forced herself to push them both past the comfort zone. “I know that when I—when she was born and you adopted her,
I surrendered everything to you and Ian.” She shut her eyes, inhaled the rain-scented air from the blowing vent. “Even the truth.”

“That was your idea, Jess.”

“I thought knowing the truth would only confuse her and make her feel…different.”

Her sister nodded, some of the tension easing out of her. “Ian and I agreed to honor that.”

“Well, after the accident, I started thinking… Shit. This isn't coming out right at all.”

Luz hesitated, and Jessie felt her struggle. It was funny how, when you knew someone like she knew Luz, you could feel what she was feeling. And what Jessie sensed right now was complete dread.

“Just spit it out, Jess,” Luz said finally, apparently discarding her chance to change the subject. “Tell me what you want.”

All right. Here goes, thought Jessie. She planted her hands on her knees, shut her eyes and took the plunge. “I think we should tell Lila I gave birth to her.”

The windshield wipers batted rhythmically into the long silence humming between them. Fallen leaves drifted down. Luz's hands tightened on the steering wheel. Her fear was so palpable, Jessie believed she could smell it, tangy and slightly acrid, like fresh sweat.

“This was the last thing I expected,” Luz said. “I never dreamed you'd change your mind about this.”

Jessie felt a new wave of anxiety emanating from Luz, and she wondered at its source. Did she have some outmoded concept of adoption? “Luz, it's not like I slunk off, had a baby, then got rid of it. Secrecy and shame have nothing to do with adoption anymore. This idea of kids feeling dirty or abandoned just doesn't hold water. We chose adoption out of love for a child, not because a child was unloved.”

“God, Jess. Do you think I don't realize all that?”

“Then you should realize people don't make a secret of adoption anymore. They haven't for a long time.”

“What people?” An edge sharpened Luz's voice. “We're not talking about people. We're talking about Lila. After all this time, how is Lila to believe she wasn't abandoned? How could she forgive me for not telling her the truth before? Is there a blueprint for this sort of thing? A how-to book? Can I look in the index under ‘What to do if your daughter doesn't know she's your niece?'”

“I don't know. It seems wrong.” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she wanted to snatch them back. “God, Luz, I didn't mean it like that. You adopted my baby when I couldn't keep her. When she was born so sick we didn't know whether she would live or die. I gave up any right to have a say in raising her. That's why I never came back. But…I'm back now.”

Luz took a shuddery breath. “So you want to tell this rebellious, out-of-control girl she's adopted.”

“Maybe she's out of control because she doesn't understand herself, and maybe knowing her identity will clarify things.”

“Maybe she'll blame me for lying to her. Maybe she'll resent you for abandoning her.”

“So we should keep this from Lila because we're afraid of her reaction?” Jessie asked, then rushed on before Luz could answer. “She's practically grown. She deserves to know. I'm not bringing this up lightly, Luz. I've thought and thought about it, long before the accident.”

Luz drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. She breathed in quick, shallow gasps. “Do you think I haven't?”

“And?”

“All I know is that there is nothing simple about this situation. Adoption is only part of the issue.”

Jessie heard the rest in the silence that followed, punctuated by the hiss and thump of the windshield wipers, the occasional thud of a falling pecan. Trust and betrayal, secrets and deception complicated the matter.

Jessie clenched her hands in her lap. She wished there was a way to be certain of what she was doing. Did the truth need to be brought to light, or was it better left in the shadows? Was she fulfilling some selfish fantasy of reclaiming a little part of her child, or giving Lila the gift of her true identity?

Lila's first question was bound to be who fathered her. The information could blow Luz's world apart. But then again, it was the truth.

“Luz?” Jessie said, desperate to know what her sister was thinking.

Luz whipped her head around so fast, the car wobbled in the roadway. She brought it back into the center of the lane. “I need to talk things over with Ian.”

A chill crept over Jessie's skin. Now she knew how Pandora felt. She reached forward and aimed the air-conditioning vent away from her. “What'll his opinion be?”

“The same as it is with everything about Lila these days. He'll want me to figure out what to do about it.”

“Do he and Lila have problems?”

“What father doesn't, with his fifteen-year-old daughter? Ian's solution is to hand everything over to me. I wonder if all men do that after their kids hit puberty. We don't know what it's like to have a dad, do we, Jess?”

Jessie let out a long exhalation. “No, we don't. Ah, Luz.”

Luz turned her eyes from the road to face Jessie. “I'm going to need some time to think about this. We should talk more—”

From the corner of her eye, Jessie spied a movement. Not trusting her vision, she blinked, and the image resolved into
a small gray squirrel, idiotically darting into the road. “Luz, watch out!” she yelled.

Luz swerved, the tires humming on the slick pavement. The back end fishtailed, momentarily out of control. The lasagne on the seat between them flew forward. Without thinking, Jessie snatched it back.

Luz quickly straightened out the car, but not before an ominous thump sounded. She pulled off to the shoulder. “Damn,” she said through gritted teeth, looking at the rearview mirror. She pounded the steering wheel with the heel of her hand. “Damn, damn, damn. I'm going to burn in hell.”

Still clutching the lasagne, Jessie turned around to see a small furry heap in the middle of the road. “Uh-oh,” she said.

“God, you always do this,” Luz said. “You always pick the worst possible time to say something upsetting, and now look what happened.”

“That's right, Saint Luz. Blame me. Even though you're the one behind the wheel.” But Jessie's temper dissolved when she saw the look on her sister's face. She fell silent, hurting for Luz, who wouldn't intentionally harm a soul. “I saved the lasagne,” she said softly.

“That's good.” Luz let out a long, weary sigh.

“Poor little Squirrel Nutkin,” Jessie whispered. Then she couldn't help herself. She burst out laughing. Luz did, too, and for a few minutes they laughed like a pair of evil witches.

“We're awful,” Jessie said.

Luz pulled onto the road and slowly headed onward. “Well, I guess nothing worse will happen to me the rest of the day.”

“Yeah,” said Jessie, “but you can't go around running over small animals just so your day will get better from there.”

 

In the café next to the computer shop, she spotted Dusty Matlock. He was seated in a booth, nursing a cup of coffee
while Amber sat across from him in a booster seat, using a French fry to draw swirls in her ketchup. Jessie's reaction to him was instantaneous—a jumble of apprehension and anticipation unlike anything she'd ever experienced. It was more than a response to a sexy guy who displayed a healthy interest in her. It was an untimely attraction that mocked her with its undeniable strength. Complicating that was a flood of tender ness as she listened to the baby chortling mindlessly.

She was tempted to flee before he noticed her. Her protective instincts warned her to get out now before she did anything stupid like fall in love. She and Dusty Matlock were the last thing each other needed. He was dealing with single parenthood, while she was facing the fight of her life, and neither was in a position to do the other any good.

Yet she couldn't resist. Particularly when Amber looked up and yelled out an incomprehensible greeting.

“That's toddler for ‘Have a seat, ma'am,'” said Dusty, getting to his feet.

“How could I resist?” She slid into the booth next to Amber, who offered her a limp French fry. “Thank you,” she said, and made a show of savoring it. The baby watched her with total absorption, then chuckled with good-natured humor. When Jessie studied her face, she felt intensely curious. Who would this little person be years from now? What would be important to her? Who would she love? What did the world hold for her?

An unbidden fantasy crept through Jessie. She pictured herself watching Lila's first smile, her first tooth, her first step. She wondered what Lila's first day of school had been like, how her first date had gone. She felt a flash of unholy envy for Luz, who had not missed a moment of Lila's life. But then she focused on Amber. All those experiences were still waiting
for this little soul. Jessie wondered who would be there to live through them with her.

Amber offered her another French fry, and Jessie accepted with a smile. “So I was working with some of the digital pictures I made for the
Texas Life
piece,” she said, indicating her bag. “Would you like to see them?”

“I'll pass.” His voice was low, suppressing emotion.

“Your story was incredible. Blair will do a good job. You'll see.” Ah, she wished she could take his pain away, but she sensed that wasn't what he wanted from her. “I hope you don't have any regrets about doing it.”

“Of course I have regrets. But you made it worthwhile,” he added.