Maggy's Child (40 page)

N
ick and Link exchanged glances.

“There’s toast left, and eggs,” Nick said soothingly, coming forward to grasp her arm and draw her toward the table. Maggy took it as a measure of his guilt that he didn’t reprove her for swearing. “Come on in and sit down.”

“I don’t give a damn about toast and eggs, and you know it!” Maggy shook off his hand and faced him with suspicion flashing from her eyes. She was sure, or almost sure, that what they had been talking about was arranging—or maybe participating in—a hit on Lyle! Not that Lyle didn’t deserve it, and not that Maggy hadn’t wished him dead more than once, but she could not conceive of cold-blooded murder, not even of a man she hated as much as she hated Lyle. It was a sin, a mortal sin, for which they would all, herself included if she knew about it and did nothing to stop it, roast in hell. Besides that, what would such an act do to David, and especially on a Sunday morning, when he would be there?

“I want to know what you two were talking about!”

Nick playfully tugged a lock of the long hair that tumbled over the front of her robe. “Nothing that need worry you,
querida
. Link, pour Magdalena some orange juice, would you?”

“Don’t you try to pacify me with orange juice, you—you …” Maggy slapped his hand away and took a deep
breath. Her furious glare included Link in its angry condemnation. He was obediently pouring orange juice into a glass for her. “Damn it, I don’t want any orange juice! Stop that, Link!”

“Okay, okay!” Link set the carton back down on the table and threw up his hands, palms out, in a placating gesture. His gaze slid to his brother, and again they exchanged glances. From Link’s slight shrug, clearly he was casting the problem of pacifying her solely onto Nick.

“I heard you say you were planning to hit Lyle next Sunday morning at Windermere. Where I come from,
hit
means murder.” Maggy spoke to Nick, her face perfectly white, her hands clenched at her sides. “If that
is
what you’re planning, I forbid it, do you hear me? I forbid you to kill Lyle yourself, either of you, or have him killed, or any combination of the two!”

Nick’s eyes narrowed. “You’re suddenly awfully concerned about Lyle. Remember him, the asshole that knocks you around?”

If there was a sudden twinge of jealousy in his voice, Maggy was too upset to notice.

“It’s not Lyle I’m so concerned about, it’s you, you fool. If you kill him, your immortal soul will burn forever in hell, and Link’s and mine with you,” she raged. “And there’s David, too.
David
will be at Windermere next Sunday morning at nine o’clock. How could you even dream of killing Lyle with David there?”

For a moment, Nick said nothing. Then, “Magdalena, I’ve told you before, I don’t have the slightest intention of murdering your sick bastard of a husband. So would you please sit the hell down and drink your orange juice?”

Her anger was infecting Nick. Maggy could tell by the deep red color that was rising to stain his cheekbones and the tips of his ears—and the fact that he was swearing at her.

But she was not so easily silenced. She had heard what he and Link were saying with her own ears, and added to
the promise he’d made her days ago, the implications were ominous.

“If you’re not going to kill him, or have him killed, then what are you going to do? And don’t tell me ‘nothing.’ I
want to know!
”

“Magdalena …” Nick began, sounding as if his patience was wearing thin.

“Nicky.” There was a warning in Link’s voice.

Nick waved a reassuring hand at his brother without ever shifting his gaze from Maggy’s face. “You’re going to have to trust me on this, baby,” he said grimly.

“So you
are
planning to do something to Lyle next Sunday morning at Windermere.” Maggy took a deep breath. “You can’t! You can’t do
anything
to Lyle with David there. No kind of harm, do you understand? And if you tell me to drink my orange juice again before we get this straight, I’m going to dump it over your stubborn, stupid head.”

“Oh, yeah?” Nick scowled at her.

“Yeah.” She returned him glare for glare.

“Look, guys …” Link interjected heavily from the safety of the table. “Chill out, why don’t you?”

“Shut up, Link.” They spoke in unison without ever glancing his way. Then Nick took a deep, calming breath.

“I give you my word, we won’t do anything that will harm your son.” The qualified promise just served to alarm Maggy more. They were planning something, and Nick was not going to scrap it despite everything she had just said. And he was not going to tell her what it was, either, which meant that whatever he had in mind had to be something she would dislike. The knowledge was downright scary.

“I’m not worried about you harming David. I’m worried about you traumatizing him. He’s eleven years old and he thinks Lyle hung the moon.” Tension sharpened her voice.

Nick took in her agitation, and seemed to make a special effort to lighten up. He held up a placating hand.

“All right,
querida
, we’ll be very careful not to
traumatize
your son.” The patronizing note Maggy thought she detected in his voice was the last straw. It made her see red.

“
Your
son.” The admission came bursting out. It was the last weapon in her arsenal, and she used it in the full knowledge that it could be as devastating to Nick’s feelings for her as the atomic bomb was to Japan in World War II. “Haven’t you figured it out yet, you moron? If you do anything to Lyle in front of David, you’ll be traumatizing
your
son!”

For a moment Nick merely frowned at her, clearly not understanding. Then he seemed to freeze, his eyes widening as her words sank in.

“
What
?”

“Oh, shit,” Link muttered from the table and dropped his head into his hands.

Ignoring him, Nick and Maggy locked gazes. After a long, terrible moment in which the truth trembled in the air between them, Nick reached out and grasped Maggy by the elbows, pulling her close. His grip was not hard, and it didn’t hurt. But the look in his eyes scared her.

She shouldn’t have told him so bluntly, or in the midst of an argument. She had meant to work up to the subject in a roundabout fashion during the next few days, or weeks, or months, whenever the moment seemed right. But circumstances had forced her hand. She had to make him understand how important it was to keep David entirely out of whatever it was they were planning for Lyle. Nick would go to any extreme to protect
her
, but he didn’t have the same feeling for David, even though David was her son. He didn’t know David, didn’t love David. By telling the truth at last, she knew that she would win his ultimate care in anything concerning her boy. Their boy.

“Are you telling me that David is
my
son?” Nick enunciated each word very carefully, as if he were afraid that Maggy might not understand him. “
Our
son? Yours and mine?”

For a moment she stood silent as the rest of the fight drained out of her. Then she nodded.

“He’s eleven years old, he looks just like you, not Forrest, and he likes to paint …” Nick enumerated these facts slowly, as if to himself. “What’s his birth date?”

Maggy told him. She could read the mental calculations he was making as they took place.

“Sweet Mother Mary!” Suddenly Nick’s eyes flared, fierce and hot, and he gave her elbows a little shake. “I should have guessed days ago, shouldn’t I? Years ago. But it never occurred to me that
you
 … My God, woman, what have you done?”

“Let me explain …” Her temper had cooled with unbelievable speed until now all that was left where it had burned were cold gray ashes of fear.

“What is there to explain? That you were pregnant with my son when you married Lyle Forrest, and that all these years you’ve never bothered to tell me that I have a son? You knew you were pregnant when you married him, didn’t you? Didn’t you?” He gave her elbows a harder shake.

Maggy looked up at him. He was looming over her, six feet two inches of solid masculine rage. His green eyes were alive with it, his mouth was grim with it, his linebacker’s shoulders were tense with it. The grip on her elbows was hard enough to hurt. Yet she did not physically fear him, because she knew that Nick, even in the extremes of fury, would never harm so much as a hair on her head. And that knowledge almost made her feel worse than anything else.

She had wronged him, grievously.

“Yes! Yes, I knew it.” The confession was wrenched out of her.

“You married him deliberately!”

“Yes, I did!”

“Why, Magdalena? For God’s sake, why?” It was a roar, the roar of an animal in pain. His grip on her elbows tightened as the deep red color that had always, with Nick, signified utter rage, flooded his entire face.

“Because twelve years ago you were a punk, and a thief, and a thug, and I wanted a better daddy than that for my child!” Beside herself with guilt, she screamed the words at him.

“So you married
Lyle Forrest
?” He said it the way he would have said
Hitler
.

“He was rich! I didn’t know him well, and—I thought he was kind! At least David didn’t grow up in the projects, and he’s always had a roof over his head, and clothes to wear, and plenty to eat!”

“Do you think I wouldn’t have provided for you and
my own son
?”

They were in each other’s face, yelling back and forth, his hands tight around her elbows, his body emanating rage as eloquently as his face. Scared of what she’d done to him, to them, and growing angry herself, Maggy stood her ground. All right, so she’d done wrong. With hindsight, that was easy to see. But at the time, she’d meant it for the best. Why couldn’t he try to see it from her perspective and understand that at least?

“Oh, you would have provided, all right,” she screeched at him. “You would have shoplifted everything we needed. And then maybe you would have sold a little dope, or stolen a car and sold the parts to a chop shop so we’d have some ready cash. And you know where you would have ended up, sooner or later? In prison like your brother! I think he’d been in there about a year when I found out I was pregnant. Just the kind of father I wanted for my baby!”

“You leave my brother out of this!”

“I won’t! It’s the truth, and you know it! You know
how I got pregnant—hell, you were there! Neither one of us thought a lick about birth control, did we? We were in love, and we were kids! When I found out I was knocked up, I got scared. Really, really scared. I was going to tell you, that day you came over with that stupid coat—remember, the one you stole? But when I saw the coat that you had shoplifted because you couldn’t afford to buy me one, I knew just what the rest of our lives would be like. We’d get married, and I’d have the baby, and we’d live in the projects for the rest of our lives, scrimping and scraping and doing without, and sometimes the baby wouldn’t have enough to eat …” Maggy’s voice broke, but before the threatened tears could fill her eyes she willed them back and glared at him. “And that was the best-case scenario. The worst case was that you wouldn’t be able to make things any better for us any other way, so you’d get mixed up in something illegal like Link did, and they’d haul you off to prison, too, and then there’d be just me and the baby, and what would we do?”

Maggy drew in a deep, ragged breath, and added, “So I decided to get an abortion.”

At the look on his face her chin went up. She knew how he felt about that topic, but then, he’d never been in the position in which she had found herself all those years ago. She had been the one who was pregnant, not he.

“Yes, I did,” she answered his unspoken accusation defiantly. “I made an appointment and went to the clinic and—and everything. But when they got me up on that table and—I knew this was it, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it, do you hear? I got off the table and told them
no
, and then I got dressed again and walked out.”

Nick’s eyes flickered, and his lips parted as if he would interrupt, but Maggy shushed him fiercely. “Just let me finish, would you please?”

When he replied by clamping his mouth into a hard, straight line, she continued: “I got as far as the steps of the abortion clinic when I realized I’d just run out of options.
I sank down on the steps and started to cry. I bawled my eyes out, there on those steps, and I prayed, too. Then I heard a car horn honking. I glanced up, and it was a big, fancy car—a Jaguar, I found out later—and the driver was waving to me. It was Lyle. I recognized him from the Harmony Inn. He was one of my best customers. I wiped my eyes on my shirt and went over to the car. He told me to get in, he’d give me a ride home or wherever. So I got in, and he asked what was the matter, and—I told him. I don’t know why I did, except that I was so upset, and he was a stranger, and he seemed kind. I told him the whole story, about how I’d run out of the abortion clinic and everything. He’d parked somewhere by this time, and kept patting my hand and saying things like ‘there, there’ to me when I cried.”

Maggy took another deep breath and looked Nick in the eye. “Then, when I stopped talking, he suggested we get married. He said he’d always wanted a child, but there was something wrong with him that prevented him from having children. He said he would marry me and raise my baby as his own if I would promise never to tell anyone that he wasn’t the father. He said the baby would have the best of everything, the best care, the best food, the best clothes, the best education. One day the baby would inherit Windermere and everything else he owned. How could I turn that down? I ask you, how could I turn that down?” It was a fierce cry straight from her heart. His lips once again parted as though he would say something, but Maggy forestalled him, rushing on with the story in an effort to get it out, all out, in the open between them at last.

“I found out later—Virginia, Lyle’s mother, told me, a long time after David was born—that Lyle had had an accident when he was a little boy. He’d fallen off a jungle gym and his testicles had gotten hung in a crack in the metal framework and were almost ripped off. Virginia said that the doctor who treated him had told her at the time
that Lyle would probably be sterile as an adult as a result of the accident, and that knowledge was one of the great tragedies of her life. That was why she was so pleased about David. Not at first, but later, when she’d had time to think about it. Virginia
knows
, you see, that David is not Lyle’s biological son. Lyle
is
sterile, he always has been, and he can’t—function sexually. Not at all. He can’t get it up. That’s why, when we were first married and I kept trying to make things—normal—between us, he would get so angry at me. That’s why his first two marriages failed. The women weren’t from Louisville, and he paid them a lot of money to go away and keep their mouths shut. By the time he offered me marriage, he was over forty, and the one thing he was desperate for that he didn’t have was a child.” Maggy’s voice faltered and softened. “That was my mistake. I didn’t realize when I married him that I was giving David over to him as a hostage for life. If I didn’t do as he said, if I thought about leaving him or reporting his abuse or getting some kind of help, David was the weapon he used. Sometimes he would threaten to take David away from me, and sometimes he would threaten to take me away from David, meaning have me committed to a mental institution or something. And sometimes, as David grew older, he threatened to tell my son the truth, that he wasn’t a Forrest by blood. For a long time that terrified me, because I was afraid David would be messed up for life if that happened. And I was afraid that he would hate me. I don’t truly think Lyle would ever tell him the truth, but even if he did, it wouldn’t make any real difference to anyone but David. Lyle will never, ever, let David go. And I won’t leave David. Because of David, he’s had me under his thumb for all these years.”