The Child Comes First (16 page)

“Not one of our best centers, but they took her on short notice and at least she's cooperating with you. Please tell me she didn't kill her own son.”

“No, I don't think she did. Her guilt seems to be only about leaving him in foster care. But I think she might know something about the man who was hanging around the neighborhood in the days before Derek's death. She wouldn't tell me much, but I think she'll have something to say eventually.”

“That's good news,” Marla said. “Well worth the trip.”

Jayda hesitated only a moment, then something inside her made her say, “I need another favor from you. And a few more days away. I…I have to go talk to my mother.”

Marla let out a sigh. “Wow. I've been wondering if this day would ever come.”

“Bad timing, I know. But I think I have to do this now.”

“Yes. That's how these things work. No waiting for a convenient moment. Just, bam! And you have to deal with it or you may never get another chance. So go. But…”

“I promise I won't be gone long. And I have lots of vacation time I haven't used.”

“I know that—I was just wondering about Tiffany's case. Court reconvenes on Monday, right? Does that lawyer know you won't be there?”

“That's actually the favor I need from you.”

“Oh, so asking for time off with no advance warning wasn't the favor?” But there was amusement in her voice.

“I hate to ask this of you, but can you tell Simon I had to go take care of something for a few days?”

“Why don't you call him yourself?”

“Complicated.”

“I see.” And Jayda knew that she
did
see. Marla added, “Was he what prompted this sudden need to talk to your mother?”

“It wasn't his fault. I really screwed up, Marla.” And then she told her boss about wrongly accusing Simon.

 

“W
HY CAN'T SHE BE IN COURT
today?” Simon barked at Marla when she called him early Monday morning. He was just pulling into the parking lot at the courthouse. He'd been nurturing a tiny spark of hope that he and Jayda could find a way to go forward.

“She's taking care of something important,” Marla said. “She'll be gone a few days.”

“She could have told me that.”

“She didn't want to. She asked me to do it instead.”

He could hear the frost in the woman's voice. “Why?”

“She said it was complicated. Have you made things complicated in any way?”

Now he understood Marla's coolness toward him, but that didn't stop anger from beginning to take the place of his heartache. “Not on purpose,” he hedged. “And where is she—what does she need to take care of? What about Tiffany's trial? Doesn't she care about that? Letting me know at the last minute is so…”

“Frankly, Mr. Montgomery,” she interrupted, “I could have told you sooner. She talked to me Saturday afternoon. But I was worried that you'd want to know where she is, that you might start calling her or maybe even try to go after her. But she needs some time to herself. Waiting until the last minute to tell you was my idea, to ensure she got that uninterrupted time.”

Seething now, Simon did what he could to control his voice. No good would come from growling at Jayda's boss. “I'm afraid you don't know me very well. If Jayda says she needs time alone, I'll give it to her.”

“Well, I'm relieved to hear it. She's an excellent caseworker and I want her to continue doing what she does so well.”

Finally, Simon understood that this woman was just looking out for Jayda. How could he fault her for that? Jayda needed someone on her side. If it couldn't be him, then it might as well be Marla. “I would never want to take Jayda away from her work. She's the best I've ever seen at dealing with her kids.”

Marla was silent a moment. “I know you've applied to adopt Tiffany. I admire your willingness to take on that responsibility. But I also know you're a man who will do anything to get the result you want. That's how you've become such a famous Baltimore attorney.”

His first thought was to deny that he was famous. His second was to deny he'd do anything to get what he wanted. But he said nothing. They would have been lies, after all. He diverted his adversary with the truth instead. “I'll do anything it takes to adopt Tiffany,” he said.

“I know,” she said softly. “That's what I'm worried about. A man like you could probably persuade Jayda to do whatever you needed to enhance your chances for adoption.”

“She's stronger than you give her credit for. And I have no intention of taking advantage of Jayda. I…” He trailed off, realizing that Marla thought he might attempt to persuade Jayda to marry him, whether they loved each other or not, just so his adoption would go through. It struck him that the idea of marrying Jayda was not unwelcome, despite everything.

“Well, that's good to hear. But I don't know you. All I know is the man the media has written about over the years. I hope you won't lead her on.”

“Isn't that really for Jayda to decide for herself?”

“Touché.” She paused, then added, “I'm just trying to give her some time to deal with her past. If you're a man of your word, you'll do the same.”

He sighed, his anger simmering to dull irritation. He hated having no control, and he certainly had no control over this situation. Nor could he control his growing confusion about his feelings for Jayda. Did he love her?

He had to clear the tightness from his throat before he asked, “When will she be back?”

“I don't know. She told me she'd need a few days off. She told me to be sure to tell you that Derek's mother is in rehab in Baltimore. She said you'd want to talk to her, see if you can get her to tell you more about the man who'd been hanging around the kids' foster home.”

She gave him the address and a number to contact at the center.

“Thanks,” he said. “I'll talk to Mrs. Baldridge. And if you talk to Jayda…”

“I'll tell her the case is going well and that she found Tiffany the best lawyer in the State of Maryland.”

A reluctant smile crept over his face. He hadn't known what he wanted Marla to tell Jayda, anyway. “Gotta go to court,” he said, and then closed his phone.

J
AYDA RESOLUTELY WALKED UP
to the front door, fighting her instincts to turn and run in the other direction. Her hand felt like lead as she lifted it to knock on the door. Three hard raps and then an interminable wait that probably only lasted a few seconds. She'd lost all sense of time from the moment she'd parked her car in front of her mother's apartment building in Hagerstown. This isolated upstate Maryland town didn't seem like a place her mother would want to live, but it was where she'd settled after her brother's death. So Jayda had driven the two hours north and stayed in a local motel overnight. Now minutes seemed longer than they should be, but then she'd lost track of a few and found herself wondering how she could have gotten from her car to the door so quickly.

Should she knock again or go back to her car and try phoning? She'd decided to make this trip without giving her mother any warning. But now she saw the flaw in her plan. There was no way to know when her mother would be at home without…

A sound from the other side of the door caught her attention.

“Who is it?” came a woman's voice.

“Mom. It's me. Jayda.” The words came out flat, dead. Just the way she felt inside. Except that her heart was beating too fast and her guts burned. She wasn't dead.

“Jayda?” Then the sound of a metal chain, the click of a dead bolt, the scrape of the latch. The door swung inward. And there stood her mother.

The two of them froze, staring at each other, not speaking. Time started acting up again, making the moment seem endless. Some calm, clinical portion of Jayda's brain registered the fact that her mother seemed shorter than when they'd last been together. She didn't stand as straight. She'd lost weight. There were dark circles under her eyes, but the gaze holding Jayda's eyes so avidly appeared steady and sober for once.

“Hi, Mom,” Jayda managed to say. But then tears came and overflowed unexpectedly. Her nose began to run. She raised her wrist to stem the tide and wondered if there was any way she could have gotten off to a worse start. She tried to speak again, wanted to ask for a few moments to talk, but her throat was closed.

“Well, don't just stand there,” her mother said. “Someone could see you carrying on!” And she ushered Jayda inside, peering down the hallway as if to make sure no one had glimpsed the weeping crazy lady at her door. As the door eased shut on its hinge, Margaret Kavanagh looked at her daughter. “The bathroom is down the hall to the left. Go pull yourself together.”

Hanging her head in mortification, Jayda did as she was told.

She went into the bathroom and closed the door, then looked at her tear-streaked face in the mirror. She barely recognized herself. Disgusted with herself for falling apart, she called upon all that inner strength she'd been building up over the years and then dashed cold water on her burning cheeks and eyes. When she straightened up and reached for a hand towel, she almost laughed. The towel was pink with a ribbon along the border. It was exactly the same type of towel her mother had used in the bathroom when Jayda was a child. Glancing around the tiny space, she saw that everything looked astonishingly familiar in this room that she'd never been before. There was a pink lampshade and a pink rug, pink toilet seat and pink curtains. All of it, exactly as she remembered from a different place and time. Laughter bubbled up inside her, but she knew she must not give in to it or risk sounding somewhat deranged. Covering her mouth with her hand in an effort to keep her raw emotions contained, she focused on breathing—in and out, in and out. After a moment, she regained some self-control. And the moment of mirth over her mother's bathroom decor helped her put this visit into perspective.

She gazed once more into the mirror and saw determination in her eyes. Certainty of her own worth shone from within. Her mother could only hurt her if she allowed that to happen, she reminded herself. Time to put that theory to the ultimate test.

Jayda found her mother in her living room. The old furniture was the same, although a little worse for wear. Margaret sat on the recliner, but she'd remained bolt upright on the edge of the seat. Clearly she would be unable to relax until she could account for her daughter's unexpected visit.

“I've come to talk about a couple of things from my childhood,” Jayda began.

“Psh,” Margaret said, with an exaggerated look of disgust. “No one can go back and fix their childhood. Everybody's childhood stinks, anyway. Why would yours have been happier than anyone else's?”

A bit stunned, Jayda had to think about that. Why, indeed? She spent her working days surrounded by kids with issues at least as bad and often far worse than hers had been. And yet she knew she shouldn't, couldn't give in to what her mother was suggesting—that Jayda had deserved no better than what she'd gotten.

“The thing is, lots of people have had lovely childhoods with only the problems that are natural to growing up. I didn't get one of those.” She used a professional tone, trying hard to remove the blame from her mind and her voice as she said what she'd come to say.

Her mother looked at her blankly but said nothing. This was an encouraging sign.

“I didn't come here to try to fix things that went wrong back then. I know that's not possible. But I need to say a couple of things out loud that I couldn't ever say to you before.”

“Why?” Wariness had crept into her mother's voice and she seemed to shrink into herself.

“Because I want to move forward with my life and I seem to be stuck on old issues. There's a chance that if I can get things off my chest, I may be able to put the past behind me.”

Her mother looked skeptical. “Must have something to do with a man you want to start something with,” she said. “But a worthy endeavor, I suppose.”

Even though she knew better than to harbor hopes regarding Simon, Jayda had to admit that this visit had something to do with him. Her mother's insight was impressive. And it struck Jayda then that her mother had used words like
endeavor
all through the years they'd lived together. She was clearly intelligent and articulate, when she wanted to be. What had gone wrong in this woman's life to make her so miserable? For the first time ever, Jayda wished she knew.

“What I'm asking for is also pretty selfish. If I were a better person, I might have come here just to find out how you're doing after all these years.”

Margaret waved her hand in front of her face, as if swatting away a pesky fly. “People are never altruistic, unless they have lots and lots of money. Do you have lots and lots of money?” she asked slyly. A hint of humor glinted from Margaret's eyes.

“No,” Jayda answered, tempted to smile again. Had she acquired her own intelligence and love of words, her eagerness to learn from this woman? Probably. It struck her that she'd never once considered the good her mother had done her during her formative years. Yet now she remembered gifts of books and the freedom she'd been given to read into the wee hours of the night. She recalled visits to libraries and museums and historical sites. That had been before Wayne had come onto the scene to help his younger sister financially. His presence in their lives had wiped all those other things from the memory slate. Another thing he'd taken from her. From them.

She sighed and decided to cut straight to the most important reason for her visit. “I guess the main thing I want to say to you is that Wayne was an awful person who did terrible things to me. He was bad and he hurt me inside, even if he didn't actually harm me physically. He touched me sexually, and he tortured me with his threats and his blame. And none of that happened because of anything I did or didn't do.”

She took a breath, her heart beating hard, and pressed on. “I wish you'd protected me from him,” she said softly. “I wish you'd listened to me and accepted that he was hurting me in a fundamental way—and I wish you'd done something about it. I'm really angry and resentful that you didn't. I want to forgive you, but I don't know how.”

That was the main point, really. She needed to forgive this woman for what had happened and move beyond the past. Forgetting that she couldn't expect all that much from her mother, she asked, “Is there a reason why you didn't do anything about him touching me? Or did you really believe that his behavior with me wasn't a bad thing?”

Margaret stared for a long moment. Then she shook her head slowly, as if she was denying something. Jayda waited with her pulse pounding.

When her mother didn't say a word, she understood she wouldn't be getting a response to her questions and she fought down her resentment. “The answers don't really matter, Mom. Now that I'm an adult I can understand that bad things sometimes happen to good kids, and that their parents aren't always going to protect them. It is what it is.” She let out her pent-up breath and imagined her anger and hurt disappearing. Maybe someday it really would. Standing up for herself, speaking of her anger and her desire to forgive felt surprisingly good.

Her mother blinked a few times. Then slapped her thighs and stood, saying, “I need a drink. You want one, too?”

This sounded like Jayda's cue to get out of there fast, in the hope of retaining what she'd gained from the experience without poisoning it all by watching her mother get drunk. She stood. “No thanks, I'll just go. And thank you for listening to me. It was kind of you to give me a few minutes of your time.”

Margaret's hands went to her hips. Jayda was struck again by how small she was, how much she'd aged. “For God's sake, Jayda, have a drink with your mother. We might not see each other again for a long, long time.”

“It's a bit early for alcohol,” Jayda answered, sounding absurdly prim and proper even to her own ears. Lots of people had a drink with lunch.

“As judgmental as you ever were, I see. From the time you could talk, you were judging me.” Margaret moved toward the side of the room where bottles and glasses sat on a fifties-style trolley. She poured herself something amber as Jayda stood frozen in the center of a throw rug.

Was that true, what she'd just said? Had Jayda judged her mother? Probably. That's what kids do, after all.

Margaret took a gulp from her glass. “Wayne was a bastard, certainly. We're in complete agreement there, even if he was my brother. But he was the one who got the good education, made it all the way through college and law school while our parents supported him. So my brother was a wealthy bastard and your father left us with nothing. Do you know what that's like, Jayda, my girl? Do you have the first idea what it's like to have a baby to care for and have a dead husband, dead parents, no education, no job and no money at all? We shared that house with my equally undereducated sister and your cousins because I couldn't afford a place of our own. And don't start telling me how welfare would have solved my problems. You've never been on welfare—you have no idea what it's like.”

This was true. Jayda had only secondhand experience with welfare. But she'd seen what some mothers had to go through to make ends meet, the grinding poverty those checks did little to repair, the endless lines and the reams of paperwork necessary to get anything at all from the state or county. You could only make a limited amount of money at a job before your benefits were cut off, but daycare often cost as much as an entry-level job paid. The cheaper babysitters the state recommended were awful, even dangerous. Better to stay home and raise the kid yourself and collect those welfare checks, barely enough to survive on. And heaven help you if there were problems, because months could go by without a precious check. No check, no rent money. No water. No lights. No food. No hope.

She'd seen it happen too many times to the families of kids she'd tried to help. Is this what her mother had faced?

“Wayne was better than the streets, I figured. If you don't agree with that decision, then you don't. But it was the choice I had to make and I made it. I didn't like it, not for one minute. But I can see you turned out okay in the end. You're educated, successful, pretty, healthy…. Without Wayne, you'd probably have died young.” She took another swig of her drink and sighed. “Because health insurance costs money and there was that time when you had that horrible lung infection and no one at the clinics knew what to do about it. Maybe you were too young to remember, but Wayne gave me the money for a specialist. And as long as I kept him happy, he kept helping. So sue me. I'm a bad mother. But you're alive to complain, at least.”

Jayda nodded. She'd heard this sort of horror story before. She knew it was all too likely that this had happened exactly as her mother described it. An impossible choice and one that left a daughter scarred forever. But that same daughter had also been fed and clothed and had a roof over her head. Was there something else her mother could have done? Who could say? How could anyone tell Margaret she should have done something else?

She watched her mother drain her glass. If she stayed any longer, she'd have to watch as alcohol made the woman's words clumsier and more hurtful. She didn't believe she could endure that, given her fragile emotional state.

“I have to go now,” she said as she edged toward the door.

Margaret poured another drink, then put her glass down on the trolley, ice clinking. “Will you come back sometime?”