The Homecoming (11 page)

Deliberately, he cast thoughts of his past from his mind. He got to his feet, checking his watch and seeing that it was past time for him to leave. He was finished here for the day. Time to head back to his hotel and stare at the tube for the rest of the evening until he could sleep.

And then it would be tomorrow. The day of reckoning. The day Sydney had to face the fact that she was wrong about Nick being Noah.

He couldn't be wrong. Because deep in his heart, Danny knew his little boy was no longer alive.

 

He was up well before the sun the following morning, and then he had to kill hours and hours before 9:00 a.m., when he was supposed to meet Sydney at
the office of the doctor who would be explaining the test results.

He was early, of course. But only moments after he took a seat in the waiting room, Sydney walked through the door. She looked cool and lovely in a pale butter-colored sweater set and flowered skirt, her face still glowing with the color she'd acquired at his home.

With her was a slender, blond-haired preschooler.

Danny felt his heart literally stop for a moment.
Knock it off!
He told himself.
That's not Noah.
Maybe not, but he couldn't keep from studying every inch of the child.

“Hello, Danny.” Sydney came right over and sat down next to him. The little boy came with her, boosting himself onto a wooden chair next to hers while she set down a backpack at his feet. “Danny, this is Nicholas,” she said to Danny. Turning to the boy, she said, “Nick, this is Mr. Crosby. Can you say hello?”

“Hi.” The little boy smiled shyly, but his blue eyes were direct and open. “Are you a friend of my mommy's?”

“Yes,” Sydney answered for him. “He is. Nick, we may have to wait awhile. I brought along a few of your books, your CD player with the new Veggie Tales CD and a couple of other things. You can decide what you want to do.”

As the little boy dove into the treasures his mother had packed, Danny tried not to stare. Even though he'd known Sydney was a mother, it was odd seeing her in this new role. And he found it impossible
to prevent his gaze from straying to the child over and over again, cataloging him against Danny's memories.

Sydney's son had a neatly trimmed wealth of shining hair as blond as the silk tassel on an ear of corn. Felicia's hair had been almost that color. And he'd seen pictures of himself as a small child with hair almost the same. It was still blond, still wavy, almost thirty years later, though it had darkened considerably from that early lightness.

He shifted uncomfortably. Coincidence. Besides, Noah hadn't had hair that color. Of course, Noah hadn't even had hair. It had been quite a source of amusement to Danny and Felicia when their firstborn had remained as bald as an egg month after month. When he'd turned a year old, he'd just begun to get a fringe of light fuzz around the back of his head, like an old man who'd lost it all but that small remnant.

The unexpected memory nearly undid him and to his horror, he realized he was on the verge of tears. Fiercely he fisted his hands, letting his nails bite deeply into his palms to divert his thoughts. The lump that had risen in his throat dissolved fraction by minute fraction, and the stinging in his eyes eased as well.

While he was trying to get himself under control, Nick Aston chose a book from the backpack and gave it to his mother. “Will you read this to me?” he asked her.

Sydney smiled, hefting him onto her lap. “Of course I will. And if you know any of the words as I go along, you can read them out loud, okay?”

“Okay!” It was obvious that this was a frequent activity for the pair.

Again, his gaze was drawn to the child. He seemed skinny, but Danny really didn't know a lot about kids this age. Maybe they burned a lot of energy. Or maybe it had something to do with the surgery he'd had. Would that affect his size? Logic told him probably not, unless it had truly stunted his growth, and Nick seemed tall for five. Five-and-a-half, if Sydney was right about him being a year old when he'd come to her.

Needing heart surgery. Another coincidence.

“Mr. Crosby? Ms. Aston? Dr. Cantoni will see you now.” The woman in the lab coat who'd opened the inner office door smiled as she beckoned to them.

Danny stood and moved forward, aware that Sydney had stooped to help Nick gather his toys. He didn't look back, wouldn't let himself look back as he followed the woman to the end of the hallway and into a large, pleasantly appointed office in pale greens and creams. He'd spoken to the doctor on the phone but hadn't met him when he'd gone to Portland General for the lab test, and he tried to smile as the tall, thin man came forward and shook his hand. “Have a seat,” he suggested, and Danny obediently sat in one of the large wing chairs.

The doctor moved around him to welcome Sydney. He also knelt to meet Nick, who let himself be led to a child-size table in front of a huge fish tank along the far wall.

“My granddad and me catched fish when I stayed wif him,” Nick announced to the doctor.

The doctor snapped his fingers. “I don't have any fishing poles here. I guess you'll just have to look at these fish. I have some pretty ones in there.”

Nick giggled, a happy-child sound that tore at Danny's heart all over again. “You can't catch fish in a tank!” he explained. “Only in a river. Or maybe a ocean or a lake.” He looked at his mother for confirmation.

Sydney smiled and nodded. “That's right, buddy.” She unzipped the backpack and set it on the floor beside the table. “Mr. Crosby and I need to talk with Dr. Cantoni for a few minutes, honey. You can play here until it's time to go.” With a whoop, the little boy all but plastered his nose against the fish tank, raptly watching its inhabitants.

Sydney smiled wryly. “I'll have to drag him out of here when we're done. He's got a thing for fish.”

As Sydney came forward and sat to his left, Danny took a deep breath and tried to unlock tightly clenched muscles, to relax his shoulders, to sit back in the chair rather than sitting on the edge with his hands gripped tightly together. This was it.

The doctor went around behind his desk. He opened a folder before him. “All right,” he said. “Mr. Crosby, this test was performed on hair samples from you and Ms. Aston's son to determine whether that child could be your biological offspring.” He took a piece of paper from the folder and slid it across the desk facing them.
“This is a chart of your DNA sequence, and below it is the child's.”

He spent several moments explaining how the test was performed, how they achieved results, why those results could be considered conclusive evidence without a doubt, and then went into a detailed comparison of the two sets of test results. Halfway through, Danny realized he couldn't absorb one more word.

“Dr. Cantoni.” He laid his hand in the middle of the piece of paper, obscuring the information. “Can you just tell us? Is he my son?”

The doctor stopped. He looked over his glasses at first Danny, then at Sydney. “Yes,” he said. “There is no doubt in my mind, Mr. Crosby, that Nicholas Aston is your son.”

Nicholas Aston is your son…is your son…is your son.

He heard someone gasp aloud, and realized distantly that it had been himself. The doctor was still talking, but it was only background noise to the clamor inside his head. Noah was alive. Alive! How could it be? Was he sure it wasn't a mistake? No, of course not. DNA didn't lie. That was the whole reason they'd had the test done. He became aware that there were tears on his cheeks and he put a hand to the bridge of his nose, pinching it tightly as if that would somehow stop the emotion flooding through him.

“…give us a few minutes, Dr. Cantoni? This has been a shock for Mr. Crosby.” Sydney, he realized, was trying to give him time to pull himself together as she extended her hand and firmly shook the doctor's.

“Certainly. Just have my nurse call me when you're ready to continue.” The doctor stood and left the room.

A moment later, Sydney's hip bumped his shoulder as she perched herself on the arm of his chair. Her right arm came around his shoulder, rubbing his upper arm gently while her other hand came down over his. She didn't say a word, but he couldn't stop himself from turning his hand over and gripping hers.

Across the room, Nick—Noah!—was chattering happily at a large purple fish with a wide mouth, apparently oblivious to the drama unfolding near the desk.

Finally, Sydney leaned down and spoke near his ear. “Danny, are you okay? Is there someone you'd like me to call?”

“No.” One of the few things he did know was that he wasn't ready to share this with his family yet. “No calls.” He heaved a sigh. “I'm sorry for doubting you.”

She made a small, dismissive sound. “I don't blame you. You would have been foolish not to,” she said, “especially after the disappointments you've had before. You must have been terrified to let yourself hope.”

He swallowed and nodded. “I was so afraid it couldn't be true….”

Silence fell, broken only by the sound of the little boy's lilting voice as he continued to chatter at the fish.

As Danny sat up a little straighter, Sydney returned to her own chair. “I guess,” she said softly, “we have to decide how to handle this now.”

Danny glanced at her, seeing for the first time that there were tears in her eyes, too. And for the first time
he realized what this news meant. He might have found his son, but Sydney would be losing hers. God! Could he do that to her?

“I don't know,” he said honestly. “I need to sort out my feelings before we talk any more about what to do next.” He hesitated. “Could I come over and visit him?”

Sydney squared her shoulders. “Of course. But would you mind if we don't tell Ni—him right away? I have to talk to my family first. I don't want him blurting it out to them the next time his Gramma calls.”

He hadn't missed her hesitation over the boy's name. Another quandary to be resolved. And her family… This was going to require a lot more planning than he'd originally considered. It was going to affect a lot more people than simply Sydney and him, though they would be the ones to absorb the most direct impact.

Now that his mind had begun to function again, it seemed to be racing at a mile a minute. There were millions of things, it seemed, to think about. And of all of them, the only one he could positively say he was sure of right now was that he wanted his son back.

N
ick chattered all the way home about the fish. Sydney was grateful that all she had to do was mutter the occasional “Oh, yeah?” and he kept right on going. Tears ran down her face behind the large dark sunglasses she'd donned.

What was she going to do? She'd been trying to steel herself for this eventuality since the day she'd begun to suspect that Nick might be a kidnapped child. But knowing she had someone else's son and being confronted with the reality were two very different things.

Could she really give up her child?

How could she not? He wasn't hers. He was
Danny's. He'd been stolen from Danny, and the kidnapping had had tragic results for Danny and his wife. Nick was all that Danny had left. How could she not return him?

She should have tried harder to find out exactly where Nick had come from. She'd suspected from early on that he wasn't Margo's. Why hadn't she gone to the authorities? Why had she waited after she learned Margo was dead?

Because she'd already become so attached to the grinning, blue-eyed toddler that she couldn't bear to lose him. She'd been very afraid that he would be returned to someone who didn't deserve him. Someone who wouldn't ensure that his heart condition received the very best repair available, someone who wouldn't cuddle him and sing to him at bedtime or delight in his growing vocabulary and budding intellect. She'd had bad dreams about crack addicts, drug dealers, prostitutes. The reality couldn't have been further from the truth.

At the house, she managed to pull herself together. She made dinner and got Nick bathed and in bed.

And then she forced herself to pick up the telephone and call her parents. It wasn't fair to Danny to delay telling Nick about his life. And she had to tell her family before that.

Her mother cried. Her father blustered.

“But surely you can fight this in court! They can't just take your child away from you—”

“He's not my child, Daddy,” she said patiently, al
though uttering the words aloud nearly broke her tenuous grip on her self-control. “This poor man has spent four years believing his son was dead. His wife killed herself because she couldn't face living without him. How could I possibly deny him a chance at happiness again?”

There was a tense silence on the other end of the line. Then her father spoke again. “Ah, Sydney Leigh. My thoughtful, caring girl. You always did have a heart bigger than all the rest of us put together. You're right.”

“Yes,” her mother said. “It may break our hearts, but it's the right thing to do.” Her voice broke, but she quickly controlled it. “Honey, would you like us to tell Stu and Shelly?”

“Oh, Mom, would you?” Sydney wasn't even going to pretend not to accept; she started to cry again. “I'm not sure I can repeat this again and again. I'd really appreciate it.”

“Of course,” her mother said. “We'll do anything we can to make this easier for you. Do you want us to come down?”

She thought about it. Her parents loved Nick and not spending these last days with him would be difficult for them. But Danny and Nick needed time to get to know each other. That would be difficult with other people around. “Not right now,” she said cautiously. “I'll let you know as soon as I have more details. I may need you a little later.”

But as Sydney hung up the phone, she knew there wasn't going to be any way to make any aspect of the
situation more bearable. Crying on her mother's shoulder wasn't going to make this hurt fade.

She'd barely set down the handset when the phone rang again. Checking the caller ID, she saw an unfamiliar number, but no name listed with it. She clicked on the phone. “Hello?”

“Hello, Sydney. It's Danny.” He sounded nervous and uncertain. “I was wondering if you and Nick would like to go to the zoo tomorrow. I thought it might be a good way for him to get more comfortable around me.”

She nodded, then realized he couldn't see her. “Sure. That's a good idea. Where shall we meet you?”

“How about I pick you up?”

“Okay. Do you have a pencil? I can give you directions.”

There was a pause. “I already know where you live.”

Oh. Right. Sometimes she actually forgot that the man had so much money he was practically green. He probably had had her investigated in detail the moment he left the doctor's office today. “All right, then,” she said quietly. “We'll see you tomorrow. Around nine?”

“Fine. And Sydney?”

“Yes?”

“Don't worry,” he said quietly. “I'm not going to rush Nick into anything. The last thing he needs is more upheaval in his life.”

But you're going to take him away from the only mother he remembers! How can that not “upheave”
his life?
Drawing a deep breath, she suppressed the visceral response. “Thank you. We'll be waiting.”

 

When she told Nick the next morning that they were going to the zoo that day, he was ecstatic. The doorbell rang promptly at nine and he raced to answer it. But as the door swung open, Nick stopped dancing around and simply stared.

On their porch stoop was a giant skunk. At least five feet tall, it was suspended in the air by a pair of muscular male arms wrapped around its furry body.

“Wow!” Nick wasn't speechless for long. “Izzat for me?”

“Nicholas!” Sydney gave him a stern stare. “Where are your manners?”

“Sorry, Mommy.” He stepped back. “You can come in.”

Sydney snorted, shaking her head.

Danny set the skunk down and straightened, smiling tentatively. “Good morning.”

“Hello,” she said. “That's, um, interesting.”

“Isn't it?” He looked down at Nick. “So who do you think this skunk is for?”

Nick glanced at his mother, not about to commit another courtesy error. “I don't know. For Mommy?”

Danny raised an eyebrow. “Do you think she'd like it?”

A crafty gleam lit the little boy's eyes. “Mommies like flowers and candy,” he said hopefully.

Danny laughed. “They do, don't they? Well, then, I guess you'll just have to take this skunk.”

“Yay!” Nick leaped forward and pounced on the skunk. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!”

“Mr. Crosby,” Sydney prompted.

“Thank you, Mr. Crosby,” Nick parroted.

Sydney said, “Why don't we put that in your room until we get back from the zoo?”

But as she reached for the enormous toy, Nick grabbed it by its striped tail and began to haul it down the hallway. “I can do it myself.”

“Okay.” Sydney shrugged and spread her hands, smiling at Danny. “He can do everything himself these days, if you listen to him tell it.”

Danny smiled again, but she caught the wistful quality. “He's so grown up.”

“He starts kindergarten in the fall,” she said, picking up the caps she'd gotten out for Nick and herself, the water bottles and the backpack in which she'd packed a picnic lunch.

“This is going to take some adjustment,” he confessed. “In my head, he's stuck at one year old. It's hard to process that this is the same little guy whose belly I used to tickle.”

“Not if you touch his belly now,” she offered, trying not to let herself think about the past. “He's horrifically ticklish right there.”

Nick came clattering back toward them again, halting further conversation. “Let's go to the zoo!”

Nick sang along with
Veggie Tales
the whole way
to the zoo. She supposed that was a good thing, since neither she nor Danny appeared to have much to say. She'd shown him how to buckle Nick's car seat into the rental car he was driving, and again he looked rueful. “I've got a lot to learn.”

The Oregon Zoo was only ten minutes from downtown Portland. It had been renovated just a few years earlier and Nick had several favorite exhibits.

“Dollars to dimes says he'll go for the penguins,” she said as they entered the main gate.

The Peruvian penguins fascinated Nick for some reason. He could stand for hours watching them waddle around awkwardly on land, only to dive into the water and swim like wild black bullets. As she'd predicted, they were soon standing watching the penguins. There was a bench a few feet away. “We can sit over there,” she said to Danny. “I guarantee our feet will be a lot happier at the end of the day if we grab every chance we can find to sit down.”

“Not like five-year-old feet?” he asked, smiling as he watched his son.

“Most definitely not.” She settled herself on the bench and shucked off the backpack. After a moment's hesitation, she decided she might as well tackle one of the issues that was worrying her most. “Have you thought about his name?” she asked Danny, carefully not looking at him. “If you want to call him Noah again, we'll have to get him used to it.”

“I did think about that last night,” he admitted. “Along with about a hundred million other things.” His
voice was low. “Noah was Felicia's choice. I'm not particularly attached to it. And I'm afraid that changing his name would be difficult for him. Changing his last name will be enough of an adjustment.”

“True.” She fought to keep her voice steady. “When are you planning on taking him?”

There was a taut silence. She watched her son avidly taking in the penguins' antics, trying to blank out the thought of Nick leaving.

“Sydney.” Danny's hand came down over hers in her lap and she realized she'd made nail-shaped crescents on the back of her left hand. “I'm in no hurry to whisk him away. He needs time to get used to this change. So do we.”

She nodded, blinking fiercely behind the sunglasses she'd donned. “We need to tell him soon.”

Danny nodded. “I called a child psychologist yesterday and made an appointment to talk to her about how to handle that. Would you like to go with me?”

She finally looked at him, touched by the thoughtfulness behind the action. “What a good idea. I would love to.”

“It's tomorrow afternoon,” he said.

She made a face. “I have to go back to work tomorrow. But under the circumstances, I'm pretty sure my boss will let me take the time off.”

“How did your family take it?”

She heaved a sigh. “About like you'd expect. Badly.”

Danny winced. “God, I wish—”

“So do I,” she interrupted. “But this is just the way it happened.” She sighed. “I spent a lot of time last night wishing I had tried harder to find out who he really was four years ago.”

Danny squeezed her hands again with his much larger one. “I'm sure you never could have imagined anything as crazy as this. Let's stop looking back and just look forward.”

“All right.” But she wasn't sure why. All she had to look forward to was an empty house.

“Who keeps Nick while you work?” he asked, removing his hand.

“A lady on the next floor,” she said. “He goes to a private preschool two days a week also.”

“I was thinking…would it be possible for me to baby-sit while you're working? It would be a great way for the two of us to get to know each other.”

“You?” She couldn't resist the startled laugh. It seemed ridiculous to expect a member of one of the city's wealthiest families to act as her baby-sitter. “I suppose so. If you really want to.”

“I want to,” he said firmly.

Just then Nick came tearing across the macadam to the bench. “Can we go see the blowhole now, Mommy?”

Danny said, “The what?” and Nick grinned. Danny grinned back at him.

“It's near the sea lion cove,” she said. “It's a natural rock formation that shoots ocean water into the air every so often.”

Both Danny and Nick turned their faces to her, still smiling. Two sets of identical blue eyes, two stubborn chins with an irresistible cleft. Two heads of blond hair, though Danny's wasn't the white-blond that his son's was.

It was shocking to see how very much the man and boy resembled each other, and she simply stared at the two of them, lost in the moment.

My God,
she thought.
How could anyone doubt that these two are father and son?

 

“Have a seat,” Terrence Logan said to the private investigator, showing him to one of the wing chairs in the formal room where the Logan family received guests. Terrence and his wife, Leslie, took the loveseat directly across from their visitor. “You have a report for us?”

The man nodded. He laid a thick folder on the glass-topped table between them. “I interviewed your son first. For the sake of clarity I'm going to refer to him as Everett Baker. He was very helpful. From there I was able to track backward almost to the date he was kidnapped.”

Leslie made a small, stifled sound, but she gripped her hands tightly together in her lap and pressed her lips together.

“I believe you already know the basic events,” the man said. “What I've done is gone back and filled in the spaces as much as possible. I went to his old schools, neighbors, in the few cases any could be lo
cated. Even a hospital in Dayton where he was treated for a broken bone when he was eleven.”

“Abuse?” Leslie almost whispered the word.

The man shook his head. “I don't know. Nothing could be proved, and the couple moved before a social worker could investigate. Twenty years ago it wasn't nearly as easy to locate people as it is today.”

“So, who were they?” Terrence leaned forward. “And why did they take our son?”

“Lester and Jolene Baker were the names of the couple who took him. Those were their real names and at no time did I find any evidence that they used false identities. They first settled in Cleveland with the boy, but they moved frequently. Over the next decade, they moved back and forth at least a dozen times between Ohio, Michigan and Indiana. Everett was enrolled in school in most of those places but his attendance record was spotty and when they moved, the teachers usually had no warning. He just wouldn't show up one day and weeks later they might get a request for his records from the receiving school in the new home area.”