Rachael's Return

by Janet Rebhan

  He sat down, threw off his shoes, and called his home number. No answer. Perhaps she was in the shower? He took off his suit and hung it in the closet, brushed his teeth, and lay down on the bed. He reached for the remote and turned the news on, keeping the volume low. He tried his home number again: still no answer.

  “Where is she?” he said. He pressed and held the button on the side of his iPhone.

  “What can I help you with?” The automated voice was female, set to a British accent.

  “Call Caroline Martin, cell,” Jake commanded.

  “Calling. Caroline Martin. Mobile,” the voice replied haltingly.

  Caroline entered the CVS store and bought newborn-size diapers, fresh wipes, a couple of baby bottles, and baby formula. Precious little was in the diaper bag she’d found in the wreckage, and there was only one empty bottle. She couldn’t be sure whether it had contained formula or breast milk that had been pumped earlier. She also purchased some infant T-shirts and inexpensive sleeper sets. As she checked out, the woman behind the counter admired the baby.

  “She looks like you,” the cashier said. “How old is she?”

  “Only a few weeks, I think,” Caroline answered.

  “You think?” the woman asked.

  “She’s not mine,” Caroline said, looping her free arm through the handles of the plastic bag. “I’m just watching her for someone.”

  She was only a few minutes from her house and would finally be able to feed the baby when she got home. Yet she had remained remarkably content. Caroline hoped the baby wasn’t allergic to formula, and considered the possibility her mother had been pumping her own breast milk. That could present a problem. “I guess if you get hungry enough, you’ll eat,” she said, looking at the tiny face. She felt tired and wanted badly to sleep. She thought about what the cashier at CVS had said and wondered if Sheriff Brady had made the same mistake of assuming the baby was hers. The thought was sudden and elusive the way intuitive insights often are; hard to hold onto, and easily dismissed, especially when one really doesn’t want to know the answer.

  Her cell phone rang and jolted her back to the present just as she pulled into her driveway.

  “Jake, oh my God, you are not going to believe this,” she said.

  CHAPTER 6

  Caroline opened her eyes as the morning sunlight streamed through the white wooden plantation shutters covering her bedroom window. She yawned and looked at her bedside clock: a few minutes after six. She arched her back and stretched both arms out over her head. The house remained silent except for the sound of Jake opening and closing cupboard doors downstairs in the kitchen. Whoever got up first was in charge of grinding fresh beans for their morning coffee unless one of them had already set up the coffeemaker the night before.

  Caroline slid out of bed and walked into the small office area adjacent to the master bedroom where the baby slept, only to notice an empty bassinet. She walked downstairs. Jake had placed the baby in her infant seat in the center of the large rectangular kitchen table. Her tiny legs and arms wiggled restlessly while her saucer-shaped eyes focused on a large stuffed animal Jake had placed next to her on the tabletop. She seemed to reach one arm toward the stuffed animal’s large button eyes, her tongue sliding in and out of her mouth as she cooed contentedly.

  “I’ve already fed her,” Jake said. “Sit down, and I’ll bring you some coffee.”

  “You’re too much,” Caroline said, happily plopping herself down on the corner of the sofa in the adjoining family room and curling her legs underneath her long nightgown. “I didn’t even hear her cry,” she said, yawning.

  “She didn’t,” Jake said. “When I got up at five thirty, I peeked in on her, and she was wide awake, staring at her mobile. So I changed her, gave her a bottle, and here we are. She’s been watching me grind the coffee beans.” Jake turned toward the baby and smiled. “I thought maybe the grinding noise would make her cry, but she didn’t even make a face.”

  It had been three days since Caroline had rescued the baby and brought her home. Jake had only returned home from his business trip the night before and they had only spoken briefly on the telephone on two more occasions since that night. The morning following the accident, Caroline had called the Lost Hills station of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and asked to speak to Sheriff Brady. She was informed Brady was out of the office and she was connected to his voicemail. She left a detailed message:

  “Hi Deputy Brady, it’s Caroline Martin. I’m the woman who reported the accident last night on Box Canyon Road in Chatsworth where the driver was killed. You took my address and phone number and said someone would be in contact with me about the baby. I’m just wondering if you have heard from any of the baby’s family members or from children’s services. Please call me back and let me know what you want me to do.”

  The following morning, she left another detailed message, but the sheriff failed to return her call.

  Caroline had borrowed a bassinet and some other baby things from her friend Jena, whose oldest son and his wife had just had their first baby. Jena had purchased all the necessary baby items for occasions when her granddaughter visited. She was happy to loan everything to Caroline for the time being.

  “This is just too weird,” Jena had said. “I can’t believe no one is looking for this baby. And what of the sheriff’s department? Do you suppose Sheriff Brady just forgot?”

  “Who knows?” Caroline said. “It was so convoluted that night. Everyone was passing the buck to someone else. And I only wanted to make sure the baby was protected. But you would think someone would be calling me back by now.”

  The local newspapers had run only a small blurb about the accident, stating a young woman by the name of Mary Anne Maynard, age twenty-one, had been killed when her automobile crashed into a rocky hillside on Box Canyon Road in Chatsworth. It also stated a passing motorist told police she’d seen a man on a motorcycle fleeing the scene of the accident. No reference to any baby.

  “What if there is no other family?” Jena had asked. “Would she go into the foster care system?”

  Caroline was silent. She didn’t want there to be any relatives; she wanted things to keep going along the way they had been. Yet she knew eventually the police or the sheriff’s department—somebody—would put this together and sort things out. In the meantime, she would continue to enjoy pretending the baby was hers and the way she felt when she was with her. She felt a renewed sense of direction and purpose and a loss of worry about unimportant things in light of the little life in need of her constant attention. The baby was a magnet, drawing on every nerve, every sense, every thread of emotion in Caroline’s being and bringing them to her. Much like when Caroline had met Jake for the first time, she had fallen in love, only in a different way. And it differed from the way she had felt with her sons. With Sammy and Pauley, she had been unsure of herself, and because she’d had them so close together, they almost blended into one experience. What she did for the one, she had to do for the other. There never seemed to be time to just bond with one baby. Pauley, of course, got the short end of the stick being the second child. At least with Sammy, she’d had some alone time with him before life got hectic. But even with Sammy, she was still a newlywed, and her allegiance to her husband was strong. This was the first time she had ever felt so completely necessary to just one other human being. There was something unique about this baby and the way she felt so protective of her.

  Now she looked around her open kitchen and admired the way it flowed effortlessly into the family room where she sat on the sofa. The morning light streamed through the trees and the sliding glass doors causing long narrow strips of light on the polished wood floor. “Thank you for being so supportive,” Caroline said to Jake. “I’d forgotten what it was like taking care of a baby.”

  “Well, I’m not exactly happy about you putting yourself out like this, especially since it’s only been a couple of weeks since your surgery,” Jake said. “In fact
, I think it’s time we went down in person to the sheriff’s station and straightened all of this out. Someone has got to be looking for this child.” Jake leaned against the kitchen counter and sipped his coffee. “I’m getting a little worried about us being accused of kidnapping.”

  “The sheriff gave me custody!” Caroline said. “He took all my information including my phone number. They know who I am and where I live. He said someone would be in touch with me.”

  “I know,” Jake said, “But I fear something got lost in translation here. My guess is some information failed to get passed along between the first responding police officer and the sheriff. I mean, the baby was fastened inside a car seat in the back of your car miles away from the accident site. He probably thought she was your baby. It was a highly unusual situation with you having to make the tough decision to take the baby with you when you drove to get cell phone reception. And then you add on the jurisdictional issues, and you’ve got the perfect storm.” Jake paused, looked out the kitchen window at the tops of the Italian Cypress trees that separated their property from their next door neighbors. A summer breeze was bending the tips lightly in a northwesterly direction. He made a mental note to have them trimmed before fire season’s first peak in August when the Santa Ana winds began to kick up. He shifted his weight against the kitchen counter, took another sip of coffee, and turned back to face his wife. “I mean, I’ve worked with law enforcement officers on plenty of cases over the years, and I can tell you these kinds of things happen more often that you would ever guess. No one likes having to do someone else’s job. The first responding police officer probably left it up to you to inform Sheriff Brady about the baby,” Jake paused, studied his wife who held her coffee cup up to her face, her lips puckered, blowing lightly on the surface of the contents, her gaze not really focused on anything in particular. “And you, of course,” Jake continued, “thought he had already provided that information to the sheriff along with your address, telephone number, and details about what you saw with the motorcycle. I would have told you to go down to the station in person, but I was concerned about you overexerting yourself. Actually, I guess I could have told you to contact children’s services directly. If only I hadn’t been out of town and completely consumed by this case. I just assumed you were handling it.”

  Caroline was suddenly animated. “I have been handling it! I’ve called every single day and left detailed messages. And if there is no family, I want first dibs on adopting her. I don’t want everyone else in the country competing with me.”

  Jake sighed heavily and shook his head. He walked into the family room and sat down next to his wife on the sofa. “Do you realize what you’re saying?” The baby grunted softly from the infant seat. “We can’t have any more children, honey. We’re old enough to be her grandparents.” He looked at his wife and then reconsidered. “Okay, young grandparents, but grandparents just the same. Our retirement is so close I can almost touch it. We have plans to travel the world, remember? The last thing we need is another kid. Besides,” he said, “that’s not how it works. There’s a long waiting list of qualified people wanting to adopt—especially infants.”

  Caroline gazed into her coffee cup and didn’t reply. Then she looked over at the baby, her eyes clouding up. “We better take her down from there; it’s too high.”

  “She’s fine,” Jake said. “She’s falling asleep now. Look at me, honey.” Jake reached out and lifted his wife’s chin with his free hand, forcing her to look directly at him. “This baby doesn’t belong to us, and we are going to find her real family. You saved her life, and that’s a good thing. God knows who else might have come along instead of you and how different things could have turned out. But I have to tell you this is as far as it’s going. I do not want to raise another child.” Jake paused, took a deep breath, and looked over at the infant seat on the table and then back again at his wife, who now had a tear making its way down her cheek. He used the thumb of his right hand, which cradled her jaw, to gently catch the drop and wipe it away before he spoke again in a low and tender voice. “Today, we are both going to take the baby down to the sheriff’s station and stay there until we can, all of us, straighten this thing out.”

  “Okay, genius, now what?” Thor said.

  “Patience, please. At least we have them in the same room together. They’re bonding. Give me credit for manipulating things this far.”

  They both looked down through a large plate glass window from a penthouse office furnished sparsely and with state-of-the-art design. The building hovered high up beyond the clouds on a bright, sunny plane. Heat emanated through the glass in a warm and comfortable gleam of light.

  “Yeah, but she can’t keep her. The husband will never go for that. This just doesn’t look good. Not good, not good at all,” said Thor, making one of the faces he always made when he thought something was beyond control. He could be impetuous at times, but he had genuine compassion for others.

  “Shush. Let me think,” Aurora said, trying to read the signs below.

  “We need to work on the husband,” Thor said. “All he can think about is his early retirement.” He paced across the room to the other side.

  “He’s not a bad guy,” Aurora said. “Like most humans, he seeks comfort more than challenge. He’ll come around.” She crossed her arms and walked to the opposite end of the large window, still gazing below. “Anyway, he’s not our big problem right now. Our problem now is preventing the birth father from getting his hands on the baby.”

  Thor walked over to where Aurora stood, intently focusing through the window and gazing earthward. “You can see that far? Wow, I’m impressed.” And then he paused before speaking again. “Birth father—you mean tattoo man? He really creeps me out.”

  “Uh-uh-uh. No judgment allowed up here,” Aurora said, her lips only slightly curling upward in acknowledgment of his humor, twisted though she sometimes thought it was.

  “Oh, who do you think you’re kidding?” Thor said, flailing his arms in the air before placing them firmly on both hips in a defiant stance. “The guy’s a jerk, and you know it.”

  “He’s definitely undesirable, but he’s not irredeemable,” Aurora stated monotonously as she continued to focus her attention earthward. “No one is.”

  “Then what is hell all about?” asked Thor.

  Aurora interrupted her focus for a moment to turn and address Thor squarely to his face, speaking softly, didactically. “People in ‘hell’ can leave any time they want. They just don’t want to. Or they don’t know they can.”

  Undaunted, Thor replied, “Well, I’m just glad that’s not my detail.” He strode away indifferently. “I’m much happier watching over the little innocent ones.”

  “And that’s precisely why I commissioned you to help me on this assignment,” Aurora said, ignoring Thor’s immaturity. “You came highly recommended as an infant guide specialist.” She turned back toward the large window and returned her focus to the thought currents traveling upward in heavy waves. Tuning in to the frequencies, she received only the ones forged with enough compassion and emotion to reach all the way to her altitude. That took a lot of concentration and occurred only when a human had enough awareness to make positive thoughts about others almost an ongoing thing. “Okay,” she finally said. “I think I have a plan.” She lifted her chin and looked up toward the blue sky and the surrounding buildings with their own wavy currents floating like heavy cloud formations toward the rooftops.

  “I know just the people we need to be working on,” she said as she turned and looked directly at Thor. “Listen up,” she said, smiling.

  Nancy Kelley sipped her coffee thoughtfully at the red light. The morning was overcast, misty, and cool. A heavy fog enveloped the entire San Fernando Valley, and a light breeze made it feel even colder. She manually flipped the handle that operated the wipers just once to clear her view through the dirty windshield of her Jeep Cherokee. The slowest setting was designed to handle a light rainf
all and was a little too fast for just a heavy mist, resulting in the wipers making a choppy dry run across the glass that sounded to Nancy like someone with bronchitis trying to inhale deeply. June gloom—that’s what everyone called it. The majority of the month, the weather stayed cool and overcast. In a few more weeks, it would officially be summer, but it wouldn’t start to get hot and feel like summer until July.

  She could see the hospital only a block away. She had only recently switched to day shifts again and felt happy to be on the same schedule as most other people. While she waited for the light to change, her thoughts wandered, as they often did when she had time to herself alone. She looked up toward a rare clearing with a blue patch of sky and wondered how Mary Anne Maynard was doing with her new daughter. She felt a sadness begin to swell inside. The light changed, and she drove another block, turning into the underground parking lot beneath the hospital. Gliding easily into her spot two levels down, Nancy turned off the ignition and allowed herself a brief reflection in the rearview mirror. By this time, she couldn’t shake the feeling something was wrong with Mary Anne’s baby girl. She knew the woman had an uphill battle to fight, and even under the best of circumstances, it couldn’t be easy for her taking care of a new baby. As a doctor, it was hard not to follow up on every patient she liked. But Nancy knew that was impossible, so most of the time she resorted to envisioning people happy and at peace. She believed it worked and that it wasn’t necessarily secondary to actually helping someone physically. Yet she had a familiar feeling right now. One she had when she thought there was some way she could be used for the good in someone’s life beyond just sending positive thoughts their way. A feeling she needed to take action. She sensed it somehow had to do with the baby and not Mary Anne. She wondered if the young woman had abandoned her infant. She felt a sense of danger and an element of urgency. She got out of her Jeep and pressed the button on her key, hearing the familiar beeping sound as all four doors locked shut in unison. As she started for the elevators, she glanced at her watch: 8:00 a.m. She made a mental note to call the shelter when she took her lunch break at noon and inquire about the welfare of Mary Anne Maynard and her infant daughter.