My Babies and Me

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  Did that mean he’d be with her longer than the couple of weeks she’d expected? Could she stand to have him around that long? Or stand to let him go?

  HE STAYED with her all evening, watching the news, helping her hang a couple of prints on the newly painted walls of the nursery.

  “You’re doing a great job in here,” he told her, surveying the work she and Seth had done the previous weekend when Michael was in Chicago.

  “If only I can find some furniture I like,” she said, trying to see the room through his eyes.

  “You have something particular in mind?”

  “Not really. I just seem to know what I don’t want.”

  “What about car seats and stuff like that? Have you started picking up any of those extras?”

  “Not yet.” She shook her head, afraid to be having this conversation with him, afraid he’d shut himself off again, as he’d done all week. Afraid to enjoy speaking with him about the babies. Afraid she’d miss what she couldn’t have.

  “Don’t you think you should start looking?”

  “I have looked, but there are so many decisions to make and since I’m probably only going to be doing this once, I want to make the right choices.” She slid down to the empty nursery floor, leaning against the wall, and gazed up at him.

  Michael joined her, leaning against the opposite wall. “What kinds of choices?”

  Telling herself not to hope that he was going to change, Susan still couldn’t suppress her delight as she told him about changing tables and diaper bags, car seats that also did duty as carriers. “And then there’s a stroller,” she said. He was listening carefully.

  “You’ll need a double stroller, of course,” he said.

  “Right, but they have these ones where the babies ride side by side, and then other ones where they ride in front of each other.”

  Michael frowned. “What are the benefits of each?”

  “Side by side, they see each other, can play with each other, and I can tend to both at once.” He looked so good to her, sitting there in a pair of cutoff sweat shorts and white tank T-shirt. So natural. Even surrounded by the colorful wallpaper and clowns on the walls.

  “The problem with that stroller is that it’s so wide, which makes it difficult to get in and out of places. Plus,” she added, thinking as she went, “they might fight with each other, pull each other’s hair.”

  “So what about the other kind?”

  “When I’m pushing, I won’t be able to see the one in front. And they won’t be company for each other.”

  “But if one’s crying, the other won’t see and immediately join in.”

  She hadn’t thought of that.

  “Of course,” he added, “there’s always a chance that the one in back will toss something and hit the other on the head—especially if the one in back is a boy.”

  Susan’s heart leapt when she saw the grin on his face. Maybe there was hope, after all.

  Just maybe.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  SETH MISSED his sojourn across town that Saturday.

  “C’mon, Mr. Carmichael, I’m sorry already. Now throw the damn ball.”

  Silently, Seth waited, raising one eyebrow at the rough-looking kid. One of the toughest of his friend Brady’s underprivileged kids.

  “Shit.” And then, “I meant to say darn, okay?”

  It took everything Seth had not to grin. He gave his best effort at looking stern, instead.

  “Ah, hell, I didn’t mean shit, neither.” Realizing that he’d just sworn again, the boy hung his head, his arm dropping to his side and the baseball mitt he’d been holding out for Seth’s pass dropping along with it.

  Seth relented. “It’s okay, Paul, you’re trying so we’ll let that be enough for now.”

  Paul glanced up, his face alight with a real grin—probably the first Seth had seen in the three weeks since he’d first started spending a couple of Saturday hours with the boy. “That’s bitchin’ of you, man...” Paul stopped, grinned again, and said, “I mean, that’s swell, Mr. Carmichael.” He enunciated very carefully.

  “Call me Seth.”

  The twelve-year-old looked as though Seth had just given him an in with the Cincinnati Reds. “Sure, man,” he said, trying to seem tough. “I mean Seth.”

  Seth threw the ball to Paul before the kid embarrassed himself any further. And for the next couple of hours he forgot his own troubles as he tried to make the life of a hardened young man more palatable. Paul had been picked up for shoplifting, but he had a history of expulsions from schools across the state. Other than the shoplifting, he’d never really done anything horrible; he was just disruptive and refused to follow rules.

  It had taken Seth maybe five minutes to figure out that the toughest thing about the kid was his mouth. And another five to find something that mattered to the boy. Baseball.

  From there, getting him to follow rules was a cakewalk. No rules, no baseball.

  But great as it felt to be working with a kid again, to be contributing something useful to society, nothing seemed to ease the ache Seth felt every time he thought of another boy who’d needed him. A boy he’d made promises to. A boy he’d deserted.

  He tried not to think of the boy’s mother at all.

  MICHAEL HAD completely taken over the third bedroom of the condo. Previously Susan’s study, the room had become his hub. When he wasn’t out at the Miller Insulation plant or in meetings, he was in that room working.

  “Michael, we have to talk.” Susan was standing in the doorway.

  He didn’t want to talk. He thought he’d made that quite clear to her over the past week. Until he knew what to think, until he understood things himself, he had nothing to say to her.

  “You’ve been here for more than two weeks and I don’t see how this is accomplishing anything,” she said. “Unless it’s hurt the good things we had going for us.”

  “Such as?” He looked up from the papers he’d been trying to study.

  “We haven’t made love since you moved in here.”

  Yeah, well, that was one of the things he couldn’t explain. “I’m not here to make love.”

  “Why are you here?”

  He wished to hell he knew. “Because I’m the father of the two children you’re carrying.”

  “So?”

  “So, that’s why I’m here.”

  “What is this supposed to accomplish?” she asked, leaning against the door frame. God she was lovely. Almost five months pregnant with his children. He couldn’t remember ever seeing her so beautiful.

  Which was just another of the things he couldn’t explain.

  Sighing, Michael put down the papers. They hadn’t been holding his interest, anyway. “I don’t know what’s supposed to happen, Susan,” he admitted. Maybe he was just seeing how long he could stand to be there, how long before he started to suffocate. Or capitulate as his father had.

  “I don’t know, either.” She wandered into the room, dropped down to the couch. “We talked more when you were across the country.”

  Yeah. And he missed those easy conversations. Frowning, he tried to find a way to express what he wasn’t sure of himself. “I need, somehow, to separate you from the children, separate my relationship with you from the children.”

  He needed to make love to her. So badly he’d woken up with a hard-on every morning for the past week. Gone to sleep with one, too, for that matter.

  “Why?” The question was soft, understanding, making it difficult for him not to reach further.

  “Because I already know how I feel about you.”

  “How’s that?”

  Picking up a pencil, Michael pulled the message pad away from the phone and drew aimlessly. “You’re my best friend. The person I always think of first when I have something to share.”

  “I was starting to wonder if that had changed.”

  He looked up when he heard the tremor in her voice.

  “The question has never been about yo
u, Sus.” He met her gaze openly, intent on reassuring her on that score, at least. “We’ve always been able to give each other the space we needed to do what we had to do, yet at the same time provide each other with understanding and encouragement.”

  “And why do think that was?” He knew she wasn’t testing him for answers she already had. Rather, she sounded as though she were trying to understand it herself.

  “Because we were two of a kind.” Finally—an answer he had. “You were hell-bent on not becoming your mother and I was just as determined not to become my dad.”

  “Yeah, I guess.” The oak-grain layers of her hair glowed in the evening light.

  “Both of them were forced by family responsibilities into roles that weren’t satisfying to them, your mom by giving up herself, her own dreams, my dad by being trapped in a job he hates.”

  “But family responsibilities bring joy, too.” Her arms rested atop her protruding belly.

  “And sometimes—like with your mother, my dad—they weren’t a joy because of the cost.”

  “I’m not so sure of that,” Susan surprised him by saying. “The cost was great, granted, but perhaps some of the joy was, too.”

  Feeling strangely deserted, Michael said, “Sounds like you’ve changed a bit.”

  “Not really.” Susan continued to hold his gaze. “Doing my job, being my own person, is still important to me.” He was immensely relieved to hear that. “I just want more now. I’m adding another, new dimension to who I am.”

  It seemed so logical when she said it. But what was going to happen when she was forced to choose? When Susan the lawyer was at odds with Susan the mother? She’d have to choose Susan the mother, of course; she’d left herself no other choice. And that was where he strangled every time. Being left with no choice scared him to death.

  “The thing is,” she said after a pause, “I don’t know how much longer I can stand having you here, knowing you don’t want to be here.”

  Michael cursed himself to hell for putting that look in her eyes. “I want to be here,” he told her, surprised at the truth.

  “Out of duty?”

  He didn’t know. Probably, at least to some extent. But...

  “I’ve always wanted to be with you whenever I could.”

  She sat watching him, her legs curled beneath her, her sleeveless cotton dress billowing around her. He’d never wished more that he was different, that he was the kind of man she deserved, the kind of man who wanted it all—home, work and family. The first two he wanted. He’d just never wanted the third.

  “Can you give me a little more time?” he asked her now, praying he’d experience some kind of revelation soon, some sign that would show him the way. Lord knew, he wasn’t finding it by himself.

  “If you’ll promise me something.”

  “What?”

  “That the minute you don’t want to be here, you’ll leave.”

  “Susan...”

  “That’s it, Michael.” Her eyes were filled with conviction. “I don’t want you here out of duty or any other misguided sense of moral expectation.”

  He didn’t want to make the promise. Wasn’t sure he could keep it. But he was giving her so little as it was. Far, far less than she deserved or had the right to expect from him. He owed her this.

  “I give you my word.”

  He only hoped it wouldn’t come back to haunt him.

  HE STAYED PUT all day on Monday the twenty-first of June. He’d rescheduled a couple of meetings with department heads at Miller Insulation so he could remain in the temporary office he’d set up in Susan’s study. He’d been trying to make sense of the report his market analyst had faxed over that morning. They were researching sites for a couple more factories in other parts of the country so they’d be ready to begin production as soon as the Miller deal went through.

  Michael was also working on profit margins—comparing the projected cost of production and distribution against the estimated consumer price.

  And he was reaching for the phone every time it rang. He hadn’t asked Susan what time her appointment with the doctor was, so had no way of knowing when he could expect a call from her.

  Although he’d tried, he couldn’t quite forget that she was finding out whether they were having sons or daughters. Or one of each. The fact that he might care enough to want to know scared the hell out of him.

  As it turned out, the time of her appointment didn’t matter. Susan didn’t phone at all. When five o’clock rolled around, and he realized she wasn’t going to, he’d convinced himself that he was glad. It was probably for the best if she didn’t include him every step of the way.

  Too BURSTING with news to go home and pretend she wasn’t, too excited to keep her newfound knowledge to herself, Susan returned to the office after her late-afternoon doctor’s appointment and called her father.

  “It’s a boy and a girl!” she said as soon as he picked up the phone.

  “One of each, eh, girl?”

  Beaming, Susan glanced at her desktop calendar. “Yep.”

  “I wish your mother were here. She’d be beside herself.”

  “I know, Pop. Me, too.”

  Silence fell with their shared loneliness. “You sure you know what you’re doing, girl?” Simon Carmichael asked a little self-consciously. “Sure you aren’t just bucking convention for the sake of bucking it?”

  She wasn’t sure about anything anymore. Except that she loved her babies with all her heart and couldn’t imagine not having them. “I know you all think I’m crazy, Pop, but I’m a big girl now, almost forty. Certainly old enough to make my own decisions.”

  “If you say so.” She heard the doubt in his voice. The resignation, too. “You know you can call if you need anything, anything at all.”

  “I know, Pop, thanks.”

  “You hear any more from that ex-husband of yours?”

  Susan hadn’t told anyone who’d fathered her children, hadn’t told anyone except Seth that she hadn’t done this clinically, but she knew they all assumed—maybe even hoped—that Michael was responsible.

  “Actually, he’s been staying at the condo for the past couple of weeks. He’s in town on business.” She had no idea what had made her say that. Susan had learned long ago to keep her private life private. Not many people understood her untraditional choices. And she’d grown tired of defending them.

  “Good.”

  “Good?”

  “I’m glad he’s there. A woman needs a man around to take care of her at a time like this....”

  Susan tuned out.

  Some things just never changed.

  SUSAN CALLED her brothers next, reaching everyone but Seth who was in town but not anywhere Susan could find him. The brothers’ reactions were all similar to her father’s. With the exception of Stephen, who’d been in the middle of some important nuclear-scientist thought when she’d called and probably wouldn’t even remember that they’d spoken. None of them—including Seth—really understood her. They all thought she was off her rocker. And they all told her to call if she needed anything.

  If she did, they’d come running. En masse. She knew that as surely as she knew they’d never include her in their annual golf outing. As surely as she knew they loved her unconditionally.

  She could hardly ask for anything more.

  Except maybe a lover who’d make love to her.

  Pulling onto her street around seven o’clock that evening, Susan frowned. There was an old and completely unfamiliar car parked in her drive. She wasn’t expecting anyone. The visitor had to be Michael’s.

  What a night for him to have company.

  “Okay, you two, we’ll just have to keep our news to ourselves. Probably for the best, anyway,” she said aloud, parking out in the street in front of the condo. Michael couldn’t even come to terms with generic babies, let alone the pair who’d just taken on form and personality. “Just see that you play nice, tonight, kids.”

  Someone kicked in res
ponse as she got out of the car, and Susan laughed.

  One of each. She couldn’t believe how lucky she was. A son and a daughter. Boy clothes and girl clothes. Brownies and Cub Scouts. Makeup and fast cars. She’d have it all.

  Or so she told herself.

  “I’ll just be going then,” a construction worker, minus his hard hat and tool belt, was leaving as Susan approached the front door.

  “Thanks for bringing him by,” she heard Michael say from the shadows of the foyer.

  “No problem,” he called. And then, “Ma’am,” as he strode past Susan.

  “What’s—”

  With a finger to his lips, Michael nodded toward the living room just as they both heard a resounding crash.

  And a very loud curse.

  “Seth?” Running into the living room, she saw her brother picking himself up from the floor, clutching pieces of a broken lamp.

  “Sorry, sis,” he slurred. “It moved.”

  “Seth Carmichael, sit down before you break anything else,” she commanded, worried sick about her brother. If he kept this drinking up, he was going to find himself in jail.

  “I’ve got coffee started,” Michael said, helping Seth onto the couch. “I’ll go get him a cup.”

  “Pud a liddle whiskey in it, would ya.” Seth’s attempt to point landed in his lap with a thud.

  “Forget it, buddy.” Susan wasn’t even a little bit sympathetic.

  “Ah, Sus, lighten up.”

  “Not till you sober up, Seth, and then we’re going to talk.”

  Two cups of coffee later, Seth was a little more manageable, but not much. It was all she and Michael could do to keep him in her living room—he was hell-bent on leaving for someplace that served liquor—while trying to preserve Susan’s belongings in the process. There’d been another casualty after the lamp. A ceramic vase she’d bought in Mexico.

  “C’mon, Seth, old man,” Michael said after he’d vacuumed up the shattered pieces of the vase. “It’s cold-shower time.”