Fearless

by Jessie Keane

  ‘She sure about this? The mother?’ Cyrus asked his wife.

  Gina looked down at the baby, sleeping so peacefully. Such a pretty child, and no trouble.

  ‘You know what I think happened?’ said Gina.

  ‘No, what?’

  ‘Some bastard forced her. And now every time she looks at this child, she sees that man. That’s what I think.’

  Cyrus straightened his glasses and heaved a sigh. ‘It’s a wicked world,’ he said.

  Gina looked at him, her husband. Flabby and plain, but he was a good man. Not a man who would ever consider doing such a thing to a woman.

  ‘Well then, I’d better just do this,’ said Gina.

  41

  Gina gathered up the baby and stepped out of the car. She walked on to the sidewalk, looking left and right. It was quiet. She’d deliberately picked a quiet time. Standing there, she looked up at the big iron gates, standing open in front of her: 273 – CONVENT OF SRS OF MERCY soared high above her head on the arches over the gates. A gust of wind caught her coat and she shivered. But she was doing a good thing for this child, the best thing; she had to remember that.

  She went through the open gate and ascended the steps to the big wooden door at the top. The door was slightly ajar, and she heard voices in the hall. Male and female. There was the sharp scent of new-cut wood in the air. Sudden alarm made her stop there, listening. Now it came to it, how the hell was she to explain this? The baby was unwanted by its mother. Gina had already tucked a note in with the baby, naming its mother and giving her address – stupid! Would the Sisters come back at Claire, try to coax her when it was clear that she wanted nothing to do with her daughter?

  Gina tucked the blanket firmly around the child. The sliver of paper brushed her fingers and she thought, I’ll take the note out. But then she hesitated. What if one day Claire wanted to know her child? And wasn’t it cruel, to deny the little girl the chance to know her mother? From the other side of the door there was the sound of footsteps approaching, and she bent and placed the baby in its blanket on the step in front of the door. Then she turned and hurried down the steps, across the sidewalk and back to the car.

  ‘Let’s go, Cyrus,’ she said, getting in. She wasn’t an emotional type of woman, but right now, it was all she could do not to weep.

  Dave Vance was a carpenter by trade and he loved wood. His trade didn’t pay much, not nearly enough to give his wife Josephine the lifestyle he knew she ought to be enjoying. And she was brighter than him – a teacher. He had always felt in his heart that she deserved better than he could provide. They’d been married five years and it was a great sadness to her – mainly to her but of course to both of them – that she had so far been unable to conceive. It broke her heart. She cried when her period came every month. A child would have made their happiness complete, rounded them off just nice.

  But that was all by the by. For now, he was working with his hands, making a living. Barely. He adored wood in all its textures, the hardwoods, the soft ones you could carve like butter. But he hated fucking wooden doors. They jammed or rattled, depending on the time of year and the humidity. This one, which the good Sisters of Mercy had hired him to attend to, was currently jamming, so he had been planing the convent’s front door for an hour now, skimming off a tiny bit here, a little bit there, until he thought he had it just right.

  ‘It’ll be loose in the summer if I do this,’ he’d warned the Sisters as they’d fluttered around, plying him with coffee and cake.

  ‘No matter,’ one smiley-faced Sister had told him. ‘It’s the jamming of the door that’s the nuisance. We like the door to open freely, to let everyone in. People come to us, they don’t want their way obstructed.’

  From inside the hall, he opened the door, closed it. Perfect, right? He smiled in satisfaction. He opened it again . . . then stopped dead.

  There was a baby wrapped in a pink blanket out there on the doorstep. He stood stunned for a moment. Couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The baby was gazing up at him with sleepy blue eyes. He looked left and right. Jesus, someone had left the kid here for the Sisters to find. A baby. A real little treasure, and someone had just left the . . . it must be a girl, the blanket was pink . . . they’d just left the little girl here, abandoned.

  Josephine would so love a little girl.

  The thought jumped into his mind. Could he do it, just pick her up and take her?

  Even before he was sure he could, even before he had time to reason it out, talk himself out of it, he was doing it. He gathered the child up and went down the steps, his heart thudding away in his chest like he was committing a crime, which maybe he was. He crossed to his old battered workhorse of a Ford van and tucked the baby inside on the passenger seat, closing the door gently.

  She’ll cry now, he thought. Create a hullabaloo. Then the Sisters’ll come down the steps and call me a wicked man for snatching an infant away. What the fuck am I doing?

  But the child was silent.

  Dave ran back up the steps and pushed open the door. ‘All done for today,’ he shouted down the hall. ‘See you tomorrow, Sisters!’

  ‘Sure thing, Dave!’ drifted back down the hall.

  Dave gathered his tools together with shaking hands and returned to his truck. He got in, glanced at the baby, who was watching him calmly. Still feeling like a criminal, he gunned the engine and roared off home.

  42

  ‘My God! What have you done?’ was the first thing Jo said to him when he came in with the baby in his arms.

  Josephine stood in the kitchen of their shabby downtown rented apartment, stirring tomato sauce for pasta with a wooden spoon. Or she had been. Now she grew still and stared at this apparition. Her husband, big craggy Dave Vance in his dusty wood-smelling work shirt and jeans, was standing in the kitchen doorway holding a baby in a pink blanket.

  A baby.

  She dried her hands on her apron and hurried forward. It was a tiny girl, blonde fluffy hair on her head, sweet pink cheeks, heart-meltingly calm blue eyes that looked up at her.

  ‘Whose is she?’ asked Jo, thinking that Dave had gone mad and that this was her fault, giving him so much grief about wanting a child. Now he’d stolen one and got himself in all kinds of trouble, just to please her.

  ‘Nobody’s,’ said Dave. ‘She’d been left on the doorstep at the convent. I was fixing the door and I just walked outside and there she was. So I picked her up and brought her home.’

  Jo gave him that don’t fuck with me look he knew so well. ‘You’re kidding, right?’

  ‘No. I’m telling you the truth, Jo. God’s honour.’

  Jo was leaning forward, craning in to look closer at the child. She raised a hand, touched the baby’s chin, and it caught hold of her finger and held on. ‘Oh, she’s so beautiful.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Dave was frowning.

  ‘What?’ Jo was smiling at the baby.

  ‘That scrap of paper in there. Here, you take her.’

  Gently he handed the baby over to his wife. Then he took out the note that was tucked just inside the blanket, and while Jo stood there in raptures, staring at the baby, he read it aloud.

  ‘Sorry, Sisters, but Claire Milo don’t want this child. Please find a home for her. We (the mother’s friends) can be contacted if needs be at the Sylvester club in NY, but please don’t ever take that as licence to come around here and try to persuade Miss Milo against her decision. It was hard made but she stands by it and won’t be moved.’ He stopped reading, looked at his wife cradling the baby.

  Jo looked up at Dave. ‘We can’t keep her though. Can we?’

  Dave gave it some thought. ‘You think they’d try to take the baby off us? The Sisters? Or that this Milo woman might change her mind, want the baby back?’

  ‘Both those things,’ said Jo, cuddling the infant.

  ‘The Sisters don’t know we got her. No one saw me pick her up, I swear. They don’t even know she exists. And this note seems pretty defini
te about how the woman feels. And she don’t know where we are, either.’

  ‘People change, though.’ Jo was looking fretful. This was marvellous, unbelievable. But it could all be snatched away in an instant. ‘The mother could change her mind tomorrow, call the police, anything could happen. You were working at the convent. It wouldn’t take them long to put things together, would it?’

  ‘All right.’ Dave was biting his lip. He’d found the child on the steps of the convent, it was almost like God had left her there for him to stumble over. This was a gift, a miracle, and they couldn’t just pass it by, could they?

  Jo was shaking her head. ‘We have to take her back,’ she said, but her eyes were locked on to the baby, and she was smiling. ‘We have to.’

  ‘There’s another way. A safer way,’ said Dave.

  ‘What?’ Jo was looking up at him now, and there was wild hope in her eyes.

  ‘Look. We move, yeah?’ Dave was nodding, thinking fast. ‘Your sister down in Baton Rouge.’

  ‘Virginia? You mean Ginny?’ Jo was glancing between his face and the baby’s like a metronome. She was holding a baby in her arms, a real live baby, and hardly registering what he was saying. She’d longed for this, and now it had been dropped into her life.

  ‘How many sisters you got? Just the one, yeah. Honey.’ He touched her hair in a warm caress. ‘This is what we’ve always wanted and we can have it. If you’re nervous of the cops, worried about her changing her mind, then let’s just go. Right now. Let’s pack up and skedaddle. Nothing holding us here, that’s for sure. We can stay with Ginny until we sort ourselves out. What do you say?’

  Jo looked down at the baby. Gently, she stroked the little girl’s cheek. Then she looked up at Dave and her face was so full of joy that he felt choked up.

  ‘I always dreamed when I had a little girl I’d call her Suki,’ she said.

  ‘Then let’s do that,’ said Dave, swallowing hard. ‘We’ll get her christened as our own. Nobody will know any different, not even Ginny. You can tell her you wanted to surprise her with the baby, she knows the troubles we’ve had and she won’t question it. She’ll be fucking delighted. Let’s pack this thing up, all right? Let’s take Suki down south and start again.’

  43

  The worst thing about it, Claire thought, was the leaking breasts. Within a fortnight of giving birth to the thing, she was back at her desk, filling in forms, interviewing staff, chasing suppliers, as if nothing had ever happened. Gradually, her stomach regained its shape but her breasts seemed to have a mind of their own. They seeped milk constantly, so that she had to wear pads inside her bra to soak the stuff up.

  ‘That’ll go,’ said Gina when she confided in her. ‘It’ll pass.’

  ‘Yeah, but when?’ Claire’s whole face screwed up in revulsion.

  ‘You still sure about all that? Me taking her to the Sisters of Mercy and everything?’

  Claire looked at Gina. ‘I don’t want to talk about it, or hear about it,’ she said flatly. ‘It’s done and gone. All right?’

  Gina held up her hands. ‘OK. Anything you say.’

  Sylvester didn’t seem to know how to approach Claire after she’d given birth and brushed her baby aside. Stammering, blushing like a schoolboy, he asked after her health.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she snapped at him.

  And then he called her into his office one morning and said: ‘Well, the day’s come. Gina goes at the end of next week.’

  ‘Is it that time already?’ Claire was sad.

  She’d miss Gina; Gina had taught her everything about this job, and been a firm friend to her in a time of great need. Almost like a mother. But not quite. Claire longed for her own dear mother Eva, and Pally, her dad. And even Trace, her misery-guts of a sister, and that old doom-monger Nanny Irene. But all that was so long ago now and so far away, another place, another life. This was her life now. She had to make what she could of it and be strong, because to even think of reuniting with her family was madness. They would suffer for it if she weakened. Suffer like poor Blue. The image of his dying was burned on her brain forever. So she couldn’t afford to do that.

  ‘Yep, it is.’ Sylvester looked at her. ‘So you want me to advertise the position? Or you want to step in when she goes? Means more pay.’

  Claire opened and closed her mouth several times. Then she smiled. ‘I’d love the job.’ But suddenly a thought hit her and the smile faltered. ‘Sylvester – you know I’m an illegal, don’t you? My visa ran out ages ago.’

  ‘Guessed as much.’

  ‘That don’t worry you?’

  ‘No. It don’t. Half the pot washers downstairs and all across this city are the same. We’ve never been troubled over it.’

  Claire gazed at him. Sylvester might be a little strange in his ways, but he wasn’t a fool; she reckoned he must be paying the precinct’s beat cops to turn a blind eye. ‘Then I guess I’ll take the job.’

  ‘That’s good news. First part of it’s organizing Gina’s farewell party, OK?’

  The party went with a hell of a bang. There was music, balloons, a chocolate devil’s food cake with GINA splashed across it, and all the girls and bar staff and door boys gave her a fabulous send-off. Sylvester made a stumbling speech, and everyone applauded warmly. It was a happy occasion, tinged with sadness. The end of one era, the beginning of another.

  When Gina had gone home to Cyrus and the girls were clearing up the mess, Sylvester called Claire to one side.

  ‘So!’ he said. ‘Manageress now, yeah?’

  ‘Feels strange,’ she said, nodding.

  ‘You’ll walk it. Tomorrow we’ll have lunch and discuss it all, OK?’

  ‘Fine,’ said Claire, and felt for one moment something like real happiness. It was the first time she’d felt such a thing since she’d lost Josh.

  44

  Much to her surprise, Claire found that she easily managed the job of stepping into Gina’s shoes. The whole baby thing was long forgotten now, she had closed her mind to it; it had been a nightmare, but it was over. After that first lunch with Sylvester – nothing fancy, just a bite to eat in one of the local diners – they went out for lunch many more times, talked business, had a chat and a laugh.

  Claire liked Sylvester. Yes, he might be awkward and a little odd, but he was gentle and he was harmless. She liked that about him and felt sorry for him because of his poor health. He seemed to be slipping more and more of those tiny pills under his tongue as time went on.

  Sylvester’s physical weakness made her feel safer still. Bullish men made her nervous. Even now she suffered the odd flashback, the feeling of someone creeping up on her in the night. The old dreams of someone hurting her, of people attacking Mum and Dad, or her sister, or even Josh, were fewer now, but she still had them whenever she was under stress. Then she would wake up sweating and fearful. All she could do was hope that one day she could leave the past behind her and move on with her life.

  So it was lunch in the diner on Valentine’s Day. No big deal. Nothing to either of them. They were friends, not lovers. The very idea was ridiculous. Sylvester was much older than her, they looked more like father and daughter out for lunch together. So what he had to say when they’d finished lunch on that Valentine’s Day shocked her to the core.

  ‘Claire? Will you marry me?’

  The diner was packed and noisy. She thought she’d misheard him. ‘What?’

  ‘I said, will you marry me.’ Sylvester was blushing like a boy. He held up a hand. ‘Hear me out, will you?’

  ‘Sylvester—’

  ‘No, just listen. I like you, Claire. I’ve always liked you. And I know you’ve had troubles in your life, and I hate the idea of that. What I would like . . .’ His voice trembled. ‘What I would like is to keep you safe. To treasure you. Because I think a great deal of you, Claire. I really do.’

  She sat there, stunned. The waitress came over and refilled their coffees, and went away again. Sylvester kept his eyes fixed on Claire�
��s face.

  ‘Listen . . .’ she started, unsure of what she was going to say.

  ‘Think it over, will you?’ His voice was pleading.

  ‘Oh God. Sylvester. I can’t.’ She really couldn’t, and for reasons that she couldn’t possibly explain to him.

  For one thing, she could never bear to have sex with anyone. That was gone for her. The very idea terrified her. For another, he was old. And she was still young. And another thing, a very important one. She could only ever love Josh. No one else would do for her. Not even a kind man like Sylvester. She was strictly a one-man woman.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, touching his hand across the table. ‘The answer’s no.’

  Sylvester nodded and held up a hand. The waitress brought the bill and he settled up while Claire pulled on her coat, struggling for normality. She couldn’t believe he’d said that. But he had. Then as they left the table he caught her hand, and to her shock brought it to his lips and quickly kissed it.

  ‘I really like you, Claire,’ he said. ‘And don’t worry. This doesn’t change anything. I promise you that.’

  It was a sweet thing to say, and she nodded and smiled at him. ‘I like you too, Sylvester,’ she said. ‘And thank you for asking.’

  She was glad afterwards that their last words together had been kind and friendly, because next morning when she got into her office she got a call from the hospital saying that Sylvester Drummond had been rushed in late last night with heart failure. They’d tried to save him, but there was nothing they could do.

  Sylvester was dead.

  45

  Claire felt awful on the day of Sylvester’s funeral; numb with grief. He’d been her true friend, a quiet supporter ever since she’d started work at his club, and she was going to miss him badly. All the girls showed up for the service, and Gina and Cyrus too, plus the bar and kitchen staff, and the door boys – even the club’s suppliers. The church was packed with his friends.