Bad Blood (Maggie Ryan Book 8)

by P. M. Carlson

  There was no question of magazine subscriptions.

  They gazed at each other for a long moment. Then the girl blurted, “Is it naturally curly?”

  “Yes.”

  “Shit.”

  Laughter flickered in Maggie’s eyes. She asked, “What’s your name?”

  “They call me Ginny.”

  “Virginia?”

  “Yes.”

  “Shit.”

  The girl looked startled, then grinned as she took Maggie’s meaning. “Oh, God. Well, their cover story is that they thought it was a pretty name.”

  “It is. What’s your whole name?”

  “They say it’s Virginia Alice Marshall.”

  Maggie gave a quick nod of approval and relief. She walked over to the girl and picked up both her hands. “Hey,” she said, “I’m glad you came, Ginny. Happy birthday.” Then she slipped a blue plaid arm companionably around the suddenly rigid young shoulders and turned back to face Nick, who was still waiting in the doorway. “Nick, love,” she said, “I’d like you to meet Ginny. My daughter.”

  He’d known, of course; but it didn’t make it any easier. Nick closed a mental door on the pleasant chaos of his life to date and bowed his head politely. “Pleased to meet you,” he lied.

  IV

  The three of them looked at each other. Nick wondered if the girl’s emotions were churning as much as his and Maggie’s were. She was holding herself very stiffly under Maggie’s friendly arm, and Maggie withdrew it as she said, “We’ve got a lot to talk about, Ginny. You can stay a while?”

  “Yeah. I guess.”

  “Great. Then maybe you want some dry clothes. Do you have a change in your backpack?”

  “No.” She was in full retreat, Nick saw, flinging up defenses, pulling into herself. Not surprising. Even Maggie, who had longed for this encounter for years, was looking damn shaky.

  “I’ll loan you a pair of jeans, then, until yours dry,” Maggie suggested.

  Ginny said coolly, “Mr. O’Connor gave me coffee. I’m fine. Thank you.”

  God, this was going to be as difficult as he’d feared. Maybe they’d do better without him. Nick said, “I’ll get you a cup too, Maggie.”

  “Thanks.”

  Nick went into the kitchen and let the little spaniel in from the porch, where she was huddling damply. “Welcome to the great reunion,” he muttered to her. He got out a mug and put it on the round oak table by the window.

  “Who brought you here, Ginny?” he could hear Maggie asking in the dining room. Changing the subject.

  “Nobody.”

  “You came by yourself?”

  “Yes.”

  Nick finished pouring the coffee and sidled through the swinging door so the dog couldn’t follow. Maggie took the mug without looking at it. He could sense the strain in her, the storm of emotion held under tight control. But her voice was pleasant and friendly. “Did you get my letters, Ginny?”

  “Letters?”

  “She didn’t give you the letters?”

  “Who?”

  “The caseworker. Mrs. Farnham. I wrote you a letter every year for your birthday. Just took one over Tuesday, in fact. The letters were supposed to go in the file, and then if you ever asked about me, you were supposed to get them.”

  Ginny looked stunned and shook her head wordlessly. Then she frowned. “Maybe I saw one. Did it have this address?”

  “No. It had to be nonidentifying. Very general. They all did.”

  “I mean on the envelope. The return address.”

  “Yes.” Maggie was puzzled now too. “But Mrs. Farnham wouldn’t have given that to you. Only nonidentifying stuff. And I thought she was going to wait until you were of age even for that.”

  “I sort of jumped the gun.” Ginny looked down at her cat, who was nuzzling her ankles. “Actually, Mrs. Farnham didn’t tell me anything.”

  “Your mother, then? Did she find out somehow?”

  “Her! She doesn’t know. Doesn’t want to know.”

  “You found out by yourself?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hey! How?” Maggie’s delighted approval was apparent. Nick could see that Ginny was caught off balance again. Whatever she’d expected, Maggie wasn’t it. The girl picked up her big cat and held him across her chest, a furry shield. They could hurt each other, she and Maggie. Nick, a helpless bystander, pulled out a chair from the table and sat down.

  “Cream, Maggie?” He reached for the little pitcher.

  “Oh. Thanks,” she said absently, holding her mug down so he could add it. She took a few sips, a little frown on her face, measuring the warring emotions in the girl’s silence. Finally she said, “Ginny, look. I’m glad you’re here. Incredibly glad. Let me tell you what I’m thinking, and you can just say if I’m right or wrong, okay?”

  “Yeah. Maybe.” Her nose was still buried in the cat’s gingery fur.

  “Okay. I think you’ve been curious about me for a long time, because that’s natural.”

  “Gram doesn’t think so.”

  “Well, I hate to disagree with Gram, but I think it’s natural. Because I’ve been curious as hell about you.”

  “Yeah.” There was a warm instant of fellow-feeling in the girl’s wary blue eyes.

  Maggie continued, “And you came today because it was your birthday.”

  “Partly. Yeah.”

  “And your parents don’t know you’re here.”

  She groped for an answer, then seemed to realize that her silence had already said it. “No, they don’t know,” she admitted. “They couldn’t handle it.”

  Maggie exchanged a quick glance with Nick. Bad news. But he knew already they could not send her back. He nodded briefly. Ginny caught the look and frowned angrily down at the cat in her arms. “Maybe I should call Mom.”

  “Okay,” said Maggie.

  Nick said, “The phone is in the kitchen.”

  “I’ll pay you back for it,” she said belligerently. Carrying Kakiy, she followed them into the kitchen. Zelle leaped up, interested, and Nick picked her up to avoid problems. But the cat merely blinked disdainfully at the little spaniel and set out on a tour of the countertop as soon as Ginny put him down. Nick sat by the oak table, Zelle in his lap.

  Maggie indicated the wall at the end of the counter. “It’s right there.”

  The girl stared down at her wet shoes, as though trying to think of what to say. Finally she dialed, stabbing her finger savagely at the phone. Someone answered almost immediately. Ginny said, “Hello, Mom…. Yeah, I’m fine. I just wanted to tell you not to worry… I’m in Philadelphia. It’s okay, I’m with friends… Just friends, okay? Don’t worry about it… Mom, for Chrissake, don’t flake out! I’m not dead, I’m not raped, I’m not kidnapped, I’m not mugged. I’m not even high. Everything’s mellow, okay? So just relax! I’ll call you later.”

  She slammed the receiver down and stood glaring at it, jaw clenched. Then she looked over her shoulder at Maggie, who was standing near Nick by the oak table.

  “Philadelphia,” said Maggie. “Okay.”

  “I lie a lot,” said Ginny defiantly.

  Maggie shrugged. “Sometimes necessary.”

  Ginny whirled on her, anger flaming. “Listen! I’m trying to be up-front with you, okay? I lie a lot. And I sleep around some. So I’m not what you wanted either, am I? So all right, just say the word again and I’ll leave!”

  “Is this a contest?” asked Maggie mildly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, hell, I’ve done all that stuff too.”

  Disbelief gleamed in the young eyes. Ginny waved her arm at the rows of spices, shiny pots and pans, bentwood chairs, Maggie in her trim blue plaid suit. “Uh-uh. This whole place is pure bourgeois respectability!”

  “Well, sure. If I feel like it, I’m respectable too.”

  “Well, I’m not!” Ginny flung her words like darts at Maggie. “I do drugs. I hang out with the so-called wrong crowd. I break rules.”
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  “So do I.”

  “Oh? Like what? Parked too long at some meter?”

  “Well, for example, when you were born, there was a rule that I couldn’t see you.”

  Nick looked up sharply at his wife, the knot of worry within him tightening. She shouldn’t expose her tenderest feelings to this angry young stranger! But then he saw that Ginny’s eyes had jerked up too and locked again with Maggie’s. His wife’s clear voice continued, “Back in 1963, they wouldn’t let mothers see babies who were going to be adopted. The idea was to erase the whole relationship. They took you away while I was still groggy from all the sedatives they used to give. But I’d checked out the hospital earlier, so I knew where the nursery was. They gave me sleeping pills, but I hid them instead of taking them. I didn’t want to be dopey. I was thinking of a plan.”

  All the defiance had drained from Ginny. Nick could see her voracious hunger to learn about her birth. She asked breathlessly, “A plan?”

  “Yes.” Maggie leaned back, hips propped against the table. “The problem was that only nurses were allowed in the nursery, and the entrance was next to the head nurse’s desk. A tough, really sharp-eyed woman. Sort of theMonitorand theMerrimac rolled into one. I thought I’d have to bash her with a bedpan.” A grin flickered across Ginny’s face. Maggie went on, “But luckily I overheard one of the younger nurses bragging that she’d brought her dress to work because her boyfriend was going to pick her up right after her shift ended. So I stole a sheet.”

  Nick stroked the little dog in his lap. He knew the story but had never heard these details before. Across the room Ginny was listening ravenously. She’d been there too, he realized. It hit him suddenly how excluded he was from what these two shared. Barred irrevocably. Nick the outsider. Ishmael O’Connor.

  Come off it, Nick old man, he scolded himself. Jealous pangs were pointless. Besides, Maggie might need him. Ginny was a live bomb, unpredictable, and able to wound Maggie as no one else in the world could.

  But at the moment, the live bomb was intent on Maggie’s story. “You stole a sheet?”

  “From the laundry cart. And just before the shift ended I sneaked into the nurse’s restroom and hid in a stall. Just as she’d said, the nurse who had the boyfriend came in to change. Took her dress out of a little suitcase and put her uniform in it. And while she was trying to pull her dress over her puffy sixties hairdo, I tiptoed out and whisked her uniform from the suitcase and substituted the sheet.”

  Engrossed by the story, her young face rapt, Ginny was lovely even with damp stringy hair and spattered clothes. That enthusiasm, those eyes, so like Maggie’s when he’d first seen her a dozen years ago. Ginny exclaimed, “God! Didn’t she notice you?”

  “Her dress was over her head. I dodged back into the stall like a flash. Hurt like hell, I remember. My stitches were brand new, and I wasn’t supposed to move fast. Anyway, I waited till she was gone, and then sneaked the uniform back to my bed and under my pillow. They’d left me another pain-killer pill. I saved it too, and waited for the night shift.”

  “Not so many people?”

  “Right. After dinner my roommate went to the john, and I put three pills on her table. When she came back I told her they’d left us more pills, and she took them all like a little lamb. And—” Maggie glanced at them both apologetically—“well, you bleed a lot after you’ve had a baby, you know.”

  They both nodded.

  “Well, I’d taken off my sanitary pad before dinner and I’d been carefully puddling onto my sheet.”

  “Gross!” Ginny was fascinated.

  “Okay, here’s the picture: Everybody goes home, and the night shift comes on. My lamb of a roommate is in a deep, deep sleep. I take my bloody sheet and arrange it around my poor roommate’s hips, then pour a glass of water on it so the stain becomes enormous and drippy.”

  “Ugh!” Ginny sounded delighted. Her mother’s daughter, Nick realized, sharing that irreverent glee in the unexpected that had drawn him to Maggie years ago.

  “Ugh isn’t the half of it,” Maggie admitted. “Next I pull on my nurse’s uniform and my bathrobe over it. I shuffle out to Nurse Merrimac and whine that I can’t sleep because my roommate is moaning wildly.”

  “And?”

  “She’s suspicious. Pops into my room, sees my roommate almost comatose with a tankful of blood dripping from the bed, and hits the alarm button. All the nurses, even the nursery attendant, come galloping to help her. Except one. She takes off her bathrobe and goes in to check the babies in the nursery.”

  “God!” Ginny was enchanted.

  “Most of the babies were asleep. I just poked along, reading the names on their little plastic bracelets.” Maggie’s voice had become softer. “Finally I hit Ryan. And I picked you up and held you. And it was the most wonderful thing in the world.”

  Ginny’s young face was taut, fighting tears. Then she seemed to notice the wetness in Maggie’s eyes too, and she hurled herself across the kitchen into Maggie’s arms. They clung to each other fiercely, as they hadn’t for sixteen years. Maggie murmured, “Oh, God. Oh, God.”

  Nick studied the swirling grain of the oak table.

  After a moment Ginny pushed herself away and asked rather gruffly, “Did they catch you?”

  “Not just then.” Maggie brushed a hand past her eyes and reluctantly let her arm drop from Ginny’s shoulder. “I wrapped my bathrobe in your baby blanket and left it in your crib, and took you into the supply closet and undressed you, very carefully, to see how you really looked.”

  “And how did I look?”

  “Terrific! Very tiny and very perfect. Except that you’d crapped all over your diaper.”

  Ginny giggled.

  “So I got a clean one from the shelf and changed you. You still had a big bandage over your navel. And then you woke up and started whimpering, so I nursed you a few minutes. You weren’t really very hungry. I think you just wanted attention.”

  “Probably.”

  “Hey, let’s go sit down.” They walked back into the dining room, smiling at each other, and sat down at the table. Nick decided that the first hurdle was safely crossed. Time to face the second. He eased Zelle to the floor and went into the front hall to put on his raincoat again.

  “Did they catch you?” Ginny was asking again.

  “Sure, they weren’t that dumb! One of the nurses came back,” Maggie said. “I guess they’d decided my poor old roommate wasn’t going to die after all. They gave me a real fire-and-brimstone scolding and hustled us both into our respective beds.” She looked at Ginny. “I thought about you all night long.”

  Nick could see the question trembling on Ginny’s lips, but she didn’t seem to be able to get it out directly. Instead she scowled at the bowl of apples on the dining room table and asked, “Why did you do all that if you were—if I was going to be adopted?”

  Buckling his trench coat, Nick felt his hands tense. How could you explain to a child? Especially to a child as angry as Ginny seemed to be? Nick wanted to enclose Maggie in his arms, to protect her from the hurt that was sure to come.

  But she was braver than he. She tried to explain. “I did it because I loved you very much. We’d already been together for nine months. A tough nine months. God, there were days when I thought you were my only friend.” Blinking, Maggie ran a finger along the edge of the table, then looked back at the girl. “I mean, I knew babies need families, and I was determined that you’d have the best. But you were my responsibility until I left the hospital and signed the relinquishment and release, so your real mom could take you home.”

  “But then—” Ginny stopped. It was hopeless, Nick saw; this was too much for one so young to absorb. Too much, and too subtle. She had not expected Maggie. And she could neither ask the question that burned in her nor understand the answers Maggie was struggling to give. Ginny grabbed an apple from the bowl and bit into it ferociously. “Hey,” she said, noticing Nick at the door and grasping wildly for a new subject, �
�where are you going, Mr. O’Connor?”

  Maggie said, “Ginny, do you think you could call us Nick and Maggie?”

  “Nick and Maggie?” The girl looked inquiringly at Nick.

  “I’d like that,” he agreed.

  “Okay. How come?”

  Maggie explained, “Well, it helps me to call you Ginny. I always thought of you as Alice when I made up stories about how you were doing. But you aren’t Alice, you’re yourself. It’ll be better if we don’t mix up our real selves with our imagination.”

  “You made up stories too?” she asked eagerly.

  “Of course. I thought about you a lot.”

  “Why Alice?”

  “My dad and I always liked the Carroll books.”

  “Alice in Wonderland?Crap!”

  Maggie grinned. “Reread it in a couple of years. It’s not bad.”

  “Maybe,” she said dubiously. The amazing blue eyes flashed back to Nick. “Anyway, where are you going, Mr.—um, Nick?”

  “I’m going to get some kitty litter,” said Nick, and waited for Maggie’s slight nod before he added, “and to pick up the children at playschool.”

  “Children!” Ginny’s spine jerked straight, and she stared at him.

  “Yes,” said Nick. “Your half-sister and half-brother.”

  “Oh, my God! I never thought of that!”

  “Never?” asked Maggie.

  Ginny shrugged. “Maybe sometimes.” She glanced at Nick. “I never thought of anyone like Nick. But sometimes I imagined my mother was very poor and had lots of children, and smiled and hugged them a lot.”

  “And made soup, probably,” added Maggie.

  “Yes.”

  “From old shoelaces.”

  “Something like that.” They smiled at each other.

  “A noble mother indeed,” said Nick.

  Maggie nodded. “Yes. But what the real Maggie actually has is a daughter going on seven and a son who’s three and a half. And generally I use noodles.”

  Ginny took a nervous bite of the apple. “A sister and brother. Just little kids.”