RSVP...Baby

by Pamela Browning

  In the face of Tia’s discomfort, Bianca couldn’t worry about whether or not Neill got a good look. She picked up the baby and cradled her close. She stroked the flaxen hair, nuzzled the rosy dimpled cheek. Tia only cried louder. In desperation, Bianca offered the pacifier, which Tia promptly spit into the petunia bed. “Hush, cara,” she whispered, hoping that her eyeliner hadn’t left a telltale smear on her cheek.

  “Why is that baby crying?” demanded Nana, heading toward the pram.

  Bianca kept shushing, and Nana kept wobbling in her direction.

  “That baby’s crying sounds like hornets buzzing inside my hearing aid,” Nana said fitfully. “Kevin, let’s go into the hotel. I’m going to teach you the rhumba,” she said as she improvised a few hip-twitching steps. Kevin tried unsuccessfully to hide his dismay as Nana dragged him toward the French doors opening onto the terrace.

  Neill poked around in the flower bed before retrieving the pacifier. “Here,” he said, holding it out to Bianca.

  Bianca squinted. “I can’t see a thing,” she said. “Contact lens problem.” In one fell scoop, she yanked the baby’s bag out of the pram and headed across the tiny creek bridge toward the gazebo, inconveniently banging her ankle on the curving leg of a white wrought-iron settee as she went She ignored the pain, desperate to get away.

  Hysteria rose in her throat when Neill followed her. How appropriate, she said to herself. The two of us on our way to the gazebo again, a year later. With Tia.

  She stumbled into the gazebo hoping she wouldn’t find Caro and Eric. Her ankle hurt where she’d hit it, but inside were inviting shadows and a surrounding fragrance of nearby lilac bushes blooming in profusion. Bianca sank down on the wide chintz-covered seat with Tia balanced on her lap. The baby kicked away the blanket as Neill sat down beside them. Tia’s bootee had come off. Bianca found the bootee and shoved it back on the tiny foot. Then she wrapped the blanket tightly again, but not before shooting a panic-stricken look at Neill out of the corners of her eyes.

  He couldn’t have seen Tia’s foot, Bianca told herself. He’d been looking the other way. Hadn’t he? To hide her confusion and rising panic, Bianca lowered her head so that her hair fell forward to screen her face.

  Tia was still screaming at the top of her lungs, and Bianca pleaded, “Hush, oh please hush.” Her eyelids grated and her eyeballs felt gritty from lack of sleep, or maybe there was a speck of dust on her contact lens, or maybe she was going to cry again.

  “Give me the kid,” Neill said, raising his voice to be heard over Tia’s cries.

  Bianca’s first horrified reaction was No! But Neill reached out for the baby, and her eye was flooding, and before she knew it he was holding Tia. The baby immediately stopped screaming and gazed up at him, clearly puzzled.

  With tears streaming down her cheeks and her stomach clenching, Bianca groped in the baby’s bag and wrapped her fingers around the bottle.

  “Here,” she said in desperation. “I think she’s hungry.”

  Neill, rocking the baby uncertainly against his broad chest, stared first at the baby, then at the bottle. “You want me to feed her?” he said.

  “Well, I can’t. I have to figure out what’s doing with my contact lens. Can’t see a thing.” She wanted Tia safely back in her arms, and soon.

  Neill tentatively offered the bottle to the baby. Tia stopped crying, latched onto the nipple, and didn’t make another peep.

  Bianca hauled out a lens case and saline solution and a small mirror. “Maybe my lens has floated up under my eyelid,” Bianca said. Not that she thought Neill cared. He held the baby awkwardly, looking all elbows and thumbs, or maybe it only appeared that way because she couldn’t really see. But Tia remained quiet, thank goodness.

  “She likes it,” Neill said in surprise.

  “She must be hungry. Oh, I do wish Franny would show up.”

  “Who’s—”

  “I think I’ve found it. The lens, I mean. It’s way over in the corner.” Bianca tilted her head back and lifted her eyelid with a cautious finger.

  “Franny shouldn’t have gone off and left you to mind her baby,” Neill said.

  Bianca froze, which wasn’t the most comfortable reaction considering that the tip of her finger was wedged in the corner of her eye socket.

  “She didn’t,” Bianca said cautiously. She held her breath, waiting to see where this conversational avenue would lead.

  “You volunteered? Well, Bianca, what’s the deal? Are you trying to redeem yourself after last year’s debacle? Doing a little public relations work to prove you’re not as bad as they think you are?” He spoke teasingly, but his words stung. She was responsible for the ruckus at the engagement party. She’d even tried to get out of this bridesmaid stint, but Caroline, playing the guilt card, had insisted that Bianca show up.

  “I’m not as bad as they think I am,” Bianca said indignantly. A little indignance was a good idea; it impressed people with one’s sincerity as long as it wasn’t overdone. And in this case, it was her natural reaction.

  “I know that. But does the bride’s mother? Listen, Bianca, if you need help with Gen, let me know.”

  “Mmm,” she muttered in a tone that didn’t exactly convey assent.

  “Why don’t we do this—when Franny reclaims her baby, we’ll go back out into the garden and we’ll make a point of greeting Gen.” Neill shifted Tia against his chest.

  Without comment, Bianca continued to work at the lens, which had not only lodged itself at the outer limits of her eyeball but seemed to have arranged itself in accordion folds. She knew that she should stop right here and tell Neill who Franny really was—the baby-sitter.

  But even though Bianca couldn’t see well at the moment, one possibility stood out with twenty-twenty clarity: She could let Neill think Franny was the baby’s mother. Tia would be out of sight most of the weekend anyway, and there would be so much going on that maybe, just maybe, it might work. Everybody at this wedding would be better off if no one found out that Tia was her own child, born three months before.

  Only Eric knew. But he’d keep his mouth shut.

  Except did she want to deny her own child? The baby she loved so much and of whom she was so proud?

  No. No. How could she? Tia was part of her, part of her life.

  “This baby’s cute. She’s like a real little human, isn’t she?” Neill said in a conversational tone.

  “Of course she’s a human,” Bianca snapped irritably, caught up in the disloyalty of her deception. Well, it wasn’t exactly deception yet. But it could be.

  “I meant that she’s apparently got all her fingers and toes and everything, only in miniature.” He sounded amazed, then abashed. “I don’t think I’ve ever held a baby before.”

  Fingers and toes. With a foreshadowing of doom, Bianca prayed that he wouldn’t demand to see the toes. They were webbed, like the toes of every natural-born Bellamy she’d ever met.

  Bianca believed in bold strokes, both in life and in design, and in this case she had an opportunity to design her life. In that moment, Bianca knew she had to try to pull it off. She wouldn’t like it. It seemed unnatural to pretend that she wasn’t a mother. She enjoyed being a mother. Loved it, really. Tia had added an unexpected joyful dimension to her life that she could never have imagined beforehand.

  But it would make these four days so much easier if no one knew that this was her baby. Or could speculate who the father might be.

  If I can pull this off, I’m the world’s best actress, she thought. Forget Helen Hunt, forget Meryl Streep, forget Holly Hunter. Next year’s Academy Award could go to—ta—dah!—Bianca D’Alessandro! In your dreams, she told herself. This performance would have to be secret.

  “Uh-oh, she’s pushing the bottle away,” Neill said in alarm.

  Bianca, having made a momentous decision, said, “You need to burp her.” Her eye felt as if it were being stabbed with daggers. Her heart, too.

  “Burp?” Neill said.

>   “Hold her over your shoulder and pat.”

  Neill flopped Tia onto the front of his blazer. “Pat what?”

  “Her back.” She now saw two Neills and two Tias.

  Tia started to fuss.

  Bianca stopped concentrating on unpleating her contact lens. “For heaven’s sake, Neill, just pat her gently.”

  “I am,” he said in a voice that told her he was losing patience.

  “Not on her bottom. On her back” The lens unglued itself and floated jellyfishlike to the middle of her eyeball. She could see.

  What she saw when things swam into focus was a wriggly baby draped haphazardly over Neill’s sleeve.

  “I’d better take her,” Bianca said unsteadily, holding out her arms. As uncomfortable as Neill looked at this moment, he was one magnificent specimen. She’d been better off when she couldn’t see him. At least then she’d been immune to his dark smoldering gaze, which was focused on her. Or maybe on the baby. Whatever and whoever, it unnerved her.

  Bianca held Tia close for a moment, loving her and wishing beyond hope that she was able to provide the kind of close-knit family life that she had never had herself. Then she arranged Tia tenderly on her lap and slowly massaged the little back. Tia promptly spit up on her skirt.

  “Do they all do that?” Neill asked.

  Bianca, operating on emotional overload, blotted wearily at the spot with a tissue. “I think so,” she said as Tia began to cry, this time in earnest.

  Tia wouldn’t be comforted, and knowing that she had to do something, anything, Bianca tossed everything into the baby bag and charged out of the gazebo and into the midst of the party.

  “Bianca, wait,” Neill called after her. Bianca didn’t know what he wanted to say to her, and she didn’t care. She was determined to find Franny, the manager’s daughter, who had assured her over the phone that she needed money for college and would be available to baby-sit whenever. But somehow they’d gotten their wires crossed, and when Bianca had arrived earlier with the baby, Franny was away from the hotel at some post-high-school-graduation bash.

  Well, Franny’d had more than enough time to get back by now. Which meant that Bianca could hand Tia over. Quickly. Vite, as they said in Italy. Which was where Bianca, who was half-Italian, wished she were at this moment. Faraway Italy sounded a heap better than Rhode Island by this time.

  Because if she and Tia were in Italy, Neill Bellamy wouldn’t have the slightest chance to figure out that Tia was her baby. And his.

  Chapter Two

  “Punch anyone?” inquired a white-coated waiter as he advanced a tray full of cups in her direction.

  “I’d certainly like to, but I really wouldn’t know where to start,” said Bianca through gritted teeth, leaving the waiter staring after her in perplexity.

  Neill accepted a cup of punch as the waiter swept by. He tried to fathom what Bianca was up to. She had deposited the baby in the pram and was pushing through the crowd with stolid determination. Everyone was munching on little sandwiches; Neill snapped one up from a tray and grimaced when it turned out to be watercress. He pitched the sandwich into the nasturtiums and decided he needed some decent food. He hadn’t eaten a real meal all day.

  The baby was crying louder than ever. Somehow the wails galvanized him into action.

  “Why don’t you give her this?” Neill said, catching up to them. He pulled the pacifier out of his blazer pocket.

  Bianca regarded it disdainfully. “It’s dirty and smushed and might give her some awful earthworm disease.”

  “Maybe there’s a spare in her bag,” Neill said hopefully.

  “Hello, Neill,” said a voice at his rear. It was Winnie, Caroline’s flaky younger sister. Winsome Winnie, as Eric called her. He and his brother had a difference of opinion on that subject. Winnie, in Neill’s opinion, was a prime candidate for the Dingbat of the Year award. If she had a brain, it consisted of canned vanilla pudding. Still, he was mindful of a sexual aspect to her bold-breasted strut, which thrust her most significant attributes toward him like a tray of fruit.

  “Hi, Winnie,” he said, keeping his eye on Bianca and the pram, still plowing toward the front of the hotel.

  “Been out on Black Jack lately?” Winnie fluttered her eyelashes at him.

  “Yesterday,” Neill said. In the week since he’d arrived, Winnie had insisted that he exercise her horse, a recent birthday gift from her father even though the stallion was way too much horse for her. Neill, an excellent rider, had been only too happy to oblige. It had given him something to do while everyone else was going ga-ga over the wedding.

  Winnie sidled closer. “Would you mind getting me some punch?”

  “Here. You can have mine.” Neill pressed his cup into Winnie’s hands and left her gaping after him as he ran hell-bent-for-leather after Bianca.

  He was desperate to get out of the blazer and tie. In full revolt, he ripped the tie off and stuck it in his pocket. He never wore ties except for family functions, where they were considered de rigueur. He hated family get-togethers; he didn’t like families. Which was why, when considering possible career options after graduating from Harvard Business School, he had put a whole continent between him and the Bellamys.

  And even that wasn’t enough space. Once this wedding was over, he was going to climb Mount Everest, which you could do if you were reasonably fit and had $75,000 to spare. Neill was and did. He was pretty sure he wouldn’t find any Bellamys or Knoxes or Lamberts on the top of Everest. Then again, you never could tell. They tended to pop up in unlikely places.

  Bianca, he’d already decided, wasn’t any more enamored of this family than he was. Which was why he thought it might be pleasant to invite her to his room for a drink.

  Well, to be honest, that wasn’t it. He’d like to get her in the sack again. Or in the sack, period. Last time—well, the only time—he and Bianca had made love, they hadn’t even been near a bed. Except for afterward, when he’d scooped her up into his arms and carried her up the twisted little flight of stairs to her hotel room and tucked her in. She’d said something funny, like “Isn’t bed the best invention ever?” She’d looked adorably cute in that moment, and it was all he could do not to stay.

  But he didn’t think it would look right if someone saw him sneaking out of her room the next morning. And so he’d administered a chaste kiss to her forehead and left. He thought they’d see each other in the morning, at which time he’d suggest that she pay him a lengthy visit in South America. But when he went to Bianca’s room the next day, she had already gone. He hadn’t heard from her since.

  Which seemed, now, like a shame. Last year, he’d halfway fallen in love with her, which was about as much as he thought he could fall in love with anyone. He wasn’t the kind of guy to have long relationships; he was a chip off the old block. Well, maybe not quite. He’d never committed to a woman in his life. He’d never said the words, I love you to anyone.

  Any Bellamy wedding was bound to be stressful. Things happened at Bellamy weddings. Crazy things. Off-the-wall things, like the time when Budge married Rhonda and a sudden storm had ripped the roof off the yacht-club dining room in the interval between the vichyssoise and the salmon course. Or the second wedding of his mother to his father when Budge had shown up in tennis shoes with his wedding finery and his mother wouldn’t many him until he went home and changed shoes. He’d come back wearing bedroom slippers just for spite. The Chicago Tribune had printed his picture in those slippers, too.

  Yes, Bianca to warm his bed during this ordeal, and, briefly, his heart—now that had possibilities. She was the only other person here who knew he’d rather be somewhere else. And so would she.

  He caught up with Bianca near where he’d parked his rented car on the drive in front of the lobby. She’d been talking with the bellman, and her shoulders slumped dejectedly. The baby was still crying. Bianca’s eyes, he noticed, were smudged with exhaustion, and she looked at her wit’s end.

  “Franny’s not ba
ck,” Bianca muttered.

  Who the hell is Franny? Neill wanted to ask, not for the first time, but then he recalled that reddish-brunette with the long thick hair who had accompanied one of the other bridesmaids, Lizzie, uninvited. That must be Franny.

  “And Tia won’t go to sleep without her Binky.”

  “Excuse me?” Neill was feeling confused. Confusion wasn’t unusual, considering that this was a Bellamy wedding. One of the many Bellamy weddings he’d attended in his life.

  “That’s what Tia’s pacifier is called. A Binky.”

  Binky rhymed with slinky, a word that accurately described Bianca in her clingy black knit. Which smelled, he noticed with a twitch of his nostrils, like baby puke.

  Suddenly he’d had enough. Bianca was ridiculously involved with this baby that wasn’t even hers, and who knew what she was up to? Who ever knew what Bianca would do next? Here he’d actually been thinking that maybe they could console each other during this ordeal when she’d already shot him down by greeting him so nonchalantly and without even the slightest flicker of pleasure.

  So maybe sex with him hadn’t been the big thrill for her that it had for him. That was humiliating. Did he want to let himself in for more of the same? A few wild nights, then goodbye again, so long, nice to see you, and so what? Did he, Neill Bellamy, need this?

  Absolutely not. What Neill really needed was a Burger King Whopper. You couldn’t get those in the part of Colombia where he lived most of the year; rice and beans and wild boar meat was what he lived on much of the time.

  “Look, I’m leaving. See you around,” he said gruffly, wheeling and heading in the direction of his rented convertible. He shrugged out of his blazer as he went.

  “I was just going to ask you if you had a car I could borrow,” Bianca called after him when he was half in and half out of the convertible. A note of desperation in her voice stopped him in his tracks. She looked absolutely gorgeous and as if she might drop where she stood in front of the hotel. The black dress made those shadows under her eyes seem darker than they probably were; while he watched, she skimmed her hair back with one hand, and he thought he detected that her hand was trembling. Why it was trembling he wasn’t sure, except that it might have something to do with hunger.