Father Found

by Judith Arnold

  “We’re standing on a street corner,” she managed to say.

  She could feel the curve of his smiling mouth against hers. He rocked his hips against hers, slowly but emphatically. “I’m so turned on, I don’t even care.”

  “I care.”

  “Then let’s go home.”

  “I can’t.” It emerged as a lament, her tone shimmering with regret.

  Slowly, terribly slowly, he let his hands fall from her. He bowed his head, resting his forehead against hers, and closed his eyes. His respiration was uneven, and his expression—what she could see of it—resonated with disappointment. “Can you tell me why? Is it the same stuff as Saturday night? I’m a sinner and you can’t forgive me?”

  “No,” she said honestly.

  “Ah, so I’ve received absolution.”

  “Jamie, listen to me.” She cupped her hands over his shoulders and leaned back until she could peer into his face. “You’ve got a lot of things going on in your life right now, what with the baby and the information your police detective dug up. You don’t know where you’re going. You can’t know until you’ve given it some thought. There’s no room for me in all that.”

  He offered a tentative smile. “I was hoping maybe you could help me figure out where I’m going.”

  He might as well have doused her with icy water. She felt her spine go slack, her spirits plummet. “That’s what I was afraid of.”

  One of his eyebrows quirked upward in puzzlement. “What do you mean?”

  “I can’t tell you how to handle your life, Jamie. And I don’t want to. You’ve got to work that out on your own.”

  “Why? I mean—I value your opinion, Allison. You’re a lot more clearheaded than I am. You know how to talk to babies. You know about women and their moods. I’m splashing around in the middle of the ocean without a life vest, and you’re a coast guard cutter.”

  Her spirits fell further. “I am not a coast guard cutter, Jamie. Do I look like a boat to you?”

  He drew back and eyed her up and down. “You look like a woman,” he murmured, his voice hoarse with revived passion. “Forget the boating metaphor. You look like the most tantalizing woman in the world.”

  “Save your breath,” she muttered, ordering herself not to let his flattery get to her. “The issue here is, maybe you’ve been in a shipwreck, but I don’t want to save you.” Not true—she did want to save him. Saving people came naturally to her. She enjoyed it. And if anyone was ever worth saving…

  No. She wouldn’t give in to the impulse. She wouldn’t let herself become involved with a man who depended on her to solve his problems for him. For her own sake, she wouldn’t do it.

  “I’m sorry, Jamie,” she said quietly, forcing resolve into her words. “I like you and I want things to work out for you. But you’ve got to work them out for yourself.” She swallowed to still the quiver in her voice. Gazing into his beautiful, stormy eyes made her want to weep, to hurl herself back into his arms and worry about the consequences once the damage was done. But that would make her no better than him, acting without a thought for the aftermath. If she became involved with him—more involved than she already was—she would wind up devastated. She wasn’t going to let passion blind her to that truth.

  “I don’t know if I can work things out without you,” he confessed.

  “You’ll have to,” she said, then brushed her fingertips lightly over his lips. “Let me know the minute you do. I’ll be waiting.”

  Before she could change her mind, before she could yield to her pleading heart, she spun around and raced across the street to the parking lot behind the YMCA. She didn’t dare look over her shoulder to see if he was watching her, following her, reaching out to her. She didn’t hear him call her back.

  YOU’LL BE WAITING, will you? he thought bitterly, watching her vanish behind a row of cars parked in the lot across the street. Well, maybe I won’t want you waiting. Maybe I won’t want you at all.

  Anger seared him, as caustic as battery acid. How could she walk away from him like that? Whatever burned between them went way beyond lust, although there was certainly plenty of that, too—on her part as well as his. She wanted him, he wanted her, and they were grown-ups. This should be a nobrainer.

  Except that it went beyond the obvious. What connected him and Allison wasn’t just an aria of harmonizing hormones like the duet he’d sung with Luanne Whoever in Eleuthera. This was complex. It was serious.

  He needed Allison. That would be bad enough—but he’d made it even worse by letting her know he needed her.

  How could she walk away?

  All right, then. He was going to have to stop needing her. The hell with her big green eyes and her long, luscious body. The hell with her expertise. He would get a book on fatherhood and learn everything there was to know about raising a daughter—or, God help him, he’d fess up to his folks and get some pointers from his mother. Because he was never ever going to Allison Winslow’s damned Daddy School class again.

  And she could go scrounge her own funds, too. He didn’t want her beholden to him, that was for sure.

  He gave her a few more minutes to drive out of the parking lot, then crossed the street. Samantha woke up and started to bawl. It figured. Jamie already felt like crud—why shouldn’t Sammy add to his misery? Actually, he found her caterwauling kind of cathartic, in a way. She was only doing what he wanted to do.

  That, he acknowledged, was yet another thing babies had over adults. They could pee whenever and wherever they wanted without the risk of getting arrested for public indecency or health code violations. They could take naps whenever the urge struck. They got carried everywhere or pushed around on a wheeled throne. They didn’t have to do their own burping if they didn’t want to; adults would manipulate their burping mechanism for them.

  And they could scream. When they were upset, when they were hungry or uncomfortable, when life wasn’t giving them what they needed the instant they needed it, they could holler to high heaven. When they were sad. When they were hurting. When they were afraid.

  “Scream away,” Jamie murmured, pushing the stroller through the parking lot to the Range Rover. “Scream your sweet little heart out, Sam. You’ve got to do the screaming for both of us tonight”

  A DAY PASSED without Allison in it. Twenty-four long, dreary hours. Amazingly, Jamie experienced a few minutes here and there during which he actually thought about something else.

  As days went, it really wasn’t so bad. Samantha actually slept for six hours straight overnight, which meant Jamie could spend those six uninterrupted hours in his own bed, blaming his inability to fall asleep on everything but the kid’s midnight hunger pangs and elimination habits. He lay on the bed, which suddenly seemed much too big for him to occupy alone, and contemplated what it was about Allison that had grabbed his imagination and refused to let go.

  It wasn’t just her appearance. He’d known women who were arguably prettier, or more curvaceous, or cuter. He’d certainly known women who dressed better. Except for their one dinner date, Allison was always clad in nurse’s white. White was such a virginal shade.

  It wasn’t just the way she kissed, either. She kissed both deeply and shyly, and it was an intoxicating combination. She always seemed a bit startled when Jamie kissed her, as if she weren’t sure she was supposed to experience such a rush of pleasure. But she did experience it, and she didn’t retreat. She gave back all the pleasure she got and then some.

  The way her body moved against him when they kissed, the softness of her breasts, the sleek shape of her. The way her hips had found his, the way her thighs had cradled him…But it wasn’t just her sensuality that got to him.

  So what was it? Her priggish, prudish morality? That was usually the sort of thing that turned him off.

  Her competence? Yeah, right.

  It was something else, and he spent his rare six-hour stretch of tranquility in bed trying to figure it out. Fragments of ideas snagged in his brain. The w
ay she talked to Samantha. The way she held the baby and studied her face and seemed genuinely taken with the kid. That was part of it.

  The way he’d felt, all warm and tight in the region of his solar plexus, when she’d asked him what he would want if his dreams could come true, and he’d almost blurted out, “You. If my dreams could come true, I’d want you in my house, in my life, helping me to raise my daughter. I’d want you to be Sammy’s mother and my wife, and the three of us would pull this gig off together.”

  He still couldn’t believe she would walk away from him when he was feeling that way. It just didn’t seem possible that she couldn’t have felt as attached to him as he felt to her.

  Thus he’d endured the night, alternately awestruck that he had found a woman who could help him through the greatest challenge in his life and infuriated that the woman didn’t want to be bothered with him until he’d gotten through that challenge on his own. By the time Samantha did her impersonation of an air-raid siren at around five that morning, he’d given up on his one big chance for a restful night.

  He tried, he really tried not to think about Allison all day. He spent some time at his computer, pushing and pulling concepts for his column in the hope they would take a shape he could recognize. He tried feeding Samantha while he wrote, holding her in his lap, propping her on his shoulder and leaving her on a blanket spread across the floor of his office, but she wouldn’t have any of it. She fussed and fussed. She was cranky and crabby, red-faced and moist-eyed. Nothing satisfied her. After a while, Jamie started to view her as the physical incarnation of his mental state.

  “What’s with you, toots?” he asked her at one point. She was lying on her belly across his knees, and he’d actually managed to write a few good paragraphs for his essay about a mother’s notion of a perfect female companion for her adult son. Samantha seemed determined to prove that she was not the perfect female companion for Jamie. She wept and slobbered so much, he had to change into fresh jeans because the ones in which he’d started the day were soaked at the knees.

  He held her against his chest and she whimpered. He’d learned through trial and error that this was one of her preferred positions, with her face pressed to his sternum and her hands pawing his pecs. He wondered if she was looking for lactating mammaries, but she never complained about the lack of them when he held her that way, with his hands cupped securely around her well-padded bottom and his chin resting against her pale, downy hair. Usually she piped down within a minute when he held her on his chest, as if just resting against his beating heart was enough to soothe her.

  It wasn’t enough today. She continued to fuss. She clawed at him, her shiny pink nails pinching his T-shirt. She mewled and left patches of saliva on the front of the shirt. Sweat seeped through her scalp and left her hair matted and damp.

  Something was bugging her, and he didn’t know what. Allison would know, but he pushed that thought from his mind. Samantha was warm, probably from all her squirming and fretting. He ran his hand gently over her hair, brushing the wet locks back from her face. She peered at him, her face scrunched into a scowl, her complexion mottled.

  “Okay, pal. You don’t want me to work? We’ll do it your way.” He saved what he’d written, rolled back in his chair, hooked his pinkie through the handle of his empty coffee cup and carried Samantha out of his office, down the hall to the kitchen. He refilled the cup, then journeyed on to the den. If he couldn’t finish his column, he might as well vegetate for a while in front of the tube.

  He sank onto the oversize couch, slouching deep into the cushions so Samantha was practically horizontal as she cuddled against his chest. Wielding the remote, he switched on the TV. He rarely watched daytime television, and he was mildly amused to find it every bit as wretched as he’d always heard. On one talk show, three young men were gleefully discussing how they’d cheated on their girlfriends with their girlfriends’ best friends. Another talk show featured a young woman who boasted of having had three breast augmentation surgeries and was planning to have a butt lift soon. A third talk show had as its theme X-rated dentists. Jamie didn’t even want to think about that.

  He pressed the channel changer button, and the screen filled with professional wrestlers. A bulky gentleman dressed in what appeared to be a caveman’s animal skins pontificated into the camera about the many savageries he was hoping to inflict on his opponent “Hey, Sam, this looks good,” Jamie remarked, turning her so she could watch. “See that guy? That’s Waterloo Walt Riley. Listen to him. He says he’s going to tear Pit-Bull Howland’s head off. What do you think, Sam? Can he do that?”

  She issued a teary sigh.

  Jamie recalled the last time he’d watched pro wrestling on the tube. It had been at Steve’s cabin on Lake Waramaug on Jamie’s thirtieth birthday— that glorious weekend before his life had been reduced to changing diapers and indulging in adolescent dreams about a prickly, uptight nurse with gorgeous hair. He had staggered into the cabin’s living room late Saturday morning, after having slept in, and he’d found Steve nursing a cup of coffee and watching Waterloo Walt go at it in the ring with the Mongoose. The two overfed, grunting men had tossed each other around, pretended to yank each other’s hair and stomped their feet for a sound effect every time they threw a punch. Jamie had scarcely paid attention; he’d been intent on mainlining some caffeine, after which he and Steve were going to take the boat out on the lake.

  He could use some caffeine now, but to get it would require leaning forward to reach the cup he’d left on the table in front of the couch. He finally had Samantha semicalm, and he didn’t want to jostle her. He satisfied himself with the robust aroma wafting up from his mug and adjusted the baby more comfortably on his torso.

  She wriggled against him, her hair still damp, her eyes blinking and her hand working its way into her mouth. On the screen across the cozy, paneled room, the two wrestlers were jawing at each other. Jamie wondered what Sam thought of those guys yelling that way. No one had ever yelled at Samantha, at least not since she’d arrived in Arlington. Occasionally Jamie wanted to yell at her, but mostly he kept his complaints to an assortment of grumbled curses.

  He didn’t have to yell at her, but he was supposed to talk to her. That was Allison’s advice to new fathers. Jamie couldn’t talk to Samantha the way Allison could, but he could share his thoughts on this professional wrestling show with her.

  “Okay, now see that guy?” he explained, pointing at the TV. “That’s Pit-Bull Howland. He’s the bad guy. How do I know that? You might well ask.”

  Samantha thumped her head against his chest and poked her foot against the buckle of his belt.

  “I hate to be the one who tells you this, honey, but if you can’t trust your father to be honest with you, who can you trust? So, here’s the down and dirty—professional wrestling is fixed. It’s all a show, not a sport. These guys work out together, they choreograph their moves, and everyone knows in advance who’s going to win and who’s going to lose. I know, it’s really sad that you have to learn the facts of life at such a tender age, but I’m not going to lie to you about this. Professional wrestling is bogus.”

  She gurgled.

  “All right, so I haven’t turned you into a cynic yet. Now Waterloo isn’t really going to tear the Pit-Bull’s head off. They just talk like that. It’s a lot of verbiage. Totally meaningless.”

  She gurgled again.

  “Yeah, kind of like the way you talk. Unlike Allison, who doesn’t open her mouth unless she’s going to say something so reasonable it makes you sick. That’s a real problem with Allison. She’s always so gosh-darn reasonable. Gosh-darn is a euphemism, by the way. Can you say euphemism?”

  Samantha slurped on her thumb and forefinger.

  “You know, I try to talk to the woman, I try to invite her to go with the flow, listen to her body, do what comes naturally. It’s not like she needs a whole hell of a lot—I mean, a whole heck of a lot—of persuasion. She’s as interested in getting up close an
d personal with me as I am with her. This is definitely a mutual situation. The only problem is…Holymoly, did you see that? The Pit-Bull just threw Waterloo across the ring. You know how much that guy weighs? Two-fifty, easy. Maybe more. Jeez, did you see the way the Pit-Bull tossed him? Like he weighed no more than a tennis ball.”

  Samantha grunted. That meant that either her digestive system was pushing her most recent meal through the final inch of her intestine or she was choking on her thumb. Her thumb still seemed to be attached to her hand, though, and he smelled no foul odors emanating from her diaper area. Maybe she was just grunting in imitation of the two wrestlers.

  “So, where was I? Allison.” He took a deep breath and shook his head. “Allison wants to make love with me, Sammy. I know she does. I hope I’m not shocking you—when you hit puberty, I’ll make sure someone explains this stuff to you. But in the meantime…The trouble with Allison is, she thinks I have to have every last detail of my life worked out before she can get close to me. Does that make sense?”

  Samantha’s attention was riveted to the television screen, where Waterloo was now prevailing. He was faking punches to the Pit-Bull’s blubbery stomach, growling and stamping his foot and creating a grand, dramatic impression of brutality. Samantha growled right along with him.

  Great. His daughter was going to learn her linguistic skills from a televised broadcast of professional wrestling. “I think I’d better switch the channel,” he conceded. But just as he positioned his thumb on the channel button, Waterloo started pulling the Pit-Bull around the ring by his hair. This was too good to miss. “Don’t ever pull someone’s hair, Sam,” he lectured her. “Remember, those guys are professionals. Don’t try this at home.”

  Samantha chirped. For a kid who couldn’t utter a single recognizable word, she certainly had quite a vocabulary of noises. And given that professional wrestling was kind of preverbal anyway, Jamie supposed it was just as well that he let her watch the mayhem. She was probably the perfect age for it intellectually.