Gift of Grace

by Inglath Cooper

  “Just give me a sec,” she said.

  Less than five minutes later, she was back with Sally-Mae, the little quarter-horse mare she’d been riding the past twenty years. She never used a saddle, preferring to ride bareback. The mare was as wide as a sofa, and basically had one gear: slow walk.

  They ambled out across the field, the two horses touching noses in greeting, both emitting short, excited whinnies. Neither Caleb nor his mother said anything for a good while, but rode in quiet companionship as they had many other times.

  It was the kind of day that made a person grateful to be outdoors. The April sunshine was warm on their backs, a light breeze lifting the heat from their skin.

  “I saw her,” Caleb finally said, feeling his mother’s gaze settle on him and yet unable to look at her for the concern he knew would have sprung to her eyes.

  “Who, son?” she asked, her voice careful.

  “Laney’s baby.”

  Catherine stopped her horse and dropped the reins. “What did you say?”

  Caleb still couldn’t look at her, didn’t think he could stand to see the fresh grief on her face. “She’s three, and she looks so much like Laney, you’d swear you were seeing a ghost.”

  Catherine slid off the mare, stood there in stunned silence while her horse began to graze.

  Caleb got off and ground tied his own horse. The mare dropped her head to the green grass, as well. He allowed himself a glance at his mother, then abruptly turned away, the pain in her eyes too much a reflection of what was in his own heart.

  “Are you sure?” she asked, the question breaking in half at the end.

  He nodded once.

  She came to him then, put her arms around him and began to cry. They held each other for a long time, encircled by sorrow as fresh as yesterday.

  “I’m sorry, Mom,” Caleb finally said. “I shouldn’t have put you through this all over again.”

  “Oh, son, I would hope you’d never consider keeping it to yourself. You’ve carried too much of this alone as it is.”

  He set his gaze on the horizon, struggled for a foothold against the anguish raging inside him. “Did I do the right thing, Mom?”

  “In giving her up?”

  He nodded.

  “That child was as much a victim of what happened to Laney as the rest of us. How could you have accepted her then, and who could blame you? You’d just been through months and months of pure hell. She would have represented all of that, and no child should start life with that mantle hung on her. You gave her innocence, Caleb.”

  “I didn’t do it for her, Mom,” he said, shaking his head. “I did it for me. I look at her, and all I see is Laney. No one else. Just Laney.”

  Again, pain flashed over his mother’s still beautiful face. “How did this happen?”

  “She came into the store with the woman who adopted her. She’s a professor at the university.”

  Catherine sighed, the sound coming from deep inside her, heavy, burdened. “Does she seem happy?”

  “Yes. She’s beautiful. And there’s this…glow to her. I can’t explain it. Angelic almost.”

  “Caleb.” She hesitated, visibly searching for words. “Find your peace in this. The child is loved. Wanted. Let her go, and get on with your life. You’ve grieved for so long. You’re a young man. There’s so much more for you out there if you will just let it in. Give someone else a chance. Make another life for yourself.”

  They were words she’d wanted to say to him for a long time. Caleb knew this. For three years, he had remained in neutral, moving nowhere, simply existing, as if waiting for life to do a rapid-fire reverse, give him a chance to make another choice, to go with his wife the day she’d innocently driven away from the farm and never come back.

  His mother put her hand on his arm, gave it a pleading squeeze. “It’s time, son. Maybe that’s why this happened. Maybe you needed to see that the child was all right before you could go on with your life.”

  “Maybe so,” he said.

  Why then didn’t the answer fit the shape of the hole inside him?

  JEB WENT TO the Whole Foods Market in Charlottesville and bought Catherine’s favorite things for dinner that night. Atlantic salmon for grilling, baby spinach leaves for a salad and a bar of ridiculously expensive unsweetened German chocolate, which they both agreed made the best brownies imaginable.

  He got home around four-thirty, knowing she wouldn’t be back from her hair appointment until nearly six.

  He removed everything from the grocery bags, then got busy mixing ingredients for the brownies, popping them into a preheated oven and setting the timer so he’d remember to take them out when they were still soft in the middle.

  Next, he made a cilantro marinade for the salmon, drizzled it over the steaks and set them in the refrigerator. Pulling an oversize bowl from the kitchen cabinet, he threw in the spinach, diced an onion and a cucumber and made a dressing of olive oil and lemon juice.

  With fifteen minutes to spare, he ran upstairs and took a quick shower, dressing in jeans and a light blue shirt she’d once said she liked him in.

  When he heard her footsteps in the foyer, he popped the cork on a bottle of chardonnay and poured two glasses.

  She walked into the kitchen, stopping in the doorway with a look of surprise on her face.

  He lifted both glasses and handed her one. “Happy anniversary, Cath,” he said.

  She stared at him, started to say something, then stopped. A sob broke free from her throat. “Oh, Jeb,” she said. “I forgot.”

  He reached out to put a hand on her shoulder. “Hey,” he said, “it’s all right. Didn’t I forget once a few years ago? So we’re even.”

  She dropped into a kitchen chair, her face in her hands, crying in earnest now.

  He knelt down in front of her. “What’s wrong, Catherine? This has to be about more than forgetting our anniversary.”

  She shook her head, drew in a deep breath, and looked up at him. “Caleb stopped by this afternoon. He saw the child.”

  A heavy pause and then he said, “What child?”

  “Laney’s child.”

  Jeb sat back on his heels, disbelief thrumming through him. “How?”

  “In the store. With the woman who adopted her.”

  He stood, raking a hand through his hair. “What did Caleb say?”

  “He’s confused. Questioning the decision he made to give her up.”

  “There was no other choice.”

  Catherine didn’t answer right away, then said, “That’s what I thought, too. But since he left here, I keep thinking, what if he hadn’t given her up? In that child, he would still have a part of Laney.”

  Jeb stared at his wife, unable to believe what he was hearing. “It’s done, Cath. Irreversible.”

  She bit her lip. “Is it?”

  He shook his head, glanced at the table he’d set with their wedding china. “I keep thinking we’re going to get past this. That one day we’ll be able to put this awful thing behind us. But I’ve been wrong, haven’t I? I’ve been wrong.”

  THAT NIGHT, CALEB SAT OUT on the porch again, the radio’s poignant offering identifiable to him only as Puccini.

  He fell asleep sometime around midnight. The dream was immediate, as if waiting only for him to close his eyes. His wife as beautiful as the day he’d married her, except she was crying. Her face ravaged by grief.

  He tried to go to her, held out his hand, but she remained just out of reach. He called her name. She couldn’t hear him. Fear welled inside him, his heart a pounding drum.

  He could not get to her, could not save her now as he had been unable to save her before.

  He awoke abruptly, sat straight up in the chair, pain searing his chest. A whip-poor-will called out from a nearby tree. The radio had lost its music. Static hummed in the air.

  Caleb gripped the arms of the old rocker, his knuckles white against the dark grain. And he understood then in the deepest part of himself that all
this time, Laney’s tears had not been for herself, but for the child he had given away.

  ON THE FOLLOWING FRIDAY, Sophie worked in her campus office to catch up on grading the papers her British lit class had turned in the day before. Sophie liked to stay on top of her workload, getting essays or tests back to her students by the next class when possible. She reasoned that if she expected promptness from them, she expected it from herself as well.

  A knock sounded on her closed door.

  “Come in,” she called out.

  The door opened and Caleb Tucker stepped inside.

  Sophie sat back in her chair, one hand at her chest. A dozen questions scattered through her thoughts, each too slippery to get a hold on. Two things registered. The room seemed considerably smaller than it had just moments before. And she wished she’d chosen something to wear other than the plain jeans and white T-shirt she’d pulled from the closet that morning.

  She stood. “Caleb. Come in. What a surprise.”

  He closed the door behind him, his face set, serious. His gaze swept the office, lingering for a moment on the framed degrees on the wall behind her. B.A. Master’s. Ph.D. “I wondered if I might have a few minutes of your time,” he said.

  Sophie’s heart kicked up its pace for no reason she could explain other than that this man had crept into her thoughts repeatedly over the past few weeks. To find him standing in her office was more than a little unsettling.

  “Sit down, please,” she said, waving a hand at the chair in front of her desk.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I’m fine.”

  Her initial surprise at seeing him gave way to an inexplicable unease. “What can I do for you, Caleb?”

  He went to the window and stared out at the manicured lawn with its neatly pruned boxwood hedges. Sophie studied the set of his shoulders, centered, it seemed, with some rigid tension she only just now noticed.

  He turned and looked at her, his eyes heavy with pain. “There’s no easy way for me to say this, so I’ll just put it straight out. I believe my wife gave birth to the little girl you adopted.”

  The words came at her in slow motion, as if they’d been delivered from miles and miles away. She dropped into the chair behind her, her legs suddenly unable to support her. “What did you say?”

  He pulled a photo from his pocket and handed it to her.

  She stared at it, leaden fear settling in her stomach. The picture had obviously been taken years ago, but the child captured there could have been Grace. A fingerprint could not have been more telling.

  “I made an awful mistake,” he said, “and gave her away.”

  The words hung there between them. In that moment, the thing Sophie had feared most since the day she’d received the incredible gift of her daughter happened. And her world blew apart into a million tiny pieces.

  CALEB PICKED UP THE coffee mug from Sophie Owens’s desk, stepped into the hall and filled it with water from the fountain outside her door. He did so quickly, then covered the distance back to her chair with long strides. Her face had bleached of color, as if someone had opened a vein and drained her of life.

  “Here, drink this,” he said, squatting beside her chair and lifting the cup to her lips.

  She sipped from it, her eyes wide and slow-blinking with the weight of shock. She swallowed once, twice, then pulled away from him as if she’d suddenly realized she was sitting next to dynamite. “Why? Why are you telling me this?”

  He stood, went to the window and stared at the students sitting on the lawn under a warm spring sun. Wished for the simplicity of life as it had seemed when he’d been their age. Nothing more to think about than hitting the books and ordering a pizza for dinner. Nothing so complicated as tearing a woman’s life apart with a single piece of information.

  The chair slid back. She came to the window and stood beside him. “Look at me, please,” she said, her voice a hoarse whisper.

  For a few drawn-out seconds, he kept his gaze firmly on the scene outside the window. He was tired of pain. Tired of his own. He didn’t want to take on anyone else’s. And yet he had come here today, propelled by something he did not fully understand.

  He turned around and sucked in a breath at the physical slam of regret for the grief now pooled in Sophie Owens’s eyes.

  “I never saw the baby,” he said, the words torn from him. “I couldn’t let myself. And then you walked into the store with her. She looks so much like Laney.”

  Sophie flinched, as if the name brought with it another slap of reality.

  “I gave away the last piece of her I’ll ever have.”

  “What is it you want from me?” she asked, her voice barely audible.

  “To fix the wrong I did to my wife,” he said. “I want her child back.”

  “GET OUT,” SOPHIE SAID, her voice calm and then rising, “Now! Go! Please! Get out!”

  Caleb stared at her for several long moments, clear regret etched in his face. He said nothing more, but quietly did as she asked.

  When he was gone, she grabbed a stapler from her desk, hurled it at the door with all her strength. It flew apart, landed on the floor in a mound of broken pieces.

  She put her hand over her mouth, forcing back a scream. She stood, swayed, her chest rising and falling as if her lungs had forgotten how to process air.

  Strangely, the moment was exactly as she had dreamed it in the awful nightmares she’d had the first year of Grace’s life.

  Nightmares in which a woman showed up at her front door, informed Sophie that Grace wasn’t really hers, that there had been a mistake.

  And yet it was different.

  She’d never imagined it would be a man knocking at her door with those terrifying words on his lips. Always, it had been the mother who realized the horror of what she had done. The mother who came back for the child she had given away.

  She felt tricked somehow, as if she’d been given the wrong description of the enemy and had been watching out for someone completely different.

  Caleb Tucker had come here today to take her daughter away from her. His wife’s child, he’d said. Did that mean Grace wasn’t his? Had his wife had an affair?

  Sophie moved to the window, watched him cross the lawn, weariness in the slight slump of his shoulders, in the heaviness of his step. She felt some measure of satisfaction that his appearance here had come with a price.

  She forced herself to reach for focus, for calm. She couldn’t panic. Had to remain clearheaded, figure out what to do. Her attorney. She needed to call her attorney. Irene would know how to handle this. Make everything normal again.

  She glanced at the broken stapler strewn across the floor. There had to be a way to put everything back the way it had been before he’d come here today.

  Hands shaking, she grabbed her Palm Pilot from the desk. She scrolled through for the number, then reached for the phone, an awful sense of déjà vu settling over her. For three years, she had lived in fear of this possibility, waiting for its arrival, as if she had known all along the inevitability of losing what had become most precious to her.

  As a child, she’d once lost everyone she loved, this same choking emptiness rising inside her like high tide, threatening to wash away anything in its path.

  She’d grown up in a home where she wasn’t wanted. Married a man who’d ended up making her feel the same way. After divorcing Peter, she’d vowed to carve out her own happiness. Make the life for herself that she had always wanted. A child, a family.

  She had that life now. A daughter she loved more than she’d ever thought it possible to love another living being.

  No one was going to take her away. No one.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “DON’T PANIC, SOPHIE.”

  Irene Archer’s voice had the soothing quality of a professional who knew her job. A partner in Charlottesville’s largest law firm—Quinn, Lewis, Day—Irene had reached her rung on the ladder by maintaining confidence under the most daunting circumstances, conveying qui
et conviction in her arguments to client, judge and jury alike.

  “I need your voice of reason, Irene, because what I’m thinking now is to pack a suitcase, grab Grace and go somewhere where he’ll never find us.”

  “I think that’s a bit drastic at this point,” Irene reasoned. “Tell me everything he said to you. And don’t leave out a single detail. I need to know it all.”

  Sophie repeated the conversation, everything she could remember, told her, too, of how she’d met him at the hardware store, how he’d hauled the hay for Grace’s party home for them, leaving out the part where she’d found him attractive, thought about him a few too many times since then.

  “That’s when he recognized her,” she said. “Oh, dear God, I wish I’d never gone in there.”

  “How could you have known?” Irene had taken off her attorney’s hat, her voice full of compassion. “We’ll deal with this, Sophie. The important thing is for you to stay strong. The adoption was conducted to the letter of the law. You have that on your side.”

  “Can he challenge it?” Sophie’s voice wavered.

  “Anything can be challenged. Could he win? I don’t think so, but life could get rough for a while. Can you handle that?”

  “I would walk through fire for her, Irene.”

  “I know you would.”

  Another wave of panic washed through Sophie, weakening her legs so that she had to sit down. “Oh, God, I couldn’t bear to lose her.”

  “You’re not going to,” Irene said softly. “Let’s wait and see what happens. Maybe he’ll have a crisis of conscience. Realize what he’s about to do. Change his mind.”

  Sophie shook her head. “I don’t think so. There’s something in his eyes, Irene…grief like I’ve never seen.”

  “Sophie.” There was steel in her voice now. “It’s important that you keep your distance from that kind of assessment. You’re going to need every ounce of impartiality you can summon. You can’t afford sympathy. Caleb Tucker is a threat to you. Don’t forget it, okay?”