“You remember him?” she asked, running along beside the gurney.
“Of course I do. I was at your wedding, wasn’t? I delivered your son, didn’t I? And with no sign of this fella, then, I might add.”
She had no chance to comment. He took charge of Philip and she was shoved onto a small seat too far away from David in the back of the ambulance, then they were on their way. She slid off the seat and sat on the floor beside him, holding his hand. He quieted then, and the paramedics let her stay there.
At the hospital, with Philip entertaining the nurses by repeating some of ‘Jeff’s’ more lurid tales of adventure, Eleanor hovered by the bed David had been transferred to.
“Is he going to be all right?” she asked.
“Of course he will,” said Dr. Grimes. “We’ll get some fluids into him, bring down that fever and see what’s wrong. At least I know it’s not measles. When you were sick he told me he’d had measles when he was a kid. Do you know if he’s on any medication?”
“Oh! Yes. My son was spending the night with him in his log house and he went to his camper for this.” She pulled from her jeans pocket the bottle of prescription meds she’d picked up off the floor, afraid it would roll out of sight when she moved the vehicle.
“Ah!” Dr. Grimes looked at the label. “Atabrine. He’s been living in the tropics has he?”
Eleanor nodded. “Ecuador, I think.”
Her lifted his shaggy white brows. “You think?”
She met his gaze, keeping her own steady. “Yes. I think.” She paused a beat. “Does he have malaria?”
Dr. Grimes nodded. “I’m pretty sure that’s all it is, given this particular medication, but the lab will have to confirm it.”
“All?” she echoed. “Isn’t it enough?”
“It could be worse. Given the high temp and the extreme shaking, dengue fever—also known as ‘bone-break fever’ would have been my guess, if not for the Atabrine. While we wait for the lab work, I’ll order I.V. Atabrine and a few other things that’ll help. We’ll keep him overnight, and you can take him home in the morning, barring complications. We’re pretty much full up at the moment because a car and tour-bus collided just the other side of town last night, leaving a few patients with mild concussion and four with broken legs. .We even have two of those in maternity beds—the three that aren’t filled with new moms, that is,” he added with a chuckle.
“I can take him home right now, Dr. Grimes.”
He patted her hand. “No, no. I want him under observation at least for tonight. He’ll feel pretty bad for a day or two, but it’ll be quieter for him at home. Can you manage to look after him there?”
She assured him she could look after him, and would. He gave her a long, level look. “Where has he been, my dear? How long has he been back?” His glance sharpened. “And how long does he expect to stay this time?”
“I…I don’t have answers to those questions, Doctor. All I can think of now is that he’s ill, and he needs me. He stood by me while I had measles, looked after me as if I was a child, and now it’s my turn to do the same for him. For as long as he needs me. For as long as he wants me. Uh, wants me to.” Look after him, she nearly added, but at his nod, she knew Dr. Grimes understood.
For the rest of the day Eleanor divided her time between David, who shook with chills then roasted with fever and clung to her like a terrified infant, and trying to keep Philip calm. He begged not to be sent home with Cindy Exley who arrived around ten in the morning to take him with her. Eleanor relented and watched while her seven-year-old paced, worried, fretted and asked a million questions, one of which she had been expecting for hours. Yet when it came, she felt her heart flip and her mouth dry.
What if David was about to change his mind again? What if the woman and the child in the picture, were ones he was raving about so much, were not to be forgotten after all? But still…
“Mom, how come you keep calling Jeff ‘David’, and ‘darling’,?”
They sat in the small cafeteria in the basement of the ten-bed hospital that was really little more than a clearing house in which seriously ill or injured patients were stabilized before being sent on to larger facilities. “Because,” she said slowly, after a pause to sip a cup of surprisingly good coffee, “his name really is David. I called him darling because I… because I love him.”
“Well, if you love Jeff, how come you’re going to marry Grant?”
“I’m not going to marry Grant.”
“Then are you going to marry Jeff?”
“Philip… I’m… I’m already married to Je—to David. He’s your father, Phil.”
His brow puckered. “You mean the one what went away before I got borned and got lost and never came back? That one?”
She nodded “That’s the one.”
“Well, how come he didn’t come back?” Philip asked with righteous indignation. “We’re his family, right?”
“I don’t know, Philip. We were his family, but maybe we aren’t anymore. It doesn’t matter, though. He’s still your father and you still love him. Isn’t that what’s important?”
He slurped the last of his pink milkshake noisily through his straw. “Yup. I guess it doesn’t matter, does it, Mom? I mean he is my dad, and he did come back, so I guess we just got to keep him, huh, Mom.”
Eleanor swallowed hard. The acceptance of a child! How easily they could find forgiveness. How much time she’d wasted by not having the same qualities herself.
“Yes,” she said. “I guess we’ve just got to keep him.”
~ * ~
David woke during the night. It was very dark, not even a glimmer of moonlight the windows of the camper, and he wondered why his bunk was so soft and warm and what was causing the lovely scent that tickled his nostrils. Slowly it dawned on him that he was not in the camper, he was in Eleanor’s bed.
It must be a dream, he thought, but her warmth by his side, her steady, even breathing told him it was true. He reached out a tentative hand and ran a fingertip down her spine. She murmured and turned into his arms, nestling close, and then he remembered.
The fever coming over him like a freight train. Going for his Atabrine. He’d felt so sick and dizzy in the camper he wondered if he’d make it back to tell Philip he needed to go home. He hadn’t wanted to scare his son and he knew, when the malaria struck, it could keep him laid low for days. He blinked.
There’d been a hospital. Or was that another time? No. This time. He remembered Eleanor sitting beside him, holding his arm while someone strapped it to the side of a high bed. He remembered an I.V.—he’d tried to pull it out. Eleanor’s voice, though, had gotten through when he ranted and raged and carried on.
He remembered, too, her being there when he woke up fully in the hospital. She’d put him in a wheelchair and rolled him out and helped him into her car. Philip, in the backseat, had said something about did he like the chair better than a wheelbarrow… and then Philip had called him ‘Dad.’
Abruptly, David sat up.
At once, Eleanor was wide awake, one hand on his back, the other wrapping around his arm. “David?”
“I’m okay,” he said, to still the panic he heard in her tone. “Just… remembering. I was in the hospital. You brought me here. Why?”
“Because you’re ours, and we gotta keep you. Philip said so. Lie down, love. Cover up. Dr. Grimes said you’ll be weak for a few more days.”
He put his lips to her hair, afraid to move, afraid he might wake up and find this was nothing more than a fever-dream again. For these few moments in time he would pretend that this was how it would always be.
“David? You all right?”
“I’m okay, Eleanor. Was it another malaria attack?”
“Another?”
“I… I’ve been having them pretty regularly. That’s why I left South America. They said I had to get out of harm’s way. Those mosquitoes seem to like me.” He lay silent for a minute. “You were in an ambulance with me.”
<
br /> “Yes, David,” she said very quietly.
“Then how did we get here?”
“My—our neighbors, Jo-Anne and Cindy Exley brought my car to the hospital Sunday so Philip and I could come home.”
“What day is it now?”
“Probably early Tuesday morning.”
“What happened to Monday?”
“Nothing much. The same as Sunday. You had chills, fever. You spent one night in hospital then I brought you home. Here That was Monday, around four in the afternoon. Malaria is something of an irregular experience for our doctor and nurses. If the hospital hadn’t been so over-crowded, I think they’d have hung on to you just to watch the progression of your symptoms.”
“Did you go… to town? I mean, to see a lawyer?”
“No, David.”
“Are you going to?”
“Not unless you want me to.”
He couldn’t suppress the tremor that ran through him. “I want you to stay here, Eleanor. Forever.”
“That’s what I want, too, David, if you want me,” she said in a rushed, frightened voice.
“I want you. I love you, sweetheart…” He was unable to go on for a moment. “I love you more than life, Eleanor. More than anyone.”
“Man… Manuela?” she whispered, choking on the word. “Manuela and Juanita?”
“God! I must’ve been doing some raving!”
“A little. But I saw the picture in the truck, David… On Friday. I went to see you to… to ask you something. I went looking for you and I found them… They are both very beautiful, David… Or maybe I should say ‘were’? Maybe someday when I can face it you will tell me about them, about what happened to them… You talked when you were sick… Said, ‘they’re both dead. I want to die, too.’ I was horribly to jealous, David, and for a time I hated you, but when you wanted to die I couldn’t let you. I love you and I’m just grateful that you came back to me when you lost her.”
David was silent for a long time.
Eleanor thought he must’ve fallen asleep once more, when he spoke in a husky voice. “And you still want me, Eleanor?”
“I always have. On Friday when I saw their picture, I could have put your axe to the kind of use Philip wanted to, on Grant. Even the little girl. I resented the fact that you could be with them while I was all alone, nursing my own child through all the childhood ailments, trying to raise him without your moral support. But that was just self-pity. It made me ashamed. You loved them and I can understand that and when you said they were dead, I couldn’t hate them or you any longer. You are my husband, Philip’s father. I’ve told him, too.” She raised her head and kissed his mouth tenderly. “I only hope Philip will make up in some ways for your loss of the little girl.”
“Oh, Eleanor, Eleanor, my own sweet one! God! How can I tell you?” He held her to him, rocking her as if in pain, his hands slipped into her hair and he kissed her, showing he was not as weak as she had thought.
“Tell me what?” she asked.
“Tell you… tell you how much I love you. Tell you how much your loving me, in spite of everything, means to me. I don’t think I’ll ever have the words to do that. So, let me show you, please.”
As dawn broke, sending shafts of summer light through the bedroom window, David said, “Sweetheart, if one of us has to get sick before I’m allowed into your bed, I’m going to become the biggest hypochondriac in the world.” He grinned. “I expect you to do the same.”
“Somehow,” she said, nestling close, “I don’t think that’ll be required.”
~ * ~
It was a Saturday nearly a week later and David, Eleanor and Philip were having breakfast when Bill walked in. He stared around in amazement at what appeared to be a happy family meal in progress. “Say, didn’t you have a beard the last time I saw you?”
David nodded, rubbed a hand over his jaw, then reached out to shake hands.
“Bill, I passed!” Philip said proudly. “I’ll be in Grade Two in September!”
“Good for you,” Bill smiled at the little boy, but Eleanor could see him giving David an odd little glance out of the corner of his eye.
“Bill,” she said, pouring him a cup of coffee, “this man is an imposter. He told you his name was Jeff Davidson, didn’t he?”
Bill nodded, mystified, and she could tell by the expression on his face not a little concerned for Eleanor, “I’d like you to be the first of my friends to meet David Jefferson, my husband.”
Bill’s jaw dropped. “I—Why didn’t you tell me that before? Where have you been, man?”
David grinned. He’d already told this to Eleanor and Philip, but he recited it for Bill’s benefit anyway. “Ecuador, Chile, Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina and then Ecuador again. Then Brazil and Argentina again, a number of times and Colombia most recently. I left Bogotá when the medics there told me if I didn’t get out of the tropics I’d become a basket case. I wasn’t sure about still having a place to return to here, but it seems I did.”
“It seems so,” said Bill, stirring sugar into his coffee. He gave Eleanor a look, stirred more, and glowered.
She touched his hand and smiled at him. “Be nice to him, Bill! It’s my life, my business, and don’t spoil it by disliking him for my sake.”
He slowly smiled back at her, and Eleanor knew he would accept David.
“Tell him about going to jail!” Philip demanded. That was by far his favorite of all the stories David told.
“Jail?”
“Well… my son”—And the smile on David’s face as he looked at the child removed all traces of doubt anyone could have had in his mind. “My son,” repeated David “is quite impressed by the fact that I once spent three weeks in a hot, foul little stone cell in Rio, accused of stealing a fish from a street vendor. I hadn’t, but I stayed there because I was in a stubborn mood and refused to pay up, purely on principle. When the fish vendor realized he’d never get a cent as long as I was locked up, he confessed to having turned his back long enough for a cat to take it. He wanted the money it was worth, and chose to accuse me because as everyone knows, ‘all gringos are rich’. That’s all there was to it, but Phil thinks it’s great.”
“Did you pay him when you got out?”
“Hell, no! I didn’t owe him a thing.”
“Stupid things people will do for their principles,” said Bill. Then, “Look, Ellie, what I came down for is to get your permission to renovate your dad’s office and make a nursery out of it. It’s the only room on the ground floor that’s big enough, that we aren’t using already.”
“I really don’t think my permission will be required, Bill. You see, we were thinking of selling the farm… To you and Kathy. If you want it.”
“If? Ellie, you know we do. But what about Phil? I thought you planned to keep it in case he wanted it one day?”
“He won’t,” David said. “He’ll have the Anderson place if he wants to become a farmer. I bought it.”
“Well! I heard some rich guy from somewhere, who owned a bunch of gold mines or something—” He ducked his head and stirred his coffee again.
“Or a drug lord who’d made millions in Colombia?” David asked, a chuckle in his voice.
Bill glanced up, color tingeing his cheeks. “Yeah, I heard that, too.”
“Actually, neither one is true. I had a little success with rubies in Brazil. Then emeralds. In Argentina.”
“Well!” Bill said again. “You two will need some more success of a different kind if you want to fill up all the bedrooms that old pile. I need your dad’s place, Ellie, for my three to grow up in, but that place! It’s a mansion.”
“We’ll fill it,” said David and Eleanor in unison, and when the laughter died down, she said, “When do the babies get released, and when’s Kathy coming home from her folks’?”
“She’s home now. The babies come home in a week or two. Stephen first. He’s the biggest. The other two, as soon as their weight is up to par. That’s why we want to
get the nursery arranged. Kathy’s going back down to the coast in a day or two.”
“She’s home? And we’re sitting here? Let’s go! I’m dying to see her. I hope you have lots of pictures.” Eleanor grabbed David’s hand. “Come on, darling. But be prepared for a bit of ice, won’t you?” she added for his ears alone.
“I am,” he replied quietly. “I can take it as long as I have you. I saw Bill’s reaction.”
Kathy was distinctly cool until Bill took her to task. “Look at Ellie,” he said severely. “The sun rose inside her this morning. Now be nice to her husband.”
A laughing group comprised of four adults, one small boy and a puppy set out with a will to convert a dingy old office into a bright shiny nursery big enough for three of everything.
As the two men shoved the heavy, dark old furniture into the hallway, the women went along behind with brooms mops and dusters, not wanting to choke the old vacuum cleaner. The one small boy and the puppy just got underfoot. “Hey, Jeff… I mean Dad, what’s this?” Philip asked, pulling a yellowish piece of paper out of a crack in the back of the desk which had once been his grandfather’s.
David didn’t even look. Father like, he said, “Ask your mother.”
Eleanor took the paper from her son, opened it and said, “Why, it’s addressed to me! From Dad. I must’ve missed it when I cleared out this desk.” She began to read aloud.
“‘My dearest Ellie, I am going to die and I know you will find this when it’s too late for your hatred to hurt me if it turns out I was wrong to take the chance I did. When I saw that you had stopped grieving for your man, I—’”
David lunged at her, trying to snatch the paper from her hand. “No!” he cried hoarsely. “No, Eleanor! Don’t read that.”
She spun out of his reach, her face white, her eyes large and dark and hurriedly .continued reading.
“‘I wrote to Dave, in care of his faculty advisor, the man from the university who notified us when the search was called off. I told him that you and the boy had both died the day Philip was born. If your man was ever found, this is why he never came back. I did it because I could see you had gotten over him and he would’ve taken you away if he’d come back. Remember, I told him I would fight, girl, and I did. What I did was wrong, even though I’m sure he will never read the letter because I’m just as sure he died somewhere in that jungle. But in case, I want to die with a clear conscience and hope you will to try to forgive your old
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