Found: One Son

by Judith Arnold

  But to deal with moving, she had to be able to think about it, and she couldn’t think about anything but Michael Molina.

  How had he found her? More important, why had he bothered? What could he possibly want from her?

  As she boiled the water for the macaroni and put Jeffrey to work peeling a carrot for the salad, she tried to apply logic to the situation. She knew Michael couldn’t have been aware of Jeffrey’s existence, so that wasn’t why he’d searched for her. She doubted he’d found her through her parents, because they hated him for what he’d done to their precious daughter, even though they were thoroughly disgusted with their daughter.

  Was he looking to relive his past? Did he think Emmie would be interested in another fling five years after their last fling?

  And why did his eyes still have the power to mesmerize her? Why did his mere touch make her feel shaky and uncertain, no longer in control of herself?

  “This carrot is too slippery,” Jeffrey complained. “It keeps slipping all over the place.”

  If she hadn’t been so frazzled, she would have stopped stirring the noodles into the boiling water and helped him with the carrot She would have demonstrated a better way to hold it, a better way to ply the peeler. But she lacked the stamina to turn Jeffrey’s struggle with the carrot into a learning experience. “Never mind,” she muttered. “I’ll do the carrot.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  Promise me you’ll be a better man than your father, she answered silently. Promise me you’ll never disappear without warning. Promise me you’ll be honest and noble, and you’ll love me at least half as much as I love you. “You can take some of the peels outside to the monster,” she suggested.

  Obviously thrilled, he scooped up the stringy orange shreds and raced out the back door. She spied on him through the window, amazed at how easily he moved about the backyard, how utterly at home he was in it. It was his small, safe universe, a world enclosed by dense hedges and filled with grass and trees and the garden. A world of mosquitoes and butterflies, of a redwood picnic table that could double as a pirate’s ship in a pinch, and a hose, and a rectangular cement patio suitable for roller skating or scribbling secret runes with chunks of colored chalk.

  Where on earth could she and Jeffrey go that would be as ideal as this house?

  Someplace where Michael Molina would never find them, she thought with a bitter sigh.

  AS IT TURNED OUT, the Holiday Inn did have a vacancy. Not that it would have mattered at that point. He’d already seen Emmie, and if her behavior was anything to go by, she wouldn’t be getting in touch with him.

  He sprawled out on the bed and closed his eyes. He could see her. She was still beautiful. She still held herself proudly, her chin high and her eyes steady. She was also still transparent. He knew, the instant she’d noticed him, that she would have been much happier if he hadn’t reappeared in her life.

  He’d hurt her five years ago; of course she wouldn’t be thrilled to see him. But he’d come to apologize, and the Emmie he’d known five years ago would have given him the opportunity to do so. Then again, the Emmie he’d known back then didn’t have a little boy who looked alarmingly like Michael.

  The possibility that he could have fathered a son without knowing about it burned inside him like acid. He wished Emmie had contacted him if she’d been pregnant—as if there had even been a way for her to contact him. If he’d known, he would never have ignored his responsibilities. But she probably hadn’t even tried to reach him. She’d probably assumed that if he was irresponsible enough to run away from her, he’d be just as likely to run away from the consequences of his actions.

  Still...a boy. His son.

  Maybe.

  She’d pointed out that the boy looked like a lot of people. Michael had to admit he’d had only a split second to study the kid before Williams College had hustled the children indoors. Maybe the boy did look like a lot of people, and one of those people, not Michael, was his father.

  He couldn’t count on Emmie to fill him in on the boy’s lineage, or anything else. She’d radiated such hostility he wouldn’t be surprised to find the police waiting for him if he dared to show up at her place again.

  It didn’t make sense, though. If he was the kid’s father and he proved to Emmie that he was willing to make up for the past five years, to pay child support and get involved in the child’s life and whatever it was fathers were supposed to do, wouldn’t she be pleased?

  No. Nothing he did right now would please her. Nothing other than the very thing that had hurt her five years ago: leaving.

  If he was smart, he would do just that. He’d pack his bag, drive back to Logan Airport and hop on the next plane heading west. He would run away again, with Emmie’s blessings this time.

  But he wasn’t that smart.

  He glanced at his watch: six o‘clock, which would make it three o’clock in San Francisco. Digging into his hip pocket, he pulled out his wallet and located the Finders, Keepers card he’d stashed there. Maggie Tyrell had asked him to telephone her and let her know if the Mary-Elizabeth Kenyon she’d located was the woman he was looking for.

  He dialed the number, listened to it ring on the other side of the country and then heard Maggie’s voice. “Finders, Keepers. Can I help you?”

  “It’s Michael Molina,” he said. “I’m in Wilborough. It’s the right Emmie Kenyon.”

  “You saw her?”

  “Yes.” He chose not to expand on his answer. He didn’t want Maggie to know that he was feeling bruised and frustrated, that Emmie had treated him as if he were toxic and that all those warnings Maggie had given him about how people changed had proved true in the most painful way.

  His succinct reply hung between them for a minute, before she responded, “Well, good. I’m glad we found her.”

  He pushed away from the mattress and hunched forward, as if that position could improve his ability to think. “I’ve got a question for you. How does a person prove that a child is his?”

  Maggie paused before answering. “Do you mean legally?”

  “I mean...” What the hell. Maggie was a good detective. Maybe she could help him with this. “How does a man go about proving he’s the father of a child?”

  “Ah.” She must have figured out what he was getting at. “Your Emmie Kenyon has a child?”

  “A little boy.” Michael took a deep breath, then added, “He’s got my eyes.”

  “Ah.” Her silence this time struck him as respectful, as if she understood how tricky his predicament was. “Is he the right age?”

  “I don’t know. I thought he looked too old, but...” He swallowed, afraid his voice would crack. “He’s got my eyes.”

  Maggie sighed. “I don’t know if you want to go there, Mr. Molina.”

  “Call me ‘Michael,’ and I do want to go there.”

  “All right.” She paused again, then said, “You could take a blood test. If your DNA matched the boy’s, then you’d be presumed to be his biological father.”

  “But the boy would have to be tested, too. I know about those tests. The mother usually insists on them when a guy is trying to elude paternity. I’m not trying to elude it—I’m trying to establish it. I’m more than willing to get tested, but I don’t know if Emmie would allow the kid to undergo tests.”

  “She doesn’t want you to turn out to be the father?”

  She doesn’t want me, period, he almost blurted out. “I don’t think she was exactly thrilled to see me” was all he could bring himself to say.

  Maggie meditated a bit more. “I tell you what. I’m going to hand you over to my brother Jack. Finders, Keepers is affiliated with his detective agency. I think he might be able to help you with this better than I can. I specialize in true love and happy endings, whereas Jack...” She didn’t complete the sentence.

  She didn’t have to. Her insinuation was clear: what Michael was contemplating would surely lead to true hatred and a pathetic ending. “All rig
ht,” he said, trying not to let pessimism overtake him. “Let me talk to your brother.”

  He heard a click as he was put on hold, then another click as the phone came to life again. “Michael Molina?” a man said briskly. “Jack Tyrell here. My sister said you wanted to speak to me.”

  “I’ve got what looks like a possibly unhappy ending,” Michael admitted. “I don’t think she wants to deal with it.”

  Jack chuckled. “She’s allergic to unhappy endings. Besides, she’s busy planning her wedding these days. All she can think of is rainbows and flowers and romance. So, what happened? Your lost lover didn’t want to be found?”

  “It’s worse than that,” Michael warned, then added, “maybe,” because he really didn’t know how bad it was going to be. “I saw my lost lover and she has a little boy, and the little boy looks like me.”

  Jack whistled through his teeth. “You know, I’m always telling Maggie these reunions of lovers aren’t guaranteed to make everyone happy. Sometimes there’s a damned good reason a relationship ended.”

  “Well, there was a good reason this one did, but it has nothing to do with the boy. It was my fault the relationship ended, and I never knew a baby might be involved. Can you help me figure out if I’m the father? Without a blood test. I’m just guessing, but I don’t think Emmie would agree to let the kid be tested.”

  “You could force her to, through the courts,” Jack suggested.

  Michael shook his head. What a great way to show Emmie how sorry he was—by issuing a subpoena for her son’s blood. “Isn’t there any other way? You’re a detective.”

  “Emmie’s the mother? Your ex-sweetheart?”

  “Yeah. Mary-Elizabeth Kenyon.”

  “Okay.” A pause, as if Jack were jotting something down. “What’s the kid’s name?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “If you could find out his name, I could probably dig up his birth certificate and see who’s listed as the father. That might tell you what you want to know.”

  Michael frowned. How was he going to find out the boy’s name? Wasn’t it the detective’s job to find things out?

  “Can’t you get the birth certificate through the mother’s name?”

  “It would be easier with the kid’s name.”

  “Okay.” Michael wasn’t helpless, after all. He had a working brain. He’d found Finders, Keepers, hadn’t he? He could do what he had to to find out the boy’s name. Maybe he could follow the boy to school—although if the boy actually was his son, he wouldn’t be old enough for school. He’d be in preschool or day care. Maybe Williams College was his nanny. However, she hadn’t exactly been forthcoming with information; he doubted she would tell him anything about the boy.

  Maybe, just maybe, Michael could approach Emmie again, and charm her into telling him what he needed to know—if not the boy’s parentage, at least his name. “I’ll see what I can do,” he said.

  “Meanwhile, I’ll see if I can get anything off the mother’s name,” Jack promised.

  “Thanks.”

  “And hey, listen, Molina.” Jack’s voice took on a confidential tone. “I love my sister, but she’s got stars in her eyes, you know? She hates to think these things can come out any way other than perfect. She’s salvaged our brother Sandy’s rocky marriage, and she’s engaged to marry Mr. Wonderful, and she’s really into the whole true-love-and-destiny thing. But even Cupid can miss his target sometimes. Don’t take it too hard.”

  “I won’t,” Michael said, although he didn’t sound terribly convincing. “It’s just...if this is my son, I need to know.”

  “Of course. I’ll do what I can to find out for you.”

  “Thanks.” Michael said goodbye and hung up. Then he fell back against the pillows, swung his legs up onto the bed and stared at the ceiling. It was white, flat, a blank screen for his imagination to play off.

  A son? Could he have a son? He’d been careful with Emmie—and buying protection in a backwater town in a staunchly Catholic Central American country hadn’t been easy. Only once, that one time... He hadn’t known it would be their last time together, but fate had crashed into him, slashing and burning, and he hadn’t been able to fight it.

  It had just been that one time, that one night.

  A low sigh escaped him. He remembered the scent of exotic flowers wafting through the screens into the back room of the posada—their room, the place they’d found because he was sharing his living quarters with Max Gallard, a colleague, and she was living with a family in a private home where she couldn’t bring a man to her room for the night. Michael remembered the silver edge of the night air, the soft, limp linens on the bed, the swirls of the wrought-iron frame against which the pillows were propped. He remembered the lace cloth covering the round nightstand beside the bed, and on it the bowl of clear water with pink roses floating in it.

  Mostly he remembered Emmie asleep within his arms, her skin soft and her respiration deep and slow. He remembered the silken spill of her hair over his arm, and the way her flesh nestled against him, and he remembered believing he had to make love to her one more time before the sun rose, had to do it because if he didn’t have her once more he was afraid he would die.

  He hadn’t realized how close to the truth that fear was. All he’d known then was that this sweet, smart, gentle, beautiful woman was the only good thing in his world, and to keep himself from loving her would be harder than to keep his heart from beating.

  He’d already used up the condoms he’d brought with him. His pockets were empty, but his soul was so full he hadn’t cared. He’d kissed her until she’d turned in his arms and kissed him back, and then their bodies had begun to move, their hands to touch, to stroke, their arms to cling and their legs to grip and their moans to blend in a passionate song. He’d known making unprotected love to her was risky—but he’d been positive that not making love to her would have been even riskier. It would have destroyed him.

  And she hadn’t stopped him.

  Just that one time.

  He had assumed he would see her again after that night, to discuss their future, make plans, even accept the ramifications of their lovemaking, if there were any. The following morning, he and Gallard were finally going to complete their work in San Pablo, and once their mission had been accomplished, Michael had had every intention of returning to Emmie, coming clean with her about what he’d been up to, and figuring out where they could go from there.

  He hadn’t expected everything to go wrong. He hadn’t expected the sky to crack open and hell to come pouring through. He hadn’t expected to have to be spirited out of the country before he could grasp what had happened, to wake up in a bed a thousand miles away, his mind filled with pain and confusion and a loneliness so profound that days passed before he realized it was Emmie he was lonely for. He hadn’t expected any of it to take place the way it had.

  He hadn’t expected to kill a man.

  After all that, after all the years needed for him to heal...damn it, if he had a son, he wanted to know. He was back, and he wanted to know.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE NIGHTMARES RETURNED. He should have expected them—he probably did expect them on some subconscious level—but that didn’t make them easier to bear.

  People always said gunshots sounded like exploding firecrackers. In Michael’s dreams they sounded like dry tree branches snapping in a raging forest blaze. The sound wasn’t festive. It was hot and mean, the music of fear.

  He couldn’t recall what the gunshots sounded like then, when he’d been awake, living through it. The reality had been more of a nightmare than the dreams that had haunted him for years afterward. The reality had been a phantasmagorical blur, images piled up on one another, jumpy and incomprehensible. In his dreams, everything was almost painfully crisp and vivid—the foliage too green, the sky too blue. Gallard too confident. The backups too late.

  “This is going to be a piece of cake,” Gallard had boasted as they’d driven their Jee
p up the hilly, twisting road toward Edouardo Cortez’s mountain retreat. “Remember, I’m the rich americano who supposedly doesn’t speak English. You’re my assistant and translator.”

  “I know.” Michael had actually been excited at the time. Maybe he’d been overly confident, too. He and Gallard had rehearsed the scenario dozens of times: Gallard was pretending to be a millionaire looking for weapons, and Michael was with him because he knew San Pablo so well, because he could navigate among the locals and find out where Cortez was operating.

  Michael had visited San Pablo frequently in his youth, when his grandparents and other relatives had still lived there, before his father had taken them across the border to California. Michael had grown up knowledgeable about the habits of the region, even though his real home was the sprawling town of Bakersfield, sunken into a valley north of Los Angeles. His father used to be gone for months at a time, traveling to San Pablo to help his parents bring in their crops, then returning to Bakersfield and trying to find work. Sometimes he took Michael with him; sometimes he left him behind with his mother and brother. His father used to call him “Miguel,” which his mother hated. “He’s ‘Michael,’” she’d argue. “He’s as American as I am.”

  They used to argue a lot, his parents.

  So Michael knew San Pablo. He spoke the accent. He understood the way things were done there. When he’d learned that a bounty hunter named Max Gallard was heading south to find Cortez, he’d volunteered to help.

  Gallard had been warrior tough, his bodybuilder physique as hard as granite, his face a blank mask. Michael had been a recently minted Ph.D. teaching classes in political science at Cal-State Northridge. Unlike Gallard, he couldn’t bench-press three hundred pounds; unlike Gallard, he’d never had any desire to. But in San Pablo five years ago, his strengths—agility and intelligence—had been just as essential as Gallard’s brawn and steel-edged experience. Michael had been in the thick of things. He’d been eager to act. He’d been determined to get back at the bastard who had caused his brother’s death.