by Nancy Adams
“There’s someone in the garden calling out Daddy’s name,” Jess commented to Maud, the au pair now by her side.
“Just leave it, Jess and come away.”
Jess once more disobeyed her nanny and continued to gaze at the woman in the garden as two security men wrestled her to the ground. As she watched the scene, Jess suddenly recognized who it was in a flash, and uttered the word: “Claire.”
She continued, “It’s the girl that Daddy had the child with The girl that Daddy had the affair with.”
With Maud still stuck in confusion, Jess ran out of the room and downstairs, out the front door and toward the garden. When she was near to them, Jess saw Claire being escorted toward the house.
The moment they saw her, one of the security men said, “Miss. Burgess, please get back in the house. Everything is under control.”
“JESS!” Maud shouted from behind, having followed the girl outside.
“Let her go,” Jess commanded the men.
“You know this woman?” the security man asked.
“Yes, she’s…Well, I’m not sure…But Daddy wouldn’t like it if she were treated badly.”
“We’re not going to hurt her, Miss. Burgess. This woman was trespassing on your father’s property.”
“But it’s not trespassing if I say I’d like her to come into the house. Is it?”
Both men looked at each other incredulously as Maud reached the scene.
Having figured out what Jess had meant at the window, the old woman was able to explain things as discretely as possible (without mentioning all the obvious detail that neither security man needed to know). Once she had explained it all, the men allowed Claire to come into the house.
As she was, Will was being picked up from the floor of the woods, slightly dazed from a blow he’d just received from the branch of a tree, one that had grounded him. He was soon in the truck and being escorted to the rangers’ lockup at the edge of the estate. While they were heading that way, a call came in for the rangers to go easy on the guy and not to call the police, just to hold him at the ranger station until further notice and treat him well. That meant that once Will was back at the station, he joined the rangers’ poker game and slowly became pals with each and every one of them as the night wore on.
At the house, Claire sat in the kitchen, covered in dirt, as Maud made her a coffee and Jess sat at the table opposite her.
“Is your father here?” Claire asked in a trembling voice, unable to meet the little girl’s inquisitive eyes gazing across at her.
“No, he’s not,” Jess answered firmly. “He’s gone to find my brother.”
Claire shuddered at this pronouncement.
“Where is that?” she asked, still unable to look the little girl in the face.
“Mexico.”
“Mexico!?” Claire exclaimed, looking up at Jess with flashing eyes. “How did he get to Mexico?”
“I don’t know. Daddy only said that he was in Mexico.”
“I need to speak to your daddy. Please, Jess. I have to call him. To speak to him.”
Claire mechanically reached her hand across the table and took the little girl’s for a moment. Jess looked down at it aghast and retracted it from Claire. The latter lifted up her hand and blushed, embarrassed by the action.
“Sorry,” she muttered, returning her eyes to the table in front of her.
Maud came over with Claire’s coffee and placed it down in front of her. Claire glanced up at her, thanked her and gave the old woman a glimmer of a smile, before retraining her eyes on the table.
“Do you love my daddy?” Jess suddenly asked.
“Jess!” Maud exclaimed. “How could you ask such a question?”
“It’s okay,” Claire stammered.
She looked up at Jess and caught the young girl’s gaze.
“Yes, I do,” she said firmly. “I’ve loved your daddy from the first time I saw him. I didn’t know it then, of course. But I was only young.”
“Did you know my mommy?”
Claire appeared to be caught by the question, and her face was overcome with sadness.
“Yes, I did,” she nodded, her eyes once again finding the table.
“Did you like her?”
“I only knew her for a very short time.”
“But did you like her?”
“Jess, please,” Maud put in, uncomfortable with the direction the little girl’s questioning was taking.
“It’s okay,” Claire said meekly. She looked back up into Jess’s eyes and stated, “Yes, I did like your mommy. I only knew her for a very short time, but we spoke on three occasions at length. From the few moments we spent together, I found that she was a very smart and conscientious person. She was also very gentle in her manners and when she spoke you felt that you had to listen. And when you spoke yourself, you felt that she had taken in every word with the deepest consideration for what you had to say. Every second your mommy talked with me, I felt blessed to simply be in her company and listen to her. I already admired her, even before I met her at the hospital. She was always championing someone unfortunate, or trying to persuade the world’s wealthiest to part with much of their money in order to alleviate part of the world’s poverty. There was something almost…angelic about your mother.”
This last part was said as if in a fever and Claire felt embarrassed when she had finished. Jess, meanwhile, had listened with intent and wonder to what Claire had said. In the speech, she had recognized many of the qualities she still remembered of her mother; a mother she had known for the briefest second, for only four years, and whom she had lately thought less and less about. She felt a light open up, one devoted to the everlasting memory of her mother, but one that had faded of late, since she and her father had gradually ceased talking of Marya.
Tears sprung from the young girl’s eyes and she automatically wiped them away.
“I didn’t mean to make you cry,” Claire said.
“It’s okay,” Jess muttered. “I just forgot how nice she was is all.” Maud offered the girl some tissues, which she took and used to wipe the last of her tears away. She then looked at Claire and went on, “Did you feel bad that you got with her husband?”
Another hammer blow to Claire’s heart, and her head couldn’t help but drop back down to the inevitable sight of the table.
“Yes,” Claire mumbled.
Maud, in the meantime, looked stunned that Jess could be so forward.
“Did Daddy feel bad?” the ten-year-old girl went on.
“Yes,” came the faint reply.
“Is that why you broke up?”
“Yes. Because neither of us could face what we’d done.”
“And you got pregnant?”
Another pang struck Claire’s heart like a thunderclap.
“Yes,” she replied slowly, before adding quickly, “But I couldn’t tell your daddy.”
“Why?”
“Because of many reasons…I think. Because I guess I didn’t want him around, because then I’d—I’d want him…to be around for good.”
“Is that why you got together with him now?”
“Yes. The moment we made contact, I knew. Well, I think I knew…I felt it anyway. I felt something compel me to be with him, and I think that he felt it too.”
“My daddy says he loves you, but that you’ve made him angry because you didn’t tell him about my brother. And also because he doesn’t like the people he went to live with.”
“But that’s why I need to talk with him. I need to know too. I need to know that the boy is okay…He’s my son too. I deserve to know. Sam—your father—thinks that I don’t care, but I do…That’s why I came all the way out here to find him. He won’t answer my calls.”
Jess dipped her hand in her pocket and handed Claire her phone.
“It’s under ‘Daddy’,” the girl said the moment Claire held it in her trembling hand.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
It was getting dark and Sam
realized that the possibility that they’d lost the family was highly likely. When they had passed the spot where Jules had discarded his phone, they sent a car down each of the next two exits just in case the family had gone down one of them. As they’d turned off, Sam’s car had continued to move along the freeway. After twenty minutes, by which time they should have easily caught them up, they discerned that the family must have turned off earlier. With this faint clue, they turned around and went down a turn-off that they’d passed five minutes before.
After that, the searches of each vehicle got more complicated as the roads constantly diverged and the possibilities of which route the family could have taken gradually became endless. It had become a wild goose chase, and the more lost they became, the more lost Sam’s mind got. He’d scared them away, and for this he blamed no one but himself. Ryan had warned him beforehand that because of the nature of the family’s stay—namely, that they were on the run—the family would be skittish and therefore should be monitored for some time to watch their habits before making contact. The fact that the house had only been monitored from around ten o’clock that morning also meant that they could have left the building before then; which, of course, they had: leaving the house at nine that morning to travel to the market and take a look around the town.
But Sam had pressed things forward, wanted to reach the boy as quickly as possible; he was so eager to see him, to see his son. When Paul had told him that he had a son, a mixture of emotions instantly became wedded together inside Sam’s head. On one level, he felt outrage at Paul for exacting such an obvious act of callous revenge on both himself and Claire. On another, he felt cheated and hurt by Claire’s withholding it all from him, as though he weren't any part of it at all.
A major element of this last fact, however, was to do with his divine love for Claire, of course. He had felt so close to her before knowing. But now that he knew she had harbored such a deep secret from him, he felt somehow outside of her suddenly. He had lost the chance to see her through the pregnancy all those years ago; to be by her side, as Paul had; to help her at every step; be at the doctors with her; listen to the advice; to see his child born; to cut the cord; to show her how much he could love her. She had taken this chance away from him.
Nevertheless, there was a third emotion that had coursed through him as he’d sat in his study with Paul. Namely, that he was, at the same time as feeling so much anger, inwardly filled with instant glory at the news. I have a son, had been his first thought. Who and where is my son? had been the first question. He had felt a mass of joy erupt inside the smoke of all that burning anger. It was this that drove him now: love, not anger. This that filled his head with sadness now: that he had missed the boy’s first five years and now he might miss him altogether.
Breaking him out of this final, rather morose thought was his phone going off. He pulled it out of his pocket and saw that it was Jess. This made his aching heart lose a couple of grams of weight and he smiled gently, before answering.
But it wasn’t Jess on the other line.
“Please, Sam, listen, it’s me, Claire; what’s happening?”
“How the heck did you get my daughter’s phone?”
“I’m at the Cliff Top.”
“How did you get there? My team have been told to admit no one unless I inform them.”
“I got past them.”
“You did!? How?”
“It doesn’t matter. Please, let me know what’s happening. I haven’t been able to sleep or think straight. All I keep thinking of is what you told me about the people he’s with being real old and living in a trailer park.”
Sam took ahold of his forehead with his hand and rubbed his temples, letting out a gentle sigh of frustration as he did.
“You really wanna know?” he asked after a significant pause.
“Yes,” she replied immediately.
“The people he’s been living with these past five years, the Lees, have absconded to Mexico.”
He heard Claire let out a faint, exasperated scream on the other end of the line.
“It’s not as bad as you think. The wife was recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and there was an accident—but no one was hurt. Anyway, the state got involved and decided to offer Mr. Lee an ultimatum at a hearing. They were gonna give him the choice that he gave up looking after Mrs. Lee and she went into care in an asylum. Or they’d take David into care.”
“David,” Claire suddenly pronounced. “Is that his name?”
“Yes.”
There was silence for a moment and he could tell that, just like he had when he’d first heard the name, she was weighing it up in her head.
“So they fled to Mexico?” Claire asked after a while.
“Yeah. I tracked them and found out that they were going to stay in an apartment in Durango Town. I wanted to meet with them, but they were out when we got there earlier today. Someone then tipped them off that people were looking for them and they ran. I was able to track their phone for some time and I spoke to them.”
“What were they like?”
“They were scared. From the short conversation I had with them, they seemed decent enough,” he let her know, not feeling up to mentioning Jules’s record of imprisonment. “They just don’t wanna leave each other.”
“Did you speak to…David?”
“No. Just the couple. But then Mr. Lee threw his phone out the window and I lost their signal. We’ve been looking for them among the Mexican roads for nearly eight hours now.”
“So you don’t know where he is?” she asked, a strangled terror in her tone.
“Not at the moment. But I will try my hardest to find him. I promise.”
His words filled her heart with warmth and she felt brave enough to venture the next question that puzzled her, “Then what?”
“I don’t understand.”
“What then, when you find him?”
“Then I’ll try to help the couple as best I can and take him. I’ll allow them to have a part in his life, but they clearly aren’t in any state to look after him properly. They’re desperate and need my help. I just wish I hadn’t scared them off.”
“You only did what you thought was best.”
“But what I think is best isn’t always so. I’ve gotten so much wrong in my life; especially in my personal life. I reacted to this all wrong.” He paused for a moment, weighing up his words as well as his feelings. “I was wrong to condemn you for any of this,” he continued. “I was wrong to think that you weren’t the scared, desperate girl that you were back then—just like the Lees. Everything was whirling around me back then, what with Marya, you and the crash, and I’ve been thinking a little these past hours, whether maybe you were right not to tell me…Perhaps I would have just been a burden to the whole thing. I don't know.”
He paused again and looked out the window at the streets that passed by, Mexican shop fronts lighted with lengths of neon tubing, people sitting around playing card games on the street corners.
Taking in a deep breath and then exhaling slowly, Sam went on, “The one thing I do know is that I love you. With all my heart, I love you.”
He heard her burst into tears on the other end, and he too shed a tear or two in that moment.
“I guess I wanna say I’m sorry,” he began softly, “for being so hard on you about this. I promise that when I get this all sorted, I’ll come back and we can continue…that is, of course, if you want to.”
“I do. I do,” she repeated firmly.
“And once I have David back, you’re willing to be a part of that too?”
“Yes.”
A huge smile alighted upon Sam’s mouth and he felt happier than he had since he’d lain in bed with her three days ago in his place at the Hamptons.
“You know,” Sam began, “it hit me like a blow to learn that I had a son. It was weird, though. Among all the anger that I felt, I was also glad to hear it. Deep down I was truly happy that our love had produced a
child, and that we—me and you, Claire—had a son.”
“You mean that?”
“Of course. On top I was angry that you’d kept it from me. I was also angry that Paul was getting his revenge and harming us both in the process. But for all the anger, the true thing that dominated me inside was…joy. And the more I’ve thought about it since, the more the anger has dissolved and been replaced with that purest feeling of happiness. It was the same when Marya told me she was pregnant with Jess. It was like our love was getting some kind of stamp, a declaration; our love was producing another human being, one made from us both. The complete embodiment of our love. And it’s the same now. David is the embodiment of our love. And I guess I want to get that love back. You don’t deny me that, do you?”
Claire paused for a moment, having taken in every single word he’d said and now weighing it all up in her mind.
“Of course not,” she said after a time. “If the people he’s with are in trouble, then we should help them and help David. He is our son and I…I…I am his mother.”
This last part echoed in her ears and she closed her eyes tight.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Glancing around the restaurant, Paul observed that the place hadn’t changed much since his parents had last taken him there when he’d celebrated his graduation from college some four years ago. Across the table from him sat Shelly. That week Paul had summoned the courage to ask her out on a date. She’d immediately agreed and they set a day that meant Shelly could easily find a babysitter for Lacey.
Now the date was on and both of them sat fidgeting a little as they got their drinks—both ordering Coke—and looked down at their menus, occasionally glancing up at one another and blushing, before resettling their eyes on the menus. Once they’d finished ordering, they sat in silence, now and then picking up a breadstick from a basket in the middle of the table and munching on it.
“So,” Shelly said, clearing her throat a little as she did, “how you finding life back in Casselton?”
