Taking the Heat

by Brenda Novak

  Gabrielle skipped the parts she’d read at least a dozen times and knew anyway and finished with the last paragraph.

  …Investigators say Tucker used a crowbar to wedge open a window that might not have been tightly closed. Fingerprints matching the convict’s were found on the window and a crowbar left in the yard. But police say no one in the area heard or saw anything unusual that night.

  There is no indication of how Tucker is traveling or where he might be taking his son. His brother, who owns a karate school in Tempe, hasn’t been available for questioning. Asked whether authorities fear for the child’s safety, Cunningham said they have no record of Tucker injuring Landon in the past but police are concerned that the child is in the physical custody of a convicted murderer. Should anyone have information on the whereabouts of Randall or Landon Tucker, they are advised to contact police as soon as possible.

  Tossing the newspaper onto the passenger seat of her Honda, Gabrielle forced herself to get behind the wheel, start the car and pull away from the gas pumps. She needed to get home. Felicia would be wondering where she was. But it was difficult to go home as though this were a night like any other. Tucker had reached Landon! She couldn’t imagine how happy he must be to have his son with him again—after two long years. He’d beaten the odds and was still out there….

  Gabrielle paused at the turnout, watched a tumbleweed blow into the street ahead of her and made a decision. If Tucker could do what he’d done to achieve what he wanted most, she was going to have the guts to do it, too.

  THIS TIME Gabrielle didn’t hesitate when she pulled up in front of her mother’s house. She and Allie were getting out and walking to the door, regardless of the consequences, regardless of the hurt or the disappointment. Resolve couldn’t stop her palms from sweating or slow her pulse, however. She was going to face her mother, the woman she’d dreamed about for more than two decades. And she was going to do it now.

  Naomi Cutter’s Toyota Camry sat in its usual place. Gabrielle shifted Allie on her hip and turned sideways to skirt the car as she approached the door. The blinds had been drawn. She hadn’t been able to see what her mother and the man she lived with might be doing, but it was almost dinnertime, so she guessed they’d be preparing food or possibly eating already.

  Once she hit the step, the notes of some Big Band music drifted to her through the door and she thought she heard a male voice announce “Jeopardy.”

  Throwing back her shoulders, Gabrielle stretched her neck, took one last look at Allie, who gave her a sweet, wet smile, and muttered, “Here goes, kid.” Then she knocked.

  “Can you get that, Hal?” someone called. “My hands are wet.”

  Gabrielle braced herself, wishing she could will away the butterflies in her stomach.

  The door swung open to reveal the man she’d seen once or twice through the window. Only this time he was wearing a button-up shirt over his customary T-shirt, and his silver hair looked as though it had been combed neatly back. “Yes?” he said, the smell of grilled onions wafting through the opening as he blinked at her and then at Allie.

  Gabrielle struggled to find her voice. “My name’s Gabrielle Hadley.” She cleared her throat. “Is…is Naomi Cutter available?”

  He glanced beyond her, toward the street. “You’re not selling anything, are you?”

  “No.”

  “And you’re not one of those church people come ’round to distribute flyers?”

  “No.”

  His gaze settled on Allie. “Just a minute.”

  The next few seconds seemed to extend through all eternity. Only the thought of Tucker sneaking into a stranger’s house in the middle of the night to reclaim his son kept Gabrielle standing stubbornly where she was. She was going to do this. She owed it to herself. Not everything in life came easy. Sometimes one had to fight, take chances—

  “Yes?”

  Gabrielle swallowed hard as her mother’s face, lined but still pleasant-looking, appeared in the doorway. Brown eyes bearing a touch of makeup regarded her curiously from beneath a head of neat brown hair threaded with gray, and Gabrielle couldn’t help wondering if others would look at them both and say, “Gabrielle definitely has your eyes.” She’d spent her whole life listening to the friends and acquaintances of the Pattersons exclaim about the similarities between Bev Patterson and the twins—“They’re the spitting image of you, Bev.” Whenever some kind but uninformed fool ventured to include her, Gabrielle had to launch into the awkward explanation that she really didn’t belong at all.

  This was her mother. She was also a stranger.

  “My name’s Gabrielle Hadley,” she repeated. “Sometimes people call me Gabby for short.” You used to once, remember? I do. I was only three and yet I’ve never forgotten that look you gave me when you dropped me off at that daycare and said, “Bye, Gabby. I’m sorry, baby. I love you.”

  In those days, Naomi was always saying she was sorry, so Gabrielle hadn’t paid much attention. She’d waved and smiled and, in the innocence of childhood, let her mother go. But when evening came, her mother never arrived to pick her up. The new adults in her life, strangers all of them, started speaking in hushed tones and shuffling her from place to place. She slowly grew to understand what that final apology had meant, and her understanding brought rage and then bitterness.

  It was bitterness that threatened to choke Gabrielle now. How could any mother do what Naomi had done?

  As Allie kicked her chubby legs and gurgled, “Ma, ma, ma, ma,” Gabrielle wondered why she felt such compulsion to approach this person who’d betrayed her so deeply. Gabrielle was now an adult with a child of her own. She should simply forget, move on—

  “Never mind,” she said. “I—I must have the wrong house.” She whirled, thinking only of escape, when the sound of her name on her mother’s lips froze her to the spot.

  “Gabby? My Gabby?”

  Gabrielle closed her eyes as something twisted painfully inside her. “No. I have the wrong house,” she said, without looking back. She couldn’t peer into that face again, couldn’t deal with the emotions and memories tumbling down on her like water gushing through a broken dam. They threatened to sweep her away into a vortex of even greater bitterness. Gabrielle feared she’d never be able to pull herself free.

  “Gabby, don’t go,” her mother said, following her when she took a few more steps. “Please. The least we should do is talk now that you’re here, don’t you think?”

  Talk? Now? It was too late.

  “Please,” her mother muttered again.

  Gabrielle paused and slowly turned, telling herself she’d seek answers to the questions she’d been asking herself since forever, then leave here and be done with it. But when she faced her mother, she didn’t feel like an adult anymore. She felt like the little girl who’d waited by the window night after night, refusing to believe that the one person who was supposed to love her had let her down so terribly. Somehow, the hurt didn’t seem even one day old. Fresh and raw, it was so poignant Gabrielle couldn’t stop tears from gathering in her eyes and spilling down her cheeks.

  “How could you?” she murmured, her defenses falling away with the years.

  Her mother looked stricken. She opened her mouth, but no words emerged. She blinked quickly, swallowed and finally began to speak. “If I explain what was happening in my life back then, it’ll only seem as though I’m trying to excuse myself. And I already know there’s no excuse for what I did. None I could give myself. None I could give you.”

  “I want to hear it anyway.”

  Gabrielle could feel the scrutiny of the man who’d answered the door, watching her from behind Naomi. He seemed to want to say something, the way he hovered there, but he maintained his silence.

  “Come in and sit down,” her mother pleaded.

  Gabrielle hesitated.

  “Just for a few minutes.”

  Allie, tired of being held, began to push and kick to be let down, but Gabrielle only clung to her
that much tighter. The past can’t hurt me now. It’s over, she told herself, dashing a hand across her damp cheeks. But she knew, deep inside, that the past was far from over, or she wouldn’t be here.

  She followed Naomi Cutter into the Spanish-style house she’d seen from the outside at least three previous times, and took a seat on a comfortable-looking brown sofa in the living room with the big window. A shampoo commercial blared on a small television, but the man who’d answered the door retrieved the remote from the recliner nearby and flipped off the volume.

  “This is Hal, my husband,” Naomi explained.

  Gabrielle summoned a polite nod, wondering how Naomi might introduce her—“This is the child I abandoned…”—and whether the young woman she’d seen at the house before was Hal’s daughter as well as Naomi’s.

  “Can I get you something to drink?”

  Gabrielle shook her head. “No.”

  Naomi’s eyes moved to Allie. If Gabrielle wasn’t mistaken, she saw sadness there. “Is this your daughter?”

  “Yes. Her name’s Allie.”

  “You can put her down, you know. There’s nothing that’ll hurt her in here.”

  Gabrielle allowed Allie to squirm to the ground, then cringed when she crawled right for Naomi and tried to pull herself to her feet using the hem of Naomi’s dress. “Come here, Allie,” Gabrielle said, and snatched her away.

  “Tell her, Naomi,” Hal said suddenly, speaking for the first time.

  “It won’t do any good,” her mother said. “There’s nothing that can fix what I’ve done. Nothing can take back—”

  “Tell her anyway.” His words were gruff yet surprisingly tender.

  Gabrielle felt nervous energy pour through her body. What was it her mother had to say? That she’d lost her job twenty-five years ago and had no way to support a child? That she couldn’t deal with the emotional demands of motherhood? What?

  “I’m sorry, Gabby. I was confused and stupid and so wrong. I’ve spent half my life wishing I could go back—” She paused to gain control of herself, and Gabrielle realized Naomi was wrestling with her own emotions, just as she was. “I have no excuse to offer you, no reason good enough for what I did. But if it makes you feel any better, I’m paying for it. I’ve paid every day of my life since…” Gabrielle heard the quaver in her voice “…I walked away from that day-care center. Sometimes it’ll hit me out of nowhere. I’ll see a child about the age you were when…when I last saw you…and then I can’t breathe for the terrible longing inside me.”

  “Why’d you do it?” Gabrielle asked. “Was I such a difficult child?”

  Naomi braced herself with a hand on the back of the recliner, as though the intensity of her feelings was robbing her of strength. “No, you weren’t difficult, Gabby. You were a good girl, a beautiful child. It was just that, well, your father had run out on us—I didn’t even know where he was—and I wasn’t making my rent each month. My mother, my only living parent, died shortly after you were born, so I had no help. I was working hard as a secretary for an elementary school and doing my best, but you weren’t old enough to go to school, and your day care was expensive. There just wasn’t enough money to go around. I was getting behind and more and more depressed. Then I met this man, a teacher, who—” she sighed “—who I thought was the man of my dreams. Except that he didn’t want anything to do with you. At first I thought he’d change his mind, but the one time I brought him to the house, he would hardly look at you. Do you remember that?”

  “No…”

  “Then he started paying attention to one of the other teachers at the school where I worked,” she continued, “a single woman with no children who was younger than me, and I started to panic, to feel like I was losing him. I was so afraid of being alone, forever fighting a battle I couldn’t win. And then…”

  Hal moved close and put a reassuring arm around her as her tears dripped off her chin and fell to the floor.

  “And then he asked me to marry him,” she said.

  “Did you?” Gabrielle asked, but she could already guess the answer.

  Shame made Naomi look far older than she had only moments ago. “Yes, but the price of his love was far too high.”

  “So it wasn’t my fault,” Gabrielle said. “I did nothing wrong.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” her mother admitted. “I’m the only one to blame.”

  “I’ve told her to contact you,” Hal put in. “But she’s never felt worthy of even apologizing to you. I can’t tell you how often she’s mentioned you, though, how often she’s cried in the night. The past has been like an open wound that just won’t heal, and I knew it wouldn’t until she talked to you. So whether you can forgive her or not—and I’m not going to tell you you should. No one has that right because only you know what you’ve been through and what your heart can bear, young lady. But I’m glad you’ve come. Naomi has made her mistakes. She was right when she said there’s no justifying what she did. But she’s also paid for her actions with the worst kind of regret. When I started teaching at the same school, she was an abused wife, hanging on to the man she just told you about. I think she stayed with him to punish herself, but I couldn’t stand to see it go on any longer. I helped her get away from him. Then I changed schools, but we met up again at an Honors Band concert a few years later. We started to date and fell in love. The rest is history. That was twelve years ago.”

  As Hal spoke, Gabrielle realized she’d misjudged this stranger she’d seen through the window. She’d assumed from his appearance that he sat around and drank beer all day. But she could tell by his demeanor that he wasn’t slovenly or abusive and that he cared about Naomi. Maybe he was the first man ever to do so.

  “So the two of you don’t have children together?” Gabrielle said, remembering the slim blonde her mother had called “honey.”

  “No,” Hal said. “I’m a widower with five children from my first marriage. Naomi has two by her first husband—a daughter who’s about five years younger than you, and a son who’s going to the University of Arizona.”

  She had a brother as well as a sister. The news took a moment to sink in.

  “Are you married?” Hal asked.

  “Divorced.”

  “You and Allie live alone?”

  Hugging her daughter a little closer, Gabrielle kissed her head. “Yeah, it’s just the two of us. My ex-husband lives in Phoenix and comes to visit us often, though. He’s a great guy.”

  “Where do you live?” Naomi asked.

  Gabrielle forced her eyes to turn to her mother, even though it was difficult to face her without feeling a remnant of the pain and resentment she’d known for so long. “Across from the prison.”

  “Here? In Florence?” her mother cried.

  “I’m a corrections officer at Eyman.”

  “Then you’re in the area. You’ll have to meet Lindy. She’ll be so thrilled. I know how you must feel about me, and I don’t blame you, Gabby.” She dried her eyes, her voice more vigorous now that they’d moved on to a new subject. “But you’d love Lindy. And I know she’d love you. Will you come back? Will you let me have your phone number?”

  There was still so much to forgive. Gabrielle wasn’t sure she was equal to the task, but the terrible weight of the memories she’d been carrying already seemed a little lighter, and she knew she wanted to try.

  “Sure,” she said, and Hal gave her a smile that promised he’d do everything he could to make things easier for her. Although Gabrielle wasn’t convinced she could ever have a relationship with her mother, she began to wonder if maybe, just maybe, she’d found a friend in Hal.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “YOU WON’T BELIEVE IT, David,” Gabrielle gushed the second her ex-husband picked up his cell phone. “I did it! I approached my mother.”

  A pause. “You’re kidding,” he said, obviously surprised by her announcement.

  “No. I just got back a few minutes ago.”

  “What made you finally appr
oach her?”

  Gabrielle thought of Tucker and Landon. “I don’t know,” she lied. “You were right. I needed to get it over with.”

  “And? How was she?”

  “She was—” Gabrielle sat on the couch and kicked off her shoes, trying to find the right word. “Nice,” she finished lamely, because she was unable to distill her mother’s behavior into anything more descriptive. A harsher word wouldn’t have been fair. A kinder word would have indicated Gabrielle was ready to forgive her, and she wasn’t sure she was.

  David called her on it right away. “Nice? That’s all you can say?”

  Allie shoved another cookie into her mouth and toddled around the coffee table to try to shove one in Gabrielle’s. Gabrielle managed to interest her in smashing it against some blocks she’d left out earlier. She’d have to wash the blocks and the table later, but she was willing to do the extra work to buy some time now. “She was glad I came.”

  “So she wants to get to know you?”

  For some reason he didn’t sound as pleased as Gabrielle had expected him to. “I think so. She’s pretty contrite about what she did, although she hasn’t said much about any kind of future relationship. But she looked at Allie with such…longing. I got the impression she wanted to hold her. And this is the most exciting part—”

  David covered the phone and spoke to someone else.

  “David?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Where’s here?”

  “The office.”

  “But it’s nearly eight o’clock.”

  “Shauna and I are trying to catch up on a few things.”

  “Shauna?”

  “She’s the gal I told you about, the one who’s been drumming up new business. She’s sort of doubling as my assistant.”

  “Oh. How old is she?”

  “About your age.”

  “Married?”

  “No.”

  “Attractive?” she asked.

  “Fairly, yeah.”

  Gabrielle tried that information on for size, wishing she felt a twinge of jealousy, but she didn’t. She hoped only for David’s happiness. “I’m glad you’ve found someone to help out. You really needed some backup.”