Huntington Family Series

by Rachel Ann Nunes

  Still, there was something about this gospel. Something about the people—about Mitch and his family. And especially the choice Mitch had made regarding his job with seemingly little consideration.

  She wished it was all over. In the past two days, she’d begun having serious misgivings. There were so many things she felt were right, like covenants and eternal families, and when the missionaries weren’t throwing around their complete assurances, which often irritated her, she could feel a longing to believe. It was hard to forget her father’s derision of the Mormons and her own doubt that God existed. Always clouding the issue was her relationship with Mitch and the eagerness with which she looked forward to seeing him each day. Yet she couldn’t allow his belief to sway her. She had to stay focused on her plan: get baptized, get custody, leave for Brazil, and never look back. That way no one could take EmJay from her again.

  There was a slight commotion in the living room before someone burst into the kitchen. “There you are!”

  She looked up to see Mitch glaring at her, EmJay in his arms. Her heart turned over in her chest. She could almost imagine him striding across the kitchen to sweep her into his arms. But even if he tried something like that, which he wouldn’t, she couldn’t allow it to happen. There was simply too much at stake.

  She stood up from the table to meet him. He’s heard from his lawyer, she thought. All week she’d been waiting, knowing he would be furious.

  “I can’t believe it,” he gritted. “First you lead them on”—he motioned to the missionaries and Tyler, who framed the door behind him—“about wanting to be baptized, and now you want to take Emily Jane away from me! Why, Cory? Why? I was willing to share, but you apparently don’t feel the same.” His face was flushed, his eyes furious.

  Cory took a deep breath. Stay calm, she warned herself. “Uh, could you guys leave us alone for a minute?” she asked the others. “I’m sure my neighbor wouldn’t mind if you shot a few baskets.”

  They nodded and disappeared from the doorway, but Tyler hesitated. “Go, Tyler,” Mitch ordered.

  “It’s okay, Tyler,” Cory said. “I didn’t get a chance to tell him about the baptism when I was over there earlier. I’ll explain now.” With a last glance at Mitch, Tyler followed the missionaries.

  EmJay pushed against Mitch’s chest in an effort to be released. When he set her down, she toddled over to Cory, who gave her a small piece of her toast.

  “Well?” he demanded, sounding angry but calmer than before. “And I’m not here about your so-called conversion. I want to know why you’re trying to get full custody.”

  She met his steady gaze. “Since I’m going to be out of the country, it would be hard to share custody, wouldn’t it?”

  “So you think you’ll just take her and leave?” He took several steps toward her. “What about what your sister wanted?”

  “I’m joining the Church. That is what you both wanted, isn’t it?”

  “Not if you don’t mean it!”

  She folded her arms across her waist. “So you are the judge.”

  “We both know you’re not serious. If you were, you wouldn’t have gone behind my back. You would be seriously studying—”

  “How do you know I’m not studying?”

  “Because I’d feel it!”

  “You’d feel it! Give me a break, Mitch!”

  He shook his head. “See? That’s exactly what I mean! You have no respect for our beliefs. You don’t understand the seriousness. You’re playing with things that should not be mocked. Cory, this is real! It’s true! But you’re using it to get what you want. Never mind how your sister felt. Never mind what’s right for Emily Jane.”

  “I’m doing what I feel is right for EmJay!”

  “Are you?” he demanded. “Or are you too busy feeling guilty at what you did to your sister to even think about what’s right for her baby?”

  Cory clenched her fists. “What do you mean, what I did to my sister? She left us!”

  “You betrayed her! Just like you’re doing now.”

  Resentment filled Cory’s entire being. “You don’t know anything!”

  “Maybe,” he allowed, his chin set firmly, “but don’t for a minute think I’m going to sit idly by while you waltz off to Brazil with Emily Jane. I’ll fight you every step of the way.”

  “Go ahead and try!”

  Mitch looked ready to lash out, but she knew he wouldn’t physically hurt her. He wasn’t that kind of man. Still, she certainly seemed to bring out the worst in him. The worst and the best, she admitted, remembering how kind he had been in days past when comforting her about AshDee—and how he’d recently allowed her to spend one-on-one time with EmJay.

  “It’s still not too late,” Mitch said, almost in a whisper. She could tell the words came at great cost. “You can drop the custody suit. We’ll work something out between us. As for the Church, you can take it slow. Give it a real chance. You have to work to gain a testimony. Please, Cory. I have no doubt you’ll gain a testimony. The gospel really is true.”

  His pleas threatened to break down the walls she had struggled to build this past week. She couldn’t allow that to happen. She couldn’t lose herself. She made her voice icy. “You also once said it was simple—which sort of implies that I’m stupid because I don’t get it like you do. Well, guess what, Mitch, I’m not stupid. And the bottom line is, church or no church, EmJay and I need each other more than anything else.”

  He blinked, and for a clear instant Cory could tell that her words hurt him deeply. “Did you ever think for even one minute,” he asked, his voice so calm and reasonable that she wanted to hit him, “that Emily Jane may need me, too? That you may even need me? Did you ever consider that I’m trying to convert you not for my sake but for yours?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying, Mitch. I don’t think you’re looking at me or EmJay as people. I think you’re trying to save us as you have all your little animals. But I’m not a helpless animal, and neither is EmJay. We don’t need saving.”

  “We all need saving,” Mitch said, his eyes pleading with her. “Especially me. Please, Cory, don’t shut me out this way.”

  “I know what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to get me to stay here so you can see EmJay. To get me to give up what I’ve worked for all my life. Well, I won’t do it. And I won’t give up EmJay, either. I have nothing more to say to you.”

  But she did. There was a lot she wanted to say. About her experiences while learning the gospel, and how she felt about him. She wished she could weep and fall into his arms, but that would be giving him too much power over her life—her spirituality—and she couldn’t permit that.

  “Emily Jane?” Mitch’s face grew suddenly pale, his eyes darting around the kitchen. “Emily Jane!” He ran into the living room.

  Cory’s heart took a sudden dive. “EmJay?”

  “Not in here!” Mitch called. “Front door’s open.”

  Cory ran after him. “She might be in one of the bedrooms.”

  “Look there. I’ll check outside.”

  She ran into each of the bedrooms, her heart pounding. Surely EmJay would be there.

  No baby.

  Beginning to feel frantic, she ran outside where Mitch was talking to Tyler and the missionaries under the basketball hoop next door. They were shaking their heads.

  “I’ll check around back.” Cory ran. From the corner of her eye, she saw the missionaries, Tyler, and Mitch split and go up the street, calling for EmJay.

  Her backyard was empty. Next, she checked each of her neighbors’ backyards. Still nothing. With each passing moment, Cory’s worry grew. How could she have let this happen? How could she have been so negligent? It was her fault. She knew that. She’d caused the tension and arguments with Mitch. Before she had come, the worst thing that had happened to EmJay was ingesting small amounts of gerbil food and paper—neither of which was likely to cause her permanent harm.

  Guilt lay heavy on her shoulders. “
Please, AshDee,” she said. “Help me find EmJay.” Tears slid down her face, making it hard to see. She wiped them away.

  The missionaries were coming back down the street, and Mitch was talking to a neighbor. Other neighbors had joined the search. Feeling an odd pull to the house, Cory went back inside. She checked under the beds and in the bathroom. She even peeked inside the closed mudroom where she still had photographs drying on the lines she’d extended.

  She went outside again. Minutes ticked by. Nothing.

  Mitch returned to her front yard. “She’s not at my house. I called the police. They’ll be here soon.”

  “Could someone have taken her?”

  Mitch shook his head. “Who? Why?”

  Cory ran over a list in her mind. The only person she could think of that might have something against her was Evan, but he was long gone on his writing assignment. Besides, she doubted he was that angry at her.

  A small red car came down the street. “Savvy,” Cory breathed. “Maybe she’s seen her.”

  They both ran toward the car, but Savvy was shocked when they explained what had happened. “I didn’t see her,” she said. “But I’ll help look.”

  The entire neighborhood was crawling, as more and more people joined in the search. A police siren signaled the arrival of the authorities. Immediately, they took Cory and Mitch aside for questioning. “How old is Emily Jane? Can she manage stairs? How long has she been missing? Has she ever run away before?”

  Cory felt impatient at all the questions. Why don’t they do something? As Mitch answered them, she drifted away, again feeling drawn toward the house. An officer caught up to her. “I need to check the house.”

  “I’ve checked it twice, but I was going to do it again.”

  The officer went with her, searching in closets, behind her suitcase, in the bathtub, in the cabinets beneath the sinks, and in many other places Cory hadn’t thought to look. Wouldn’t EmJay answer if she were here?

  Yet Cory had felt drawn toward the house.

  The officer moved to the mudroom. “The door was closed,” she said. “She couldn’t have gone in there.”

  He shrugged. “Can’t tell you how many times my toddler keeps shutting himself in the bathroom.” The room received little light from the kitchen, so he turned on the wall switch. The first place he looked was inside the ancient dryer the previous occupants had left. Then he turned toward a pile of dirty clothes. “Ah,” he said.

  Cory craned her neck, wondering what was so interesting in her dirty laundry. Her breath caught in her throat as she saw EmJay curled up in Cory’s dress—her finger-painting dress, as Mitch called it—sound asleep. The skin around her eyes was slightly red, as though she’d been crying.

  She must have shut herself in while we were arguing. We didn’t hear her. Remorse filled Cory’s heart as she gathered the sleeping baby into her arms, dress and all. “Thank you,” she whispered to the officer. “Thank you so much.”

  He smiled. “No problem. I wish every missing child report could end so happily. I’ll go inform your husband and the others.”

  Cory nodded, not bothering to correct him. She sat on the floor and rocked EmJay. The weight in her arms felt like a blessing.

  Had she really felt drawn to the house? Was it AshDee? Or was it the Spirit the missionaries kept talking about? Tears rolled down her cheeks.

  “Cory.” Mitch came into the room, followed by Tyler and Savvy. “Could you give us a moment?” he asked them. They nodded, and he shut the door behind him.

  “She was here all along,” Cory whispered. “She’d been crying.” Her eyes rose from EmJay’s to his. “I felt she was in the house. All along, I felt her here.”

  She could see by his solemn expression that he believed her—or at least wanted to. He knelt next to her on the tile floor, close enough so that if she moved a little, their knees would brush. “And what do you think told you?”

  “I don’t know.” Cory suddenly felt weary. “I know what you want me to say, and I admit that all your talk about the gospel sounds so logical, so reasonable. But I’ve lived long enough to know that something is almost never what it seems in the beginning.”

  “You’ll know the truth in your heart, if you search for it.” Mitch’s voice was soft and compelling, his eyes intense. “Oh, Cory, I want more than anything for you to know it’s true.”

  “I can’t be what you want,” she said, feeling strangled. “When I’m with you, I want to believe—and that’s not fair to me.”

  “What are you saying?”

  Cory hated the note of hope in his voice. “I’m saying that my feelings for you confuse the issue. How can I know if I believe in your church or in you? Maybe I’m just taking the path of least resistance.”

  He gave a snort. “Doesn’t sound like you.” He reached out to her then, and her limbs went weak. His arms closed around her shoulders, and his face came close. Cory put her lips to his and returned his kiss. There was something so right about his touch. Emotions flooded her senses, and she knew that she loved this man. Loved him completely and totally. More even than she loved EmJay or her job. Enough, in fact, to put aside her concerns about whether or not his church was true and follow him blindly.

  “Cory,” he murmured against her lips.

  No! she agonized. I won’t spend the rest of my life wondering if it’s really true, or if I did it because of you and EmJay. She pulled away. “Leave me alone, Mitch. Just leave me alone.” With that, she laid the sleeping baby in his arms, scrambled to her feet, and ran to the door.

  “What about Emily Jane?” he called after her.

  Cory was asking herself the same question. She didn’t know. She didn’t know anything right now except that she had suddenly awakened to the stark reality that she wasn’t better than Mitch to raise EmJay. All along he’d been willing to put EmJay first, while Cory had thought to make the baby fit into her lifestyle. He had also willingly agreed to share EmJay with Cory because that was what was best for the baby, while Cory had only wanted to free her niece from his grasp and whisk her away to the Amazon where EmJay would forget that he and his family even existed, never mind the bond between them. This last ached the most—knowing that had Cory been given her way, she would have compounded EmJay’s loss of her parents with the loss of Mitch. How could she have been so blind and so terribly, terribly cruel?

  Cory kept running.

  And running.

  She didn’t stop running until she was back in the Amazon.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Cory didn’t show up for her baptism on Saturday. Tyler and the missionaries were discouraged, but Mitch was glad. Maybe this meant she was finally taking the gospel seriously. If so, she might someday be able to accept both him and the gospel in her life.

  Maybe.

  Savvy received her mission call to San Francisco, California, and after Cory’s no-show, Tyler called to ask Mitch if he could bring Savvy over for a celebration barbecue on Monday night. “Sure,” Mitch readily agreed. “The birds are gone now. I’ll make my best teriyaki chicken.” He’d keep some fish handy, too, in case Cory came around to see the baby.

  On Sunday night, Mitch went over to her rental house and knocked on the door, but she didn’t answer. He hadn’t seen her since she ran off in her car the day Emily Jane had disappeared. He felt confident that wherever she’d gone, she would soon come back to see Emily Jane. Whatever her feeling toward him and the gospel, she loved the baby, of that much he was certain.

  Mitch’s first indication that Cory wasn’t coming back was the manila envelope the mailman delivered Monday afternoon, filled with pictures of Cory’s little monkey friend, Meeko. Over the past three weeks, she had recounted many of the creature’s exploits, and Mitch had already written a story for Emily Jane about a monkey who lived in the Amazon near a wildlife conservation camp. His story was hilarious at times, even to Mitch, though he was sure it would never be heard or appreciated by anyone outside his family.

 
; He thumbed through the pictures with excitement—Meeko looking surprised with an upturned bottle of shampoo, Meeko swinging down from a tree, Meeko wearing a pair of headphones, and many more. His favorite was of Meeko balancing atop some kind of small horse.

  His smile faded when he saw the short note, stuck in behind the pictures, as though Cory wanted to offer him an apology before breaking his heart.

  Mitch:

  I’ve gone back to work. I need space. Please, please, whatever you think of me, tell EmJay I love her. I do love her more than I can say. That’s why I’m leaving. You’re right, she’s better off with you for now. You have so much support, so much love for EmJay. I grew up feeling alone, except for AshDee, and I don’t want EmJay to ever feel that way. You have a wonderful family.

  I have to figure things out for myself. I can’t believe just because you say so. AshDee’s picture albums are at the rental house. I’ll be in touch. Sorry. Please tell Tyler I’m sorry, too.

  Cory

  Stunned, he slumped to sit in the open doorway, one ear listening for Emily Jane, even as he tried to take in the information. How could she leave? After making both him and Emily Jane love her, how could she go without even saying good-bye?

  This is good-bye, he thought, hefting the envelope.

  He still didn’t understand. He felt like running into the middle of the street and screaming out his hurt. Mitch shut his eyes tightly, fighting the pain inside his heart. One tear escaped.

  As he heard Emily Jane’s voice from the bedroom, he wiped it away and went inside. She’d crawled up onto his bed from her small one and was now eating a tissue from the box he had left on his nightstand. Spying him, she quickly swallowed what was in her mouth and shoved in the rest.

  Gently, he fished the soggy tissue from her mouth and picked up her little body, cradling her. “Good morning, sweetie. Why didn’t you get out by yourself? I know, you wanted me to come and hold you. Well, here I am. I’m not leaving. I promise.”

  As he spoke, anger slowly replaced the hurt in his heart. How dare Cory leave her. How dare she!