A Mother's Secret

by Janice Kay Johnson

  He drained the ravioli and dished it up along with some asparagus and the French bread, then went to the table to eat. He distracted himself with the front page of the newspaper, but was still moody even after he’d cleaned up the kitchen.

  Daniel had to think to remember where he’d put the photo album his mother had kept for him. There had been one for Adam, too, and later for Joe, who must also have his father’s now. For each of them, the annual school pictures were included, as well as occasional snapshots from family vacations or momentous occasions.

  He found it in a bookcase in his bedroom after having a flash of memory: Rebecca sitting cross-legged on his bed, the album open in front of her. She’d asked him about pictures, the people in them, why that trophy had meant something and whether he and his mother had just quarreled before a picture was snapped. Daniel suspected his answers hadn’t been particularly revealing.

  Now he carried the album downstairs, poured himself some coffee, and went back to the living room. He flipped it open on his lap, to the first picture, in the hospital within a day of his birth. Vern had probably taken it, or else, presumably, he’d have been in it. Mom wore a hospital gown, but had brushed her hair as though in preparation for having the moment recorded. The tenderness as she looked down at him, a standard-issue newborn cradled against her breast, surprised him. Tender wasn’t a word he associated with her.

  He got a little better-looking in the pages that followed. There he was, grinning at the camera, chubby still and sitting in a playpen. A couple of pages later, he was just learning to walk—maybe Vern or his mother had captured his first step, or close enough. A few pictures included Vern, a solidly built man who was considerably shorter than Daniel had ended up. Daniel couldn’t see a trace of himself in Vernon Kane’s round face, not even in the shape of their eyes or noses, the line of their brows. Maybe he should have wondered sooner. Presumably, Vern had studied him and come to the same conclusion.

  Most of those early pictures were of marginal quality. People in them were squinting at the sun, or were slightly out of focus. Hazy memories made scenes clearer in his mind, but this album wasn’t exactly an award-winning photographic record of his childhood.

  And then he turned the page and found himself looking at his kindergarten picture, professionally taken and as bright as the day he’d carried the packet home in his book bag. His face was freckled, and his hair had already darkened from the bright copper tufts he was born with to something closer to his current color. He was smiling, but…warily. Not with the open gaze Daniel expected to see.

  He stared at the picture, but it wasn’t his face he saw. Superimposed was another boy’s, one who had gazed speculatively at him while asking Rebecca when she was coming back into the restaurant.

  A boy who looked so much like Daniel at this age, they could have been mirror images except for the eyes. Unlike Daniel’s, the boy’s were brown, a warm chocolate brown.

  Just like his mother’s.

  The kid had come out boldly because he didn’t understand why his mother had gone off to talk to that strange man.

  “Son of a bitch,” Daniel murmured.

  The puzzle pieces slotted into place so damn effortlessly, he couldn’t understand how he’d failed to fit them together sooner.

  She’d been pregnant when she left him, and she’d never told him. No wonder she was shocked to see him! No wonder she’d hustled him out of the restaurant before he could get a good look at the boy—at his son. No wonder she’d been dying to get rid of him.

  I have a son.

  A son who, thanks to Rebecca Ballard, must think his father didn’t give a damn.

  “MOM, THE PHONE’S RINGING!” Malcolm bellowed from his bedroom.

  Rebecca laughed and rolled her eyes as she reached for the handset. “I hear it,” she yelled back, then hit Talk. “Hello?”

  Daniel’s voice was deep and distinctive. “Was I going to be invited to his high-school graduation?”

  The kitchen floor seemed to drop and roll beneath her feet, a sensation terrifyingly familiar to a lifetime resident of a city famous for earthquakes. She had that disoriented, queasy feeling that lodged her stomach and heart somewhere they didn’t belong and made her want to run. She backed against the refrigerator, needing its solid bulk to anchor her.

  “Daniel,” she whispered.

  “A father, it seems.”

  “I thought…you hadn’t realized.”

  His voice was taut. “The sight of him…niggled. I finally got to thinking enough to take out the photo album my mother kept.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut. The pent-up need to flee pressed harder and harder at her chest wall. Unwillingly, she said, “He looks just like you did.”

  “Except for his eyes.”

  “Yes.”

  Rage roughened the timbre of his voice. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “You didn’t want to be a father.” She knew she sounded desperate. She was pressing so hard against the refrigerator, the pointed corners of the magnets hurt. “We didn’t have any future.”

  “What does that have to do with it?” He spaced the words coldly. “Not all parents live together.”

  “That’s not what I wanted for him.”

  “He’s my son, too.”

  Her face contorted. It was at least a minute before she could whisper, “Yes.”

  “I’m coming over tomorrow night.”

  At that her eyes popped open. “You know where I live?”

  “People aren’t hard to find.”

  “Malcolm…”

  This pause had a different quality. “Is that his name?”

  Malcolm Daniel. She could not tell him right now that she had acknowledged him.

  “Find someplace for him to go if you prefer,” he said, his voice hard. “We’re going to talk about this either way. Seven o’clock.”

  He was gone, only the dead quality of the silence telling her that protest was useless.

  Her hand, when she took the phone from her ear, was shaking.

  “HE CAME, HE SAW, HE KNOWS,” Naomi said, her tone brisk even though her hug when she arrived had been sympathetic. “Now you have to deal with it.”

  “You’re a big help.”

  “I’m a big help, too,” her son said right behind her.

  Rebecca had been so wrapped in apprehension and misery, she hadn’t heard Malcolm come down the hall pulling his small blue suitcase, a miniature of the kind adults hauled through airports.

  Steadying herself, she bent to hug him. “I know you can be.” Wrinkling her nose, she said, “Do you really need that much stuff?”

  “Last time I went, Aunt Nomi got tired of Chutes ’N Ladders. So I brought lots of games this time,” he explained.

  Behind Rebecca, Naomi choked, then recovered herself quickly. “Gee, that’s great. You ready to hit the road, kiddo?”

  “I don’t wanna hit the road.” He scrutinized her anxiously. “Mom says you have to drive extra careful when I’m with you. Right, Mom?”

  “Right.” She pretended to skewer Naomi with a stare. “Five miles below the speed limit the entire way.”

  Since her friend lived no more than a mile away and the drive didn’t require her to get onto the Cabrillo Highway at all, Naomi wouldn’t be driving over thirty-five miles per hour. But Rebecca wasn’t about to stint when Malcolm needed reassurance. Tonight, she guessed he’d picked up on her tension.

  “Cross my heart.” Naomi grinned at Malcolm, her freckled face alight. “Whatd’ya say? Shall we go have fun?”

  “Yeah!” He hugged his mother hard, but hesitated on the threshold. “Unless Mom’ll miss me too much.”

  “I have a grown-up thing I have to do tonight,” she told him. “But I promise I’ll pick you up by nine.”

  Comforted, he was willing to go. Rebecca followed them to the door and watched them walk to the car. Malcolm, voice high and excited, told Naomi how his bedtime was usually eight. But Mom was letting him stay up real la
te tonight.

  If only he knew, she thought, heart aching.

  He will know. Soon, I’ll have to tell him.

  She made herself shut the front door and leaned back against it. Wonderful. Now she was left alone to pace and imagine the worst until Daniel showed up.

  The worst? Hadn’t it already happened? He’d seen Malcolm. He was a man who would want what was his, and no judge would need DNA testing to confirm Malcolm was Daniel’s son.

  A firm knock on the door she leaned against made her gasp and spring away from it. Hand pressed to her mouth, she fought for composure.

  Had he been parked down the street, watching as Naomi took Malcolm away?

  Probably. She had to get a grip. She made herself close her eyes and take several slow, deep breaths. There, that was better. She could handle this. Him. She didn’t know how, but she wasn’t letting him steal her son.

  A second, louder knock vibrated the door. She opened it and said, “Hello, Daniel.”

  The anger she had expected made his face hard. For just a second, she let herself assess him as she hadn’t been able to that day at the restaurant. His hair was shorter than she remembered it, his shoulders broader, more heavily muscled. He was dressed as if he might have gone out to dinner with friends, in slacks and a long-sleeved blue shirt that she guessed was silk. He always had dressed well when he wasn’t on a work site. He carried those clothes well, too. Rebecca had become used to other women looking whenever she was out with him.

  Without saying anything, Daniel stepped past her into the small living room, immediately shrinking it with his mere presence and making her self-conscious.

  She crossed her arms in self-defense, seeing her home through his eyes. No, the cottage wasn’t fancy. The furnishings were quirky and personal, assembled over the years as she had need and saw something that appealed to her. In fact, she’d had the same sofa for ages. She had a flash of memory, Daniel pressing her back on it, yanking her clothes off with hungry urgency. Please don’t let him remember.

  But he wasn’t looking at the sofa. He was turning slowly, taking in the scuffed, scratched hardwood floor that desperately needed refinishing, the old-fashioned sash windows that required all of her muscle to open them even a foot to let in air, the cracked vinyl floor through the arched entry into the kitchen.

  Well, so what? she thought defiantly. Not everyone was rich. She and Malcolm had wonderful neighbors here in Old Town Half Moon Bay. They could get to the beach within minutes. He’d taken pony rides at a ranch just outside town. Not half a mile away were fields of pumpkins and cut flowers. Malcolm had a swing set in the tiny backyard. He had everything he needed.

  “So this is where you’ve been hiding out.”

  She stiffened. “This is where I live. If I’d wanted to hide out, I would have left the state.”

  Tension radiated from him, and, as if he couldn’t help himself, he took a few steps away, then swung back to face her.

  “Why didn’t you get an abortion?”

  Her chin snapped up at that. “Why would I? I wanted to have children. I’m perfectly capable of supporting us. I was thrilled.”

  “But not so thrilled you told me. When did you find out, Rebecca?”

  Find out? Not until the end of their relationship. Suspect? Sooner, but she already knew Daniel Kane wasn’t cut out to be a family man. She should have run then, but she hadn’t. For another month she had let herself hope.

  “I was three months along the last time I saw you.”

  “Three months.” He shook his head, his gray eyes dark with bitterness. “We were still spending a couple of nights a week at each other’s places. Sleeping together. Talking over dinner.” He paused. “Making love.”

  “Was it making love, Daniel? Or just having sex?”

  He shrugged contemptuously. “Either way, you lied to me every day. Did you despise me so much?”

  “No.” She took a quick step toward him, her heart wrung by the flicker of pain she would swear she had seen. “Oh, no. I thought…I suppose I thought I was protecting you from having to make decisions you wouldn’t have liked.”

  He snorted. “How noble of you. You were protecting me from the knowledge that I was having a son.”

  “I didn’t know…” Rebecca stopped.

  He stared at her.

  “I mean, whether I was having a girl or a boy.”

  He made an impatient motion. “Girl or boy, most kids have a father.”

  “What would you have done if I’d told you I was pregnant?” She flung the question at him, as if it would sting, and yet she hoped he’d answer honestly. She’d wondered so often.

  A strange expression crossed his face. Rebecca had no idea how to read it, and had little chance anyway, he hid his emotions so quickly.

  “Does it matter now?”

  “Yes.” In the face of his looming size, she plopped down on the sofa. “Yes, it does. You’re angry at me for misinterpreting how you would have reacted back then, but you can’t tell me how you would have reacted.”

  “All right. I would have been shocked. I assumed you were using birth control.”

  “I was using birth control!” she snapped.

  As if she hadn’t spoken, he said, “Once I thought it over, I would have taken responsibility. Asked you to marry me.”

  If he had, even if she knew he didn’t love her, that he was only asking because it was the right thing to do, she would have said yes. Then think how miserable they both would have been.

  She crossed her arms as if that would hold in the pain.

  One of the main reasons she hadn’t told him, she realized now, was her fear that he would ask her to marry him for all the wrong reasons and that she would be weak enough to accept.

  “I would have said no,” she lied. “You were making it pretty plain you’d lost interest in me. To my mind, love’s definitely a requirement for marriage.”

  “Then we would have shared custody. I’d have helped you out financially.”

  “But you see,” Rebecca said quietly, “I didn’t need your financial help. And shared custody may be equitable for the parents, but it sucks for the kids.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Your parents were divorced.”

  Gee, he remembered a tidbit about her background. How nice to know.

  “Yes, they were. Which meant Lea and I might as well have been tied to the end of a bungee cord. Plummeting down one day, yanked up the next, completely powerless. One year at Mom’s, the next year at Dad’s. Sometimes a month here, a month there, depending on what some judge decreed. It was horrible! I refuse to do that to my child.”

  There was a long silence. She was shaking, aware of how passionately she’d spoken, how much she’d given away. But if she’d hoped to soften him, to make him listen, she had failed.

  “Got news for you.” His jaw muscles spasmed. “From here on out, you’ll be sharing him, whether you like it or not.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  SOMEHOW SHE’D PULLED her knees up without realizing it and was huddled in the corner of the sofa while Daniel still stood, staring at her with such contempt.

  “You don’t know him!” she cried. “You don’t love him. Why are you doing this?”

  “Tell me. What does he know about his father?”

  She hesitated. “He hasn’t asked much.”

  “Much?”

  One day after his friend Evan’s father had spent an afternoon patiently teaching the two boys how to hit a ball off the batting tee, Malcolm had asked on the way home how come he didn’t have a dad. She had explained that his father was someone who hadn’t been in her life for very long, and that they’d chosen not to get married and be a family together. He had seemed satisfied, if rather quiet for the rest of the drive.

  “It’s not something four-year-olds think about.”

  “What did you intend to say when he was ten? Fifteen? Eighteen? Were you going to admit that you’d never told his dad he existed? Or did you plan to tell him, ‘
I’m sorry, he’s not interested in you’?”

  She’d lain awake nights worrying about just that. Should she be honest and tell her son she hadn’t wanted his dad involved in his life? Would he come to resent her for making that decision? She hadn’t found an answer. Like Scarlett O’Hara, she’d thought tomorrow was soon enough. It was hard right now to imagine him feeling she’d somehow deprived him by ensuring he had a stable home.

  “I wouldn’t have said that.” Her voice came out thin, hopeless. “I would have been honest.”

  Past tense, she realized in despair. However much she might fight Daniel over this, she would lose. Legally, Malcolm was his, too. If he took her to court, she’d look bad for having deprived him of his son.

  “Are you married?” Daniel jerked his head toward the short hall that led to the bedrooms, as if she had a man stowed in one of them. “Is there someone he considers a dad?”

  Oh, she wanted to lie! She certainly wasn’t going to admit that there had been no man since him.

  Nor did she want him to suspect that she’d been breathless since she opened the front door because he was still the single sexiest man she’d ever met. She didn’t even know why she reacted this way to him and no one else. She hated finding out that was still true. Yes, he was big and well-built and his eyes, a stormy dark gray, had sometimes seemed to reveal a vulnerability that had made her weak-kneed.

  Or weak in the head, she scolded herself, to think for a minute that a softening of his usually closed expression meant anything deep.

  “No. There’s no one right now.” Rebecca chose her words carefully. “I…haven’t wanted him to get attached to anyone I wasn’t serious about.”

  He considered her for a moment, frowning. At last he gave a stiff nod. “All right. How are we going to do this?”

  This. Rebecca felt sick. Daniel Kane wanted to talk about the mechanics of her giving up half her child’s life.