The Doctor's Secret Child

by Catherine Spencer

  “The hospital social worker, abetted by your new doctor. Why weren’t you the one to call me, Momma? Did you think I wouldn’t care that you’ve been hurt or that I’d turn my back on you when you needed help?”

  “I knew how much you hated it here, and what it would cost you to come back again.”

  “I still hate it here. I probably always will.”

  “Then why put yourself out for a woman who never looked out for you the way a mother should?”

  “Because you are still my mother, and now that my father’s gone…”

  She didn’t finish the sentence; didn’t add, “there’s nothing to keep me away,” because there was no need to hammer the point home. John Paget had chased her from the house so often, wielding whatever came to hand and cursing her at the top of his lungs the entire time, that there wasn’t a soul in that dismal neighborhood who didn’t know how deep and abiding the antagonism between father and daughter had been.

  Many was the hour she’d shivered in the bitter winter cold, with nothing but hand-knit slippers on her feet and a thin sweater to protect her from the wind and the snow; many the summer night that she’d hidden in the wood shed behind the house until she’d deemed it safe to venture to her room again.

  Yet for all that people had seen and heard, they’d shown her not a shred of pity. Instead they’d stood in their doorways and shaken their sanctimonious heads as yet another family fight erupted into the street. Poor John Paget, plagued with such a hussy, and him with only one leg, poor soul! Wild, that’s what she is. Born that way and she’ll die that way. Tsk!

  No doubt when they heard she was back, they’d lurk around the cemetery, waiting to catch her dancing on his grave. As if she’d expend the energy! She was glad he was dead, and if anyone asked, she wouldn’t compromise her integrity by denying it. He’d been a monster and the world was well rid of him.

  “Don’t think I haven’t paid for what I let happen when you were little,” Hilda Paget said, the suffering in her eyes provoked by hurts which went deeper than those afflicting her broken body. “It’s haunted me that I turned a blind eye to the way your father treated you. It would serve me right if you left me now to rot in this bed.”

  “What, and live down to everyone’s worst expectations of me? Give them the chance to nod their heads and say, I told you so? Not likely!” Molly laughed, doing her best to make light of a past she couldn’t change. “Sorry, Momma, but I’m here to stay for as long as you need me, and I haven’t come alone.”

  Her mother’s glance flickered to Ariel hovering near the door. Her voice broke. “You brought your little girl to visit me? Oh, Moll, I never thought to see the day!”

  The yearning in her mother’s eyes, the pathetic gratitude in her voice, ripped holes in Molly’s heart. Steeling herself against the onslaught of emotion, because she knew Ariel would dissolve into tears if she saw her mother was upset, she beckoned to the child. “Come and be introduced, sweetheart.”

  With more composure than any ten-year-old had a right to possess, Ariel came to lean lightly against the side of the bed. “Hello, Grandma. I’m sorry you got hurt when your car was hit by a train.”

  Tears pooled in Hilda’s eyes. “Dear Lord!” she quavered, wrapping her bony fingers around Ariel’s small hand. “Dear Lord, you take me back near eighteen years! You’re the image of your momma when she was your age, child, the living image. So pretty, so fine. Look at those big brown eyes and that lovely hair, Moll! She’s all of you, and nothing of me, thank God!”

  What she didn’t come right out and say was that Ariel had inherited John Paget’s looks. Not wishing to draw attention to such an unwelcome fact, Molly squeezed Ariel’s shoulder and said, “Go unpack your bag and leave your grandma to rest while I see what I can put together for dinner, honey, then we’ll have a picnic up here. That okay with you, Mom?”

  “Can’t think of anything I’d like better.” Hilda was tired, no question about it, and her breathing labored, but her smile shone out like a beacon in the fog. “Don’t think I ever had a picnic in bed before. Don’t think it was ever allowed when your father was alive. Guess maybe I’ve got more to look forward to than I thought, yesterday at this time.”

  How she made it out of the room and downstairs before she fell apart, Molly didn’t know. Choking on emotion, she took refuge behind the antlered coatrack while she groped in her pocket for a tissue. But mopping her eyes did nothing to silence the accusations ringing in her head.

  It’s a bit late to shed tears now, Molly Paget. You were the only thing to stand between that poor woman in the bed upstairs and her bully of a husband, yet you walked out and left her to fend for herself when you knew she didn’t have it in her to stand up to him. You’re a pitiful excuse for a daughter and deserve every word of criticism and disapproval ever cast at you. How would you feel if Ariel grew up to abandon you the way you abandoned your mother?

  Destroyed, that’s how! Because Ariel was the most important person in the world to Molly.

  But Hilda had had a husband, and what he thought and wanted and decreed had always carried the day, no matter how harsh or unreasonable his demands. If living with him had become too burdensome, all she’d had to do was pick up the phone. It wasn’t as if Molly had disappeared without trace. From the day she left home, she’d kept in touch with her mother through letters. But those she received in return had been infrequent and stilted, as though her mother begrudged having to reply at all. The last had been sent eleven months ago and short enough that Molly could recall it almost word for word.

  Dear Molly, Hilda had written. Our winter has been hard. The kitchen pipes froze twice last week and the price of fish is very high. Cadie Boudelet’s new grandchild came down with bronchitis, poor little thing. The Livingstons had a chimney fire last week and nearly burned the house down. Our TV broke and we have decided not to get another because there’s never anything worth watching, so I try to get to the library once a week. I sold four quilts at Christmas which brought in a bit of extra money. It started snowing at the end of November and hasn’t stopped since and here we are in April already. Your father hardly ever leaves the house because he’s afraid of falling on the ice. Hoping this finds you and your little girl well, I remain your loving Mother.

  Typically there was no question about their life. No spark of interest in Ariel’s doings and only the most cursory inquiry about her health. The apparent indifference had fueled a decade-long resentment in Molly which she’d been sure nothing could undo. But the unguarded joy on her mother’s face when she realized who it was standing at her bedside left that resentment in tatters, and had Molly questioning her assessment of those sparse, uninformative letters.

  Suddenly she saw the loneliness written between the lines; the utter emptiness of a woman who’d given up hope of the kind of affection which tied families together. The recognition left her awash in yet another wave of guilt.

  “But, I’m here now, Momma,” she whispered, stuffing the sodden tissues back in her pocket and fumbling her way down the darkened hall to the kitchen. “And I’ll make up for the past by seeing to it that whatever future you’ve got left is the best I can make it.”

  Nothing in the kitchen had changed. The same old refrigerator, past its best when Molly had been a child, still clanked along in the corner. The same two-burner stove stood on the far side of the sink. What was surely the world’s ugliest chrome kitchen set—table topped with gray Formica, chair seats padded with red plastic—filled what floor space was left. The only new addition was the calendar thumbtacked to the wall near the back door, and even it looked exactly like its predecessors, except for the date.

  Small wonder her mother showed no interest in getting well. A caged hamster racing endlessly on its treadmill led a more interesting and varied existence.

  There was canned tomato soup in the cupboard, and in the refrigerator a block of cheese, some butter, a jar of mayonnaise, and half a loaf of bread. Molly found the cast iron frying p
an where it had always been, in the warming drawer below the oven, and set to work. She might have come a long way from the days when she’d worn hand-me-down clothes, but the lean years in between had taught her to make a nourishing meal out of whatever she happened to have on hand. Hot soup and grilled cheese sandwiches, with tea on the side, would serve for tonight.

  The kettle was just coming to a boil and she was turning the sandwiches in the frying pan one last time when the back door shot open and sent a blast of cold air gusting around her ankles. But it didn’t compare though to the chilly glare of the woman who came in with it.

  Cadie Boudelet never had been one to smile much, but the drawstring of disapproval pulling at her mouth gave new definition to the term “grim-faced.” “I heard you were back,” she announced balefully. “Bad news travels fast in these parts.”

  “Lovely to see you again, too, Mrs. Boudelet,” Molly said, unsurprised to find nothing had changed here, either. The Boudelets and every other neighbor had viewed her as an outcast ever since she turned ten—a Jezebel in the making, with the morals of an alley cat in heat already in evidence—and a warm welcome would have left her speechless. “Is there something I can do for you, or did you just stop by to be sociable and say hello?”

  “Hah! Still got the same smart mouth you always had, I see.” Cadie slammed an enameled casserole dish on the table and crossed her arms over her formidable breasts. “I brought your ma a bite for her supper, so you can throw out whatever you’ve got cooking there—unless you were making it for yourself, which is likely the case since you were never one to think of anybody’s needs but your own.”

  Sorely tempted though she was to dump the contents of the casserole over the woman’s self-righteous head, a brawl on her first night home would hardly further her mother’s recovery, Molly decided. So steeling herself to restraint if not patience, she wiped her hands on the dish towel she’d tied around her waist and said, “I understand you’ve been very kind to my mother since she came home from the hospital, and for that I’m grateful. But now that I’m here, you need go to no more trouble on her behalf.”

  “No more trouble? Girl, a load of it walked in the door when you decided to set foot in town again, and all the fancy clothes and city airs in the world can’t hide it. Just because you snagged yourself a rich husband don’t change a thing and you’d have done your ma a bigger favor by staying away. She don’t need the aggravation of your being here when she’s got all she can do to deal with your daddy’s passing.”

  Just how unwisely Molly might have responded to that remark was forestalled by the sound of the front door opening and footsteps coming down the hall. A moment later, Dan Cordell appeared in the kitchen.

  “Good grief!” she exclaimed, exasperated. “Doesn’t anyone around here believe in waiting to be invited before they march into someone else’s house?”

  “No need to,” Cadie informed her. “People around here got nothing to hide—as a rule, that is. ’Course, that could change, depending on who’s living in the house in question.”

  Accurately sizing up the scene, Dan raised a placating hand. “Just thought I’d stop by to make sure you were handling things okay before I call it a day, Molly, that’s all. Is that one of your fabulous casseroles I can smell, Cadie?”

  The drawstring around her mouth relaxed enough to allow a smirk of pleasure to slip through. “It is. And there’s plenty more at home, if you’ve got time to stop for a bite, Doctor.”

  The smile he cast at the old biddy left Molly wondering how the icicles draped outside the window didn’t melt on the spot. “Thanks, but it’ll have to be some other time. I’ve got a dinner engagement tonight and I’m already running behind. Molly, can we speak privately a moment?”

  “You listen to what the doctor tells you, girl,” Cadie warned, wrapping her shawl around her head and yanking open the back door to let in another Arctic blast. “He knows what he’s talking about and your ma’s lucky he was there to look after her when she needed the best. He’s a good man, is our Doctor Cordell.”

  In the silence she left behind, Molly stared across the kitchen at Dan, an age-old bitterness souring her tongue. “Tell me something, Doctor. How come you’re everybody’s fair-haired darling despite your many past delinquencies, while I remain forever a pariah, no matter how much I might have reformed?”

  “Maybe I work harder to change public opinion than you do, Molly,” he said, propping up the wall with his altogether too impressive shoulders. “Or maybe I don’t go quite as far out of my way to offend people. You’ve been home what…an hour? Two? And already you’re squaring off with your next door neighbor. If I hadn’t shown up when I did, you’d probably have wound up decking Cadie when you should be on your knees thanking her.”

  It—he!—was the last straw! Cadie Boudelet was a tiresome, ignorant woman who seldom bothered to learn the facts before she arrived at a conclusion, which rendered her opinion of Molly, or anyone else for that matter, irrelevant. But that he should have the nerve to stand there mouthing holier-than-thou platitudes, as if the mere idea that Molly might not have achieved heights of perfection comparable to his caused him intolerable pain, just about made her throw up and she wasted no time telling him so.

  “You make me sick to my stomach, Dan Cordell! If there’s one thing I can’t abide, it’s a man who pretends he’s above reproach to the one person in the world who knows differently. And if you think sticking ‘Doctor’ in front of your name entitles you to change history, you’re even more arrogant than you are insufferable!”

  CHAPTER TWO

  “YOU don’t think much of me, do you, Molly?” he said, glad she didn’t have a kitchen knife at hand or he’d probably have been wearing it between his ribs.

  “I don’t think about you at all,” she informed him loftily, “except when you force yourself to my notice. Then I find you irritating beyond words. So say whatever it is you came to say, then please leave.”

  He’d thought, when he heard she was coming back, that seeing her again wouldn’t much affect him. Thought that age would have mellowed the fiery rebel he’d known briefly more years ago than he cared to count. She’d be a little plumper around the edges, both emotionally and physically; a little complacent and a lot less arrestingly gorgeous. Less inclined to fly off the handle, too. After all, she’d risen well above her impoverished beginnings, according to her mother, and had surely outgrown all those old resentments.

  He’d been wrong on every count. The girl she’d been paled beside the woman she’d become. Spitting fury at him from across that sorry little kitchen, dark hair tumbling around her face, dark eyes flashing, her burgundy red skirt flinging an echoing slash of color across her magnificent cheekbones, she might have stepped out of a Russian drama, or a gypsy saga.

  No wonder Cadie Boudelet had been on the verge of a stroke! Molly Paget had bloomed into much too exotic a specimen for the staid population of Harmony Cove to take in stride, and lost none of her rebelliousness in the process.

  “If I’m irritating and insufferable, you’re impossible,” he said, fully aware that in firing a counterattack he left himself wide open to another verbal onslaught, but too intrigued by the challenge to let the opportunity pass. “I’m sorry if my being a doctor leaves you nauseated but the fact is, I earned the right to the title, just as you earned the right to call yourself a mother. And I fail to see what history has to do with the way things stand today.”

  “Not everyone’s memory is as hazy as yours,” she said, with a lot less passion than he’d expected. “Coming back here is like taking a one-way walk into the past. I’m hardly in the door before you’re all lining up to tell me not to bother unpacking my bags.”

  “You storm back into town with both barrels blazing, ready to take on all comers, and wonder why no one’s rushing to put out the welcome mat? It’s not other people’s perception of you that’s the problem, Molly, it’s that permanent chip on your shoulder.”

  “I’m not th
e one who put it there.”

  All at once, she looked defenseless, leaving him to wonder if she was quite as hard-boiled as she liked to appear. Her mouth drooped and if it weren’t that she’d always known how to use those stunning eyes to good effect, he might have been fooled into thinking they held the faint sheen of tears.

  As if anyone or anything could make Molly Paget cry!

  Shoving aside the preposterous urge to take her in his arms, he shifted his weight so that both feet were planted firmly on the floor, and rammed his hands in his jacket pockets, out of temptation’s way. “You are the one who chooses to keep carrying it around, though. Take a little well-meant advice from an old friend, Molly: drop the attitude and learn to give a little, and I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts you won’t have to take nearly as much flak as you seem to expect.”

  “And it was for this that you wanted to speak privately with me? To dish out—?”

  “No. Consider it a bonus thrown in without charge. The reason I dropped by is that I just got word the public health nurse is held up at one of the outlying farms and probably won’t make it back in time to look in on your mother. Hilda needs two different medications before she goes to sleep. If you like, I can walk you through what they entail or, if you’re not comfortable with that, I’ll come back again last thing and administer them myself.”

  Her face told him she didn’t much like either option. “It depends what you mean by medication. If it involves sticking needles in her—”

  “It doesn’t,” he said, unable to curb a smile. “If it did, there’d be no question but that I’d be the one to do the sticking, if for no other reason than I remember you don’t cope well with needles.”

  “You do?” Her mouth formed a perfect O of surprise, reminding him of a rosebud about to unfurl.