Merry Christmas, Babies

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  The idea of Elise pregnant was so far removed from his idea of reality he couldn’t quite get his mind around it.

  “B&R didn’t even enter my head.”

  “Well, it will, and I want you to know that I’m prepared to do whatever it takes to handle my responsibilities the same as I always have.”

  He didn’t doubt her. And at the moment didn’t care.

  Looking her in the eye, he sought to explain the inexplicable. “Who’s the father?” And why did he already hate the guy so much?

  “I don’t know.”

  Fire burned beneath his skin. How did a woman—at least the kind of woman Elise was—get pregnant without knowing the father? Unless she’d been raped. Could a woman go through something like that and never let on? Surely even Elise, as strong and unflappable and self-contained as she was, couldn’t do that.

  And how did he tackle such a sensitive and intimate subject? He didn’t want to trigger a breakdown.

  He thought of the times he’d seen her cry.

  There weren’t any.

  The times she’d come to him with a personal problem.

  There weren’t any of those, either.

  “When are you due?”

  “Christmas.”

  He couldn’t help a quick glance at her midsection. It was as flat as ever.

  “I won’t let you and the business down, Joe,” she repeated.

  “I’m not worried about me! Or the business.” Did she think he was that shallow?

  “You’re obviously upset.”

  “I’d like to kill the bastard who did this to you.”

  “I did this to me.”

  Had her expression not been so earnest, the situation so tragic, he would have chuckled. “My friend, you are the most self-sufficient woman I’ve ever met, but even you cannot produce the necessary male ingredient for procreation.”

  “No, but I can buy it.”

  Her skirt had pink flowers on it. And dark smudges along the hem. He waited.

  “I had artificial insemination.”

  “You meant to get pregnant?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good God, woman! What the hell did you do that for?”

  “I want a family, Joe!” Her brows rose with her voice, giving her an air of desperation. Panic. He had no idea what to do.

  “But—”

  She shook her head. “Don’t ‘but’ me right now, okay? This isn’t up for debate. It’s a done deal.”

  “I’m trying to understand.”

  “How could you?” Elise got up and left the room so quickly, he was pretty sure she wasn’t coming back. And wished there were a door that would allow him to quietly slip away without having to pass through the inner domain of her home. He wished she had a best friend he could call to take over where he was grossly inadequate.

  “Here.” She was back. With a shot of bourbon mixed with water.

  Joe accepted the gift without a word. Took a long sip. And stared at ice cubes floating in amber-colored liquid.

  Sitting down on the other end of the couch, Elise leaned forward, her elbows on her knees, and turned her head toward him. “How many guys have I dated more than once in the last five years?”

  “Two that I know of.”

  “Then you know of all of them.”

  He was treading on uncharted ground. He’d been confiding in her about his love life for most of the time he’d known her. All he knew of hers was what they’d just covered.

  “You’re a strikingly beautiful woman, Elise.” Surely she knew that. “You could have any man you wanted.”

  Still she watched him. “I didn’t think you ever noticed I’m a woman.”

  The glass started to slide through Joe’s sweaty fingers. He got a better grip.

  “I noticed. But you made it plain from the beginning that you valued our friendship and wanted it to stay that way.”

  “I did. I do.”

  “I respected that.”

  Staring at her clasped hands, she was silent for a long moment. “I have a little story to tell you.”

  He waited.

  “One I should’ve told you years ago.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said, frowning as she peered over at him again. “My reasons seem silly now, and yet to me they make perfect sense.”

  He had no idea what any of this had to do with her newly disclosed pregnancy, but knowing Elise, he was certain he was going to find out. What surprised him was how badly everything about this evening threatened him. He was generally a flexible guy. Took change on the cuff. Accepted other people and their choices, whether like his or not, without much difficulty. He’d grown up in a family with seven kids, and someone was always doing something he didn’t like. To survive, he’d learned the wisdom of withholding judgment.

  “You mentioned my looks just now, as though my being beautiful was just part of who I am.”

  “Isn’t it?” Joe asked her. She used to intrigue and frustrate him with her insights. He hadn’t realized she’d stopped sharing them until this moment when he realized that one was on its way. He sat back, waiting.

  He’d missed them.

  “No. My looks aren’t me at all.”

  “We all have outer packaging,” he countered. A philosophical debate he could do. And even if he couldn’t, he was willing to try—anything to delay the moment they’d have to get back to the problem at hand. “It’s a part of you, just like your gender. And your sense of humor. It shapes many of life’s experiences and has no bearing on others.”

  “Exactly, it’s a package. One we’re born with. It gives us a sense of self from our earliest moments.”

  She didn’t usually agree so quickly. “Right.”

  “It combines with our memories, our loved ones, to provide the rock upon which our lives are built. No matter what happens to us, we can go back to that rock and find solid ground.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Joe watched her through narrowed eyes. There was a catch here. He could feel it coming.

  “And that’s why I didn’t tell you my little story before now,” Elise said. “I didn’t want you to know I don’t have that rock. You treated me like I was normal, and normal was something I hadn’t felt in far too many years.”

  “Too many years,” Joe repeated. “You sound as if you were forty when I met you.” He wondered if pregnancy had already gotten to her emotions. One second she was Elise, and the next she wasn’t making any sense at all. “You weren’t even eighteen.”

  “And you treated me like it. You wouldn’t have if I’d told you what I’d already endured before I got to my freshman year at the University of Michigan.”

  The room was warm. Joe chugged the last of his drink.

  “I’m not the woman you see, Joe.”

  He didn’t believe her.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ELISE WATCHED THE EMOTIONS flit across the face of her dear friend and partner. Joe had always been so easy to read. He didn’t have anything to hide.

  His open honesty made him a great salesman.

  And a horrible poker player.

  He didn’t want to hear what she had to say.

  But he had to hear it.

  Maybe as badly as she now needed to quit hiding from the truth.

  “This face you find strikingly beautiful…” The words caught in her throat. She’d loved hearing Joe describe her that way, but she needed to bury her head and cry at the same time. It wasn’t her he was admiring.

  It wasn’t ever her.

  “It’s not me, Joe. It’s a piece of art—the award-winning work of a very talented craftsman.”

  Dr. Thomas Fuller hadn’t told her about the public acknowledgment of his work—or the pictures of her face that had been passed around. She’d seen a magazine open to an article in his office one day.

  And had rushed to his private bathroom to throw up.

  “I don’t understand,” Joe said.

  “You know
B&R’s start-up money came from a life insurance policy my father purchased before he died.” When it came right down to it, even after all the years of counseling, the new steps she’d vowed to take, she still couldn’t find the words to speak of the night that had irrevocably changed her life forever.

  “Yes.” Joe twirled his glass, moving the ice cubes around and around.

  “I’ll get you another drink.”

  He didn’t argue.

  “I was born in Arkansas,” she said as she came back into the room and handed him the full glass. She took her bottle of water to the other end of the sofa. Opened it. Played with the lid. “I was third youngest of four kids.”

  “You have siblings?”

  She couldn’t blame him for sounding so shocked. Yet the reaction cut her to the core.

  And that was why she was speaking up. People couldn’t know what she didn’t tell them.

  “A brother and two sisters.”

  He threw up a hand. “Why haven’t I ever met them? You know all my brothers and sisters. Hell, you know their kids better than I do.”

  She’d spent a lot of holidays with his family.

  And she’d hurt him. She hadn’t expected that.

  They’re dead, Joe. The words said themselves in her head.

  “You’re welcome to meet my family right now if you’d like to take a five-minute drive with me to the cemetery.”

  “They’re dead?”

  She tried to nod. Meant to nod. She stared at him. Not even blinking.

  “All of them?”

  Now she blinked, opened her mouth, but it was trembling too badly to wrap around words.

  His face stiffened, and paled. “How?”

  “A fire. The electrical system in our house shorted.”

  JOE’S SKIN WAS CLAMMY. Chilled. He needed to walk. Do something. But he couldn’t move.

  Surely the horror he was beginning to picture wasn’t as bad as he was seeing it. Elise was his friend—probably the best friend he’d ever had. She was strong and steady. Nothing bad ever happened to her.

  How could he have been so blind? So damned self-interested that he hadn’t known she was hiding?

  “They didn’t have time to get out?” he asked now, aghast at the thought of her siblings trapped in a burning home.

  “It was the middle of the night.”

  The story she’d had to tell him was simple enough. But it contained images he was never going to forget. His beautiful, self-sufficient partner sitting on her sofa, hunched over, consumed by inner visions. And a fear so real she was shaking with it.

  “What about your parents?”

  “Them, too.”

  She’d lost her entire family in one tragic night. He couldn’t even fathom such a thing. Not when his siblings, his parents, were still very much alive and in his life, an intrinsic part of who he was.

  He stared at his friend, seeing someone completely different, someone his heart bled for. Someone he was in awe of.

  “How old were you?”

  She didn’t seem to see him. “Eleven.”

  A child. An innocent. Six years before he met her. Six years of growing up…where? With whom?

  “Where were you at the time?” How had she been told? Did she see the house?

  “There. I was there.”

  Joe fought the images. He thought about holding her until it all went away.

  And then the end of the story became terrifyingly clear. She’d referred to herself as the award-winning work of a talented craftsman. She wasn’t who he saw.

  “You were burned.”

  She cringed, hugged her knees. And nodded.

  He watched. Waited for her to look up at him. Could he pull her into his arms and make it better? Should he touch her?

  Elise’s eyes, when she finally raised her head, revealed the child she’d been. She seemed unsure of his reaction—as though she’d been expecting a negative one.

  He swallowed. Fought the urge to run his fingers over her face, through her hair, to kiss away the tears glistening in her lashes. To take her into his lap and rock her.

  “How badly?”

  “Forty percent.”

  Of her body? Trying to imagine the reality made him sick to his stomach. The pain would have been excruciating. Enough to send an adult over the edge, let alone an eleven-year-old child.

  “Hair ignites quickly,” she said now, her voice more that of a young girl than the indomitable woman he’d known. “It’s highly flammable.”

  Joe had nothing to say. His eyes stung. He took her hand.

  “Mine was long.”

  ELISE HAD NO IDEA HOW much time had passed. Caught in a warp between past and present, long-ago pain and current fear, she pushed words past the constriction in her throat as best she could. Spoke, for the first time to a nonmedical person, about the night a large part of her died, leaving behind the intelligent automaton who assessed life, made wise decisions, lived up to societal expectations, was kind to others—and had no sense of personal identity whatsoever.

  Holding Joe’s hand—another first—she answered his questions as best as she could, telling him about the years of reconstructive surgeries.

  “Dr. Fuller was an angel sent from God,” she told him. “I met him at the burn unit when I was first brought in, although I don’t remember that.” She smiled, despite the tears in her eyes. “From what I’ve been told, he took one look at me, heard that my family had all died in the fire, and declared himself my provider and protector. He worked with Social Services and I was placed in the home of his parents’ dearest friends—when I wasn’t in the hospital. I was the culmination of his life’s work, and he performed operations that normally cost exorbitant amounts, at the fee covered by my insurance.”

  Elise, withstanding Joe’s perusal with difficulty, could feel her skin tightening where she still had surface sensation. Even after all those years in and out of hospitals, she’d never gotten used to the stares—and the accompanying horror on the faces of the strangers who’d seen her.

  “It’s amazing there aren’t any scars.”

  “There are.” She closed her eyes, reached with her free hand to trace her hair line. “Here—” her finger moved down the outside of her jawbone to beneath her chin “—to here.”

  There were other scars he couldn’t see. That no one saw. Both inside and out. But she was lucky. Thanks to Thomas Fuller, the only external signs left from that hateful night were skillfully hidden, mere thin, silky lines.

  “And the people who kept you, they were kind?”

  “Very.” If she tried really hard, she could still smell Mary’s peach cobbler baking in the oven. “The Bournes were a childless couple in their seventies. My parents were both estranged from their families because they’d married outside their religions—one was Jewish, one Catholic. So I never knew either set of my grandparents. The time I spent with the Bournes was a gift. Mostly I remember their kindness. They carted me back and forth to appointments, therapies and surgeries, visiting me whenever I was in the hospital.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “Wally died of a heart attack the year before I started college. Mary followed about six months later. They were both eighty-one.”

  “I knew you then.”

  “Barely.”

  “You never let on you were grieving…”

  Joe shook his head. It must be late. He couldn’t let go of Elise’s hand—as though his touch made a difference to her aloneness.

  “I’m so incredibly sorry,” he said, hating how trite the words sounded. He’d asked what she’d meant by therapy, and she’d told him about the years of painful treatments she’d endured to regain full use of her injured muscles and limbs. About the nerves that couldn’t be fixed, the parts of her face that would never experience sensation again.

  “Thanks.” She didn’t seem to notice that her fingers were still clasped in his. “You’re the first person I’ve ever told about this—apart from counselors.”
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  He frowned, wishing he’d taken more time to get to know her over the years. He had an idea he’d missed out on much. “Why is that?”

  “Look at how you’re looking at me.”

  He blinked, pulled away. Let go of her hand. “What?”

  “You feel sorry for me.”

  “Of course I do! You suffered such a tragedy.”

  “I know. And I appreciate the sympathy, don’t get me wrong. But after everything I’d been through, I just wanted to live a normal life. It wasn’t ever going to happen if I took my past with me.”

  “Your past is a part of you.”

  She was busy trying to leave it behind. “Maybe.”

  “It made you strong.”

  She didn’t feel strong.

  “I’ve dated two wonderful men in the past five years, and both times I could never get enough sense of who I was to be able to give my heart to someone. There’s always this part of me that’s detached.”

  She figured that there was no point in holding back now. Joe already knew the worst. And he was safe. A friend and no more.

  “I feel fake inside,” she admitted to him. “Just like my face is fake.”

  She drew back when he reached to touch her, but he ran his fingers down the side of her cheek anyway. “You don’t feel fake.”

  She didn’t feel his fingers, either.

  And then, as his hand continued over her face, away from the grafted skin, she did.

  “I lost everything, Joe. Mementos, photos, tokens. The memories fade and there’s no one left who shared them to remind me. I look in the mirror and I’m not me. There is nothing there that speaks of my heritage.”

  He started to speak but she held up a hand. She had to finish what she’d started.

  “Don’t get me wrong. I’m not feeling sorry for myself here,” she continued. “Yes, horrible things happened, but I was also incredibly lucky—in many ways—and I’m very grateful for that. Truthfully, I think more about the good than the bad.”

  He nodded, sipped his watered-down drink, then held the glass in both hands in his lap.