That's Our Baby!

by Pamela Browning

  He made himself look back at the map. “There’s no need for you to go with me,” he said. “I can handle the repairs myself.”

  Kerry regarded him steadily. “I want to help. If it hadn’t been for me, you wouldn’t be in this situation.”

  At that false pronouncement, guilt settled over Sam like a cold, wet blanket. Of course he hadn’t come here to check on her; the papers he wanted her to sign had been paramount in his mind. He knew he ought to steer her in another direction.

  “So,” she went on, oblivious to his jumbled thoughts as she got up and headed for the kitchen, “since you’re here, the least I can do is get us both another cup of hot chocolate.” She moved closer and poured more hot chocolate from the kettle into his cup.

  She went on talking over her shoulder as she returned the kettle to the kitchen. “After we get up in the morning, we’ll hike to the plane, and you’ll get started on the repairs. I’ll be your helper and your gofer.”

  He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Repairing the Cessna isn’t going to be a picnic, you know.”

  “I believe you.” She settled herself on the small backless bench across the room and regarded him over the rim of her mug. “Two people can work faster than one. You know, Sam, I’m counting on you to get us out of here.”

  Sam knew she was. That was the worst of it. He finished off his hot chocolate and tried to think past the knowledge that he was a cad and a jerk. Or was he? His intentions had been good at the start of everything. It wasn’t his fault the plan had gone awry.

  Kerry, who couldn’t possibly be aware of what he was thinking, offered a tentative smile. “I’d better get to bed if we’re starting out early.”

  It was a handy escape and he took it. “I’m going to turn in, too. It’s been a long day. Are the sheets for the couch still in that chest?” He indicated a dresser that had been shoved against the far wall.

  Kerry shook her head. She went to the old wardrobe beside the ladder to the loft and opened the drawer in the bottom of it. “I had to move the sheets to make room for some of my clothes.” She tossed him two sheets, a top and a bottom one, and a heavy wool blanket. “There are pillows behind the couch,” she told him. She caught herself up short and cast a glance at her old pillow, still stuffed into the wood box.

  “I guess I’ll need one of those pillows myself,” she said sheepishly.

  “I’ll get it,” he said, but she reached the couch at the same time he did. He didn’t mean to, but he bumped into her.

  Kerry let out a sharp cry, and Sam realized that he must have hit her finger.

  “It’s all right,” she said, but her voice quavered.

  His heart went out to her. It must be hard to be Kerry Anderson right now. She’d lost her husband, faced up to financial problems and set out in a bold new direction—all in the past year. He didn’t want to add any more problems to the ones she already had. Life for her must be difficult enough. And if he waited until they got out of here to unload those papers on her, the ride wouldn’t be as bumpy, and he wasn’t only thinking of their mode of travel.

  “Good night, Sam,” Kerry said softly.

  He was unable to take his eyes off the sway of her body as she climbed the narrow ladder. She turned to look at him over the low loft railing. “I’ll set the alarm for sunrise. That’ll give us all the daylight hours to work on the plane,” she said. Then she disappeared into the darkness beyond.

  Sam pulled out the folding bed, made it up with the sheets and settled into it. Was he doing the right thing by not confronting Kerry with those papers right now? And what if he did and the resultant resentment made it impossible for them to cooperate well enough to ensure their mutual survival? In his anguish, he wished with all his heart that this was one of those black-and-white situations in which proper conduct was clear. There was nothing clear about any of this, least of all his conscience.

  As he punched his pillow into submission, he heard Kerry rustling about upstairs and wondered if she was getting undressed. With one finger out of commission, sleeping in her clothes would be easier for her than trying to take everything off and shimmying into pajamas or a nightgown.

  On the other hand, maybe she slept in the nude.

  AFTER SHE WAS SNUG in her solitary bed, Kerry lay close under the rafters of the loft listening to Sam sleep. It hadn’t taken him long to drop off. He made noises while he slept, although it wasn’t snoring exactly. More like “snoofling,” which was something less than a snore but more than a deep breath. There probably wasn’t any such a word in the dictionary, but there should be.

  I wonder if he ever snores, she thought sleepily. Doug used to snore, and even though other wives complained about their husbands’ snoring, Kerry had always found it reassuring to know that he was right there beside her. Maybe that came from his being absent so often, on one of his frequent overnight flights somewhere.

  She couldn’t help thinking about Doug. Tonight Sam had brought out feelings that Kerry hadn’t known she could have anymore. She’d felt protected by Sam, and cared for, which was silly considering the fact that they didn’t like each other much.

  But still… She’d been startled to discover a confusing and totally out-of-line sexual attraction working between them, and she couldn’t imagine where that came from. She was pregnant and hadn’t known she was capable of sexual feelings. Was this normal? Was it commonplace? With no man in her life at present, she’d expected her sexuality to have settled into a dormant stage, and the possibility of feeling desirable to any member of the male sex had seemed remote.

  She wished now that she could discuss this with Emma, her friend in Anchorage, or her sister Charlene, but Charlene was single and wouldn’t know anything about having babies anyway. Charlene did, however, understand male-female relationships. Charlene could have a field day with what was going on between her and Sam, and certainly Charlene would know if what Sam was exhibiting was sincere interest in her as a human being, concern over his best friend’s widow’s welfare or something else entirely.

  And if it was something else entirely, then why was it happening?

  That was the last thought to escape Kerry’s consciousness before she fell soundly asleep.

  WHEN SHE WOKE UP before the alarm the next morning, dragging open eyelids that felt stone-heavy with sleep, she felt sore all over. Her hip hurt where she’d bruised it the day before, and her shoulder was stiff. Her finger felt okay until she tried to move it, and then she realized all over again that she’d really and truly broken it.

  Bedsprings creaked in the cabin below, and she thought, “Who’s that?” And then she remembered: Sam. Memories of the night before flooded her consciousness.

  Sam. Sam Harbeck was here.

  Her finger ached. Sam had really bumped it hard last night while they were trying to get the pillows from behind the couch. And he’d looked so contrite after it happened. For a moment she’d thought he might offer to kiss it and make it well.

  Ha! No chance of that. He still didn’t like her, and she didn’t like him. The best they could hope for was a period of cooperation after which they would each go their separate ways.

  “Yo! Kerry!”

  She sprang bolt upright in bed. She hadn’t realized that Sam was already awake.

  “I’m up,” she called into the hollow predawn darkness. “I’ll be down in a minute.” She reached for the saltines she kept nearby as an antidote to morning sickness.

  “No rush, I’ve been awake for a while, waiting for the alarm to go off. I think I’ll light a lantern. It’s mighty dark down here.”

  She heard him striking a match, which was followed by the flare of the lamp wick. She squinted at the clock and saw that it still had a half hour to go before the alarm. As she punched the alarm button down, she swung her feet over the side of the bed. The floor was cold, and as she groped around in the dark with her feet for her slippers, she heard the back door slam. No surprise; Sam was heading for the shed.

  Do
wnstairs, she gingerly started assembling the ingredients for breakfast, treating her sore finger with respect all the while. Sam had removed the slop bucket from below the sink, which she appreciated because she didn’t like walking into the woods to empty it. Also, he must have stoked the cook stove earlier, because the coals were hot. A cursory check through the window at the spruce wood neatly stacked in the breezeway showed enough to last another two weeks, or at least it would have lasted that long before the weather turned unseasonably cold.

  Surely the river wouldn’t freeze in September—or would it? As the wife of a pilot and as a former flight attendant, she knew enough about bizarre weather patterns to be wary. While she folded blueberries into the flapjack batter, she wondered what was taking Sam so long. If he’d only gone to the shed, he should be back by this time. She wished he’d hurry. She wanted to use the shed herself. Pressure on her bladder from the growing baby made frequent trips to the facilities absolutely necessary.

  She tossed strips of bacon in a skillet and wrinkled her nose at the greasy odor, which was unfortunately making her stomach feel unsteady. Still no Sam; where was he? Her stomach was churning. She kept swallowing, willing the nausea to stop, and finally she munched on a couple more saltines.

  After she’d laid the cooked bacon to drain on a bed of folded paper towels, she didn’t think she could stand the bacon odor any longer so she wrapped herself in her shawl and ventured out into the breezeway. The morning felt cold and crisp, and the sun reflected off billowing drifts of snow deposited by the storm of the night before. When she knocked at the door of the shed, Sam didn’t answer. Then she saw his footprints leading off through the new snow toward the river. So she was free to use the shed, which she did with much relief.

  Back in the cabin, she walked through to the front door and opened it to let fresh air blow some of the bacon odor out. A stand of birches stood between her and the river, and she saw a startled deer dart back into the forested slope at the foot of the mountain. She often saw wildlife at Silverthorne; it was one of the many things she loved about the place. But this morning, the only wildlife she wanted to see was Sam Harbeck. He had been gone too long, to her way of thinking.

  SAM HAD LEFT to give Kerry privacy. And to give himself a chance to think things over. That pouch containing the incriminating papers was burning a hole in his pocket.

  A rocky moraine, left long ago as Williwaw Glacier retreated, covered the bank of the river. The water, opaque with glacial till, was cold, but still moving freely. So maybe there was hope that the river wouldn’t freeze after all, despite the shelf of ice that now lined the bank. Yet he knew all too well that freeze-up could occur very quickly. First small wrinkles of scum ice would appear on the water’s surface, then more wrinkles, then the wrinkles would join and become hard. He’d seen it happen in a matter of hours.

  He made himself stop thinking about it and stood for a moment, bowled over as always by the grandeur of the towering mountaintops and the craggy ice wall of the glacier. The glacier’s passage had crushed centuries’-old trees against the rocks and boulders along the glacier’s banks, pulverizing them as it ground relentlessly forward, and he marveled at how much the ice had moved since his last visit. Well, so had they all—Doug was gone, Kerry was a widow, and at the moment he was missing his friend very much.

  “Halloo! Sam!” The sound of his name startled him out of his reverie.

  He saw her through the trees, a small figure wearing bright colors.

  Kerry.

  What was going on between him and this woman? Her voice put him in mind of things he’d rather not contemplate. Or that he would like to contemplate. He was contemplating them even now, and why? His hormones had surged into overdrive from the first minute she’d hauled off and brained him with her pillow.

  He felt a grin spreading over his face as he thought about how funny she’d looked, all spooked, but feisty. Kerry got her back up much too easily, but he had to admit she was an interesting woman. Most women weren’t, at least not to him. And his response to Kerry was totally unexpected. Unnecessary. And unforgivable. He had no business getting the hots for his best buddy’s wife.

  Widow, he reminded himself, for all the good it did.

  “Sam?”

  “I’m on my way,” he said, turning around and plowing back up the bank toward the cabin.

  Kerry waited outside for him, fully dressed in jeans and a lumberjack’s red plaid jacket, her hair in two braids tied with incongruous blue satin ribbons. She looked…different. Not like the Kerry who had been Doug’s disapproving wife, not like the wounded Kerry he’d found here yesterday.

  “I made breakfast,” she said without preamble.

  “Good,” he said, stepping past her into the cabin, forgetting to knock the snow off his boots. Too late he remembered, but by that time she was sweeping past him and asking if he’d like scrambled eggs along with the flapjacks and bacon reposing on a large platter near the stove.

  “Not fresh eggs,” she hastened to add. “They’re powdered. I’ve learned to do a pretty good job with them, though.”

  “Eggs would be good,” he said. “We need to bolster ourselves for a long walk and a lot of hard work.”

  She didn’t say anything, but busied herself at the stove. He saw that she’d already brought in the slop bucket that he’d emptied earlier. It impressed him that she was so efficient, and he admired the way she moved around the kitchen, graceful but focused on her task. When the eggs were ready, she carried them over to the table, where he sat drinking coffee from a big cracked blue mug that had always been his when he stayed here.

  “You make good coffee,” he said.

  “Doug taught me how.”

  “No way. Yours is much better. Doug’s coffee always tasted like runoff from a moose wallow.”

  She looked like she wanted to smile. Instead she set the platter of eggs down.

  “Aren’t you going to eat?” he asked sharply.

  “I—well, I ate something earlier,” she said. She shoveled flapjacks from the platter to his plate—six of them.

  He looked at the large stack of flapjacks in front of him. “Blueberry flapjacks,” he said, pleased. “My favorite.”

  “It was a good summer for blueberries. The patch behind the lodge was full of them.”

  She busied herself at the stove while he got down to the business of eating. “You should have eggs,” he said conversationally as he wolfed them down. He’d certainly eaten worse powdered eggs, and this surprised him. Kerry had never seemed like the kind of woman who would enjoy roughing it, much less know how to navigate her way around a kitchen.

  “More bacon?” He looked up to see a strange and unfathomable expression cross Kerry’s face even as she held the bacon toward him.

  “Thanks, this is a great breakfast,” he said as she all but dropped the platter on the table. Her face had a peculiar color to it, a greenish tinge.

  “Are you—” he began, knowing in that moment that something was wrong. But he’d hardly uttered the words when she blurted, “Excuse me,” and darted quick as all get-out out the back door. She didn’t shut it after her, either. He heard the shed door slam and got up to push the back door shut, thinking in his annoyance that only a fool cheechako would fail to shut a door in this kind of cold without regard to how much cabin heat she was wasting.

  The sounds coming from the shed were unmistakable. Kerry was upchucking with great fervor.

  The realization totally unnerved Sam, and he stepped outside into the cold air. He didn’t know whether to make his presence outside the shed known or if he should speak to Kerry or what exactly his behavior should be. She might prefer to be private about this. He was sure that she’d be embarrassed to know he was listening, but she sounded really sick.

  He settled on clearing his throat, although he doubted she could hear him.

  But Kerry, mortified, did hear him, and that didn’t make this any easier. Morning sickness was the one thing about having
a baby that she hated, burdened as she’d been with the symptom almost since the first week of her pregnancy. Now Sam Harbeck, the last person to whom she wanted to show any weakness, was shifting from one foot to the other only a door away while she reversed a breakfast of five saltines and a flapjack.

  Unsteadily, she groped in her pocket for a tissue and wished for a giant swig of mouthwash. Sam, of course, was still cooling his heels in the breezeway.

  When she was ready, she opened the door and tried for nonchalance, as if vomiting were no big deal. Truth was, she was embarrassed beyond talk. If forced to explain, she’d pray for instant annihilation from whatever source: an asteroid, being kidnapped by elves…

  “Are you okay?” Sam asked. Anxious lines radiated out from his eyes, and a furrow of concern bisected his forehead.

  “I—um, well, it’s just a slight upset,” she said. If she looked the way she usually looked after one of these episodes, her face was milk-white. Snow-white. Snow seemed like an inspired idea at the moment, so she reached down and grabbed a handful, which she then used to wipe her face. Sam stared at her, his mouth hanging open.

  “You aren’t coming down with some kind of virus or something, are you?” he asked sharply.

  “No, I don’t think so. Maybe I ate too much goulash last night.” It had been heavily seasoned, and he might buy this explanation.

  “I ate goulash, too, and my stomach is fine,” he said, sounding perplexed.

  “Then I probably shouldn’t have taken a pain pill on an empty stomach,” she said. She sidestepped past him, and he followed her into the house. The heavy odor of bacon dredged up an urge to throw up again, but there was nothing left in her stomach. For which, Kerry reminded herself with the steely resolve that had brought her this far, she might as well be thankful.

  “Maybe you’d better take it easy,” he said. “Stick around the cabin while I take a look at the plane.”