It's a Boy!

by Victoria Pade

  “Oh, Carter.” Heddy sighed, laughing quietly and knowing she shouldn’t be as relieved as she was that the potential reason for Lang’s sour mood didn’t involve her or their kisses last night.

  “You have to wear shoes, kiddo,” she told Carter, putting them on again.

  When the inspection ended, Lang told her everything looked good. There were a few minor things that the current owner had agreed to fix, but otherwise he thought they could set a closing date.

  “Unless you’ve changed your mind,” he added, letting her know it was up to her.

  “No, I like the space more now than I did when we saw it before,” she assured him. “And since Clair’s husband and two other lawyers at his firm looked over the grant paperwork and the contract with Camden Superstores this morning and have given me a thumbs-up, I guess we’re good to go all the way around.”

  “Great. Glad to hear it,” Lang said.

  Everything turned to business then while Lang picked Carter up and propped him on his hip to keep him out of any more mischief. When they were done, Heddy, Lang and Carter went out to the SUV.

  “Are you busy the rest of today?” Lang asked as he put a wiggling, once-again-shoeless Carter into his car seat.

  Thinking that Lang had something else business-related in mind—and wanting to prolong this time with him even if he wasn’t in the best mood—she said, “My major plan was to figure out if April is too early to sprinkle grass seed on the spot where your crew took out my sign this morning. By the way, thank you for that. It was a bigger job than I thought and I couldn’t have done it myself.”

  The men he’d sent over had also hung a big banner from the eaves of her house announcing that her cheesecakes would soon be available at Camden Superstores.

  “Could I persuade you to do me a favor then?” he asked.

  “Can I hear what the favor is before I say?” Where had that flirtatious tone come from?

  He told her about his morning, confirming what she’d guessed from Carter’s comments. During Lang’s shower, Carter had apparently lost interest in what he was supposed to have been watching on television and had instead tried to flush unflushable objects, causing the toilet to back up and flood the bathroom. Not to mention putting Lang’s smartphone out of commission.

  “I have my phone buried in a bowl of rice. One of my sisters said that might dry it out and bring it back,” Lang said. “But I run my whole life on that thing, so I can’t take the chance that it will come back with kinks. I’m just gonna get a new phone, so I need to go down to the mall in Cherry Creek and I don’t think I can do that alone with Carter today.”

  Heddy still had moments when something about the boy made her think of Tina and stabbed her through the heart, but for the most part being with Carter wasn’t painful for her now. Somewhere along the way she’d come to view Carter merely as Carter and had stopped dreading being with the toddler. In fact, sometimes she got a kick out of him and his energy and boundless enthusiasm for things.

  Since she could tell that Lang really needed some help today, she said, “As of today my shop is closed so I think I could probably fit a trip to the mall into my busy schedule. And while we’re there, you might want to have Carter’s feet measured. His shoes are kind of hard to get on, maybe they’re too small and that’s why he keeps taking them off.”

  Light dawned in Lang’s strikingly handsome face. “Oh, that makes sense! A shoe from a different pair was in the mass flushing today and he said it was a bad shoe. I just figured he was screwing around. I didn’t think it really meant anything.”

  Heddy smiled, glad to see that his dark spirits were evaporating right in front of her eyes. “I think he’s just outgrown them and they hurt his feet.”

  “Sure. And that makes them bad. Of course. Well, like I said, I’m a rookie. And maybe a little dense, too, huh?”

  “I don’t think that at all. I think raising a child is a learn-as-you-go kind of thing in a lot of ways. And you’re doing pretty well for being new at it,” she said as they got into the front seats of the SUV and headed for Denver.

  * * *

  It was Heddy’s mood that darkened as the time at Cherry Creek Mall passed.

  After they’d successfully purchased a new smartphone and three pairs of shoes for Carter—who did need them—Carter spotted the children’s play area at one end of the lower level. It had bigger-than-life cartoon characters for kids to crawl under, climb on and slide and jump off.

  Of course Carter was drawn there and Heddy didn’t have the heart to say no when Lang was willing to indulge the toddler, so she conceded. Feeling, even as she did, that she was approaching her own private hell. She might have gotten better about being with Carter, but watching an entire group of kids of varying ages, some of them little girls, was still like opening a wound.

  Trying to hide that fact, she sat with Lang at one of the café tables outside the half wall that surrounded the play area. Using his new phone, Lang checked in with his office, leaving Heddy with nothing to do but watch all the kids at play. And while she tried hard to focus only on Carter, her attention still wandered to the other kids. Particularly to a little girl who looked to be about the age Tina would have been now—another trigger for pain.

  But then it got worse.

  After sending an older child into the play area, a woman pushed a stroller right next to Heddy’s chair and stopped. Heddy couldn’t keep herself from looking down at the baby girl inside the stroller. A baby girl who had to be no older than Tina had been.

  Three months.

  And to make matters worse, the baby had just a smattering of thin, pale, wispy hair like Tina had had.

  And big brown eyes like Tina’s.

  And chubby, cherubic cheeks and a tiny petal-pink mouth.

  Just like Tina...

  And that did Heddy in. It took everything she had not to cry. Not to get up and run as fast as she could from that spot and that baby.

  Keep it together, she silently screamed at herself.

  But to do that she turned herself to stone on the outside. Sitting straighter and much, much stiffer, she stared at the passersby rather than at the kids in the play area or at the baby in the stroller, and fought just to maintain the appearance that she wasn’t falling apart inside.

  “Okay, done!” Lang finally said.

  Heddy stiffly turned her head to Lang and hoped that the sadness that was nearly overwhelming her didn’t show on her face.

  “As if this day couldn’t get any crazier,” Lang said to himself. Then, to Heddy he said, “We’re all really conscious of not abusing the privilege, but at Camden Inc. a request from a Camden is granted ASAP. We have the manpower to accomplish just about anything. Then take into account that the request is top priority and I want it fast-tracked—because I know you can’t afford slow movement on any of this—and as a result...”

  He shrugged as if he were finally conceding to the way this day was playing out.

  “My secretary tells me that there’s a bakery near here that’s going out of business. She just heard through a friend that the almost-new ovens, refrigerators and freezers are all going up for sale and she can get us first look if we go over there now. And if that’s not enough, because I put a rush on them, the mock-ups of your packaging, logos and the initial promo ads that our marketing and advertising departments have been working on for you came in this afternoon. So if you don’t mind, after we drag Carter out of there, we can run over to look at the appliances, and then—if you want—we can go to my office and check out the other stuff. You can either green-light the designs or send them back to the drawing board.”

  Distractions. That was good, Heddy told herself.

  And yet somehow it wasn’t helping to pull her out of the pit she’d slipped into.

  “What do you say?” Lang asked when s
he didn’t immediately answer.

  “Sure,” she agreed quietly, thinking that filling what remained of the day with activity was better than going home and being alone when she felt like this.

  * * *

  “Where did he go?”

  There was an edge of panic in Lang’s voice when he suddenly realized that Carter was not where he was supposed to be.

  After looking at and buying some of the industrial-size appliances that Heddy would need, and then going to Lang’s office to check the packaging and promotional material, it was after seven before they’d headed back to Heddy’s house with a bag of burgers and fries. When they were done with the meal, Carter had demanded the “plillow and banket” that Heddy had given him before and gone to lie on her sofa to watch cartoons while Lang and she stayed at the kitchen table and chatted.

  Lang had just glanced over at the couch and discovered that Carter wasn’t there.

  “Carter?” he called as he got up from the table.

  Heddy’s back had been to the sofa so she hadn’t seen Carter move. She stood and went with Lang to search for the two-and-a-half-year-old who wasn’t answering.

  “At least I don’t hear a toilet flushing,” Lang grumbled. But they didn’t find Carter anywhere in the living room, kitchen or shop area out front. Or in the downstairs bathroom, either.

  “I don’t know how he could have gone up the stairs without either of us noticing,” Heddy said. “But he couldn’t have gotten outside because the doors are all closed tight, and the door down to my work space creaks like crazy. If he’d opened it, we would have heard it. So let’s look upstairs,” she suggested, leading the way to the bedrooms and bath there. “He has to be somewhere. Does he like to hide?”

  “Yeah, but he’s not good at it. He thinks he’s hidden if he stands against a wall with his eyes closed,” Lang said as they climbed the steps that were enclosed on both sides and rose from just behind the kitchen wall of Heddy’s stove and pantry.

  They found Carter in the larger of the two bedrooms on the second floor. He’d climbed onto Heddy’s queen-size bed and was sound asleep, clutching the toy he called Baby tightly against his tiny chest.

  “The couch must not have been enough for him tonight,” Lang whispered.

  “He had a long, hard day,” Heddy said just as softly.

  “I’ll carry him back down—”

  Heddy reflexively stopped Lang with a hand to his arm, immediately aware of just how rock-solid an arm it was but trying not to let that register as something she liked. A lot.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “Let him stay where he is while we have dessert. No sense moving him now and then again when you take him home. He’s fine there.”

  “You don’t mind?”

  Heddy shook her head and crossed to the bed to pull a corner of her quilt over the little boy to cover him.

  Then she and Lang quietly went back down the stairs.

  The oven timer began dinging as they reached the kitchen and Heddy opened the oven door to check the sugar cookies she was baking for their dessert. The oversize cookies needed another minute or more, and after telling Lang that, the two of them gathered what was left of their fast-food meal and threw it away.

  By the time that was done, the cookies were ready to come out and since tonight her sofa was free, Heddy suggested they sit there and have dessert.

  When they were settled, Lang said, “How come being with you improved my day and put me in a much, much better mood, but being with me has made you more quiet than usual and...” He studied her with those gorgeous blue eyes. “Sad?” She knew she had been quieter than usual but she thought she’d hidden her plummeting spirits better than that.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It isn’t...anything.”

  “I think it is,” he insisted. “I’ve been feeling it for a while. Since the mall. Something’s wrong. If I did something or said something...”

  “You didn’t.” She couldn’t let him take the blame for inadvertently placing her on the sidelines of that play area.

  “Don’t you feel well? Did I give you a headache? Are you tired of having Carter around? Or me? Or—”

  Heddy laughed but even that came out sounding gloomy. “I feel fine.” Physically, anyway. “It’s just...me...”

  He didn’t look convinced by the “it’s not you, it’s me” line. Instead his expression was growing more concerned by the minute. And that didn’t seem fair so Heddy decided she should just tell him. There wasn’t any reason not to, anyway. She hadn’t wanted to get into this part of her history with him before, but something was different now. Maybe that he’d shared some of his own personal stuff with her.

  “I have a hard time being around kids,” she confessed.

  “So it is Carter.”

  She laughed again, this time with more humor. “Carter is great,” she said, meaning it. “He’s such a character and he’s so busy and so full of life—” And just saying that last word made her voice crack.

  “But he’s a handful and he can run you ragged,” Lang concluded as if to let her know he understood if she’d grown weary of the child.

  “No, really, it isn’t Carter. In fact, being with Carter has actually been good for me. This is the first time in five years that I’ve been able to handle being around a kid at all, let alone as much as I’ve been around him.”

  “Why?” Lang asked, sounding completely confused as he reached for another cookie from the plate Heddy had set on the coffee table. “I know you said at one point that you’d been married. Was having kids the issue that broke it up?”

  “The marriage didn’t break up. And not only was I married, I had a little girl. She was three months old when I lost them both.”

  That stopped Lang cold. “Lost? As in—”

  “They died.” She watched shock hit him.

  “Oh, God, Heddy, I’m so sorry. It didn’t even occur to me—”

  “I know. If I say I was married, people automatically assume I’m divorced. That’s just more common than becoming a widow at twenty-five.”

  “Was there a car accident?” he asked before quickly adding, “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

  “Not talking about it doesn’t fix it. And no, it wasn’t a car accident. It was a freak thing. I’d been on maternity leave...”

  “From your job as a nurse?”

  “A pediatric nurse, right,” she confirmed. “Tina—that was my baby’s name—was three months old and I had to go back to work. My husband, Daniel, and I didn’t want to leave the baby in day care or with a sitter if at all possible, so I asked for the overnight shifts at the hospital. That way Daniel could be with Tina while I worked, and when I got home, he went to work.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He was a teacher. High school physics.”

  Lang had stopped eating the cookies and was listening very intently, his gaze steady on her as she continued.

  “My first night back at the hospital was also the first really cold night of that autumn. We had an appointment set up for a guy to come out and check the furnace—it was something we did most years—but that wasn’t for a few days. It hadn’t ever been a big deal to turn the heat on before the furnace had been checked, and with the baby...” Heddy’s voice cracked but she was determined not to cry so she swallowed and went on. “Not thinking anything of it, we decided to turn on the heat. No big deal.”

  “Except that it was?”

  “There was a carbon monoxide leak. We didn’t have detectors, there wasn’t any kind of warning. Daniel and Tina went to sleep that night and...I lost them both.”

  Lang’s handsome face showed even more shock—his eyes were wide, his brows arched high. “That is a freak thing,” he agreed.

  For a moment he didn’t say an
ything else; he just reached over and took her hand. Then, in a deeper, slightly hushed voice, he said, “Did it happen here? Did you come home and find them?”

  “It wasn’t here, no. It was in another house. I sold it. I couldn’t go back there.”

  “Yeah, I don’t think I’d be able to, either.”

  “And no, I didn’t find them. I’m grateful for that at least. Daniel had an early meeting that morning so Clair was coming over to stay with Tina until I got home. But when Clair got there Daniel didn’t answer the door. So she went looking in the windows...”

  Even though Heddy hadn’t seen with her own eyes what her cousin had seen, there was still a vivid enough image of it in her mind. “When Clair got to our bedroom window without seeing Daniel or Tina anywhere in the house, she knocked on the glass, thinking maybe Daniel had overslept. You know, maybe he’d been up late with Tina and then they’d both conked out...”

  “Sure.”

  “But when there was no answer to the knock on the window, either, she peeked through a tiny gap in the bedroom curtains. She could see Daniel, under the covers...”

  And in her mind’s eye, so could Heddy. With the bassinet at the foot of the bed.

  “But even though Clair knocked harder on the window and started calling really loudly to Daniel...” Another catch in Heddy’s throat kept her from saying what Lang finished for her.

  “Daniel didn’t wake up.”

  Heddy shook her head and fought for the ability to talk around the lump in her throat, still staving off tears. “It didn’t make Tina cry, either. Not even when Clair hit the window hard enough to crack it and shouted at the top of her lungs. Clair realized then that something was wrong. She called Clark, who was her fiancé at the time, and he called 9-1-1 and rushed over. By the time I got home there were police and fire trucks and an ambulance....”

  Lang looked as if he were picturing it all himself and wished he wasn’t. “That’s horrible,” he commiserated, and then, as if the light dawned for him, he added, “and today there was that little baby in the stroller, right next to you. I saw you looking at her. I thought you went a little pale, but—” He made a pained face. “I thought maybe she had a dirty diaper and smelled bad or something.”