The Baby Gift

by Bethany Campbell

  Leo shrugged modestly. “Hmph. Well, I guess I’ve taught him a thing or two along the way.”

  Briana put aside her tea, barely tasted. “I have to be going. I’m getting behind, with all these trips to the city.”

  Inga looked stricken. “Oh, don’t go yet. Harve should be back soon—it’s starting to get dark. Stay and talk to him, Briana. I’m sure you’d be a comfort to him.”

  “I’m sure you’ll be better,” Briana said. “You’re family. I’m not. I don’t mean to be unneighborly, but I have things I have to do. I’ll bring Nealie in a little while.”

  She rose and put on her jacket, which she had flung over the arm of the sofa. Leo looked unhappy at her departure. “You just got here. I’ve been waiting all day to see you. You’ll be back again to stay tonight?”

  Briana hesitated, then nodded, feeling strangely guilty. “Yes. After I take Nealie home, I’ll come back to spend the night. But I can’t keep doing it, Poppa. When Harve feels more settled, he can take the spare room. I’ll tidy it up for him.”

  “Oh, my dear,” Inga said brightly, “I’ve already cleaned it and rearranged it—for you. Your poppa wants you to be as comfortable as possible.”

  My Poppa wants to control me as much as possible, Briana thought, irritation rising. “Only a few nights more,” she said. “I mean it.”

  Inga, standing behind Leo, must have seen the sparks stirring in Briana’s eyes. She looked at Briana with kindly sternness and shook her head. Her expression clearly said, Don’t say anything to upset your father. It’s not good for him.

  Briana knew that look well. She had seen it on her mother’s face a thousand times. She had grown up with it. It was household law to defer to Poppa, to cosset and never upset him.

  She had only violated that law once, with Josh. She was about to do it again. Her emotions spun like a whirligig, and she didn’t know if it was the situation, the hormones or both.

  “We’ll talk about it later,” she said with a calmness she didn’t feel.

  NEALIE DIDN’T WANT to go to Leo’s.

  Tears rose in her hazel eyes. The sight of them made Josh’s heart tighten painfully, as if pinched in a vise.

  “Mommy, I don’t want to go to Grandpa’s. I want to stay here with you and Daddy. It’s hardly ever just the three of us.”

  “Your grandfather wants to see you,” Briana explained, smoothing the girl’s hair. “And I have to go to the greenhouses and work. I’m way behind on the plants.”

  So after supper, they drove Nealie to Leo’s. She went reluctantly, carrying her video of Beauty and the Beast. Josh, his heart constricted, watched Briana walk their daughter to Leo’s door.

  When she got back into the truck, she said nothing, and neither did he. They drove in silence to the oldest greenhouse. “I have seedlings to repot,” she said. “We can talk while I work. You can help if you want.”

  The greenhouse was warm and humid, fragrant with the scent of fertile potting soil. The shelves were full of trays of young plants, delicate and green, just starting to flourish. In the silence, they seemed to be breathing almost perceptibly, and they gave the air a strange, secretive liveliness.

  Josh watched her wet the fine transplanting soil, set out the stacks of new pots, swing a tray of seedlings from a shelf on to the worktable. She plunged her hand into the soil bucket and brought up a palmful that she deftly patted into a medium-size black plastic container.

  She gave him a nervous smile. “It’s kind of fun. Like playing in mud.”

  He tried to follow suit. He wondered if she wanted them both to have their hands in the moist black earth so they would not be tempted to touch each other. She had worn a white T-shirt, as if to ward off any contact.

  Josh’s fingers were awkward on the fragile stems, the sensitive root balls. And Briana was clearly on edge. He knew her being flooded with hormones didn’t help.

  For days he had wanted to be alone with her for more than a few stolen seconds. He wanted to talk, but he felt tongue-tied. He had things to ask her and tell her, difficult things, and he did not know where to start.

  At last, to break the silence, he said, “Why do you keep repotting these things? They look fine the way they are.”

  She firmed the soil in the bottom of another container. “To build the root system.” She tipped a tomato seedling from a smaller pot into the palm of her left hand. “See this? The plant’s small, but its roots are already crowded. It wants more room.”

  He lifted an eyebrow. “But then the same thing happens. You do it again and again.”

  “Of course,” she said, concentrating on settling the roots in their new home. “Tomatoes love to be repotted. Each time they’ll grow bigger roots. The stronger the root, the better the plant. By the time these are ready to go into the ground, they’ll have terrific root systems—not like those dinky little plants you see for sale most places in the spring.”

  “Seems like a lot of work,” he grumbled.

  “Good, strong roots are worth it,” she said.

  He looked at her, the fine-featured profile, the beautiful mouth tense with concentration.

  “Good, strong roots,” he said. “You believe that goes for people, not just plants.”

  She looked at him, and her eyes were sad. “For some people.”

  “People like you,” he said. He thought, She’s known this greenhouse, these smells, these sights, the feel of the soil from childhood. Just as Nealie already knows them.

  She said, “People like me. Yes, I suppose.” She turned and took another handful of soil.

  He reached for another handful himself. He wasn’t afraid of dirt. But he wasn’t used to treating it with reverence, either. “And then there are people like me. Who live without roots.”

  She packed fresh soil around the transplanted seedling to its lowest leaves. “It’s hard for people like me to understand people like you.”

  “And vice-versa,” he said, stealing another sidelong glance at her. She’d wiped her cheek and left a dark smear of dirt along the delicate line of her jaw. He wanted to wipe it away, but his hands were as dirty as hers. He thought of kissing it away.

  No. He couldn’t be swept that way again. Their time was running low. Too much was happening too fast, and nothing physical was possible between them. She was terrified of an accidental pregnancy.

  He took a deep breath and said, “Today when I went to Harve’s—”

  “It was very good of you to do that,” she said. “It really was.”

  “No. I didn’t go out of a kindly, charitable impulse. I went so I wouldn’t feel like a turd.”

  She gave him a small smile. “I’ll give you credit for your actions, not your motives.”

  He shook his head, troubled. “Don’t give me credit for anything. Other people came, too.”

  “That’s what neighbors do,” she said. She said it with the simple sincerity that could turn him inside out.

  “I saw that,” he told her. “They came and they helped because he was one of them. They’re all like him. They’ve all got—roots.”

  She frowned. “I don’t understand what you mean.”

  “I worked with them,” he said. “But I wasn’t one of them. I could feel it. And I knew I’d never be one of them.”

  “Oh.” Was there disappointment in her voice, or did he only imagine it? She carefully transferred another seedling, its roots as fine as cobwebs.

  He said, “It’s how I used to feel when I’d try to fit in with your father and brother. I don’t belong. It’s like I’m a different breed.”

  Softly she tamped down the soil to secure the plant, to keep it steady and nurtured. “You are a different breed. We—my family and I—we’re tame. We’re the hot house-plants. You flourish in the wild.”

  “But I love you.”

  The words leaped from his mouth as if they had a life and will of their own. His heart slammed in his chest, crazed by his foolishness.

  Her pretty face was sad. “I�
��I care for you, too. Deeply. But what good does that do?”

  He started to reach out to her, then saw his hand, muddied to the wrist, and drew it back. He gripped the table instead.

  He said, “I look at you—” He stopped, swallowed. “I look at you and I want you. I want to have another baby with you. And maybe even another.”

  “Babies need fathers,” she said. “Fathers who are there to help them grow up.”

  “I’m Nealie’s father,” he said with passion. “I love her, and she loves me, and I try to be a good parent.”

  “I know,” she said. She took another young seedling and tipped it out, taking care of its frail roots, its slender stem.

  “If you’ll marry me again,” he said, “I’ll try to be a good husband. I’ll love our baby, and I’ll be the best father I know how to be.”

  “But you’ll be gone, mostly,” she said. “And you’ll go to dangerous places.”

  “It’s my job,” he countered. “Lots of women marry men who have to be away—they have since the beginning of time. They’ve married sailors and soldiers and explorers. Men went off to wars—”

  “Most of those men had to go,” she said. “You choose to. There’s a difference.”

  He gripped the table more tightly and leaned toward her. She drew back slightly, as if in self-defense. “I would always come back to you. Always. And to our children.”

  Tears suddenly sprang to her eyes. “Could you come back from the dead? Because the first time, it wasn’t so much that you went away. It was where you went—and why. You could have died. There was shooting. There were bombings. But you had to go there. For what? For pictures.”

  His muscles stiffened in resentment. “They were good pictures.”

  The tears welled more brightly. “Good for what?”

  He swore to himself. She didn’t understand him at all. Maybe it truly was hopeless between them. But he swept his soil-stained hand in a gesture that took in the greenhouse, the whole farm.

  “What good is this?” he retorted. “All this work, all this clannishness, for what? So a few hundred people can chow down on a homegrown tomato? Wow. Talk about a mission in life.”

  “These plants are endangered,” she said, flaring into argument. “They’re part of our heritage, but if people don’t work to save them, they’ll die out.”

  “Okay, so your job is to preserve things, right?”

  “Right,” she said. Her nod was pugnacious.

  “So is mine,” he reasoned. “I preserve moments. I preserve split seconds in time. Sometimes they’re pretty. Sometimes they’re not. But I’m trying to capture a piece of the truth. Including what’s disappearing forever from this world.”

  “Do you have to put your own life in danger to do it?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “You do it more than sometimes.”

  “I go with the story. That’s all. That’s all I’ve ever done.”

  “And it’s all you’ll ever do,” she accused, going to the racks and pulling down another tray of seedlings.

  “Is this,” he asked with a bitter smile, “the root of the problem, pardon the expression? That you’re scared?”

  She slammed the tray down so hard the young leaves trembled and crumbs of soil jumped. “You’re damn right I’m scared. I’m terrified.”

  He looked at her in wonder. “I never took you for a coward. Not you, of all people.”

  She started filling a new container. She moved with the briskness of fury. “I don’t want to be a bride one month and a widow the next. I don’t want Nealie to think she’s got a full-time father and then, instead, be an orphan. I don’t want our baby to grow up knowing you loved some story more than him—or her.”

  A tear spilled down her cheek, and she brushed it away angrily, leaving another streak of dirt.

  He looked at her, his throat aching with emotion. It destroyed him when she cried. “Life’s uncertain for everyone, Briana. Look at Harve. If that fire had started a few hours later, he might have died in his sleep.”

  “Not everybody’s life is as uncertain as yours,” she answered. “Good grief, can’t you understand? I don’t ever want to believe that you’re mine again. Because I can’t bear the idea of losing you a second time. The first time nearly killed me. If that’s cowardice, make the most of it.”

  The tear coursed down her face, fell from her chin and landed on the breast of her white T-shirt.

  Damn the mud, he thought, and put his arms around her, pulling her close. She stifled a sob and wrapped her arms around his neck. He knew he dare not kiss her, or he wouldn’t be able to stop. So he simply held her as tightly as he could.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THE NEXT MORNING after Briana’s ultrasound, the doctor surprised her. He told her that the eggs seemed mature, and he prepared to give her a shot.

  “This substance tells your system to release the eggs,” he said. “We’ll make an appointment for you and your husband to come in tomorrow. We’ll recover your eggs and get his sperm donation.”

  Briana head swam, and she felt as if she were trapped in a surreal high-tech science experiment. “He’s not my husband,” she said. “He’s my ex-husband.”

  “Sorry. Forgot,” said the doctor, showing no emotion.

  He stuck in the needle. Briana winced. She wondered what this dose of hormones would do to her already tumultuous emotions. But she thought of Nealie, took a deep breath and tried to be strong.

  When she got home, Josh was gone, working at Harve’s. Nealie was at school. Penny was at the greenhouse, planting herb seeds. Briana was glad for a respite of solitude and doing nothing. She sat for a long time on the sofa, with Zorro purring almost noiselessly on her lap.

  She stroked him with one hand and lay the other on her abdomen. What’s happening inside me, she wondered, half in awe, half in fear.

  When Josh came back, he had Nealie with him. Briana wanted to stay as long as possible with Nealie and Josh. She phoned her father to tell him she wouldn’t be up to his house until nine or ten.

  Inga answered Leo’s phone. “Please don’t be too late. He worries, you know. And stress isn’t good for him. He should avoid it.”

  Inga said it politely, she said it with concern and even sweetness, but Briana could only think, I’d like to avoid stress myself. Perhaps the safest thing to do on a night this full of ricocheting emotions was to take care of Poppa as usual—as if everything was ordinary.

  At Nealie’s bedtime, she and Josh took the girl upstairs, tucked her in and took turns reading her a story. Once Nealie was asleep, they talked, but with reticence. She could think of little to say. He was strangely quiet.

  At last he said, “I know what you’re feeling. I’m not crazy for Harve to sleep here again, but maybe it’s easiest on all of us this way. Go to your father’s. Get a good rest.”

  When he kissed her good-night, she felt a rush of poignance. He was holding back, she knew, for her sake. Last night he had said he loved her. He did not say it again tonight.

  She was glad. To hear him speak those words might, at that moment, rend her apart completely.

  THE APPOINTMENT in St. Louis was at ten o’clock. Briana could not say how long she and Josh spent at the clinic. Things seemed to happen swiftly yet in strange slow motion.

  Afterward she eased herself into the passenger side of Josh’s car. He helped her, treating her as if she were as fragile as spun glass. “Are you sure you’re okay?” he asked, his brow furrowed.

  She nodded. She was in slight pain, but what she felt most was a sense of unreality.

  No surgery had been necessary to retrieve the eggs. She’d been given a mild intravenous sedative. Then the doctor inserted a thin needle through the vaginal wall, which he guided by ultrasound, and harvested five eggs.

  She could go home, and it would seem as if nothing had happened at all. No one should be able to detect the slightest change in her.

  But she felt profoundly different in ways she did n
ot yet understand. It was as if she viewed the world through a fine haze and had cotton in her ears, not enough to deafen her, but enough to make all sound seem muted and distant.

  Josh got in on the driver’s side and fastened his seat belt. He shot her another look of concern. “You told me they wouldn’t hurt you,” he said. “But they must have. You’re pale. And shaky.”

  “It didn’t hurt much,” she said.

  He frowned, then raised one eyebrow. “I think I got the better deal this time. I just had to go into the bathroom with the girly magazine again.”

  She tried to smile, but her lips wouldn’t obey. Josh had thrust the key into the ignition, but he pulled back his hand, leaving the key unturned. He unsnapped his seat belt and leaned close to her, putting his arm around her shoulder. “Come on, babe,” he said gruffly. “What’s wrong? Tell me.”

  He wore a Scandinavian sweater, and she lay her cheek against his chest, needing to feel the strength and hardness of his body. “I feel like somebody in a science-fiction movie,” she said. “There are parts of us back in that lab. A doctor is probably examining the eggs right now. And somebody’s putting your sperm in a bath.”

  “Where do they get the teeny-tiny bathtub?” he teased.

  This time she did smile, but it faded quickly. She said, “This afternoon, they’ll fertilize the eggs. We won’t even know when it happens. You and I might not even be together.”

  He sighed and held her closer. “Right. It’s not very sexy.”

  She shut her eyes and rubbed her forehead again his sweater, just under his collarbone. He said, “It seems like I at least ought to kiss you.”

  She said, “I wish you would.”

  He bent to her, and she lifted her face. His mouth was gentle, not demanding. She could feel that once again he was holding back, repressing desire. His restraint tugged at her heart more than any passion could.

  He drew away and framed her face between his hands. “So Mr. Sperm meets Ms. Egg this afternoon?”

  “Yes.” She studied his rugged features. His eyes so often had a guarded expression. They were not guarded now. She thought, He really does love me. He does.