“No problem.”
Jeffries left, and Farrell took a seat on the other side of the table from Sally. He knew Jeffries—and Archie, too—would be watching through a two-way mirror, but Sally probably didn’t.
“I was there the day the house was raided,” he said in a conversational tone. “As a matter of fact, I was the one who found Mary in the closet.”
“I didn’t put her in no closet.”
“Didn’t you?”
“I wasn’t even there that night. Someone else was taking care of her.”
Farrell nodded, as if he believed her. When she relaxed a little he added, “Of course, you were seen there that night by one of the neighbors, so we know that’s not quite true.”
Sally slumped. “I didn’t put her in no closet. She was asleep on the bed last I knew. I had to leave fast. I didn’t have time to get her.”
Farrell nodded again, as if in his world, that happened all the time. “She was badly frightened.”
“Well, I didn’t frighten her, did I? You were the ones that broke in while she was sleeping.”
“The courts don’t look kindly on mothers who abandon their children. You’ve never called to ask about her, have you? You haven’t tried to find her.”
“So?”
“She’s a beautiful little girl.” He cleared his throat. “I’ve spent some time with her since I found her.”
Sally looked as if she wondered what this had to do with her.
Farrell let his emotions shine through in his voice. “I’d do almost anything to make sure she isn’t hurt again.”
Sally suddenly seemed interested. “That so?”
“Yeah.” He shook his head ruefully. “I don’t have kids of my own. Mary’s almost like a daughter to me.”
“That so?” Sally tossed her dirty hair back over her shoulders.
“Does her father spend time with her?”
“I don’t know.” She grinned.
Farrell cocked a brow in question.
“I don’t know who her father is,” she said triumphantly, as if she’d told a wonderful joke.
“Oh.” He nodded. Under the table, his hands balled into fists. “She needs a father.”
“Maybe she does.” Sally was still grinning, but her eyes narrowed. “Maybe I ought to find her one, you know?”
He waited, not quite holding his breath.
“Am I in big trouble?” she asked, in what seemed like a change of subject.
“I’m afraid so.”
“Can you help me?”
“How could I do that, Sally?”
“Well, you and me, we could come to an understanding, right?”
He felt sick inside, but this was exactly what he’d been hoping for. “What kind of understanding?”
“Mary needs a daddy, and it sounds like you might want her.”
“And?”
“And I got the right to give her away, but I got to get something in return….”
“In other words, you’ll give me Mary if I do you a favor?”
Sally looked cagey. “Yeah, something like that.”
Farrell sat back and closed his eyes.
Farrell put his arm around Gemma and brought her to rest against his shoulder. He didn’t know why he hadn’t told her about finding Mary’s mother. He had come to Gemma’s house late, well after his interview with Sally Matthews. Jeffries had come back into the room, and together they had explained that in addition to everything else, she was now in serious trouble for having offered Farrell her daughter in exchange for his help. Selling a child, no matter what the currency, was against the law.
He hadn’t told Gemma, although that had been his conscious purpose in arriving at her doorstep. But once inside, he had taken her in his arms instead, and now they were upstairs in her bedroom after passionately making love. She was snuggled against him, and he knew that soon she would be asleep.
His heart was overflowing with emotion. A long time ago he had given up his childish hopes of ever loving or being loved by anyone. Gemma had come into his life accidentally, and he had very nearly lost her before he found her. But there had been a spark inside him that a childhood of neglect and alienation hadn’t been able to extinguish. And Gemma had fanned it into flame.
He loved this woman with a passion that was grander because he hadn’t believed it possible. He wanted to tell her, but he had never had any practice. Still, he wanted to tell her….
“Gemma?”
“Hm…?”
“I didn’t know I could be this happy.”
She made a soft sound of pleasure. “Me either.”
“I didn’t want any of this.”
“You just didn’t know you wanted it.”
“Maybe…” He stroked her hair. “I don’t want it to end.”
She was silent, but she didn’t move away.
He didn’t know how to tell her what he was feeling. She could talk openly about her emotions; he had spent a lifetime learning to repress his.
Instead, he started with what had happened that night. “I came to tell you something. I didn’t come for this.”
“Are you apologizing?”
He laughed. “Are you kidding?”
She touched his face. “I like it when you do that.”
“What?”
“Laugh that way.”
“I do it a lot more often than I used to.”
“That you do.”
“I do have something to tell you, Gemma. Are you awake enough to listen?”
He could feel her body tense. “Go ahead.”
“Mary is going to be freed for adoption.”
She sat up and looked into his eyes. “What?”
“We found her mother tonight. And she’s agreed to relinquish her rights.”
“Why?”
He had hoped to avoid this, but he had guessed that Gemma would want to know it all.
Gemma listened without saying anything until he had finished. “She tried to exchange Mary for her own freedom?”
“She had nothing else to bargain with.”
“What if she changes her mind?”
“She doesn’t want Mary, Gemma. That part was crystal clear. And since three cops heard her offer to give me Mary if I helped her out, she can’t really change her mind.”
“What’s going to happen to her now?”
“She has a record, but so far it’s mostly minor offenses. She abandoned Mary, but if it looks like she’s trying to do the right thing now by giving Mary up for adoption, the judge will probably be lenient. Unless she’s linked directly to activities at the drug house, she’ll probably be put on probation…until she’s arrested for something else.”
“Mary’s really safe? You’re sure?”
“I talked to Marge Tremaine and told her what happened. She says the paperwork will start immediately. She also said that you can apply to adopt Mary.” He paused and took a deep breath. “Or that we can.”
“We?”
Farrell had dodged bullets, chased criminals on foot through rush-hour traffic, handcuffed and hauled in men twice his size, but nothing compared with the difficulty or danger of his next words.
“I know we’ve only known each other a little while….”
She didn’t answer. She wasn’t going to help him in this.
“Gemma, I never thought I wanted to marry or have children. I didn’t think I could offer a woman or children anything. And it’s hard to believe, I know, that being with you and Mary could change how I feel so quickly. But one of the things I learned in all those foster homes was to grab what I needed when it came around, because if I didn’t, it might never come my way again.”
“Farrell, I—”
He rested a finger against her lips. “I want to spend my life with you. I want to spend it with Mary, and the children we have together. I know this is sudden. I know it’s too soon to speak, but circumstances, Mary’s adoption, make it necessary. You probably don’t trust—”
This time she was
the one to put her finger on his lips. “Farrell, no. Please, you’ve got to listen to me now.”
She looked as if she wanted to cry. Everything inside him froze. In the weeks they had been lovers, he had misunderstood. He had believed that the passion they had found together was more than it was. He had seen love when there was only attraction. He had moved too quickly….
She sat up and moved away from him. In a moment she got up and pulled her robe off the chair and slipped it on. Then she sat back down on the edge of the bed and turned to face him.
“I’ve never told you much about my marriage to Jimmy.”
“It’s never mattered to me.”
“I have to tell you. You have to know, so you’ll understand….”
He didn’t want to ask her what he had to understand. She was going to say no to marrying him and adopting Mary together. That was as clear as anything in his life.
His voice was hollow, the voice of the man he had been before falling in love with her. “You don’t have to make excuses. If you don’t want to marry me, that’s good enough.”
She pulled the robe tighter around her. “Do you remember the day you told Marge what it was like to be a foster child?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“The only way you could make us understand how you felt about Mary’s situation that day was to tell us why it mattered so much to you. I have to do the same thing.”
He didn’t want to hear this. Her relationship with her dead husband had nothing to do with him, but he was powerless to tell her so, because he didn’t want her to stop talking. When she stopped, where would they be?
“I married Jimmy the summer after my last year of college. He was bright, good-looking, charming in every way. It was a small school. If we had voted for Most Likely To Succeed, Jimmy would have won hands down. I thought I was the luckiest girl in the world. Everyone loved him, and I thought I did, too.”
“So you were living a fairy tale. I don’t understand what this has to do with me.”
She continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “A year passed, then two, and I began to see what I’d been too young and immature to realize at first. Everyone loved Jimmy, but Jimmy loved himself most of all. The world revolved around him. He knew how to get anything he wanted, and he did, regularly. If he couldn’t get it in the usual ways, he’d manipulate others until he had what he wanted. He wasn’t above lying or wearing people down. Just as long as things went his way.”
Farrell watched her. She wasn’t quite looking at him. She was looking at her past, and she didn’t like what she saw.
Gemma continued. “You know, I was raised to take care of people. My mother was a stay-at-home mom, and I adored her. She took such good care of my sisters and me when we were growing up, and I wanted to be just like her. She and my father were so happy, and when I married Jimmy, I wanted us to be just like them. So even though I began to see things about him that disturbed me, I closed my eyes.”
He interrupted. “I don’t know what this has to do with me. Do you think I’m like him?”
“No!” She shook her head so hard he couldn’t doubt what she said. “You’re nothing like him. We were married for five years before I realized that he’d been leading me on about wanting a family. I wanted children, and Jimmy had always promised that we’d have them. Somehow, though, he always came up with an excuse why we had to wait. By then I was beginning to see him for what he really was and to have serious doubts about our future together. My parents had moved to Florida, so I made arrangements to go and visit them to think about what I was going to do. I was twenty-seven, and it was clear to me that I’d married a man who wanted things, not people, in his life. I think Jimmy realized that I might leave him. He was sales manager for a conservative company that strongly promoted their family image, and divorce would have been frowned on. One day while I was away, his boss took him aside and asked him about his plans for the future. Jimmy decided that children would be good for his career.”
“He told you this?”
“I figured it out later. Jimmy was too smart to admit something like that. He realized that if I knew what he was thinking, I’d never agree to stay with him, much less bring children into the marriage. No, he knew me too well. He came down to Florida, cried like a baby and told me that he couldn’t live without me. He asked me to go into counseling with him. I was ecstatic. I came home. We went to counseling for a few months, and Jimmy fooled me and the therapist. At the end he told me he was ready to have children, and I believed him because I wanted them so badly.”
“But you didn’t have them?”
“I got pregnant quickly, but it was a tubal pregnancy.” She looked straight at him. “I didn’t want to admit anything was wrong, and I waited too long to see my doctor. I lost the baby and my chance to have another. I can’t have children, Farrell. I had an emergency hysterectomy.”
“Gemma…”
She shook her head, warning him not to say anything. “I wasn’t as devastated as you might think. I mourned terribly, but I knew that even if we couldn’t have children of our own, Jimmy and I could still adopt. But Jimmy had other ideas. He waited until I got out of the hospital, then he informed me that he wanted a divorce.”
Farrell couldn’t remain silent. “That doesn’t make any sense. If he didn’t really want kids, he had the perfect excuse. And his job…”
“No, it made sense to Jimmy. You see, he had a new job by then, and no one was asking questions about his personal life anymore. But even though he wasn’t sure if he’d ever want children, he was sure he wanted a wife who could have them. For Jimmy, adoption was out of the question. He felt it was his duty to pass on his own exceptional gene pool. Jimmy wanted everything he owned to be perfect, and in his eyes, I wasn’t perfect anymore.”
She had tried to finish as if she were telling a story about somebody else. But now she looked at him, and he saw the misery in her eyes. “He moved out. For months I just sat at home, frozen with grief. I had always wanted children, and now I couldn’t have them. I had wanted a man like my father, and instead I’d married a man without an ounce of integrity. Jimmy didn’t sit at home, of course. He found a young woman who worshiped him, one who could probably bear a dozen babies. Then, the night before his attorney was going to file the divorce papers, Jimmy ran a stop sign, and that was that. On the last day of his life, he couldn’t stop long enough to let someone else have the right of way, and it killed him.”
She shook her head. “Jimmy wasn’t much for details. He hadn’t gotten around to changing his will. I was still the beneficiary for his insurance policies, his pension. He bought insurance the way he bought everything else. Only the biggest and the best. It’s the ultimate irony, isn’t it, that Jimmy left me enough money so that I can spend my life raising other people’s children?”
Farrell knew that the words he said now would be the most important of his life. He wished that he knew how to put his feelings into words. But all he could do was try.
“I’m sorry. I know how badly you were hurt.” He wanted to reach out to her, but he knew better than to touch her yet. “He was a bastard, Gemma.”
“That he was.”
“But you told me you know I’m nothing like him.”
“You’re not, Farrell. Jimmy could talk about everything. What he was feeling, what he was supposed to be feeling, what he wanted me to think he was feeling.” She shrugged. “He could charm anyone until they couldn’t see which end was up. Even my family was fooled, until the truth was right in front of them. Jimmy would say anything I wanted to hear. You tell the truth whether I want to hear it or not. And believe it or not, that’s what I…” She shook her head, as if she couldn’t finish.
“I can see why you might have trouble trusting a man again.” He was making his way carefully, like a man in a pitch-black room.
“I trust you.”
“Then what does this have to do with us, Gemma?” he asked gently. “After everything
that happened, are you afraid? Do you need more time? I can give you all the time you need, even if it makes the adoption trickier. I can—”
“Farrell, I can’t marry you, no matter what I feel. Don’t you see? I was married to a man for almost seven years. I gave him everything. And in the end, he tossed me right out of his life because I couldn’t give him children.”
“Do you think that matters to me?”
“Yes!” She took a deep breath. “A while ago you said something about the children we would have together.”
“Give me some credit here. I didn’t know you couldn’t have children. Do you think I would have said something like that if I did?”
“No. I know you wouldn’t have. You’re a good man. An honorable man. You’d marry me anyway, and just tuck that away. But sometimes, when you saw other people with their newborns, you’d wish, just a little, that you were holding your own child in your arms.”
“No, that’s not—”
“Farrell, you have never had a family of your own! Never! And I can’t give you one. If you married me, you would never have biological ties, not to one person on the face of this earth. Don’t you think I know how important that is? I have family. I have nephews. Mark’s hair is the color of mine. Shawn looks like my baby pictures. I don’t have to bear children to see family all around me. I can love my nephews. I can love Mary. I can love the other children who come into my life. But I can’t love you, because I know that in the end, you’ll resent me for depriving you of your own babies.”
He couldn’t find a thing to say. He was struck by two things simultaneously. One, that she believed every word she was saying, believed them so vehemently that her mind would not be changed tonight. The second was that she didn’t want to believe them. But if he couldn’t find a way to change her mind, they had no future together. In the very center of Gemma’s heart was a place so bleak, so damaged by her ex-husband, that it would take a very special kind of healing to make her whole again.
She had healed him, or, at least, she had begun the process. Now he had to find a way to do the same for her. And he thought he knew what it might be, although the thought of it made him feel sick inside.
“You’re wrong about everything,” he said quietly. He reached for her hand and clasped it.
A Mother's Day: Nobody's ChildBaby on the WayA Daddy for Her Daughters Page 8
