He turned to the last page. It was a collection of short newspaper articles, all detailing the conclusion of criminal trials or subsequent sentencing. Paul Riley was the subject of them all.
Farrell closed the scrapbook. “I had similar articles about my mother, Gemma. I tore them out and threw them away the last time I looked through this. I’m not sure why. Noreen wasn’t any better than Paul, although at least she admitted I was her child. She and her brothers left the farm in Iowa and never looked back. She wanted the good life. She told me once that she didn’t want to end up like her mother, bitter and depleted, so she went looking for something else. Only, she didn’t take any of the values she’d learned in church as a child. She stole and lied and used her body to get whatever she could from men. She got pregnant with me and tried to use me to get money from Paul. When that didn’t work, she gave me to the state to raise.”
“What about your grandparents? Didn’t they try to help you?”
“I was born late in my mother’s life. My grandparents were old, and they had washed their hands of all their children by the time I was born. Alfred and Gary had turned out like my mother, using whatever they could to get whatever they wanted. My grandparents had mortgaged the farm to help their sons out of one jam or the other. In the end, they were so deeply in debt they couldn’t recover.”
“But none of that was your fault, Farrell. How could they take it out on you?”
“In one of her letters Hattie said that my grandparents were rigid people who only saw the world a certain way. They thought that anything that didn’t fit into their views was no good. My mother was obviously no good, and so, in their eyes, I couldn’t be, either. And a child born out of wedlock didn’t fit into their picture. They never even wrote to me.”
“Maybe your mother turned out the way she did because of them.”
“Maybe she did. And maybe I was better off not having them in my life. Unfortunately, like I said before, I had one of my uncles for a while. Gary took me in when I was seven. He looked good on paper, I guess. He had a wife, a job. He’d been in trouble with the law, but the court thought that he’d cleaned up his act. They didn’t know he wanted me because he needed a child to stand watch for him.”
“Stand watch?”
“His talents ran to burglary. He set me up with an ice cream cone and a puppy he got from the pound, and the puppy and I would walk back and forth, up and down the block, while he broke into houses. If I saw a police car, I whistled. Unfortunately, Gary was cockier than he was smart. He got caught on our third trip out. I got sent back to foster care, and the puppy went back to the pound.”
“Farrell…” Gemma laid her hand on his arm. “You’re breaking my heart. Why are you telling me this?”
“Those are the people I came from, Gemma. They’re my blood, the stuff that I’m made from. At the worst they were criminals. At the best they were rigid and bitter, with no joy or love in their souls for their only grandchild. I thought you should know.”
“Why? Do you think it matters to me what your family was like? You’re you, and you’re nothing like them!”
He let that sink in a moment. He wanted her to think about what she’d said. “I’m not,” he said quietly. “You’re right. I’m the man I am because of some people I met along the way. Not because of the people whose bloodlines I carry.”
Gemma watched Farrell’s face. He had not shared this story of his family often. She knew him well enough to know that. But he wasn’t ashamed. She knew that, too. Farrell had grown past the family who had given him life. He knew who he was and what was in his own heart. He knew which side of the law he stood on, and he was a proud, confident man.
Gemma couldn’t think of anything to say in response to what she had learned about him. Farrell’s family was as different from hers as the county jail was from Shore Haven. She understood what he was trying to say, and she wanted to accept it, to reach out to him and tell him that they could make a different kind of family together. But she was still so tied up in her own misery, her own failures, that the words wouldn’t come.
Farrell seemed to understand. He reached inside the box for a second album. This one was stuffed full. He opened it before she could speak. “I had ten foster homes. Six of them didn’t make it into this album. Four of them did.”
He opened the album to the first page. “These are the Jensens. I was only with them a year, but Sarah taught me to read. She wasn’t a warm, welcoming woman, but she took her job seriously. I was a shy seven-year-old. I’d been moved twice in first grade. At the beginning of second grade I went to live with Gary, and he didn’t send me to school. By the time the Jensens got me, I was so far behind that the schools decided I was slow. Sarah wouldn’t have that. No child in her care could possibly be slow. So she drilled me every night until I was in tears. But she taught me to read, and I never had trouble in school after that, no matter how many schools I attended. Sarah made me understand I could do anything I wanted if I just tried hard enough.”
He smiled at the picture of the Jensens. It wasn’t a photograph, but a childish drawing of two blond and overweight adults. He turned the page to a yellowing school paper printed neatly on wide lines. “My first A. Sarah’s doing. She’s the one who bought me this scrapbook.” He turned the page again. “My first good report card. Sarah smiled when she saw it. It might be the only time she did.”
Gemma put her hand on his arm. “You don’t have to go on, Farrell.”
“I think I do.” He continued showing her mementos of the other homes where he’d learned the things he needed to become an adult. She listened to him tell about the Watkinses, who had taught him to take care of himself with older, rougher boys. The Petersons, who had given him music lessons and bought him exactly the right kind of clothes so that he would fit in with the other thirteen-year-olds at his school. The Lamberts, who had attended every school conference and even every football game the year he had warmed the bench for junior varsity.
He ran his finger along the snapshot of a nondescript older woman. “Mrs. Lambert was the one who helped me repair that first scrapbook. When the county tried to move me in my senior year, she and her husband threatened them with a lawsuit. She was there when I graduated from the police academy, too, although she was in the last stages of cancer. Through the years I started to think of those four families as ‘the important ones.’ They weren’t my families by blood, but they gave me the things I needed to become a man.”
He closed the second album with its collection of photographs and pictures, its school papers and report cards.
He set it back in the box, then turned so he could see Gemma’s face. Her eyes were clouded with tears, and she couldn’t speak.
He did. “You were right when you said I needed my own family, Gemma. You were right, because I do have things I need to pass on to my children. I need to teach them that they can do anything if they try hard enough, just the way Sarah Jensen taught me. I need to teach them to take care of themselves and not to be afraid, the way Sam Watkins did. I need to show them I understand how important it is to explore new parts of yourself and to fit in, the way the Petersons did. And I need to show them that I care what they do and what they feel, the way the Lamberts did.”
He took her hand. His was warm and strong, a hand that wrapped around hers protectively. “Those are the things I need to pass on to my children, Gemma, the very best parts of myself. Not my genes. Not my heritage. The man I am despite that heritage. You’ve come to terms with your inability to bear children. Now you have to come to terms with my acceptance of it.”
“Farrell…”
He spoke the next words slowly. “I don’t care where my sons and daughters come from, Gemma, but I do care desperately who their mother is.”
Tears flowed down her cheeks—healing, renewing tears. She hadn’t meant to cry. It seemed wrong, when her heart was so filled with hope and with love for him. He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it. “Marry me. Share my
life. Let’s make a real family together.”
She moved into his arms as naturally as if she had never moved out of them.
He kissed her, and she kissed him back. As he held her, in her mind she saw the family they would make, a family filled with love and warmth and laughter.
She pulled away at last, and he wiped the tears off her cheeks with his thumbs.
“I love you,” she whispered. “I will forever. When we have grandchildren and great-grandchildren—”
“Ma?”
Gemma turned and saw Mary standing in the doorway. Her thumb was firmly in her mouth and her blanket was trailing behind her. Mary, the first of the children they would raise and love together. Farrell put one arm around Gemma and held out the other. Mary flew across the room and scrambled into his lap.
Farrell Riley enclosed his family in his arms.
BABY ON THE WAY
Marie Ferrarella
To Pat Teal, with all good wishes for a full recovery.
Love, Marie
Dear Reader,
Everyone deserves a second chance. “Baby on the Way” is about second chances and two people who needed them and each other. When Officer J.T. Walker came to Madeline Reed’s rescue late one night and helped the young widow give birth to her son, he had no idea that he was getting a second chance, or that he was giving one. But as different as J.T. and Maddy were, they had one thing in common. They had both lost someone they loved, and both thought that love only came around once. They were wrong.
All you need to love again is an open heart that’s willing to take a chance on the greatest gift the world has to offer. Maddy and her baby helped J.T. open his heart again by drawing him, kicking and screaming, out of his lonely world and into theirs: a world filled with warmth, laughter and, most of all, with love.
I hope their story brings you a measure of joy this Mother’s Day, and if you don’t have someone at this moment, may you find someone to love, and to love you, very, very soon.
All the best,
Chapter 1
Nights were the hardest.
Nights were when all the memories, both good and bad, would come crowding back into his head, giving no quarter, taking no prisoners as they slashed through his heart. The bad memories all revolved around the loss of Lorna, around having to do without her.
You would think, J. T. Walker thought as he steered his patrol car down a long, lonely stretch of road, that after two years he would finally have come to terms with it. Come to terms with the emptiness, the sorrow.
Well, maybe he had.
After all, he was still here, still alive, still moving through life, fitting one day onto another like some giant mismatched string of pop-beads. And he was no longer sleepwalking through his life, the way he initially had when the news had reached him. That had to mean something, right?
Yeah, he thought cynically, it meant that he was a survivor.
Only question was, what was he surviving for? Nothing that he could see. Lorna was gone, as were his hopes for a family, swept away by the carelessness of a drunk driver early New Year’s Eve in one horrific turn of the wheel, one terrible miscalculation.
Gone, just like that.
Leaving him to grieve, to continue as best he could in a world that had the audacity to continue spinning without Lorna.
Without laughter, without joy.
If only he hadn’t been working late, an extra shift so that he could have the next day off to spend with his wife. If only he hadn’t told her to go on ahead of him to her parents’ house, that he would meet her there after he got off.
If only…
Damn it, he was getting maudlin again.
Annoyed with himself, J.T. shook his head to drive the thoughts away, like a soaked dog shaking to rid himself of the water that was stubbornly clinging to his coat.
The thoughts wouldn’t leave as easily as droplets of water, but he was a police officer and he had a duty to perform. To patrol the darkened streets and make sure that the citizens of Bedford, California, who slept peacefully in their beds, could continue to do so untroubled. Dwelling on the past, on things that couldn’t be changed no matter how much he wished and prayed that they could, was utterly fruitless.
When was he going to accept that?
Damn it, Lorna, why did you leave me? Why?
The silent question echoed back at him in the silent squad car, mocking him. The radio crackled, but no message followed. Only static. It was a peaceful night. Peaceful everywhere but within his mind.
Tired, annoyed with himself, J.T.’s hands tightened on the wheel of the squad car he usually shared with Officer Adam Fenelli.
He was alone tonight.
Fenelli had caught his youngest son’s bronchitis and had called in sick earlier this evening. They were shorthanded at the station as it was and there was no one to partner with him, nor anyone offering to switch into his squad car for the shift.
Not that he blamed any of them. He wasn’t exactly great company anymore, preferring to ride in silence. On the quiet side to begin with, he’d lost all interest in carrying on purposeless conversations just to pass the time. Time passed anyway, whether he talked or not. Fenelli never seemed to take any notice of his lack of communication, doing enough talking for both of them.
A half smile attempted to curve J.T.’s lips. Fenelli was a good man who never stopped trying to reach him, to get him to open up. The older officer might as well have saved his breath.
J.T. figured he had nothing worth saying anymore.
The streets of Bedford were silent, its store lights dimmed to just the barest of glimmers. Street lamps stood like thin sentries, their lights bright against the inky sky as they marked the coming of the midnight hour.
It was a weekday and, for the most part, everyone was home, asleep, in preparation for the beginning a new day. They could sleep. He couldn’t. So he’d volunteered for the night shift and tried to close the day with its brightness away.
To his surprise, Fenelli had made the shift over with him, remarking that he could use the change. J.T. knew it was because the older officer was worried about him, but there wasn’t anything Fenelli could do to help him. Nothing did any good.
J.T. was simply marking time.
Another wave of darkness threatened to creep over his soul, and it might have, had he not seen something in the road just then. Up ahead, just beyond the boundary of the shopping center and a couple of miles before the next residential area, he thought he saw two red lights pulsing.
J.T. squinted, trying to make out the shape. The squad car’s heating system was out of sync and the windshield was beginning to fog up again, as it did periodically, drastically cutting his field of vision. He slowed his vehicle down to a crawl. Having no handkerchief available, J.T. rubbed the glass with the palm of his hand as he continued to stare straight before him.
After a minute or two he began to barely make out the rear lights of a stalled car. The red spheres were pulsing like twin heartbeats, sending their syncopated rhythm into the darkness, two beacons in the night.
Some motorist was probably out there somewhere on foot, J.T. guessed, although he hadn’t passed anyone in the past fifteen minutes. Maybe whoever it was lived in the development up ahead and had gone there.
He sighed. Stalled cars were not uncommon, but he was bound to check it out, just in case. From where he was, he couldn’t make out the license plate, but the car was a relatively new model sedan and in good condition. There had been no reports of a stolen vehicle on the scanner, so he doubted it was anything other than what it seemed—a car that had more than likely run out of gas or developed some kind of annoying, disabling problem.
Parking several yards behind the vehicle, J.T. got out of the squad car, his hand resting lightly on the butt of his service revolver. Just in case. Every policeman knew that the seconds between leaving his own vehicle and approaching another on the side of the road were the most crucial, risk-filled seconds of his life. The w
arning had made its rounds even here. Bedford was as peaceful as they came, but be that as it may, it never hurt to be cautious.
The scream shattered the night, his thoughts and his calm.
Hurrying the rest of the way, straining for any sights or sounds of danger, J.T. had his gun out of its holster by the time he reached the driver’s door. There had been no one visible as he’d run the short distance from his car to the stalled one, but the scream had come from somewhere and there was no one around anywhere else. No stores, no homes hiding behind a residential wall, nothing. The scream had to have come from the car.
One hand holding his gun ready, J.T. yanked open the door of the car with the other. Part of him embraced the idea of trouble. Anything to get his adrenaline moving, to occupy the space where loneliness had taken up permanent residence.
That was when he saw her.
There was a blonde slumped over to the side, her body wedged behind the steering wheel, her abdomen distended with the swell of an unborn child.
“Lady—” he began, and got no further. She screamed again, this time all but destroying his eardrums and peeling back his skin. The last time he’d heard a scream like that, Fay Wray had gotten her first terrifying look at King Kong.
He noticed that her right arm was extended out onto the passenger seat, as if she were trying to claw her way out of the vehicle.
In pain from the roots of her hair down to the soles of her feet, Madeline Reed had trouble focusing on the face of the man looking into the car. Seeing the gun he held, her first thought was that he could shoot her and put her out of her misery.
“I’m sorry,” she gasped. “I’m not…much on…pain and this—” she stopped to suck in air with the fervent hope that it could somehow arrest the on slaught that was coming “—this is pretty bad.” She’d just made the understatement of the century, she thought, biting down hard on her lip.
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