by Lisa Tucker
“That’s good. I assume it’s a woman. Who is she?”
When he didn’t answer, she asked him again. Finally she said,
“You don’t have a babysitter, do you, Danny?”
“We do, too.” He looked so afraid her heart went out to him. “I just can’t remember her name.”
“It’s all right,” she said, looking into his bright blue eyes. “I’m a friend. I won’t hurt you, no matter what you tell me. I promise.”
When she put her arms around him, she thought he would pull away, but he didn’t. Instead, he started crying, and soon he was crying so hard his chest shook. Even his sister felt bad and patted his foot. Amelia couldn’t understand everything he said, but she got the basics. His mom was in rehab for a month. Matthew had paid for it (which Amelia found incredible), but he was only keeping them for a few more hours, until she and Ben left. Then they would be out on the street with nowhere to go but a crack house. Danny was scared of that place. All the people there were drug addicts.
She wondered if she could take care of these kids until their mother came back. She knew Ben might not like it; he was already stressed about joining Richard’s lab, and worried about money. Amelia’s trust fund was already gone for the year and committed for two years after, all to important charities. They were living off her job and Ben’s salary from the foundation, which was about to end. Ben needed a good research position, and he was glad the one he’d accepted was in Philly, where the cost of living was cheaper than New York.
She asked Danny, “What if I kept you until your mom’s out of rehab? Would you like that, or would you rather stay with Matthew?”
When Danny answered, “Matthew,” Amelia tried not to be hurt. It was probably just that the poor kid was afraid to go somewhere new. “But he won’t do it,” Danny said. “I asked him already this morning. I thought since he likes Isabelle so much, he might say okay, but he said, ‘Dream on.’”
The bastard, Amelia thought. Using these kids to fake out Ben and then throwing them out on the street.
“How about if I talk to him for you?”
“That might work.” Danny sniffed hard. “I know he really likes you.”
“What makes you say that?”
“He was really worried last night when you passed out. Also, he has a picture of you that looks really pretty. You have on a green and white dress. It’s from a long time ago.”
Her interview dress for the health policy think tank. The last time she spent real money on clothes. She was surprised, but then she remembered what a packrat Matthew was. He’d even kept all their old furniture rather than replacing it, which seemed insane given the money he made. “Does he have any pictures of my boyfriend, Ben?”
“Some. One with you in it, too. And Matthew. You’re all standing by a boat.”
She remembered that day. The second summer they lived in Baltimore. An older woman had taken the picture for them, but the pose in front of a sailboat was Matthew’s idea, so they’d look like rich preppies summering at the Cape rather than poor students who’d taken a bus to Rehoboth. Matthew made them all copies. She wasn’t sure where hers was, but she knew Ben didn’t have his anymore; he always threw away everything except journals and lab books and things he needed for research.
“Don’t worry,” Amelia said. “I’ll talk to Matthew, and I promise he’ll agree to keep you until your mom comes home.”
Danny was squinting and Amelia thought to ask if he needed glasses. She said she could talk to Matthew about that, too. He said no, he didn’t think so; then he hugged her. When Ben and Matthew returned, Isabelle ran over to Matthew but Danny stayed put, holding on to Amelia, trusting her to do the right thing for him.
She told the men that she needed to talk to Matthew privately now.
Ben said, “First, come into the bedroom for a minute. I have to tell you something.”
“Fine,” she said, but she winked at Danny, promising him that nothing Ben said would change this.
Ben shut the door behind them, but even so, he was whispering. “You can’t talk to Matt, babe. He just confided in me that he realized last night he’s still in love with you. It’s not fair to him if we stay here any longer. We shouldn’t move too close to him, either. We don’t want to hurt him any more than we already have.”
Amelia thought for a moment. This was an unexpected but very smart move on Matthew’s part. It gained Ben’s sympathy while blocking her out for good, making it impossible for her even to suggest dropping by to see him. He could dump the kids, knowing she couldn’t come back in a few days to check up on things.
“I have to tell him something.” She took Ben’s hand. “Trust me, I’ll be very sensitive to what you just told me. It won’t take long. It’s very important.”
Ben looked at her. She wondered if he was a little jealous, or just worried about Matthew. Either way, she wasn’t about to back down. Finally, he agreed, but he said, “I don’t think Matt will do it. Haven’t you noticed that he’s been trying to stay away from you all morning? Even I noticed that, but I would never have suspected why.”
“Give me a minute to talk to him. Go to the bathroom or something. I know I can get him to say yes if you’re not standing right there.”
Ben agreed. He was at his limit for emotional complexity, a fact that she was counting on.
She went into the loft. Matthew was holding Isabelle, and Danny was sitting on the couch, watching them. She whispered, “I know,” in Matthew’s ear. Then she smiled. “Can we take our own walk now?”
Ben was blinking with surprise, but he nodded when Matthew reminded him to watch Isabelle. Neither Amelia nor Matthew said anything on the elevator. When they were outside, walking against the wind, she told him she knew he was kicking the kids out today.
“Congratulations on your powers of investigation,” he said.
“Now tell me why I give a damn.”
She was rattled, but she said, “I’ll tell Ben.”
“Go right ahead. I already told him it was all a ruse.” Matthew looked at her. “Surprised you, didn’t I?”
Stunned was more like it.
“All I had to do was admit that I was oh so jealous of him when he told me in Paris that you were pregnant.” He smirked. “Poor lonely Matthew, making up a family because he can’t have one with his only true love. Cue violins.”
They were a block from Matthew’s building. She looked up to his apartment, saw the wall of windows, thought about Danny. She’d promised to work this out for him.
“Are we finished here?” he said. “Because I have a life to get back to.”
“Rachel, right? She called while you were out. She sounds like she’s an imbecile, and all of twenty years old.”
“Not that it’s any of your business, but yes. First I plan to work for a while, then I’ll have a pleasant dinner with Rachel, who’s twenty-six and absolutely gorgeous, after which I’ll take her back home and have sex with her for hours.” He grinned. “Poor me, I have to do what I can to soothe the pain of my broken heart.”
“You’re such an evil bastard.”
“So I’ve heard, many times.” He clutched his chest. “I can’t tell you how it hurts to have my one and only love assess me so harshly. But so long, farewell, hope your move goes smoothly and your kid is healthy and you stay the fuck away from me until we’re all at least a hundred.”
He turned around and started back to the apartment. Amelia was desperate to stop him, and then she remembered the one thing he did care about.
“Pain Matters,” she said to his back. It worked; he stopped. She walked up to him. “The phony ‘grassroots’ group you created to sell Galvenar. Very clever, the way your PR firm hid everything behind wall after wall of true pain advocates. I’m going to make sure the whole intricate scheme is exposed in the New York Times . I’ve already put in a call to my contact there.”
“I don’t believe it. I know Ben told you that you can’t say anything about Galvenar. He didn’
t mean the panel in Paris; he meant anywhere.”
“I won’t be. The New York Times will.”
“You’ll still hurt Ben by doing this.”
“No, I don’t think so. I considered that yesterday, before I left the Times a message while we were at Ben’s cousin’s house. Ben had nothing to do with the creation of Pain Matters. Even you can’t think I’d believe something that ludicrous.” She paused and looked at Matthew. “Whatever you have on Ben, it won’t come out if this is exposed.”
“Yes it will, because I’ll release it. If you think I care about a friendship, even Ben’s, more than—”
“Of course you don’t. Nothing and no one is as important as your stupid company. But I also know that you’d be reluctant to release your secret when whatever you stand to gain from dropping Ben’s name would be muted in the furor over Pain Matters. Then, too, if you use Ben now, what will you have left to use in the future?”
He cursed several times before he asked her what she wanted.
“Not that much. I just want you to keep the kids until their mother comes home from rehab. You can hire a nanny to help you take care of them.”
“And at the end of that, you write the article anyway? No thanks. It’s not worth it.”
“No. I’ll never talk about Pain Matters. I’ll bury all my research about that, even though it took me two years.” She inhaled. “I give you my word.”
He believed her, she could tell. Since she hadn’t lied to him before, he thought she was incapable of it, and even morally opposed to it. As if her morality were that simple. Even freshman philosophy students learn that lying is sometimes necessary, usually through the exercise of imagining the Nazis at the door, asking if you’re harboring a Jew. In this case, Matthew was the Nazi and Danny was the Jewish child she had to protect. Any lie was not only allowable, but a moral good.
Too bad for Matthew that he’d never taken a philosophy course. He seemed thoroughly confused. “How can you agree to this? Doesn’t it go against your own ethics?”
“Galvenar isn’t a bad drug; it just doesn’t belong on the essential medicine list. But I can let that go. Most ministries of health can’t afford it anyway. And Danny deserves to be taken care of. He’s a wonderful kid.”
She saw the flash of relief in Matthew’s eyes when she said Galvenar wasn’t a bad drug. She wanted him to think the creation of Pain Matters was all she had, which was true at the moment, though it wouldn’t stay that way for long. She’d just sent one of her staff to Jakarta, following Matthew’s trail. She’d warned him that she would pull out all the stops to find out what hold he had on Ben. He should have believed her about that, too.
“Will you take care of them or not?” When he hesitated, she said,
“I won’t write the article about you, either.”
“The one where you attempt to show that the guy who broke his back taking care of you last night is really an incompetent buffoon?”
“Yes.”
More cursing, but finally he agreed.
“You know I won’t break my word,” she said. “But if you break yours, I will call the Times and say I remembered what I was going to tell them. And don’t think I won’t find out, because I am going to check on those kids every few days.”
“Ben won’t like that.”
“Ben will be busy at the lab.”
“So you’re going to keep this from him, too? For some kid you just met? Amelia, you disappoint me. Being pregnant has warped your moral code.”
“Don’t flatter yourself. You never understood my moral code any more than you understood what I wanted in Palm Beach.”
That shut him up. They walked back to the building, but Matthew walked on the street, refusing to even share the sidewalk with her. When they were waiting for the elevator, Amelia remembered to tell him that if he retaliated against Danny in any way for telling her the truth, the deal was off. “He didn’t mean to. He really likes you. He said having you around was like having a real father.”
Matthew pushed the elevator button again.
“Don’t you have any sympathy for him?” she said. “You’re really not that different. He doesn’t have a father; you lost your father when you were twelve. He’s very poor, but you were poor, too. His mother is sick, and so was yours.”
“My mother had cancer. His is a drug addict who stole five thousand dollars from me. But I refuse to discuss this with you. You consider me capable of retaliating against a ten-year-old. I think that sums up the hopelessness of trying to get you to understand anything about me.”
She was relieved, thinking what this meant for Danny. Matthew would be nice to him, just as she’d hoped. Even after she and Ben left and they were heading to the train station to go to New York, she was still thinking about Danny. Could you fall in love with a child at first sight? It had never happened to her before. Maybe it was being pregnant, something about hormones.
“I hope we have a boy,” she told Ben.
“I don’t care as long as it’s healthy.”
She hoped he wasn’t making some reference to her age. She’d already agreed to do every prenatal test for older mothers. She decided he was just being sweet.
“Which one did you like better, Danny or Isabelle?”
“What a question. I liked them both. They’re kids.”
“Are you glad I talked Matthew into keeping them until their mother comes back?”
“I don’t know. He was going to call social services and find them a good foster home. I wonder if that wouldn’t be better for them, since Matt has to work all the time.”
A foster home? That made more sense than kicking them out on the street to live in a house with drug addicts. Danny must have misinterpreted something Matthew said.
“But for Matt’s sake,” Ben continued, “yes, I’m glad you talked him into it. I worry about him being alone right now. He told me he hasn’t been sleeping, and he looks wiped out.”
“He does?”
“Didn’t you notice? I’ve never seen him look this bad. I felt even worse listening to him talk about last night with you. He’s really a mess.”
“Are you saying that a tiny little part of you didn’t feel—I don’t know—proud? Like you had something he wanted?”
Ben gave her a look like she’d just suggested murdering puppies. “Of course not. I love Matt. I just want him to be happy.”
“Maybe you should give me back to him, then.” She knew how childish that sounded, but she was annoyed by his passionate declaration of feeling for stupid Matthew.
“Even if I wanted to, which I don’t, I couldn’t. Matt cares about me, too, and he wouldn’t want you, knowing it would hurt me.”
This was way too much male bonding for her to handle. Luckily, they were at the train station. They were finally going home, but just to pack a few things. Tomorrow it was back to Philadelphia, to stay in a hotel the lab would pay for while they looked for a new place.
“At least we’ll be in our own bed tonight,” she said. They were walking inside 30th Street Station. Ben didn’t say anything, but he squeezed her hand. He was already looking for the ticket booth. She knew he was tired, and no wonder, after everything he’d been through in the last week and the last year.
They were waiting on the platform when she thought of what Ben had said about how bad Matthew looked. Was it possible he was right? She’d noticed Matthew’s cashmere sweater and expensive jeans; his stylishly cut, still thick brown hair; his teeth, so white she knew he had to be having them bleached at the dentist. Even when he was sitting right next to her at the hospital, she’d seen nothing but his unfairly long eyelashes and obscenely handsome face, the same disgustingly good-looking man he’d always been. Yet even Danny had mentioned that Matthew griped a lot about being tired. If it was really true that he looked wiped out, why hadn’t she noticed this? Not that she would have cared if she had, but it was still so strange to think she could have missed it completely.
The train was onl
y a few miles from Philly when Ben fell asleep with his face smashed against the window. Amelia pulled his head onto her shoulder and thought about the genetics study he and Matthew had talked about. She hoped it was true and the baby would get more of Ben’s genes than hers. He was obviously much smarter than she was, and, she suspected, a much nicer person deep down.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
His Father’s Son
After Ben and Amelia left, Matthew told Danny it was time to have a talk. Isabelle had gone down for her nap early, no doubt because she’d been awake most of the night, tugging on Matthew’s earlobes, hitting him in the face, kicking him right in the middle of his sore back. He’d woken up exhausted and in agony and soaking wet, because, as his crap luck would have it, she’d picked that night of all nights to pee in the bed. He was extremely annoyed that Danny hadn’t mentioned they needed diapers, but he’d gotten over that as the morning went plunging downhill.
Now he was sitting across from the kid at the table, plying him with potato chips and orange soda. He could tell Danny expected him to be angry, but he wasn’t and he told him so. He also told Danny that he and Isabelle could stay until their mother came back. “But I do want to know how you did it. I think you owe me that.”
To his credit, Danny didn’t pretend not to know what Matthew meant. Was that a smile on his clever little face? Yes, it was, and no wonder. He’d run an elaborate con on an adult and gotten exactly what he wanted.
At first, he would admit only that he’d cried.
“What do you mean?” Matthew said. “A few tears or complete hysteria?”
“As hard as I could.” Crunch, crunch. “I cried so hard it made my throat hurt.”
“And how did you manage that?”
He shrugged. “I can cry when I need to. I do it all the time when I’m begging for money.”
“An unusual skill. But how did you know it would work with Amelia?”
“She’s the type I always pick to beg from.” Crunch, crunch, crunch. A gulp from the soda. “I knew it as soon as I saw her.”
