The Lion's Surprise Baby

by White, Jade

  “Damn!” Felicia said, slack-jawed. “No wonder you couldn’t keep your clothes on with that! And he had you on your back for a whole week…”

  “On my back, and standing up, and every other way you could think of.”

  “Damn!” Felicia repeated, at a loss for any other words.

  “See?” said Tara.

  “It’s a wonder you could even get up again after going a couple of rounds with that.”

  “There were times I thought I’d never get up again and I didn’t care.”

  “I hear you. Wow. Damn…”

  At length, Felicia managed to tear her eyes from the gorgeousness on the computer and sit back down. Once she was seated again, she had another thought. “Tara, what if you don’t tell Brenton he’s gonna be a daddy, and what if you do go ahead and raise the baby on your own. What will that do to your life? Have you thought about that?”

  Tara stared out into the air, seeming to look at nothing but really looking out into the future. “I have. Eighteen years at least, Felicia. Eighteen years of taking care of a child. Getting him—or her—through being a baby and going to school, and getting sick and getting him or her through all the things that kids do and all the things they go through, growing up. My God, being the mother of a teenager. A teenager. Do you remember what you were like when you were a teenager? I remember what I was like. Getting a child through childhood and then that. And the tiredness and the expense and…everything.”

  “Mm-hmm. And all that, by yourself. With no man, no Daddy around. Just you. That’s the biggest thing anybody ever does in their whole life, Tara. And it’ll be just you doing it.”

  Tara snapped out of it and looked at her with, one should pardon the expression, an expectant gaze. “Well, I’m sure I’d have a little help, wouldn’t I, Auntie Felicia?”

  “Oh, you know Auntie Felicia would be on the job. But I’d be backup. You’d be the mom. If you’re gonna go this alone, you’re gonna have to be ready to be the mom.”

  Tara slumped her shoulders and slumped backwards in the seat. “I know. Just me—from a widow to a single mom. Oh, Felicia, I’m already tired.”

  “And there’s one other thing,” Felicia said. “And this is the big one.”

  “What?”

  “You know what. Kids ask questions, Tara. They look at what’s going on around them and they ask questions. Little Him or Her is gonna see other kids with moms and dads, or other kids with two parents. And Little Him or Her is gonna start asking where Daddy is. And who Daddy is. And why Daddy isn’t here. What are you gonna say?”

  “Please, let’s not get that far ahead yet,” said Tara, shutting her eyes and rubbing her forehead. “I’m not even at the point of knowing whether it’s really a him or a her.”

  “Not to mention, when Brenton finds out one day, he’s gonna want to know why he was never in the loop. He’s gonna have a few questions too.”

  Keeping her eyes closed but unable to shut out all the questions and all the complications, Tara wearily said, “There’s just too many things going on, too many sides to all of it. I can’t deal with it all at once. All I can do now is deal with the part that’s happening right now and sort it all out as I go along. The whole thing is too big to do anything else.”

  “Okay, well, here’s the part we’re going first. Lunchtime today, we’re going over to the drugstore and we’re buying you a test. And later today we’re going back to your place and you’re taking the test and finding out for sure, even though like you say, you’re never late and it must be. You need a test. Then we’ll just start from there.”

  Tara opened her eyes again, but stayed leaning back in her seat as if she could just go to sleep and forget it all. In the same weary voice, she said, “Yes, that’s what we’ll do. We’ll take a long lunch and we’ll buy me a test. Meanwhile, this is just between you and me.”

  “Definitely,” said Felicia.

  _______________

  As Tara expected, the stick of the pregnancy test produced a blue plus sign that confirmed the reason why she was late. At the end of the day, Tara and Felicia settled down in Tara’s living room, Tara on the sofa and Felicia on a seat facing her opposite the coffee table, and pondered all the many ramifications of what Tara knew all along and what her test had verified. If this had happened with George, Tara would be surprised (especially at the failure of the birth control pills that she would still have been using), but happy. Now all she could feel was a cloud of uncertainties swirling over her head.

  “There’s another thing we didn’t account for,” Tara said. “I don’t even know if Brenton wanted kids. We never talked about it. We never expected this to happen. We just enjoyed doing what you do to get kids. This is probably something that was never in his own plans, just like it was never in mine. Or it may be something that he didn’t want until a few years down the line, after he’d done other things. If he knew about this, it would turn his life upside down just like it’s going to do mine.”

  “Or maybe,” Felicia suggested, “you’re not giving the guy enough credit. Look, he’s a rich guy, right? Rich from real estate. He’s got plenty of money. So what if he’d just roll with this and decide he wanted it? What if he didn’t look at it like a burden on his life at all? He might at least want to help you provide for it. He might at least want to give you some support—as in child support. And he might call out fathers’ rights. There is such a thing, you know.”

  “I know. But he has a right to do all the things he wanted to do and be all the things he wants to be.”

  “He can still do all those things and be a father. Look, I know you’re thinking about your body and your choice as much as you’re thinking about him. And I know you think you’re protecting his future. But don’t you think you’re taking all the choices for yourself and not giving him any?”

  For the first time Tara became defensive. An edge crept into her voice. She straightened up on the sofa and glared at Felicia. “Are you trying to say I’m being selfish?”

  Felicia held up her hands, trying not to start a quarrel that neither of them wanted. “I’m saying… All I guess I’m saying is you’re maybe not looking at the big picture in all this.”

  Tara’s defensiveness melted into something more like despair. “The picture is too big. There are too many things.”

  “Then you’ve got to do what we were talking about. Don't try to take on the whole thing at once. Take it on one piece at a time. And you have got help and support right here, you know. I’ve always got your back, no matter what you decide.”

  Tara was grateful for that, at least. “I know,” she said.

  “So you’re calling your OB-GYN in the morning, like we said.”

  “First thing,” Tara replied.

  “Okay,” Felicia said. “You gonna be all right now? You need anything else?”

  “Just a little more time to myself, to think,” said Tara. “I’ll see you in the morning—after I call the doctor.”

  “Can I say just one more thing?” Felicia asked.

  “Of course. What?”

  “I understand everything you’re thinking about, and I get your reasons for not wanting to tell Brenton. I don’t really agree with them, but I know you’re trying to look out for him. I just don’t think this is the way to do it. And keeping this a secret, that’ll only be good for so long. Things like this come out. They always come out. Something always makes them come out. A secret like this—it never stays a secret. That’s all I’m gonna say.”

  Tara simply answered, “Okay.” She had no comeback to that. She had nothing else to offer in the way of an answer.

  Felicia got up to leave and Tara saw her to the door. At the door they hugged it out, the long, deep hug of best girlfriends and surrogate sisters who would always be there for each other. Tara permitted herself a tear and accepted Felicia’s reassurances of things being all right, no matter what. And Tara let her out, leaving herself alone in the apartment again.

  Well, she
was not exactly alone, after all. For the next nine months she would not be alone in her own body, and for years to come after that she would not be alone in her own life. She settled back down on the sofa, in silence, and sat there again under the brewing storm of her uncertainties, wondering when her skies would ever be clear again.

  So much to think about. So much to plan. Just so much.

  Felicia had been right about one thing. Tara knew she could never go through with terminating the little life that Brenton had made inside her. All questions of morality and superstition and everything else aside, she simply could not bring herself to do such a thing. Whether it was wrong for the world or wrong for society or wrong for womanhood itself was not the point. It was wrong for her. She couldn’t do it.

  Tara Phillips was going to be a mother. And whether he knew it or not, Brenton Morgan was going to be a father.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Daniel Adam Phillips, conceived on a Thursday evening, was born on a Thursday afternoon, nine months later.

  It was the policy and practice of the hospital that the staff were not to show any bias or favoritism towards any baby in the nursery over any other. And it was a sensible, practical, and necessary policy. However, where baby Daniel Phillips was concerned it went quietly out the window. During her maternity stay, every nurse on the floor quietly and discreetly came to Tara and told her in glowing terms that Daniel was the most beautiful baby they had ever set eyes on in their lives.

  Being Daniel’s mother, Tara naturally agreed with them. Why, after all, would a mother not think of her own child as the most beautiful thing that ever lived? And yet some nameless instinct told Tara that this was not the nurses’ imagination nor her own natural maternal bias. Not that she had spent her whole life in the company of infants or seen hundreds of them the way the maternity staff had, but Tara had a feeling deep down that there was something particularly enchanting about her little son.

  Somehow, he seemed almost preternaturally beautiful. She chalked this up to the feeling she had upon meeting Daniel’s father. Brenton had that same magnetic quality of handsomeness and attraction about him; he was a natural head-turner and a natural inducer of mesmerized stares. So yes, Tara thought, this was only her seeing Brenton in their child. He was just like his father.

  That, however, did not quite explain the reactions of others to Daniel. The nurses who crowded around the maternity ward window just to look at him, and who practically fought for the privilege of picking him up and holding him and carrying him to see his mother, had never met Brenton. They seemed to be responding to Brenton’s son almost as strongly as Tara had responded to Brenton himself.

  Felicia, too, was instantly wrapped around the little boy’s tiny fingers. Her face would light up at the sight of Daniel as if she and not Tara were his mother. She had to be coaxed to hand him over to Tara when she came to visit them at the hospital. Tara would watch Felicia cradling the little bundle of beauty in her arms and beaming pure love at him from her smile.

  Tara had a strong inkling that Daniel was going to be a very popular boy growing up. He was going to take after his father. He was going to be more handsome than it seemed humanly possible for anyone to be. He was going to be very strong and athletic. And he was never going to have trouble getting a date. Tara was going to raise a boy that everyone either wanted to be with, or everyone just wanted to be. She could tell she was going to have her work cut out for her.

  But her immediate task, for which she was grateful, was just to accept into her life this little gift from the most amazing week she had ever spent; to welcome him and hold him and love him with all her heart. And as he looked up at her with a rounded little facsimile of Brenton’s face and a sparkle in Brenton’s blue-green eyes, Tara’s heart felt as though it were expanding outward to wrap up the little boy in her love.

  This was a piece of Brenton that she would always have. He would be her life and her world. In all her life, Tara was never more sure of anything than that she had done absolutely the right thing in having him. As Brenton had shown her all the passion in the world, Tara now poured all the love in the world into her son.

  Tara soon learned that the seeming enchantment of Daniel was not limited to her and the hospital staff. One day when the weather was nice, she took him for a brief visit to the office and all work and all business were forgotten in his presence. Employees got up from their desks for a look and did not want to go back. Customers got up and crowded around and appeared to be dazzled at the sight of him.

  One customer even gave Tara a business card and offered to put him in commercials, swearing this baby could sell anything. Tara believed him. Whenever she would take him on a little outing, people passing nearby in her building, on the street, in the park, or in the market would stop and look and admire him as if they had never seen a baby in their lives. It was enough to make Tara feel flattered and vain, and she was not even the one they were admiring. She wondered at times if people were as enraptured with Brenton when he was a baby and what his mother did about it.

  There were times she thought she should call Brenton, or E-mail him or text him, and tell him what they had made together and what she had brought into the world from him, and she felt guilty that she did not. She remembered everything that she and Felicia had talked about when she first thought she was pregnant, of which Felicia reminded her on occasion. Brenton should know that he was the father of this little thing of wonder that struck such love and adoration in the heart of everyone who saw him.

  Tara felt as though she were cheating him, depriving him, robbing him of what was his. But time and again she thought of the life that Brenton had imagined for himself, and that being the father of a child out of wedlock had no place in that life.

  When Felicia brought up the subject again, as it did one day at Tara’s apartment while Daniel was taking a nap, the inevitable question was, “What if Daniel didn’t have to be a child out of wedlock? What if Brenton decided he wanted to marry you?”

  And the inevitable answer from Tara was, “He shouldn’t have to feel obligated to marry me. We were only together for a week. We didn’t make any commitments. We didn’t pledge to be together forever. We went to bed together and we understood that it was going to be over and we were both going back to our own lives. I didn’t expect anything else then and I don’t expect anything else from him now.”

  Felicia argued back, “Maybe you didn’t make a commitment then, but guess what: lying in that crib in what used to be George’s den, that’s a commitment. Brenton ought to have a chance to commit to that little boy just like you.”

  Tara was adamant. “I don’t believe marrying and staying together just for a child is right. I don’t think it’s good for anyone, not for the parents or the child. It’s not about just committing to the child; it’s about committing to each other. Brenton and I didn’t have that. We had sex. Being together just for Daniel and not because it’s what we both really want, I don’t see how it could work in the long run. Brenton’s life is where he is; my life is here. And having just me in his life, I think it’s better for Daniel than having his father one minute and not having him the next. It’d be like pulling the rug out from under him.”

  “It’d be better than never knowing his father at all,” said Felicia.

  “I can’t do it,” Tara insisted. “It would disrupt everyone’s life. I’ve had my life changed completely from what I thought it was going to be, once when George died, then again when I got pregnant. I don’t want any more disruptions. I just want my child and my life, and everything in its proper place.”

  Felicia always relented, for Tara was after all the mother and the final decisions, right or wrong, were hers. “If you say so,” Felicia shrugged. “All I’m saying is, a father’s got a place in a boy’s life. That’s all.”

  Daniel was an unusually quiet child. He did not seem to cry as much as one would expect a baby to cry. He had an unusual tendency to sleep all the way through the night, which Tara
found peculiar. She had expected to go through what she had heard so many other parents bemoaning, the long sleepless nights of a crying baby and the need to get up and feed him in the wee hours. She had even braced herself for the complaints of other people in her building about the noise.

  Strangely enough, Daniel cried very little. He did make noises during the night when he was hungry, but they were not the usual infant cries. They were odd sounds, which Tara compared to something between a wail and…a howl. No, not a howl, but something else; a sharp, keen, rasping kind of cry, with almost a kind of a hiss behind it. This worried her so that she took him to the doctor to have a full examination to determine exactly what would cause Daniel to make that kind of noise instead of crying.

  The doctor could find nothing wrong with him at all, nothing unusual to speak of, and advised Tara not to worry about it until something else out of the ordinary happened. Tara wondered what could be more out of the ordinary than a baby who hardly cried, and did not sound like a baby when he did.