Carly Bishop - No Baby But Mine
Page 22
"What big bird?"
Laughter bubbled out of her; tears brightened her eyes.
"You've got so much to learn, Weisz, that your head is going to hurt. You've never heard of Sesame Street?"
"Oh. That big bird."
"You faker."
"Yeah."
She took something from around her neck.
"Christo wanted me to give you this." He held out his hand. His eyes fixed on the coin shape.
Then, as he turned it over and over in the dim light, it dawned on him that this was the medallion of his own Gypsy great-great-grandmother, hanging from a bezel on a cord.
"Kirsten, does he know?" he asked, his voice low, urgent.
"What he knows, Garrett, is that when I come back, his daddy's coming, too."
Christo was going to love this. His daddy, coming to him in a helicopter.
when the chopper set down in the front yard of the Wilder house, Christo flew out the door with Wag at his heels, and Matt in the wake of them both. He skidded to a stop and fell on his butt in the snow when in the harsh chopper lights he recognized Garrett for the man in the park.
His son's eyes grew wider and wider, his chin trembling fiercely.
Garrett jumped down from the door of the chopper and scooped up his boy, who clung to his father's neck in a vise grip worthy of a professional wrestler.
Worthy of a boy, Kirsten thought, snapping photos of their reunion through her tears, who had believed his whole life that as soon as his superhero dad was done putting away the bad guys, he would come home.
Christo squirmed loose enough to turn to Kirsten.
"Is he really my daddy?"
For one insanely long moment, with Ginny and Sam, Matt and J. D. and Ann Calder waiting for her answer, she looked into Garrett's eyes and then answered his son.
"He is."
on december twenty-first, Kirsten heard on a CNN news flash that Ross Vorees had been indicted in Wyoming for the murder of Chet Loehman. On the twenty-second, word came down that John Grenallo had been indicted on seventeen different counts mostly related to criminal conspiracy. On the twenty-third, Burton Rawlings died of the gunshot wound he had sustained.
On the twenty-fourth, Christmas Eve, she married Garrett Weisz in a small ceremony in her home on Queen Anne Hill. To be sure it was done right, Christo stood with the minister and watched them taking their vows to each other, and to him, pledging their love.
Garrett finally tore himself away from Christo's teepee on the stroke of Christmas Day. He went downstairs, then, and found his wife and thought how happy Christo's grandfather would have been, for he had survived Hungary in 1956, convinced that a man finally got what a man deserved.
It was a lucky man indeed who got both what his heart desired, and what he deserved. He stood at the bottom of the stairs, where there was mistletoe just pining to be invoked.
"Come here, Kirsten."
Her eyes swam, her heart foundered. It was a lucky woman indeed, whose husband both honored and loved her for his own hero, who was the superhero their son had always imagined, and the hero she had first met on a fateful night in the Mercury.
The End