With Child

by Janice Kay Johnson

  But the way she’d poked and prodded, as if it did matter who he was, and then the startled knowledge and guilt on her face when he’d confronted her… The way color had run up her neck and blossomed on her cheeks as she’d sucked in air. For a minute there, as they’d stared at each other, he was afraid he’d given away more than he’d ever meant to, as well.

  It was the next day that Quinn let himself put into words the truth that had been eating at his gut.

  He wanted her.

  God help him, he couldn’t remember when he hadn’t. Maybe from the beginning, although he hadn’t known why he always felt uncomfortable in her presence, why he didn’t like to watch Dean nuzzle her neck or wrap a possessive hand around her hip or pull her onto his lap. Guilt tasted like bile in his mouth, corroded his stomach, but even he knew it made no sense. If he’d come on to Dean’s wife when his buddy wasn’t around, he’d deserve to burn in hell. As it was, he’d done the best he could: buried even the knowledge that she attracted him, stayed away from her, frozen out her attempts to draw him into a warm family circle, as if they could be sister- and brother-in-law.

  He’d just been too stupid to know why he was doing it.

  When he’d first met her, Quinn remembered thinking that she wasn’t Dean’s type. Dean liked women that were more like his Camaro: sexy, well-endowed, just a little obvious. Mindy wasn’t exactly Quinn’s type, either. He’d tended to go for women whom Dean called “high society,” ones who were subtle, smart, sleek.

  Mindy was like a bunch of daisies picked in the field. Effortlessly pretty, sweet, cheerful.

  So why was it, Quinn wondered, that she’d somehow drawn both men?

  He grunted in amusement. Maybe the qualities that had irritated him the most had also first attracted him. That infectious giggle. Her bare feet. Her short tousled hair that always made him think of the head of a dandelion. Her childlike pleasure in simple delights.

  Perhaps it had been much the same for Dean. She’d been fresh, charming, without artifice, fun. Dean had clearly basked in the way she glowed with admiration for him.

  Quinn hadn’t let himself get to know her well enough to discover that she was also smart, well read and, in her own way, as lonely as he was.

  He swore aloud, something that caused no heads to turn at the station. You’d have to invent a new obscenity if you didn’t want to be background music here.

  Carter was still booking Marvin’s shooter, while Quinn was writing up a report. His mind kept wandering, because the truth was that they’d got lucky. A drug bust and the resultant charges had apparently scared the hell out of a barely eighteen-year-old member of the gang, who offered to testify about the murders he’d witnessed to get out of jail time. The arresting officer had called Quinn.

  Quinn hoped the kid was planning to move after the trial, because if he stayed in Seattle he was dead.

  Carter wandered in, a pint of milk in his hand. He peered over Quinn’s shoulder. “You haven’t finished yet?”

  “There’s no challenge,” Quinn complained. Then, “You’re drinking milk?”

  Carter patted his stomach. “I didn’t get a chance to tell you today. I have an ulcer. Can you believe it? The doctor recommends I give up coffee among other things.”

  “An ulcer, huh.” Quinn couldn’t help laughing. “I’m the one who should have the ulcer. You’re too good-humored to have earned one.”

  “I suppress the angst,” his partner said with dignity. Then he grinned, too. “Doctor said it may have nothing to do with stress. He’s got me on some kind of antibiotic. Go figure.”

  Quinn clapped him on the back. “That’s good news. I was expecting a five-way bypass.”

  “You were expecting to bury me.” Carter took a swallow of the milk. “Unlike you, I’m done for the day. Don’t stay too late.”

  Quinn tossed a wadded up piece of paper after him. Carter danced to the side and, laughing, walked away.

  The bare-bones report written at last, Quinn escaped in turn. He arrived home to find the Howies’ car in the driveway. He opened the door to the smell of dinner cooking, the murmur of voices and the sound of Nancy’s laugh. His stride checked and he paused, still unnoticed. Quinn hadn’t heard her laugh like that in years.

  He walked in unnoticed. George and Nancy sat close together on the couch in the living room, heads bent over the baby. Wearing sweats and a pair of fuzzy slippers, Mindy was in the kitchen, stirring something on the stove, humming tunelessly and swaying in time to her own music. To his biased eye, she looked cute.

  What in hell was wrong with him?

  “Hey,” Quinn said.

  She turned from the stove, spoon suspended above the pan, face brightening. “Quinn! Look who’s here!”

  “I saw.” Ridiculously warmed because she seemed so glad to see him, he strolled into the living room. “Nancy and George. What do you think? Isn’t Jessamine the most beautiful baby ever?”

  “Oh, Quinn.” Nancy accepted his kiss on the cheek. “She is darling!”

  Jessie lay on Nancy’s lap, limbs flailing, her mouth pursed and her vague gaze wandering from face to face. Quinn reached down and lifted her to his shoulder.

  “Hey, little one,” he murmured.

  Her head wobbled as she tried to see his face. He liked holding her, now that he was getting the hang of it. The other night, he’d spent a couple of hours with her snoozing on his chest, him reading police reports. He’d ignored every itch and muscle twitch for the pleasure of having the feather-light weight over his heart, her baby smell in his nostrils.

  In the past, he’d been disbelieving when tough cops he knew had wandered in to offer It’s a Boy cigars, their faces invariably wearing dopey, happy grins. Now, he understood. And Jessie wasn’t even his child.

  So far, he was trying real hard not to think about what that meant. So he didn’t appreciate it when, over dinner, George said, “Well, Quinn, are you going to miss that little doll when Mindy gets her own place?”

  Mindy laughed at him. “You mean, is he looking forward to getting a good night’s sleep?”

  He couldn’t summon a joke. “I’ll miss her.” Even to his own ears he sounded curt.

  There was an awkward little silence before Mindy started telling about how Quinn had gotten shanghaied into attending her Lamaze class. “But he turned out to be a great labor coach,” she concluded, beaming at him. “I don’t know what I’d have done without him.”

  The Howies gazed at him with identical expressions of shock. Did they disapprove because he’d been present at the birth and Mindy wasn’t his own wife?

  But then George nodded with seeming respect and approbation, while Nancy smiled with delight. “Quinn! I didn’t know you were actually in there with Mindy! How wonderful that she had your support. Of course you and Dean always were willing to do anything for each other. I should have known you’d step in for him.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Quinn saw Mindy’s smile dim a little. Or maybe he was imagining it. His flare of anger took him by surprise. Why did everyone assume that every decent thing he did was either a tribute to his dead friend or a duty imposed by their friendship? Was it impossible to imagine that he’d wanted to be with Mindy when she’d needed him, that he could love someone besides Dean?

  In shock of his own, he thought, Love?

  They were all staring at him, so he buttered a roll and said, “I can’t believe Dean would have expected me to hold his wife’s hand during labor. Heck, he’d have probably fainted.”

  They all laughed.

  “Mindy and I have gotten to be friends.” He made it sound matter-of-fact and casual at the same time. “I wanted to do this with her.”

  “You know Quinn’s delivered a baby before, don’t you?” Mindy jumped in.

  “No!” Nancy exclaimed.

  He had to tell the story again, distracting them from the idea of him sitting at Mindy’s side during labor as a sort of embodiment of a dead man. The idea repulsed him.


  After the Howies left, Jessamine began to cry and Mindy went to get her. He stayed in the kitchen when she sat on the couch, discreetly freed her breast and helped Jessie latch on. He knew what she was doing, but he never let himself look. Quinn didn’t know if she’d noticed how he avoided her when she was nursing—he hoped she hadn’t. But he couldn’t seem to make himself just sit down and keep chatting as if she didn’t have her shirt lifted and her bra open to expose a breast. He wasn’t sure whether he was made more uncomfortable by the fact that he was turned on by the idea of an eager mouth on her breast, or by the tenderness he could see even across the room.

  Quinn froze in the act of opening a kitchen cupboard. He was just full of revelations tonight, wasn’t he? But why in hell would the tenderness between mother and child bother him?

  Because he felt excluded.

  The answer came to him without even a pretense of a struggle. He’d already known. Just hadn’t wanted to admit it.

  Mindy wasn’t his, and Jessie wasn’t his. If he got too close, he’d be kidding himself. Some kind of invisible force field surrounded them, and he couldn’t cross it.

  Quinn shook his head, stunned by the devastation that lay inside him, as gray and lifeless as the land buried in ash after Mount Saint Helens had erupted.

  He’d always felt the same way when he saw kids with their parents, mothers with babies, fathers swinging toddlers onto their shoulders or shooting baskets with their teenage sons on the driveway outside their houses. From the time he was little, he’d watched other kids run to meet their parents after school, babbling about what Teacher told them and eager to show off schoolwork, and he’d felt…invisible. A watcher who would never be enclosed in one of those shimmering bubbles. Even at the Howies’, he’d been the one who hadn’t fit, the silent, solitary extra at the table, as if he were forever a guest.

  By then, he’d told himself he didn’t care. Now, standing in his kitchen watching across a great distance as Mindy nursed her baby and cooed softly to her, he knew he’d lied to himself. He did care. He’d cared then, and he cared now, with a searing pain that roared in his ears like a wildfire that had leaped the fire line.

  He wanted to be loved.

  And the agony came from knowing whose love he wanted, and could never have.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  INFECTED WITH A SENSE of urgency about the future, Mindy waited only until the evening after the Howies’ visit to ask Quinn if she could use his tools in the garage. He had a well-equipped workbench, she’d discovered on further exploration, with a table saw she itched to get her hands on.

  Even though she knew he’d seen some of her work, he seemed surprised when she told him that, before Dean’s death, she’d actually been selling wall plaques and signs that said Welcome or My Secret Garden in gift shops. Either he thought her stuff was nothing special or he’d assumed her woodworking was no more than a hobby. His surprise left her feeling insulted. Or maybe hurt was a better word.

  But he did shrug and say, “Sure. Use anything you want. Just let me know if you need help. The table saw can be dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing.”

  The next morning, after he’d left for work, she headed out to the lumberyard and the hardware store, Jessie in a cloth carrier on her stomach. She came home with several thicknesses of plywood, enough lumber to cut out the bits and pieces she had in mind, paint and sheets of copper and galvanized steel, miscellaneous mosaic tiles and wooden dowels, springs and intriguing pieces of hardware. On impulse she stopped at a junk store that had caught her eye on the way to Lamaze class and bought old signs, buttons, a broken stained-glass window and a hideous collage someone had once made after a beach vacation. She’d need more. Lots more. But this was enough to get her started.

  Mindy was going to make birdhouses.

  She’d seen a few quirky ones in leafy neighborhoods of the city, hanging from tree limbs or sitting atop fence posts. Back when she’d first suspected she was pregnant, Mindy had seen one that looked like a gingerbread cottage. Meticulous and charming, it had made her smile—and think. There were almost limitless possibilities. She could build a miniature southern plantation house, or a tiny church. She could use an old wooden game board, or paint and age plywood to look like one. She imagined gingerbread trimming eaves; a deep blue, star-spangled birdhouse; a small log cabin.

  She hadn’t yet made a single one when Dean had died. After that, well, the whole idea had seemed like a dream.

  But looking out at that enormous old maple in Quinn’s backyard, she’d started picturing a birdhouse hanging from one of the branches. It would have to look as if it might have been hanging there since this house had been built, but it would also have to be witty in some way. She wanted a birdhouse that would make Quinn smile.

  All those wonderful tools were sitting unused out in the garage. She had time. And Mindy really thought the fantastical birdhouses she was imagining would sell. What better time to experiment?

  What’s more, if she made even one really great birdhouse, she’d have a Christmas present for Quinn. Something made by her own hands.

  The next two weeks, Jessamine napped contentedly in an oval wicker laundry basket in the garage while her mommy sawed and hammered and painted and cursed when she figured out flaws in her designs.

  Mindy got books from the library and read about Pacific Northwest birds. Some preferred perches, others holes; some open-air accommodations, others dark interiors as if they’d found a hole in a rotting cedar tree. Many of the birdhouses she imagined would probably decorate a porch or even a living room and never be inhabited, but she wanted to design them so they could be.

  She split tiny shakes for the roof of her first one, a rough-hewn cottage decorated with stars cut out of an old tin sign she’d found at a junk store. But when, as an experiment, she set it outside in the rain for a couple of days, to the side of the house where Quinn wouldn’t see it, she discovered the roof leaked. She had to cover the seam at the ridge. After some experimentation, she bent a strip of the same tin sign and tacked it on. In faded red letters, it advertised some long-forgotten brand of soda pop. She liked the effect.

  Her favorite was a Northwest Indian style longhouse, with the door opening beneath the legs of a bear she painted in red and black. That was one of the first she took to the gift shop in Belltown that had once carried her signs.

  The owner, a woman who wove baskets for sale in the shop, leaped up to coo over Jessamine. “Ha! Well, now I know why you disappeared. Do you have something for me again?”

  “I do. I don’t know if they’ll appeal to you, but…”

  The owner followed her out to the car. The minute she saw the row of birdhouses in the trunk, she said, “They’ll be gone in a week. Christmas shoppers are already getting frantic. What are you thinking we should ask?”

  They discussed price, and Mindy left those first birdhouses at the shop. Three days later, the store owner called to tell her they’d all sold and to ask when she could have more.

  “’Tis the season,” she reminded her.

  Mindy started making two or three birdhouses in a similar style before she moved on. It would make sense, she realized, to alternate simple ones, perhaps painted in a checkerboard of white and red and then distressed, with more ambitious undertakings. The latest of those was a doozy. Working from a photo, she was trying to capture the soaring spire of the Smith Tower, the tallest skyscraper west of the Mississippi when it was built early in the twentieth century.

  Quinn came down to the workshop a couple of times and admired her efforts. “So you’re selling them, huh?”

  “Yes, and they’re going fast.”

  “Good for you.” He grinned at Jessie, nestled against his shoulder. “Your mommy is an artist. Did you know that?”

  Jessie opened her mouth and wailed. She neither knew nor cared what Mommy did with saws and hammers. She just wanted a snack. Laughing, Mindy took her from Quinn and followed him into the house.

  As
she settled down in the living room to nurse, Quinn backed away, his expression remote. “I think I’ll go to the gym. Will you be okay?”

  “Of course I’ll be okay.” She flapped her hand at him. “Go.”

  He emerged a moment later from his bedroom with a gym bag, cast a single, distracted glance at her and went out the front door.

  He’d been distant lately, Mindy thought with dismay. He seemed to enjoy Jessamine, but mainly when he could have her to himself. He never hung around when Mindy was nursing or changing diapers—although, the diaper part she could understand. Not that Quinn hadn’t changed a few diapers himself. He seemed happy on his days off to take care of Jessie for a couple of hours while Mindy worked in the garage or did errands.

  What was missing was the closeness she’d felt with him those last couple of weeks before Jessie was born, and even at first after she had been. Mindy couldn’t quite pinpoint when he’d changed. It hadn’t been abrupt, more like a gradual retreat.

  Did it have anything to do with the Christmas season? She couldn’t remember whether he had seemed any different last year. She had noticed that, despite Quinn’s talk about making Jessie’s first holiday special, he hadn’t even hung strings of lights from the eaves like his neighbors. Three days before Christmas, and he hadn’t suggested putting up a tree. Did he even have ornaments?

  She sighed. Blaming his mood on holiday-induced depression was wishful thinking on her part. Christmas had nothing to do with his mood. She had everything to do with it.

  Her sad conclusion was that the closeness had been an illusion. When he thought she’d needed him, he’d been there. Of course they’d talked—they’d spent an awful lot of time together that had had to be filled somehow. Now she didn’t need him, and he was following his preference, which seemed to involve avoiding her.