All Who Are Lost (Ashmore's Folly Book 1) (18 page)

On the way back to the garage apartment – despite the postage-stamp dimensions, she didn’t miss Dominic’s house – she stopped at a consignment store and found a bassinet that she could afford. She brought it up the stairs with her and then heard in horror Francie’s reaction.
I can’t – I can’t – I’m too young to be a mother – I can’t take care of her – let them keep her – someone else can take her—

You can’t.
Laura grasped at the one certainty.
You can’t give away his child. He has rights too. You need to tell him. He’ll take her.

She would never see the baby again if the child went to Richard and Diana – oh, dear God, if Diana
would
take her. She could not go home. She could not go back to Dominic after her taste of freedom.

Francie stopped crying long enough to yell back at her,
Richard, Richard, Richard! Is that all you think about? She’s my baby. She’s not his. I didn’t even put him on the birth certificate.
And then, later, when she calmed down,
I looked up the laws in this state. If I give her up for adoption, he’d have to sign away his rights, and face it, can you imagine him doing that? And if he takes her, then she’s still there, she’s still in my life, I have to see her! I won’t ever be free!

But you can’t give her away, Francie, you can’t—

Francie had rounded on her swiftly.
What do you mean, I can’t? You don’t get a say in this! I’m the one who was pregnant. I’m the one who had to be fat and sick. I’m the one who had to go through labor – you try it and see how you like it!
Then she broke down.
I didn’t think it would be so awful. I thought it would be so romantic to give him a child. I thought it would make him love me.

She would have given anything in the world to trade places with Francie. Richard should have turned to her – but no, she wouldn’t think that, there lay madness.

So she outwitted Francie, who still spent most of each day lying around the apartment, sobbing her eyes out. When the doctors said the baby could go home, Laura combed her hair to match Francie’s – a center part instead of a side part – and dressed in the loose jumper Francie had worn most of the summer. She wore heeled sandals to match Francie’s two extra inches. She slipped the hospital ID that Francie had thrown down on the cheap kitchen table onto her wrist and took her Virginia driver’s license. At the hospital, she gambled on the constant personnel turnover in the three months since the baby’s birth, and later that day, “Francesca Dane” brought Baby Girl Dane home.

Get her out! Out! Take her away! I don’t want to see her!

No.
Laura stood her ground, even as her heart crumbled at the agony on her twin’s face.
She stays. You don’t want to be around her – then you leave.

They had stared at each other across that tiny body, and Francie, older by a year less a day, used to getting her way with her sparkle and vivacity, never thwarted until she had run into the wall of implacable biology, finally faced with a
No
she couldn’t charm her way around – Francie backed down.

She calmed down and apologized. She promised to do better. She had been cooped up for months, she said, and the enforced bed rest had depressed her. She had to get back out in the world before she went crazy.
Okay, you win.
She can stay here till I decide what to do.

She has to have a name
, Laura had pointed out.
What do you want to call her?

I don’t care. You pick.

Laura named Richard’s daughter after his mother – the closest to a real mother that she herself had ever known. Being with baby Margaret – soon Meg – let her feel closer to Peggy.

Fine with me
, Francie said.
I’m going to go find a job.
You stay with her during the day, okay? I’ll babysit at night when you’re out singing.

So Laura had time during long autumn days to continue making Meg’s acquaintance. At first, she loved taking care of Meg because the baby belonged to the two people she loved best in the world. Then – she carefully never examined her feelings to know when they changed – Meg began to belong to her. When she took the baby out, people complimented her on her baby, and only the first time did she put anyone right. The second time, she smiled and said thanks. Meg
should
have been hers. She sang to Meg, she rocked her, she soothed her to sleep, and she cringed every time Francie talked about adoption.

But babies took money, and their cash situation was critical. The little money they saved had to be kept in case Meg got sick, and the bills for the baby’s care continued to arrive. Francie, exclaiming in despair:
I can’t take this anymore! Something’s got to give! I’m going to talk to that counselor at the hospital tomorrow. She said it would be easy to place a white baby girl for adoption.

Somehow, each time Francie made the threat, Laura was able to soothe her, extract a promise to think on it, wait until after the new year, things were sure to get better…. Then came the December night when she walked home from the club to save bus fare, exhausted, wondering how she was going to pay the heating bill – and there Francie had sat at their little table, sopping wet on a dry night, Meg in her little carrier beside her. Francie, with haunted eyes and flotsam in her hair. Meg, dry, but with a trace of sand on her delicate skin.

She knew then that she had to run again. This time with Meg, this time from Francie.

She had $33 to her name, and one last piece of jewelry.

She waited and watched, and over the next few nights, as she sang her smoky songs and gazed out alluringly at her small audience, she felt only the dread of coming home to an empty apartment. The police knocking on her door.
Could you come with us to identify….
The darkness that hung over the apartment, the unspoken remnant of that night. The look in Francie’s eyes that never warmed, that iced her every time she saw her sister look at Meg.

And then – salvation.

A Stanford doctoral student escaped from a downpour into the lounge and lingered for her act. At the end of her set, he bought her a drink. The songs she sang and the dress she wore made her seem much older; Cameron St. Bride could not know that the siren he watched with such hungry eyes masked a scared girl in search of a rescuer. He danced with her, he sat through two more sets, and when she got off duty, he kissed her for what seemed like hours. She had been kissed before, but never like this. She had never been held against a man’s demanding body, and she responded eagerly.

“I want you,” he had whispered finally, his hand on her breast, “come with me.” Laura made the second fateful decision of her life and went. She craved the warmth his body offered; she was dazed and aroused by his assault on her senses, and she had already noticed the money in his wallet when he paid for their drinks. Virginity and virtue seemed trifling matters next to the cold hard cash she needed to take Meg and run.

Less than twenty minutes later, a stunned Cameron St. Bride got the truth out of her, and what began as a diversion for him and an act of desperation for her changed as he heard her stammer out the story of that terrified dash across the continent and the agonizing months of her break with the past. His first, instinctive opinion that she should go right back home died seconds after she began talking about Dominic, about Francie, about Richard. About Meg.

He took her home that night, claiming that he always saw a lady home from a date, and at the door he had pressed two hundred dollars into her hand. “Buy the baby some milk,” he had said, and vanished into the night. She thought never to see him again. She
hoped
not to see him again. She had, after all, sunk to a level she had never imagined all those months when she had plotted her escape in the safety of her father’s house. She had sold herself. She was no better than the girls who walked the street down the block from the club.

But she had enough for a bus ticket. Enough to take Meg and run, at least as far as the next state.

Then, the next day – he came back. He admitted later that he had asked himself why even as he mounted the stairs to her apartment, wondering if he truly wanted to get involved with a girl barely of age, a girl caring for a frail baby, a girl who had suffered a dark history of emotional abuse and whose sister remained a burden she could scarcely manage. He even turned away once. But finally he knocked, and she answered the door holding Meg in her arms. He looked at them both and fell in love.

His presence that weekend, larger than life in their tiny room, made all the difference in the world. Meg, too quiet for a baby, brightened when he picked her up. Francie’s eyes lost that cold, dead look. Laura slept soundly for the first time in weeks.

“I’d like to see you next weekend,” he said Sunday night, before starting the trip back to Stanford, and she who had loved another for the whole of her life said, “Come back.”

“Wolf in wolf’s clothing,” Francie speculated after he left, and shot a suspicious look Laura’s way. “Something happen you didn’t tell me about?”

“No,” said Laura.

Francie stared at her intently. Laura kept her face still while those all-too-knowing eyes tried to pierce her calm. The unspoken tension that neither wanted to acknowledge grew until Francie shrugged and buried it all. “Suit yourself. All I can say is, he looked like he wanted to eat you up.”

“You’re imagining things.”

“Richard used to look at me that way,” said Francie, and burst into tears.

No, he didn’t
, thought Laura, who was finally learning skepticism.

The next weekend, Cam returned, and the weekend after that. Over the next month, he wooed and courted and cosseted Laura. She finally came first with someone. She grew to depend on him; she confided in him her terrible fear of the Bay.
I have to take her away…. If I go to Texas, will you ask your father to help me find a job?

I can do better than that
, he said, and touched her face tenderly.
Oh, God, Laura, you are so young to deal with this. I’ll take care of you. You don’t have to live like this….

But I have to keep Meg,
she said, knowing that he wanted her to live with him. He had not made any advances since that first, terrible night, but she knew that he still wanted her. His eyes told her that. At night, huddled under a blanket in her narrow bed, listening for Meg in the darkness, she could even contemplate going to bed with him, just to have him hold her afterwards and tell her that everything would be all right
. Do you really want to live with a baby, Cam? She has to come first. And she’s a lot of hard work. She’s not a toy I can put in the closet when I’m tired of playing with her.

We could adopt her.

She couldn’t have heard him correctly.
Adopt her? But they won’t allow that, we’re not—

Marry me, Laura,
and he framed her face with his hands
. Marry me, and I promise you’ll never have to worry about losing Meg again. Besides
, and he smiled down at Meg, sleeping on a blanket,
she grows on you, doesn’t she? I don’t know anything about being a father, but I’ll be the best you could ever want for her.

No!
Francie’s response to the first tentative question echoed down the years.
Oh, my God, I just want to forget! How can you even think – I’ll see her and I’ll never stop remembering—

And Cam’s quiet voice:
Francesca, let’s you and I go somewhere and talk this out.

Later, Francie returning from that private dinner, subdued and thoughtful, and for the first time in months, not shadowed in pain. Her only reaction, when Laura asked her hesitantly what Cam had said:
Don’t marry that man just to have a roof over your head, Laurie. You’ll survive. We’ll all survive. I won’t take Meg away from you. But – just don’t marry him.

For the first time in her life, she ignored Francie.

She was grateful to him, of course, and it was the worst possible basis for marriage. Passion existed between them, and their devotion to Meg bound them together, but she never loved him, and for that she felt inordinately guilty. She
should
have loved him. He was generous with himself, his time and money. Better than that, he showed her a gentleness that went a long way towards destroying the insecurity Dominic Abbott had built in her. When he took her to bed the night she agreed to marry him, his loving patience allayed her fears and did much to erase the emotional damage of that first night.

He never mentioned that night again.

He determined, too, to erase another memory. Sight unseen, he despised Meg’s biological father, and his distrust of Meg’s birth mother, now living next door to them in the rental house at Stanford, did not abate over the year they spent in California. For Cam, the year was a necessary waiting period for the adoption, a time to finish his dissertation and plan the future. For Laura, the year became a cocoon of healing from the past, a year in which she existed contentedly as a wife and mother, a year in which her first pregnancy, unplanned but welcomed, ended in pain and blood one Saturday afternoon. For Francie, the year imprisoned her in a boring job as a bank teller and a restricted social life under the conservative eye of a brother-in-law she despised.

But then the year ended. Cam received his doctorate; a judge signed the final adoption papers and sealed the records; Francie, declaring passionately that she never wished to set foot in California again, decided to move to Texas with them.

There, Francie cut her ties
. I’m afraid I’ll try to be Meg’s mother if I live with you, Laurie. I know myself too well. You need to take care of your marriage and your baby without me hanging around. Don’t worry, darling.
She laughed and hugged Laura
. I’ve already talked it over with Cam, and he agrees. You’ll see me all too often anyway!