Fearless Hope: A Novel (31 page)

“I’ll come to check on you later today.” Claire turned and hurried toward the sound.

“Please take me to Logan’s,” Hope said as Levi helped bundle Esther Rose into the tiny car seat he’d placed in the back.

“I thought I was taking you to your mother’s.”

“Logan called Grace and said to tell me that I could stay at his house if I wanted to while he was gone. He said he would be gone a few days longer than he expected. I want to see what damage the tornado did and get Simon started on the repairs. He’s pretty good at what he’s doing, but I’d feel better if I could supervise a little at this stage.”

“And how are you going to do that so soon after giving birth?”

“The weather is nice. I will spend a great deal of time on the porch.”

“People will talk. They will expect you to go stay at your mother and father’s.”

“People
always
talk,” Hope said with exasperation. “My mother has her hands full taking care of both her family and mine right now. I’ll stay there until Logan gets back. The baby and I will rest better there than at my parents’ for now. Then I’ll make other arrangements.”

•  •  •

Logan brought the glass of ice water his mother had requested and handed it to her.

“Thank you, dear,” his mother said. “Would you mind if we went outside on the balcony while we talk?”

“Whatever you want,” he said.

After they were seated, with the panorama of the city from Deborah’s high-rise apartment laid out before them, she began.

“First of all, you must promise me something,” she said. “You must promise me that once I begin, you won’t interrupt and you won’t ask questions until I’m finished.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m afraid if you stop me, I won’t be able to start again. I have to take a run at this thing. When I’m finished, I’ll let the chips fall where they may.”

“I promise,” he said.

She took a deep, shuddering breath, and then began telling him a story that he suspected would probably change both of their lives.

“I was thirty years old,” his mother said. “That can be a hard year for a woman. It was also the year the doctors discovered cancer. My fiancé left me within hours after finding out. He was a man who couldn’t stomach sickness of any kind.”

“Was he my father?”

“Oh, heavens no. It’s much more complicated than that.”

“I’m a grown man, Mother.” He took her hand in his. “I don’t care who my father was. A married man maybe? A criminal? It’s all in the past . . .”

Then she started laughing, but her laughter was on the verge of hysteria. Soon the laughter turned to sobs. Finally, her sobs subsided and she wiped her eyes.

“I will probably end up in the hospital before this is over, Logan, but I’ve accepted the fact that what I’ve deserved for a long time is prison.”

“Mom . . .”

“Please, dear. Don’t interrupt. I have to tell this my way.”

It was so hard to see her like this, but he sat back and let her tell her story her way.

“The worst part about the cancer was that it was ovarian and when it was all over, I knew I would never be able to have children. I was an only child and I had always wanted children.
When the surgery and chemo were completed, I was not in good shape physically or mentally. I craved sunshine and air, and so I rented a cheap beach house in Florida with my last bit of savings. I had the idea that watching the ocean would be peaceful and I thought it would help me heal.”

“Did it help?” he asked.

“Please don’t interrupt, Logan.” She took a sip of water. “It helped for a while, until I was treated to the sight of a large, happy family playing together on the beach.”

Far below, they heard the sound of an ambulance wailing. His mother waited for the sound to fade away before she continued.

“It was an isolated beach. They wanted privacy and so did I, but I became obsessed with watching them. I kept wondering how some people managed to have all the luck. The woman had so many lovely children, and I had nothing. I brooded on this, which was not a wise thing to do in my condition.

“The littlest boy caught my eye. He was a beautiful child, about three years old. They left an older brother in charge one day—a teenager. He soon grew bored with his job as babysitter. He kept swimming farther and farther out while keeping only half an eye on his brother. The little boy was so happy playing in the sand, he didn’t notice at first when his brother didn’t come back.”

“What happened? Did the brother drown?”

“That’s what I feared. I saw this child all alone on the beach, and I knew it was dangerous for a child that young to be left alone near water. So I walked down to where he was and simply sat down beside him. That was all I intended to do. Just watch after this sweet little boy until the family returned. He was hot and sweaty. I took his hat off and laid it on the beach. No one came. I had sat there for over an hour.

Logan wondered what this had to do with him and his
father, and wished she would get to the point, but he didn’t interrupt. It was her story, and she needed to tell it the way she wanted.

“I should have called the police or the coast guard to hunt for the older brother. I should have done a lot of things. Instead, I decided the little boy had spent enough time in the sun and I took him indoors with me. A wind had begun to blow up by the time I picked him up and started carrying him, and I saw that it was erasing my footprints. It occurred to me that this was a good thing. When I got him back to the beach house, I fed him applesauce, which he gobbled up like a hungry little bird. I was entranced. He was so trusting, sweet, and innocent.”

Logan began to realize where this was going. For the first time in months, he found himself craving a drink.

“After he ate, he climbed up onto my lap and I rocked him to sleep. There is something magical about having a child lying, sleeping, in your arms. I studied his eyelashes, his tiny mouth, his eyebrows, the flush on his cheeks, and I fell in love. I had been through too much. I was weakened by my ordeal, both physically and mentally. Something snapped. I told myself that fate had given him to me to help heal the terrible hurt. It was a long time before I realized that I was not entirely sane for a while.”

The blare of a fire engine filtered through to his consciousness. Somewhere there was a fire. Somewhere down below people were going about their jobs. Somewhere there were people who were eating and sleeping and doing normal things. He longed to be normal, to go back to before this terrible day began. It occurred to him that “normal” was vastly underrated.

“The local police came to my door. They said two kids had gone missing. They said they’d found the youngest child’s hat at the edge of the water. They feared both had drowned. They wanted to know if I’d seen anything.

“The little boy was sleeping on my bed in the other room while I talked with them. I could have brought him out then and been a hero. Instead, I lied. I told them that I was still recuperating from chemo, had spent the day in bed, and had seen nothing. I was very apologetic. I was also very pale and thin, still wearing the turban women who are cancer victims sometimes do. I looked every bit like the sick woman I was. No one would have suspected me of being capable of anything like what I had done.”

Logan listened in horror. It was exactly what he had feared. She was describing a kidnapping.

“They thanked me and left. I knew the minute they were gone that I had crossed a line and that there was no turning back. I waited, but there was no follow-up. I watched the rest of the investigation from behind a drawn curtain. It didn’t take long. The family, in their terror over their two missing children, had walked up and down the beach, obliterating any footprints or possible clues. I watched the mother crying, and the father trying to comfort her—and I felt great sympathy for her because I knew exactly how she felt—I had been feeling the same kind of grief myself until this angel-child came into my life like a gift from God.

“As I said before, I was not entirely sane.

“The family left and did not come back. I stayed two more days, so that no one would get suspicious. The little boy did not cry at first. I had never seen a more contented child. I was fascinated with him. We played little silly games all day long with me on the floor with him, stacking everything from canned goods to toilet paper. Someone had left a toy truck behind, and we played with it endlessly. I made a game, also, of cutting his hair. He’d worn his hair rather long for a little boy. Straight bangs across the forehead, and a straight cut at the earlobes. When I was finished he could have been a miniature Marine.”

Her voice, he noticed, had gotten singsong and had begun to
sound as though it was coming from far away. It was almost as though she were describing someone other than herself doing these things.

“The one thing we did not do was go outside. The risk was too great. I left the blinds closed and we played together in a sort of twilight world.”

Who was the child? Was
he
the child?

“There did come a time when he began to cry. He spoke a different language than me, so it was impossible to communicate with him in words. He missed his mother and kept saying something that sounded like
mem
.

“In the middle of the second night, while he was deep asleep, I packed up the car and drove him to my mother’s home in New York City.”

“Please tell me this story has a happy ending, Mom,” he said. “Please tell me you regained your sanity and gave him back to his family.”

“Please be patient, Logan. I’ve waited a long, long time to tell you what happened. You see, I had graduated at the top of my class from Columbia law school, right before the surgery, and had gotten offers of three different jobs before I got sick. I figured that gaining employment from one of those offers was about the only real chance at a normal life I had.

“My mother was a painter. As you know, she was not a particularly good one. We had always lived a bohemian lifestyle and moved around a great deal when I was young. Like you, I never knew my father. I’ve often thought that her lifestyle is why I chose to study so hard, get good grades, and go into law. Nothing could have been more different from the way I had been raised.

“My mother was not happy with me showing up with a stolen child, but she did not want to see me go to prison. Her own past was not without legal blemishes. She preferred no one look
into her life too closely, either. She was estranged from her family, and her few friends were not the kind of people who would find a child appearing out of nowhere particularly suspicious. Many of them were living in a sort of substance-abuse fog anyway. I had worked two part-time jobs to put myself through law school. Between studying, going to classes, and keeping myself afloat, I had not made any close friends. We made up a story about the child and people bought it.

“On my way out of town, I had bought a newspaper. A three-year-old child drowning off the coast of Florida was not big news, although there was a brief mention of his disappearance and a paragraph about his brother being found later on that day when a fishing boat had discovered him clinging to a large piece of driftwood.

“As my strength returned, my grief over my illness and faithless fiancé diminished, and I began to regain my emotional stability. By that time, I had landed a job with a good law firm. I knew I could not confess my sin without destroying my future. The way I saw it, there was nothing I could do to make atonement except love the child as my own and give him the best life possible.”

She stopped talking.

He waited. “Is something wrong?”

“Just gathering my thoughts. It seems like I’ve spent my life dreading this moment.”

“Take your time, Mom,” he said. “This is a lot for me to take in, too.”

After a few minutes, she began her story again. “Because I had studied criminal law, I had a great deal of book knowledge about the mechanics of committing crimes in general. I had the legal knowledge necessary to obtain a birth certificate for the child and I applied for a social security number for him. I gave him a name that I thought sounded strong and brave.”

“You named him Logan.”

She nodded. “I named him Logan, after the great Indian chief.”

He wondered if he would ever rid himself of the sickness he felt in his stomach over this terrible tale. Where was the family from whom he had been stolen? Who were they?

“It wasn’t long before I realized that caring for a child was not all giggles and kisses. Little boy Logan needed supervision and constant care. Fortunately, the bit of language he had learned by three years old dissipated under a steady diet of English. It was all he heard, and eventually, it was all he remembered.

“I’ve read that taking away a child’s native tongue also helps take away his memory. This was not something I deliberately did, but I genuinely had no idea what he wanted when he asked me for something in that foreign language. If he used any form of English, I praised him lavishly.

“As he got older, he seemed to have forgotten everything he’d experienced before the age of three. If he mentioned some vague memory, I told him that it had been a dream. When he turned into a man, I braced myself to be accosted with his knowledge of what I had done, but he never did. He had been a good child, and he became a good man.

“I was never a good mother. I tried, but I could never give him what he truly deserved . . . the truth. I also could not give him one other thing he always wanted, a sibling. Sometimes in the beginning, he would cry himself to sleep repeating what sounded like his brothers’ and sisters’ names. He was lonely, and each time that happened, I would hold him, trying to comfort him, and shedding silent tears over what I had done. I loved him, I still love him, very much.”

“You were an excellent mother.” It was true. At least, apart from the fact that she had stolen him from someone else, it was true.

“I’ve often thought it was no accident you became a writer who explored criminal and psychotic behavior. Subconsciously, you must have realized you had been living with ‘crazy’ most of your life,” she said. “Looking back, I realize that I have tried to make up for the terrible wrong I committed by going out of my way to do pro bono work. I’ve helped a lot of people, innocent people wrongly accused who did not have the money to hire a really top-notch criminal attorney.