Finding Their Son (6 page)

“Seriously? You knew about my aunt?”

Everyone in Pierre had speculated about her aunt’s sexual proclivity. “The nurse or the preacher’s wife?”

Her grin told him she knew he was kidding. “The nurse.”

“Does she still live in Pierre?”

“No. Hasn’t for years. She lives in San Francisco with her longtime partner. A surgeon.”

He was glad to hear it. “Good. She helped a lot of people through some pretty tough situations. I give her credit for that.”

Char didn’t reply. She seemed intent on flipping the tortilla, but it could be that he’d said something wrong. When she carried the bowl of steaming, fragrant soup to the table and placed it before him, he stopped her—one hand lightly touching her wrist. “You don’t agree?”

She shook her head, the multicolored strands catching the light in an interesting way. “I’ve never had a problem with Pam’s sexual orientation. She provided some stability when my mom was strung out or too in love to remember she was a mother. But she could be very opinionated, and she expected people to do what she said without argument—especially members of her family.”

The last proviso seemed to hold significance. Eli watched her dash back to the stove. A minute or so later, she delivered a plate with a golden browned tortilla that she’d cut into eight triangular pieces.

She returned to the counter for a pair of ceramic salt and pepper shakers shaped like turkeys. She set them on the table near his bowl. “When Pam found out about me, she immediately made a plan. Well…um…after she gave me a physical and determined it was too late for me to safely—
or legally—have an abortion.” She stumbled over the word. Eli bet it constantly tripped her, even after all these years.

He had a lot of questions, but the aroma of the soup was making his mouth water too badly to get a word out. He picked up the spoon she’d already set on top of a pretty green and black linen napkin and dug in.

She scuttled back to the counter and returned a second later with a glass of milk. Milk. Something his mother would have done. Bobbi, who was lactose intolerant, only bought milk for the children. She yelled at him if she ever saw him take a swig.

“I’ll let you eat in peace. Your clothes are probably ready to go into the dryer.”

Good, he thought, tearing off a hunk of cheese and tortilla to dunk in the bowl. Hell, the last time he tried to cook for himself, he’d nearly burned down the place. Bobbi had won blue ribbons for her pies and breads at various fairs, but her menu planning changed dramatically when she took a job at the casino three years earlier.

The money had come in handy—E.J. needed braces, Micah was asthmatic and Juline was a clotheshorse. Looking back, Eli wondered exactly when he went from daddy to Daddy Warbucks.

Lately it seemed as though he was the guy who said no all the time.

I sucked as a parent.

“Really? I figured you’d be a great dad.”

He nearly choked on the swallow of soup that was halfway down his throat. He hadn’t realized he’d voiced the thought out loud.

“What are you—a mind reader? Do those funny streaks of color hide your antennae?”

She laughed and wiggled her index fingers upward through her hair. “Like in
My Favorite Martian?
I used to watch reruns on Friday night. While you were making the All-State Boys’ Basketball team.”

“For all the good it did me,” he muttered under his breath. He knew she was close enough to hear, so he quickly asked, “How come you weren’t at the games?”

“I was. Sometimes. If Mom was seeing somebody halfway decent. But when she was alone…well, weekends were tricky. Sobriety-wise, Fridays were the worst day of the week.”

He didn’t need her to explain. His father had only remained sober during basketball season because he had such high hopes for Eli. Once those hopes were squashed, Dad went back to his usual pattern: work, drink, tear down everything you spent the week building, pass out, promise to do better, work, drink…et cetera, et cetera.

Neither spoke for a few minutes, then Char straightened and folded her hands on the table in front of her. He studied her hands. Short nails. No polish. Three, handcrafted rings—two with stones, one plain. All pretty and delicate on her strong, resourceful-looking fingers.

“I suppose I should fill in the blanks about what happened,” she said. “That journal you were reading ended with me admitting I was pregnant. What came next…” Her voice trailed off a moment, then she added, faking a smile, “Is in another book. Black cover. For obvious reasons.”

He wiped his mouth with the napkin and pushed the bowl aside. Easing back against the chair, he said, “Okay. Tell me what happened. But make it the truth. I’m a cop. I can tell when someone’s lying.” He wished. He’d never
once suspected his wife had been keeping a life-altering secret from him all these years.

“I told you before,” she said stiffly, her small, pointed chin lifting. “I don’t lie.”

Their gazes met and held. He believed her. “Go on.”

“You read the passage about what happened the night you came to my aunt’s. I didn’t plan it. Obviously.”

He believed that. “You acted on impulse. I get that. What I don’t get is why?”

“I was fifteen. Kids that age do dumb things without thinking about the repercussions.”

Fifteen. Micah was fifteen. “Why me?”

“I had a crush on you. I don’t know why, but I sorta built up this fantasy about you and me. If you read any of my earlier diaries, you’d see your name mentioned quite often. So when you showed up out of the blue that night…Well, I guess you could say I took advantage of you.”

He hadn’t heard anyone use that phrase in a long time. His ego wasn’t wild about the idea that anyone could have used him, although that summed up what Bobbi did.

“It was a dumb thing to do, I know,” she said. “But…” She took a breath and slowly let it out. His gaze was drawn to her chest.

Damn.
He’d held those breasts in his hands and didn’t remember? What the hell was wrong with him?

She pounded her fist on the table to get his attention. Eli was ashamed but he wasn’t going to apologize. “I’m trying to remember.”

“Well, don’t. It wasn’t that great. You were drunk. I was a virgin. It was over…fast. And you took off when I got up to go to the bathroom. Some bloody bandages were all that was left behind. I burned those in the incinerator
behind the house and never told anyone what happened between us.”

He wondered if she burned the sheet, too. Had it contained a smear of her virgin blood? A sadness he didn’t want to feel passed over him.

“I read about your wedding in the paper. They described the whole thing. Right down to the kind of flower in the lapel of your tux.” Which she’d cut out and pasted into her journal. He’d seen the yellowed clipping. Bobbi had one just like it in their wedding album.

“A few weeks later I heard you joined the Marines.”

He nodded. “Seemed like the smart thing to do for a guy with a high school diploma and a kid on the way.” He didn’t try to soften the snarl that came from describing that turning point in his life.

“I told myself I was happy for you,” she said. “I got something from you—more than I expected as I later found out, but at the time I was satisfied.”

He wondered if he’d given her any satisfaction that night. She’d implied not, but he hadn’t been a complete novice when it came to pleasing women. He might have asked if the question wouldn’t have come off sounding completely lame and a dozen and a half years too late.

“When did you find out you were pregnant?” There, he could be a grown-up.

She looked reflective. “I think I knew within a couple of weeks. Not possible, I’ve been told. But I knew. Deep down. The old bla—” She caught herself from saying something she didn’t want him to hear. Another secret? “A voice in my head told me I was pregnant, but I refused to believe her. It, I mean.”

He tried to picture Char coping with such a scary reality,
alone. Micah’s age. A tenth-grade student with her whole life ahead of her—and a new life inside her. “You must have been scared.”

She shook her head. “One would think, right? But actually, I was happy. Excited. Delirious. That’s why I kept it a secret for as long as I could. I knew that once everyone else found out—my mother and Pam, in particular—there’d be holy hell to pay. So as long as it was just me and the baby I could be as happy as I wanted to be.”

As happy as I wanted to be.
The words sounded eerily familiar, but Eli couldn’t place them.

“That’s not the kind of thing you can keep secret forever.”

“I know. Eventually the school called my mother because I’d been skipping P.E. It wasn’t like I had any choice after a certain point. If I’d showered with the other girls I would have been outed immediately. I got by longer than I expected by stealing my aunt’s prescription pad and writing an excuse of contagious impetigo. I didn’t know what that was, but it sounded bad, and nobody seemed in a rush for me to share water or towels with my classmates.”

“Eventually someone complained?”

“Miss Duty. Can you believe we had a P.E. teacher named Duty? Only in Pierre.”

Eli remembered the woman all too well. She’d come on to him—in a broadly flirtatious way—after practice one day. He could have nailed her without a backward glance…if he hadn’t been on-again with Bobbi at the time. “And…”

“She called my aunt. I always wondered if Miss Duty was secretly gay.” She paused a moment as if to reconsider the possibility. Eli kept his opinion to himself. “Anyway,
Aunt Pam went ballistic. She looked at me—really looked at me—and instantly guessed what was going on. It got loud and ugly around my house for about a week, until I finally confessed what happened.”

“You told them you had unprotected sex with an Indian. I bet that went over well.”

She looked miffed. “Your ethnicity wasn’t mentioned. In fact, your name didn’t come up until I filled out the birth certificate. Naturally there was some speculation about the baby’s heritage after he came out because he had a full head of glossy black hair.” She paused as if tripping over that specific memory was painful. “But my hair’s pretty dark without the highlights.”

“So my name is on the kid’s birth certificate.” Not that that proved anything. His name was on E.J.’s, too.

Char didn’t answer right away. “No,” she finally said.

“No?”

“Pam totally went off when she saw your name. She said the last thing any of them needed was for some tribal muck-a-mucks to get involved. She balled up the form and threw it in the garbage. She came back a few minutes later with another blank one and made me put
unknown
on the line where the father’s name is supposed to go. She said no one would question it because I was my mother’s daughter.”

The way she said the last told him more than he wanted to know. He felt an unwelcome tug of sympathy. “Emotional blackmail,” he said softly.

Her pretty eyes were tear-free. “It worked. I knew in an instant I didn’t want my kid to have the kind of family life I had. The kind of family life he would have had if he’d stayed with me.” She looked at him, chin high. “Pam
arranged for a private adoption. I didn’t see the family, but they met my criteria.”

“What kind of criteria?”

“I…” She looked down. Was this when the lies started? “At least one of the parents had to be Native American. I wanted our son to be proud of his heritage.”

Eli couldn’t repress his scorn for her naiveté. “Wherever he is, I’m sure he thanks you a lot for that.”

She sat forward. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, come on, Char. You grew up in South Dakota. You know what happens to kids on the
rez
.” He used the slang he heard every day on the job. “Even the best and the brightest somehow get sucked into the vortex. They check their ambition at the door and fall into the same old patterns of alcohol abuse and apathy.”

Her face was contorted with concern. “But how could knowing about your heritage be a bad thing? You spent your summers on the reservation. You’re a success story.”

His laugh was anything but funny. “Right. The guy who tried to rob you. Whose career is probably dust. Whose wife left him and kids think he’s the biggest jerk on the planet.” Her expression turned intense as the reality of his situation sank in. “Yeah. Your kid is really going to thank you for that.”

She licked her lips and swallowed. Her hands were clenched on the table, as if in prayer. “I wanted him to be proud of who he is. My family tree flattens out after two generations. Nobody remembers my great-grandparents’ names or birthplace. We’re a freaking bonsai. But you have this rich, beautiful culture that makes you unique and special. He should know that.”

Her passionate tone and adamant conviction confused him. He didn’t like being confused—the constant emotional state of his life lately. “Right. Well, he’s probably a junior in high school at this point. That was a turning point in my life,” he admitted. “It’s the year I met Bobbi. With any luck your kid is smarter than I was.”

Her clenched fists remained clenched. “Kids are smarter these days, aren’t they?”

He thought about E.J., who had appeared to have his head on straight and his goals firmly in sight…until the rug was yanked out from under him. Now, according to Bobbi, his son was living with his skanky girlfriend—her words—and smoking pot every day. “Not really,” he said, feeling old and tired.

Char stood. “I have the adoption papers in my safe. I haven’t looked at them for years. Maybe we should try to find him. To make sure he’s okay. Give him options he didn’t know he had.”

Options?
He’d had options. Fat lot of good they’d done him. His life was too messed up at the moment to devote thought to another big unknown. Besides, he was pretty sure finding a child given up in a private adoption wasn’t all that simple.

“I’m not judging you, but I am curious. How come your mom or your other aunt didn’t offer to help raise the kid?”

Her elaborate shudder told him a lot. “My uncle was worse than any of my mother’s boyfriends. The fact that he calls himself a man of God is such an outrage, even a dumb kid like me could see through him. Marilyn is like my grandma. Saintly martyr? Or victim of abuse? The answer depends on who you ask.”