The Baby Agenda (14 page)

Eight hours and forty-five minutes later, Caleb Graham Becker was born.

I
T WAS ALL
W
ILL COULD DO
to tear himself away from Moira's side. The sight of his wife nursing his son was so stunning, he had a giant lump in his throat and wasn't sure he could have said a word. Caleb hadn't taken much urging to latch onto his mommy's breast. He was so small, so precious. And for all that Moira looked exhausted, her hair sweat-dampened and matted, she was also lit up from inside with a glow that made her beautiful. Will hadn't known he could feel so much.

But she finally said, “You'll call Mom?” and he reluctantly nodded.

“Yeah. Sure.” He started toward the door. “I'll be right back.”

For a moment he wasn't sure she'd even noticed he was leaving. He felt a sharp slice of pain. For all that he'd held Caleb first, had been the one to lay their baby in Moira's arms, Will had this momentary fear that she had what she needed now, and it wasn't him, that he was on the outside looking in.

Then she looked up and gave him a smile that started soft and grew radiant. “Oh, Will,” she murmured, and he found himself grinning idiotically at her. How foolish to get his feelings hurt for nothing.

“I'll hurry,” he repeated, and left.

He went downstairs and stepped outside, startled to realize it was daytime. A part of him felt it should still
be the middle of the night. He glanced at his watch. 11:20 a.m. Almost lunchtime. He had the same sense of dis-orientation he did after an international flight. The last hours had seemed entirely apart from the normal flow of time.

Shaking his head, he stepped aside from the double doors as a family pushed an old woman in a wheelchair in. He took out his cell phone and called Moira's mom first.

“You have a grandson,” he told her, smiling as she exclaimed and wept and begged for details.

“Quite a bit of hair, I think you'd call it auburn. Not as bright as Moira's, but there's some red in it. I couldn't tell with his eyes, they were kind of muddy. Maybe they're going to turn brown. Uh…he's eight pounds, nine ounces. Thank God he was a week early,” he said fervently.

Her mother laughed. “Has he said his first word yet?”

Discovering his legs were a little shaky, Will leaned against the stucco wall and laughed, too. “No, and I don't think he's quite ready to crawl, either. Now, if he'd had another week…”

“Think what a grump his mother would have been by then.”

He was still laughing when he called Becker Construction and told Clay the news. Clay didn't weep, but he sounded staggered.

“Man. Are you going to call Sophie?”

“Yeah. You'll tell Jack?”

“Hell, yes! Can we come up and see the kid in a couple of days?”

“Any time after we're home and Moira's rested.”

He then called his sister, who predictably enough did cry. She also, if he was hearing right, was jumping up
and down while screaming, “So cool!” But then she went quiet, and finally said softly, “And you named him after Dad. That was, um…”

Will had to clear his throat. “I'm glad Moira liked the name.”

“Oh, Will.”

She, too, promised a visit, although thought she'd probably wait a couple of weeks.

Then Will made one more call, to Gray. “Moira and I have a son,” he said.

“A son. Well. Damn.” The pause made Will wonder if Moira's best friend wasn't fighting some tears of his own.

“Have you named him yet?”

“Caleb.” Will smiled even though he was only looking at the parking lot. “Caleb Graham.”

“For me.” He made a choking sound. “Damn.”

“We should be home by tonight if you'd like to run over.”

“You're okay with that?”

“Why wouldn't I be? You know Moira will want to see you.”

“Yeah. Damn.” Gray's vocabulary seemed to have deserted him. Will hoped he didn't have any important meetings scheduled in the next few hours.

Him, all he wanted to do was get upstairs.

Once there, he found that Caleb had been taken away for further assessment and to give Moira a chance to rest. She was sound asleep. Knowing she'd expect it, he backtracked briefly to the nursery and stared through the glass at his son, bundled like a burrito in a thin, pale green blanket, his spiky dark red hair covered by a tiny blue knit cap. As Will watched, Caleb's mouth moved and his face momentarily scrunched up in a frown, then smoothed out as he relaxed into sleep. Will stood there for ten minutes
or more, unable to tear his eyes from this small person he'd barely met and yet loved so much. Nature in all her mystery, he thought ruefully.

Realizing suddenly that he needed to be with Moira, he returned to her room. She lay on her back clutching the white cotton blankets to her neck, as if she'd been cold when she fell asleep. He pulled up a chair beside the bed and sat looking at her with much the same wonder he'd felt watching his newborn son. Between the books he'd read and the class, Will had thought he'd had a pretty good idea what childbirth involved, but he'd discovered that he hadn't known at all. Now, he was in awe of what Moira had endured. He flexed his hands—they still ached from the strength of her grip as she struggled to ride the ebb and flow of contractions too powerful to be mastered.

Her eyelids were near translucent and her copper lashes lay against purplish bruising beneath her eyes. He doubted she'd had a good night's sleep in weeks. But…they had their son. Will felt exultation so fierce, he couldn't remember why he'd even hesitated about changing his life so that he could be here with her and Caleb.

Her breasts rose and fell; her lips were softly parted. A great bubble of emotion swelled in him as he fought the hunger to touch her: to smooth back the damp strands of copper hair plastered to her high, curved forehead, or to caress her cheek. He could hardly wait until tonight, when he could hold her.

I love her,
he thought, waiting for that painful, glorious pressure in his chest to ease, although he wondered if it ever would entirely. And if what he felt was really love, or only the by-product of what they'd gone through together. It was logical that nature would want to ensure that he stay to protect and raise his child. What he felt,
maybe this was the male version of the hormones that had a pregnant woman at their mercy.

But he didn't think so. He was pretty sure he'd started falling in love with Moira Cullen one week shy of nine months ago, and had kept tumbling ever since.

And now that love was all tied up with what he'd felt the moment the nurse laid baby Caleb in his arms and he gazed into those unfocused, bewildered eyes and known that nothing would ever be the same.

This, he thought with bemusement, is what his father had felt when he was born. He wished like hell Dad could be here. Wanted to think Dad
was
here, in some sense.

Right this minute, it was almost impossible to imagine how Moira's father could have failed to feel this savage certainty that he would do anything for her, give anything at all to make her happy, to keep her safe. Did the son of a bitch ever give his daughter a passing thought? Would he give a damn if he knew how his absence had damaged her?

Maybe, Will thought, he was wrong in suspecting that half the turmoil he sensed in Moira had to do with a childhood devoid of a father. She wanted her own child to have one, but maybe on another level she didn't. Maybe she didn't believe in fathers at all, or at least not their staying power.

The hospital sounds outside this room hardly made an impression on him. Will only smiled an absent thanks when a nurse brought a freshly warmed blanket to cover Moira, who gave an unconscious sigh of pleasure when it settled over her. He just kept looking at her and wishing their marriage was different, that she felt any faith at all in him.

 

M
OIRA WAS SITTING ON THE SOFA
nursing Caleb when Will walked into the living room. Surreptitiously, she adjusted
her blouse, knowing it was silly when he'd seen all of her at one time or another, but feeling shy anyway. His gaze flicked to Caleb, greedily suckling, lingering either on his son or the swell of her now overabundant breast, she wasn't sure which, before settling on her face.

“He's hungry again already?”

“I'm hoping to get him down for the night,” she said.

“Greedy little bugger,” Will said fondly, then sat in the easy chair facing her. He stretched his legs out, crossed them at the ankles and relaxed, but didn't pick up his book. Apparently he was simply going to watch her.

After a minute of pretending he wasn't, she said, “I should have driven Mom to the airport today.”

“She understood why you didn't.”

Her mother had come only for a few days instead of the couple weeks she'd offered when Moira thought she'd be on her own with a newborn. Mom and Will had gotten along splendidly, as far as Moira could tell; they'd taken turns cooking and cleaning the kitchen, and had had several long, quiet conversations Moira wished she'd overheard.

As dearly as she loved her mother, though, it was almost a relief to have her gone now. With Will still not working, they hadn't needed the help, which had made Mom really a guest who had to be entertained. Will had made an effort to leave them alone sometimes, but Moira was too confused about how she felt about him and their marriage to have any desire to confide even in her mother.

They'd decided last night that Will would take her to the airport, because it was up to a two-hour drive each way, depending on traffic. Too long for Moira to leave Caleb, since she was nursing, and Will had quietly said, “I'd rather we not take him, with it so cold out there and the roads icy.”

Still, Moira felt a little bit guilty now. She frowned, thinking about it. No, that wasn't really what was bothering her. Mom
hadn't
minded. It was more complicated, she thought. Things had changed without her realizing how much it would affect her relationship with her mother. Some of it was little stuff. Already she and Will had developed a kind of verbal shorthand, an ability to read each other's minds, that sometimes had left Mom excluded; a couple of times Moira had caught a fleeting expression on her mother's face that in retrospect Moira realized was sadness. This visit was the first time Moira had ever kissed her mother good-night then gone off to bed with a man, and
that
was different. It just…had felt as if they'd lost some closeness that they'd both always taken for granted.

It was the first time she'd found herself speculating about her mother's choices, too. Moira didn't remember her dating very often, and never seriously. Had Mom not
wanted
to remarry? It had always been her and Moira against the world, although—to her credit—she hadn't tried to cling when the time came for Moira to leave for college.

Moira frowned, forgetting that Will was watching her. Was it an accident that her own life was ending up an echo of her mother's? Or would have, if not for Will's stubborn refusal to take no for an answer?

“What are you thinking?” he asked now.

It took her a second to recall what they'd been talking about. Her not accompanying Mom to the airport. That was it. “Just Mom. About today…I know she understood. It's not that.”

When she hesitated, Will said, “You miss her?” His gaze was keen on her face. She wondered what he was thinking.

“I guess I mostly feel bad that we didn't need her more. You know?”

He nodded. “If it had been a busier time of year, I might have picked up some work for Clay while your mom was here to take care of you. To give you two time alone. But he's got crews idled as it is, so I didn't want to ask.”

Moira looked at him in surprise. “Are you thinking about going to work for him?”

After a minute Will shrugged. “Maybe later. Not long-term, and not for now. First I want to do the bedroom.”

The guest room was to become Caleb's, but they'd agreed to wait to redecorate until Moira's mother came and went. Although they had bought a crib, Caleb was currently sleeping in a bassinet beside their bed. Now that Mom was gone, though, Will was going to paint and put up a wallpaper border. Moira didn't sew very often, but she'd bought fabric to make a valance for the window, too. Will would be taking down the bed and storing it in the basement.

“You know,” he said, “we might want to think about putting on an addition.”

Moira had been switching Caleb from one breast to the other, something that was easier to do when she wasn't trying simultaneously to whisk the cup of the bra up with lightning speed to cover her breast even as she freed the other one. But that brought her head up. “An addition?”

“To the house?” He looked amused but also…wary, she thought. “Another bedroom or two maybe. Do you really want to be without a guest room?”

“Well, maybe not forever, but…”

“Your office is too tiny to make a decent bedroom. I might want my own office down the line, too. And then if we have more kids…”

They hadn't even decided whether they were going
to stay married, and he was talking about them having another baby? Something that might have been jubilation tangled with apprehension.

“Wow.” She cleared her throat. “You're, um, thinking way ahead.”

“Why not? I'm free right now, I could do most of the work.” He shrugged again. “Think about it.”

Moira made herself speak calmly. “I think I'd like to wait until we know better where we stand.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“We agreed we'd talk when Caleb was a little older.” Her stomach squeezed into a ball at the thought, and she silently pleaded,
Argue. Tell me we don't have to, that you never plan to leave.

But…he didn't. His eyes narrowed and she had the sense that he was mad, but he only said tightly, “If that's what you want.”