A Precious Gift Read online

  For a few seconds in the car, she’d thought about telling him, recounting all of it. But then they’d slid into the conversation about their parents. She had no doubt that Brian would feel betrayed she’d never confided in him about all of it, especially because of the infertility problems. He’d never forgive her, just as he hadn’t forgiven his mother. They were becoming closer again…

  While Carrie waited for Brian, she looked in on Lisa. The teenager was watching TV and just waved at her. Carrie sensed she didn’t want to be disturbed. After an “I’ll see you in the morning,” Carrie returned to the kitchen to make a snack for her and Brian to take upstairs. She needed Brian tonight. She needed his strength and his gentleness as well as his conviction that they’d be good parents.

  When Brian came in from the garage, his expression was serious. He saw the dish of cheese, crackers and fruit Carrie had prepared and he grimaced. “I won’t be coming to bed for a while. I’m expecting a fax any minute, then I have to put some figures together.”

  Her disappointment must have shown.

  “The owner of the Hawaiian property has decided to sell,” he explained. “I won’t have to fly there now, but I will in a few weeks.”

  Her mind still swirling between the past and the future, Carrie asked, “Can’t you send someone else? Lisa’s baby will probably be born by then.”

  “Let’s handle this one day at a time. If I do have to go, maybe you and the baby can go with me. It would be our first vacation as a family.”

  “Except it wouldn’t be a vacation for you. You’d be working,” she protested.

  “Not all the time. Maybe a few days out of the week. Just think about it.”

  “Will you think about delegating the responsibility to someone else so you don’t have to go?” She’d never expressed her opinion about this before. When it was just the two of them, it seemed to be her job to support whatever Brian did. But now, with a baby…

  Brian’s response could determine the course of their future as well as the course of their marriage.

  Five

  “It’s not that simple, Carrie,” Brian replied, not giving her the answer she wanted.

  “Maybe it would be that simple if you were willing to let go of a little control.” Something had happened to her when she’d seen Lori tonight. She’d remembered she needed to fight for what she wanted.

  “I didn’t get where I am by letting go of control.”

  “And where are you, Brian? Where are we? You have enough investments to retire comfortably now. Once we have a baby, don’t you want to be a real father?”

  “Real? What is a real father?” he asked warily.

  “A real father is available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. A real father knows his son or daughter’s birthday, goes to soccer games, helps with homework. A real father knows his child inside out and if there’s something wrong, there’s no way he’d miss it.” Her father had never known about her rape, had just accepted the explanation that Carrie had taken a break from modeling because she’d gotten the flu and needed time off.

  “What did your father miss?” Brian asked perceptively.

  Her husband’s question was an opening if she wanted to take it, but the mood between them had definitely been broken. Brian might have always wanted an ideal family, but her concept of ideal parents and his might be very different. She couldn’t confide in him when she felt as if they were miles apart. She couldn’t confide in him knowing he didn’t forgive mistakes easily. What she had done was much more than a mistake, and she’d never forgive herself for it. How could she expect anybody else to?

  “My father wasn’t so different from yours. After he was hurt, he was lost in his pain and painkillers. Your father blamed your mother for his lot in life. My father blamed fate.”

  The fax machine in Brian’s office beeped. Carrie could hear the sound of the document printing out.

  When Brian approached Carrie, she held out the plate of cheese, fruit and crackers. “Take this with you. You might get hungry while you’re working.”

  “Don’t you want any?”

  “I’m not hungry. I’ll settle in with a book I started.”

  “There’s always tomorrow night,” Brian suggested easily.

  “Unless you get another unexpected phone call.”

  Several emotions played across her husband’s face, and she couldn’t sort them out. She knew the way Dutch Summers had left one job for another and gambled money away. Brian was determined never to let that happen to him and had developed a work ethic that superseded all else. But if they had a child, his life wouldn’t be so black and white.

  To her surprise, Brian nudged up her chin and kissed her long and hard. Then he stepped away.

  Moments later, he’d gone into his office and she knew he’d be working half the night.

  Brian was studying a list of architects who might want to bid on designing the resort in Hawaii when the security alarm went off. His first thought was that Carrie had been right with her preoccupation to make sure the system was always set.

  Pushing his chair back quickly, he was ready to take on whoever had breached their home. Then common sense prevailed. Possibly an animal on the patio had set off the motion detector. That had happened before.

  When he hurried to the family room, he realized immediately a stray cat had had nothing to do with setting off the alarm. Lisa had. She stood at the open French doors, looking panicked.

  “Stay put,” he told her as he went to the kitchen door that led to the garage, opened the panel just inside the door and punched in a code that turned off the alarm. When the phone rang, he picked up the cordless phone in the kitchen, taking it with him to the family room.

  “It was a false alarm,” he told the security personnel, reciting his ID number so they’d know he wasn’t a burglar giving them a reason not to answer the alarm.

  After he finished with the security company, Brian went to the stairs and called up to his wife. “Carrie, there’s nothing to worry about. Lisa set it off.”

  “I’ll be right down,” she called back.

  When he returned to the family room, he found Lisa still standing just inside the French doors. She was wearing a red hooded jacket that Carrie had bought her to replace her tattered, dirty one.

  “Where were you going?” Brian demanded, checking his watch and seeing it was one in the morning.

  “I just needed some fresh air,” she returned defiantly.

  He saw she had her purse under her arm and she was in full makeup. “You’re in no condition to be out in the city at night. If you’re going to live here, I expect the truth from you, even if it gets you in trouble.”

  “So what if I get in trouble with you? Are you going to put me back out on the streets? I’m eighteen, Mr. Summers. I can do whatever the hell I want.”

  “Where were you going, Lisa?” He wouldn’t let her sidetrack him from the issue. If she was going to run away again because everything had gotten to be too much to handle, he and Carrie would just have to deal with that.

  “I was going to meet a friend.”

  Carrie suddenly appeared beside him, and he wondered how much of the exchange she’d heard.

  “If you’re not going to think about yourself,” she said softly, “you’ve got to think about your baby. What if you had a dizzy spell on your way somewhere? How were you going to get where you want to go?”

  Lisa raised her chin. “I was going to walk out of the development and catch a bus.”

  “Lisa…” Carrie’s voice was so gentle, Brian saw that it got to the girl. Carrie got to the girl.

  “Were you going to meet someone?” she asked, fully expecting an answer.

  “My best friend, Ariel,” Lisa confessed with a catch in her voice. “She hasn’t been able to find a job and she doesn’t have any family, either.”

  “Where were you going to meet her?”

  “At the shelter. I was going to throw stones at the window and then she’
d let me in.”

  Standing beside Lisa now, Carrie suggested, “If you want to meet your friend, call the shelter and set up a time. I’ll take you to see her.”

  “You’d do that?”

  “Sure. I’m volunteering at the hospital in the morning, but I’m free in the afternoon. You can even meet her at the mall for lunch, my treat.”

  Lisa eyed Brian. “I wasn’t going to run away. I would have come back.”

  He didn’t know whether to believe her or not. “I set the security alarm when I come home at night. If you have plans after that, you’ll have to let us know.”

  “That sounds a little bit like being kept in jail,” Lisa returned solemnly.

  “Your idea of jail is somebody else’s idea of security.”

  “I feel safer knowing we have a security system and it’s on at night,” Carrie explained.

  After Lisa looked down at her sneakers, she seemed less defiant. “I guess I’ll go to bed. I’ll try to get hold of Ariel early tomorrow morning. At breakfast I’ll let you know what time we’re going to meet.”

  Carrie nodded.

  As Lisa headed for her room, Brian made sure the French doors were locked. “I don’t trust her.” Deep worry twisted in his gut. “She could take off at any time and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

  “I don’t think she wants to run away. As she said, I think she’s feeling trapped. We have to believe her, Brian, or else trust will never grow.”

  He ran his fingers through his hair. “She might want to stay involved in her baby’s life. We have to consider that, too.” Now that the first glow of the idea of adopting had worn off, they had to face the reality of what they were doing.

  “I’ve read a lot of material on open adoptions since we’ve been considering this,” Carrie said, “and they’re usually best for everybody concerned. I truly don’t think Lisa wants to be a mother and I don’t think she’ll want to be one anytime in the near future.”

  “So you’d be okay with her dropping in and out of this baby’s life?”

  Carrie’s dark eyes were luminous with emotion. “Yes, because we’ll be the parents. We’ll be caring for him day and night. If Lisa wants to visit, that’s fine, because we’ll be the mom and dad.”

  Brian knew many women would feel competitive with Lisa and threatened by her, but Carrie was thinking of this child’s welfare and he admired her for that. “Are you going back to bed?”

  “Yes. I think I’d just fallen asleep.”

  He remembered the way their evening had ended abruptly. “I’ll be up in about an hour.”

  Carried nodded but didn’t say she’d wait up.

  When Carrie left the family room, Brian thought about going with her and easing the need in his body that hadn’t diminished. But he had a responsibility to anyone who wanted to invest in the Hawaiian project, and he needed to put together a package on it by the weekend. Thinking about what Carrie had said, he considered delegating and letting go of some of the control. Could he do that? Maybe Ted would want a more active role. Brian couldn’t imagine bringing somebody new in to be his right-hand man. It took too long to build up a working relationship, too long to establish the trust he’d need to delegate. Could Ted handle the responsibility of heading up new projects?

  Brian knew if he tried to figure that out now, he’d be up all night.

  When Carrie returned home from the hospital the next day, she was glad she had taken time to read to the children. They’d helped her put other distractions out of her head. Last night when the security alarm had gone off, she’d awakened in a panic, then broken into a cold sweat. For a moment, the fear that someone had broken in and was going to hurt her, violate her again, had frozen her and filled her with terror. Then Brian had called up the steps.

  She’d taken about ten deep breaths, brushed her hair and come downstairs as if nothing had happened. So many times she’d weighed Brian’s right to know about her past with the consequences of telling him. Foster had turned away. Wouldn’t Brian turn away, too? Wouldn’t any man? Not only because she’d had an abortion, but because the infection from that abortion had spoiled all of her plans to have a family?

  After she had taken the antibiotic the doctor had given her and recovered, she’d never known about the scarring from the infection. It hadn’t been until she’d gone to the fertility specialist, had tests and confided in him about the abortion that she’d learned the extent of the damage.

  Brian had taken to the idea of adoption slowly, but now he was embracing it as much as she was. She was so grateful for that and for Lisa, she was willing to do whatever she could to help the teenager find her life.

  When Carrie checked on Lisa, she found her getting dressed. Carrie told her to take her time and she went to the kitchen. The housekeeper had been in that morning and homey smells of cooked food swirled around the kitchen. As Carrie peeked into the refrigerator, she found glazed chicken pieces in a casserole with a note to warm it at 350 degrees for forty-five minutes. There were steamed fresh vegetables to reheat in the microwave, and bread pudding cooled on the counter. Carrie had gotten the recipe from Verna for that and had tried it on her own a few times. She liked cooking and had done it a lot for her family when she’d lived at home. But cooking for one seemed to be a waste of time with Brian rarely home for dinner. Maybe that would change now. Maybe Lisa would join them at dinner and they could have a “family” meal. Carrie realized she wanted that almost as much as she wanted Brian to be home more often. Usually she didn’t voice her opinion about that or his long hours, but last night with a baby to consider, she’d felt she’d had to say something.

  Checking the answering machine, she found a message from Leigh Bartlett. Leigh and her husband, Adam, were inviting Carrie and Brian to come riding at their ranch on Saturday and to stay for dinner. That would be fun. If Brian didn’t have other plans.

  Carrie was pouring herself a glass of apple juice when the phone rang. Picking it up with an unhurried “Hello,” she heard, “Carrie, it’s Mom. I’m glad I caught you.”

  Since she was eighteen, Carrie had had mixed feelings about her mother. Counseling had helped in that regard. At first, Carrie had blamed herself for the rape and the abortion. She shouldn’t have been walking home alone at night. She should have been wearing something less provocative. She should have realized what could happen to a young woman on the streets and somehow prevented it. She should have been stronger after the rape, pulled herself together, gone to the police, reclaimed her life. She should never have let her mother talk her into an abortion.

  Lori had helped her look at each of those statements from different angles. Her therapist had explained post-traumatic stress syndrome and assured Carrie that women handled rape differently—some wanted to hide and never see the light of day again. During the first three months of counseling, Lori had helped Carrie understand that her mother’s fears had played into the situation, too. Paula Bradley had seen her oldest daughter as her family’s salvation. Ever since her husband had been disabled, they’d lived on government checks that hadn’t gone far with four girls to raise. Cleaning money had also gone for basic expenses.

  When Carrie’s modeling career had taken off, all that had changed. Her mother could finally meet the bills and even buy new clothes. They’d made plans to move into a bigger apartment in a better part of town and they’d bought a new car. Carrie’s father owned a bigger TV and had subscriptions to sports magazines he’d never been able to afford. He also had a refrigerator stocked with beer and had seemed to shake himself out of the depression he’d experienced since his accident. He’d even seemed happy at times. Even more than the rape, her mother had seen Carrie’s pregnancy as a severe threat to the lifestyle they were starting to enjoy. She didn’t want any of her daughters to end up cleaning other people’s houses. She didn’t want to go back to counting pennies, stretching macaroni casseroles, or worrying if they could pay next month’s rent. She’d seen an abortion as Carrie’s only way
out, as her family’s only way out.

  Over and over Lori had insisted that no one should make a decision under stress, especially not one that would affect the rest of her life. Furthermore, she’d decided that Carrie hadn’t even made a conscious decision. She’d been in a state of shock, still reliving the rape and the horror of being violated. In a way, her mother had taken advantage of Carrie’s emotional state. Back then, Carrie had had trouble accepting Lori’s reasoning. She still did to a certain extent. She felt she was responsible for her own decisions. Yet, if her mother hadn’t come to her “rescue,” she knew she would never have had the abortion. Even now, it was all still confusing. Even now, she still blamed herself. Although she’d decided long ago to forgive her mother for whatever part she’d played in everything that had happened, the experience had raised a wall between them.

  Carrie usually spoke to her mother every few weeks. She and Brian had gone to Windsor for Christmas. “Hi, Mom, how are you?”

  “I’m fine. How are you?”

  “I’m good.” Although she’d told Brenda about Lisa and the possibility of becoming a mother soon, she hesitated to go into it with her mom.

  After a few moments of silence, her mother filled the void. “I just wanted to thank you again for the generous Christmas presents you and Brian gave us. Your dad loves his recliner, and I took the leather handbag you gave me to a meeting at church. Everybody oohed and aahed over it. The coat, too. It’s such a pretty color of ruby.”

  Once Carrie had signed the contract with Modern Woman Cosmetics, she’d invested in a house in Windsor where her mom and dad could live for the rest of their lives rent-free. As she’d made more money, she’d set up a trust for her parents. Her mother no longer had to clean other people’s homes, though she insisted on working as a cashier at a local drugstore.