A Baby For Christmas

He loves me, she thought, and tucked the words away in the depths of her heart to take out and savor again and again.

They tided her over until Christmas, when she and Sue and Arthur and Des flew down to the Bahamas and met Piran at Conch Cay.

She watched Piran closely to see if he was still interested in her. It didn’t take long to decide that he was.

There were more discreet glances. More tense, tongue-tied encounters. Another walk on a different beach.

She wanted to know about the cannons on the headland, and Arthur said, ‘Piran knows. He’ll tell you. Take her down there and explain to her, Piran.’

So Piran did. He didn’t say much all the way down the beach. It was a cool, blustery day and he jammed his hands in his pockets and walked steadily, barely glancing her way. But he was as aware of her as she was of him. She knew it because when the sleeve of his jacket brushed her arm he sucked in his breath and flinched away.

As they walked, she picked up shells, asking if he knew what they were. He did, and Carly saved them. She asked him everything she could think of about the cannons, making their excursion last as long as possible. And finally she got him talking about his courses and his field work in archaeology.

She was fascinated, hanging on every word, wishing that someday she might get to go on a dig or underwater expedition with him. She didn’t dare say so. Not yet. But she began to dream.

On the way back he stopped and picked up a piece of something shiny and red. She’d never seen anything like it before. He told her it was sea glass, smoothed now by years of being tossed about in the waves.

‘Can I hold it?’ she asked.

‘You can have it if you want.’

Carly wanted. She put it in her pocket with the shells, rubbing it between her thumb and her forefinger all the way home. She knew that whenever she looked at it she would remember this day with Piran.

She must have daydreamed more than a hundred happy scenarios between them after he went back to school. In every one of them Piran came back and saw at last that she had become a woman. He cast aside the cool indifference or faintly disdainful tolerance with which he’d habitually treated her. He started treating her as the woman he loved.

Carly wanted it to happen so badly that she came to believe in it. It would happen, she decided, on her eighteenth birthday.

And when Arthur got a letter from Piran in March saying that, yes, he would be coming for the Easter vacation, she was certain it was true.

He came. She went with Des to meet him at the airport and for a moment she thought his eyes lit with pleasure when he spotted her there. But if they had the fires were banked by the time he was close enough to shake his brother’s hand.

He didn’t shake hers. He did, however, look at her mouth with a hungry, almost desperate gaze.

He loves me, she thought again. And she hugged the knowledge to herself, happy beyond belief.

From the moment they met at the airport, he didn’t take his eyes off her. Everywhere she went, he watched her. Every time she looked up, he was there.

On the night of her birthday she barely ate her dinner, so aware was she of the dark, brooding young man directly sitting across the table from her. Arthur and her mother spoke to her frequently, encouraging her to talk about her plans for the summer, about the classes she would take at university in the fall. But Carly could barely form words.