Father On The Brink

None of that mattered. Only Andrew mattered. Whatever she had to do to keep him safe, to keep him with her, Katie would do it. She could not—would not—lose her son. She could give up anything else. But not him. Never him.

Someday, somehow, she hoped Cooper would understand what had driven her to do what she’d done. Someday, somehow, she hoped she and Andrew would be in a position to explain. But until that day dawned, Katie had no choice but to disappear. It was the only way she could ever be certain that William wouldn’t find her and take her son away.

Disappearing with Andrew, however risky, however chancy, however frightening, was the only alternative she had. It was for the best, she tried to assure herself further. All she needed was a little time to figure out what she was going to do. Everything, eventually, would work out just fine. Unfortunately, she knew assurance would be a long time in coming.

“Oh, Mr. Dugan!”

Cooper spun around quickly at the summons, sending the balloons he clutched in one hand bouncing into a frenzy of colliding color, and causing him to release completely the huge, stuffed bear he’d held in the other. Only through some fast dancing and shuffling did he manage to save the bouquet of red roses he also had tucked under one arm, and the strawberry milkshake he balanced along with the balloons.

He didn’t react in such a way because he thought someone was calling out to him—no one ever referred to him as Mr. Dugan—but because that tiny little part of Cooper that would remain a frightened child forever feared his father had risen from the grave, and was barreling down the hospital corridor toward him, brandishing his belt with the big, gold buckle gleaming.

Naturally, Cooper remembered almost immediately that his father was nowhere around. Nearly fifteen years had passed since Mike Dugan’s death, even more time than that since Cooper had last run out on the sonofabitch, shocked by the blood on his own knuckles after he’d broken the old man’s nose. No, it was the nurse Cooper had met earlier who approached him now, the one who had been seeing to Katie. With a shuddering sigh, he swallowed his terror whole, and forced himself to breathe as normally as he could.

“Yeah?” he said when the nurse was beside him. He congratulated himself for the steady timbre of his voice.

“Mr. Dugan, I need your Social Security number.”

Still a bit shaken, Cooper recited the numbers from memory without questioning the woman’s request.

“Date of birth?” she asked.

Again, he surrendered the information automatically.

“Place of birth?”

“Gloucester City, New Jersey,” he told her.

Suddenly, it dawned on him that he was offering snippets of his personal life to someone whose name he didn’t even know, and revealing them for no reason he could fathom. He also noted belatedly that the nurse was writing the information down.

“What’s going on?” he asked her as he bent to retrieve the wayward teddy bear. He straightened, and as he rearranged his loot, asked further, “Why do you need all that information?”

The nurse, still scribbling away, replied without looking up. “We need it for your son’s birth certificate.”

Certain he’d misunderstood, he sputtered, “You…you need it for what?”

Finally, the nurse looked up from her clipboard, her expression bland. “Your son’s birth certificate,” she repeated. “Your…um…your girlfriend left without completing the form.”

Cooper shook his head hard, trying to wake himself from what could only be a bizarre dream. “My son…?” he repeated quietly, the words feeling more than a little strange on his tongue. “My girlfriend .. ?” he added in the same tone of voice. Then the rest of the nurse’s statement hit him. “She left? Katie’s gone? Where? What the hell is going on here? She just had a baby. How could she leave?”

The nurse stared at him as if he were something she’d normally vacuum up from the carpet. She pulled her clipboard toward her, and crossed her arms over it and her chest. Then she cocked one dark eyebrow at him, and he knew he wasn’t going to like one bit whatever she was going to tell him.

“Ms. Brennan checked herself out of the hospital this morning. If you had been here to meet her like you were supposed to, you would have realized that.”

Cooper had intended to be there earlier this morning. Not because he’d thought Katie was going to be leaving, but because he’d wanted to check on her and Andrew and make sure they were okay. Actually, he’d planned to return the night before, but he’d wound up making runs until nearly midnight. By then, hospital visiting hours were over. So he’d waited until this morning to come by. Hey, he’d needed the sleep anyway. And judging by the strange reality to which he’d awakened, he obviously still hadn’t gotten enough.

“Let’s start all over here, okay?” he asked hopefully.

The nurse opened her mouth to say something, but he lifted a hand, palm out, to stop her.

“Yesterday,” he said, “right around lunchtime, I arrived at this hospital in an ambulance with a woman who had just delivered a baby. Am I right about that?”

The nurse nodded. “Of course. You—”

He held up his hand again, and the nurse bit off whatever she had been about to say. “And the woman’s name was…?” he asked, letting the question trail off so that the nurse would answer it for him.

She pulled her clipboard away from her chest and glanced at it only slightly before telling him, “Katie Brennan.”

He released a sigh of relief. “That’s right. Katie Brennan. And her son’s name?”

The nurse studied the clipboard again. “Andrew Cooper Brennan Dugan.”

Cooper nodded his head as she revealed the first three names, then quickly switched to shaking it at her recitation of the last. “No, that’s not right. It’s Andrew Cooper Brennan. Period. No Dugan. His name ends at Brennan. Right?”

The nurse turned her clipboard so that Cooper could view it. “No, she said she wanted to have both her last name and yours as part of the baby’s legal name. So it’s Andrew Cooper Brennan Dugan. Says so right here on the birth certificate application. Ms. Brennan did get that much filled out, anyway.”

“Let me see that.” The request was just a formality, as Cooper had already snatched the clipboard from the nurse’s hand.

“Hey!” she objected.

But he ignored her. For there, enhanced with Katie’s delicate, scrawling signature, were the documents in question, filled out exactly as the nurse had told him they were. Katie had named Cooper as Andrew’s father on the birth certificate application. In black and white and triplicate. For all the world to see. She had made her son his son, too. In the eyes of the law and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, anyway.

“This doesn’t make any sense,” he muttered. “Why would she do something like this?”

“Check out early?” the nurse asked, obviously misunderstanding the question. “Because she has no insurance, that’s why. I mean, your policy will cover the nursery charges, of course, because the baby is your dependent. But since you haven’t married the baby’s mother,” she added, placing emphasis on the last part of her statement clearly to indicate her disapproval of Cooper’s moral misconduct, “the bills for her portion of the hospital stay will have to be out-of-pocket. So she checked out early to save you both some money.”

“No, I mean—”

“Naturally, she didn’t want to leave without the baby, so she checked him out, too,” the nurse continued, ignoring Cooper’s interjection. “Since you didn’t show up to meet her this morning, she took a cab home. And frankly, Mr. Dugan,” she added, “I thought better of you than to do something like that.”

“But…” Cooper’s voice trailed off again, before he completed his statement. His head was buzzing with confusion, and all he could do was stare at the hospital chart in his hands.

“Your girlfriend was all ready to go when I went in this morning,” the nurse continued. “Her doctor wanted her to stay longer, but since there were no complications with the delivery, and since she and the baby were perfectly healthy, and since it’s not at all unusual to be released so quickly, nobody had a problem with letting her go.”

“But…but…but what about me?” Cooper finally asked, his mind still reeling as it tried to process so much misinformation. “I might have had a problem with it.”

The nurse snatched back her clipboard. “Then you should have been here this morning when your girlfriend was ready to leave.”

“But—”

“Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go file these forms.”

“But—”

“Go home to be with your new son, Mr. Dugan,” the nurse told him as she sifted through the collection of forms. “And not that it’s any of my business, but you might want to think about marrying that woman. Make yourself a proper family. Do the right thing.”

With that, Cooper found himself alone, without the nurse in the raspberry-colored scrubs who had become the booming voice of moral integrity. And even though he had done nothing wrong where Katie and her son were concerned, even though Katie was the one who had overstepped the boundaries of reason and propriety, Cooper felt guilty and duly taken to task. Why? He couldn’t begin to imagine. But for some reason, he suddenly felt as if he were the one who needed to set things to right.

For some reason, he suddenly felt like he really should do the right thing and marry Katie, thus making his son legitimate. Thus making the three of them, as the nurse had said, “a proper family.” Even though Katie was still a virtual stranger. Even though Andrew was in no way his son.