Talking About My Baby

Tara had already considered that. “I disagree. Julia fostered her out—informally—to me. People have done it forever, everywhere. Uther Pendragon handed Arthur to Merlin, who gave him to Sir Ector to raise. Dad told me about an Eskimo lady giving her second son to a woman who had none, for the strength of the community—”

Francesca rolled her eyes. She’d once heard Charlie convince a man that moose turn into caribou when they cross the Arctic Circle. “Things have changed, Tara.”

“But remember how it was in Hawaii? Lots of adoption within families. Fostering and adoption are ancient traditions—”

“And this is the dawn of the third millennium.”

Tara lifted the infusion of fenugreek she’d brewed. “To a bright new century. Here we are. And I can help you. I’ll do the homebirths. You do the hospital births.”

“I’ve already told my homebirth clients that I can’t attend homebirths anymore. I can’t risk losing hospital privileges, and there’s simply too much pressure from the medical community.”

“Tara to the rescue. I’ll start a homebirth practice to fill in the gaps. After all, I have no hospital privileges to lose.”

“You should not be practicing in the state of Colorado, Tara. It’s not legal. In January—” Francesca began.

“Not an issue. These hands caught more than eight hundred babies just last year.”

“In Texas. I know your credentials, Tara. But the answer is no.”

The infant in her arms ceased sucking at Tara’s nipple and the tube from the supplemental feeder. Her head dropped away in slumber, and Tara carefully turned her to burp her.

Pretending not to see the bonding between her daughter and the newborn, Francesca watered pots of cacti in the solarium. The muscles in her shoulders ached. How could Tara have done it?

Only Tara would have done it.

And Tara was fragile as a cactus. Cacti seemed hardy, but if you ignored what they were and watered them too much... Was Tara really over Danny, over his running off with her partner, having a child with her partner? Now ex-partner.

How can I turn her away? Wandering to the kitchen, Francesca touched the soft cheek of the sleeping newborn. Skin so fine. The smell of her so new. “Do you even have her birth certificate?”

“No.” The solution—the last-gasp, avoid-losing-Laura solution—confronted Tara again. Surely it wouldn’t come to that.

“How do you plan to adopt her, Tara?”

“I’m working it out. Don’t worry. If I’m not worrying, why should you?”

Francesca folded her arms across her chest. Lines in her forehead deepened as she returned to the solarium. After a bit, she shook her head and muttered, “That man.”

“Isaac the Greedy? His kids are cute.” Releasing the parking brake.

“His children are in dire need of a mother.”

In dire need of a mother?

Tara came alert. “Where’s their mother?”

“I understand she’s dead.” Reluctantly, Francesca added, “In Rwanda. That’s where they came from.”

Rwanda?

Tara saw the terraced slopes, felt the heat and humidity, smelled the scents, the unique scents of that country, the faces of the people. She had read the newspapers and books in ’94 and since, and cried for Rwanda.

She placed Laura in a sling against her chest, a style she’d learned in South America, and went to the sink. She removed the feeding system and emptied the remaining milk, then prepared for next time. Afterward, she took flour, cinnamon and nutmeg from the cupboard. “I’m going to make a couple of pies and take them up to your nemesis and his motherless children.”

Francesca’s eyes rounded. “You’re going to do what?”

“It’s for Laura. Here’s a man who needs a wife. And I need a husband so I can get a home study and adopt Laura.”

“Tara, you can’t—”

Tara laughed. “Just kidding, Mom.”

Francesca reminded herself to breathe. It sometimes occurred to her that Tara had been conceived in a turbulent year—oh, in how many ways—and that she’d been born on the fifth anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and that maybe all of this was to blame for her having turned out as she had. But no. Charlie Marcus’s genes—and personality, if you could call it that—were responsible.

“I’m going to try to talk him out of selling this house,” Tara explained, almost as though reasoning with herself.

Francesca studied her daughter. Was Tara lying? She’d learned from the best—her father. “The house is a done deal.”

“Not till closing.”

“He’s not going to back down, Tara. I’ve known him longer than you have. Not to say that I do know him, only that I know how he feels about selling this house. I always get the same answer.”

Her daughter’s smile made Francesca uneasy, as if Tara actually planned to marry Isaac McCrea. “Then maybe someone else should do the asking.”

SHE DROVE SLOWLY, yet the low-slung station wagon hit rocks in the four-wheel-drive road. Her mother had offered to watch Laura, but Tara had declined. She didn’t want to be apart from her. You’re so precious. Blowing bubbles in her car seat.

Twilight bathed Tomboy. The ghostly skeleton of an uninhabited mining structure rose against the far rock walls. Closer by stood another deserted building, the Columbine, which had once been a bordello. Now the windows were boarded, like those of the houses across the road where miners had lived, but Tara drove with one elbow in order to direct an X made with her two index fingers toward the house of prostitution.

Had he bought that, too? Her mother had said “everything north of the road.”

Lights shone from a house set alone at the edge of the tundra. Decades ago, the mine owner had resided there, in a two-story cabin set eight feet above the road, at winter snow level. Subsequent owners had built onto the sides and back, adding the steep rooflines of a chalet, with outdoor shutters and balconies. A snowmobile near the side porch awaited the first storms.

Isaac McCrea had chosen a high and desolate paradise for his home, and Tara envied him the alpine wildflowers that would poke through the tundra, the grasslike slivers ice formed at that altitude, the alpenglow which would turn the peaks pink each night.

He must have heard her car. A tall shadow darkened a downstairs window, then moved away.

She parked, and when the motor died, she could hear music. Drums and singing.

HIS DOORBELL RANG, and he crossed the pine floor in his wool socks, calling over his shoulder to David, “I’m going to steal the scroll.”

Dice rolled on the kitchen table as he opened the door.

It was Francesca Walcott’s daughter with her newborn. He remembered an observation earlier that day. She didn’t look like a woman who’d recently given birth.

A black cat shot between his feet and leaped to the porch railing. Arching its back, it hissed.

“Don’t take it personally. She always acts that way.”

Tara heard a trace of an accent. How could she have missed it earlier? She held out a cardboard box. “I made you some pies. The bottom one might be a little crunched. I had to stack them. There’s cardboard in between.”