Maybe Baby: One Small Miracle

As she walked past him, holding Melanie against her like a shield and bulwark against the enemy, he said, low and fierce, ‘I didn’t want to win, Anna.’

For a moment she almost turned back. He touched her shoulder, and she shuddered with her body’s betrayal of her heart. ‘Then why does talking to you, touching you, always feel like a contest I’ve already lost?’

When he didn’t answer, she moved out of the hangar into the bright-and-darkness of the heavy-clouded air, thick like soaked cotton wool, glistening with diamond-bright moisture and a touch of sunlight breaking through in tiny slivers.

Coming home again felt like a farewell. The beginning of the end … and this time goodbye would be for ever. She couldn’t go through this again—and after Melanie’s life was settled, one way or the other, she hoped to have the strength to leave Jared and Jarndirri for ever, and, finally, never yearn to come back.

CHAPTER FIVE

JARED took his time feeding the animals in the massive sheds on the high ground, and making sure the gates were securely closed and the electric alarms on—the storm was closing in hard now—before returning to the homestead. He kept trying to think of what to do to get things back to the way they used to be with Anna; but even after all the years of being her lover and husband, and after everything they’d been through together, he felt as if he was locked inexorably in square one.

Her words kept chiming in his head like a bell tolling. Talking with you always feels like a contest I’ve already lost. Well, he knew how it felt now. That was how he’d felt every time she’d thrown him out of her place at Broome. And if he hated it, if he couldn’t stand being in last place with her, how had always losing made her feel? In his driving need to do it all, be it all, to win at any cost, had he left her behind, left her out in the cold and, worse, not even noticed?

Maybe it’s time things changed. Maybe it’s time we both won.

He strode in through the back verandah to the kitchen. After a spare breakfast and no lunch, he was more than ready for dinner—but there was nothing cooking. Anna was no cook, but she could do a steak and salad when Mrs Button was sick, so why hadn’t she …?

Distant cries gave him his answer. He followed the wailing sound to the spare room where she’d slept for so many months. Anna’s bags were on the floor, unopened, but the baby’s things were strewn all over.

So she was still resisting coming back to their room? He squashed the urge to grab her bags and take them where they belonged—for now. He’d change her mind soon enough. He’d make her melt for him.

Then he forgot his needs, his plans. Holding the baby, jiggling her in an awkward attempt at comfort, Anna was striding the floor, totally frazzled as the baby wailed without let-up.

He knew better than to offer help with the baby right now. ‘Should I make our dinner, or warm a bottle for her?’ He took care to not sound superior or triumphant. This isn’t a contest between us, Anna—and whatever it is, I haven’t won in a long time.

‘She’s had a bottle, had her nappy changed. She doesn’t have a fever or anything. I’ve tried playing with her, singing to her—I don’t know what to do,’ Anna all but wailed.

He frowned, looking at the baby. She seemed more angry than exhausted, and she’d slept really well on the plane. A thought occurred to him. ‘How old do you think she is?’

Anna wheeled around on him, flushed and pretty in her dishevelment, and needing him … at least for now. And she was holding a baby in her arms … but it wasn’t his baby son, his Adam.

Jared ached, thinking of what could have been—if the baby was Adam he’d have the right to hold him, to kiss her better, to walk him at night—anything to lighten Anna’s load. He’d look into his son’s eyes and feel that love, that bond—the sense of future, of destiny fulfilled.

Adam …

‘Rosie started coming around three months ago, and she was …’ She frowned down in anxiety at the baby, whose face was mottled and her wails upgrading to ear-piercing shrieks. ‘She must be about six months—why?’

‘At that age, babies eat stuff like mashed bananas and vegetables,’ he said gruffly, still locked into the pain of useless longing for his son, his child, and for the loving wife he’d somehow lost. You always end up getting what you want. ‘Cereals too. Mum gave us all cereal.’

‘I fed her this morning,’ she replied in clear impatience. ‘There was cereal in her bag.’

‘Mum always fed the babies at night, too—usually vegetables or cereal with banana or mashed apple in it. She said they slept better. If the baby’s used to that, not eating would make her cranky.’

‘But she threw out the teething rusk I gave her and screamed louder,’ she retorted, looking like she was about to tear her hair—or already had, by the looks of her. Apart from the lack of chocolate smears, she looked as she had the day he’d first kissed her, all mussed and kissable …

But lustful thoughts weren’t going to help either of them now. She was trying to get this right on her own and failing—and he had minutes to help her before she turned away from him.

So he grinned at her to lighten her lack of knowledge. ‘Have you ever tasted those things?’

She caught the smile, and her eyes glimmered in return, her mouth slowly curving. ‘Obviously not for too long a time. So it’s cereal and banana?’

His heart soared at the first real smile she’d given him for over a year. ‘Yes, so long as the bananas are ripe enough. Come on, let’s see.’ He led the way into the kitchen, resisting the urge to do anything stupid like touching her, no matter how badly he wanted to, or how easily he could make her want it. He’d made too many mistakes with her, it seemed.

He just wished he knew what all his mistakes were, so he didn’t repeat them. Now she was finally back where she belonged, he couldn’t afford to blow it again.

‘How ripe is ripe enough?’

He hid the grin this time; she sounded as touchy as anxious, hating it that he knew more about babies than she did. ‘They need to be soft and sweet, but not bruised. Don’t worry, Anna, we can steam an apple if the bananas are too hard or soft.’

‘They’re all spotted—that’s overripe,’ Anna grumbled over the screams, rocking the baby on her hip in a futile attempt to soothe her. ‘What else can go wrong today?’

‘Don’t worry.’ Jared grabbed a red apple and a peeler. ‘I’ve done this hundreds of times for my brothers and sisters. Five minutes and I guarantee she’ll be happy.’

Anna reached up to the hanging ladder that had served as a pot rack for a century, and grabbed a small saucepan. ‘How much water do you need?’

Busy peeling the apple as fast as possible, he said, ‘Half an inch, and turn the heat down as soon as it’s boiling. In the meantime … ‘He reached into his precious store of childhood favourites, his arrowroot biscuits, and handed one to Anna. ‘She can have this—it’s what the cereal’s made of.’

She grinned as she took the semi-sweet cookie. ‘You must be desperate for quiet to give up your night-time treats.’

How she managed to do insane things to his body with a grin when she looked like an extra on a horror film, he had no idea. But she did it as no other woman ever had or would, and he accepted it. She was his woman.

‘Desperate,’ he agreed, smiling back at her, wondering if he looked as incredibly aroused and needing as he felt. ‘The kid’s louder than a city street.’

‘Not now,’ she said softly, as the baby grabbed the arrowroot from her hand, and gurgled over the biscuit, slobbering in a chattering ecstasy only babies and children knew how to show. ‘Thanks for the biscuit. It was inspired.’

He shrugged, feeling like a total idiot. She was thinking about the baby while he was thinking of how to get her into bed. ‘I was the oldest of five kids. I had to mind them a lot.’

‘That’s a definite advantage right now.’ She cocked her head towards the stove. ‘The water’s boiling.’

‘Oh. Right.’ He turned back from his rapt contemplation of the picture before him: a messy Madonna smiling for the first time in a year, holding a yabbering baby who was covered in milk and chewed biscuit. As he peeled and pared the apple and dropped slices into the water, he made a vow—he’d do whatever it took to give Anna the motherhood that had brought her back to life: the life he’d never been able to give her, despite spending over a hundred thousand on IVF implantations and specialist visits.

He’d had all his dreams come true, thanks to the Currans—especially because of Anna. He knew what he had—he’d never taken it for granted. He’d worked day and night to make life perfect for her, without the financial fears that had turned his mum grey before her time, and sent his father into the downward spiral that ended with a noose and debts that had taken him, Jared, ten years to pay off.

Even when her fertility problems meant frequent trips to Perth and massive cheques to cover the treatments, he’d made sure Anna was never burdened with the feelings of negativity and fear that his dad had pushed on his mum. Anna had never once had to worry where the next meal was coming from or how they’d pay the next round of bills, as his mum had had to for as long as he could remember.

But somehow all his hard work, everything he’d done to make their lives secure hadn’t been enough to make her happy or want to stay with him. And worse still, he couldn’t see how to make this fantastic life, the only life he wanted, enough for a woman like Anna.

No. I’ll find the way. I’ll make her happy this time. I’ll work harder, tell any lie, even play daddy to this kid, if it keeps that smile on her face.

‘Can you find the strainer?’ he asked abruptly. Hiding the emotion as she’d accused, yeah, but at least he didn’t carry on like his father had, dumping all his problems and feelings onto her. He still remembered the way Mum had tried to shut Dad up at the dinner table. Not in front of the children, Rob! He still remembered the low-voiced arguments over money at night, his mother’s weary Well, what do you want me to do, Rob, wave a magic wand for you?, and his father’s alternate pleading love and despairing coldness.

A family with cracks in it as wide as the dried-out red land before the Wet, the Wests had patched it together with more children, more bank loans, until the shaky edifice had collapsed around them. Then his dad had taken the easy way out. Overwhelmed with the sudden load alone, Mum had asked Bryce to take him; the next oldest, Sam, had gone to their grandparents. She raised the three little ones, Nick, Andie and Dale at his Aunty Pat’s place in Perth until she’d sold off enough of the pieces of Mandurah they’d still owned to buy a house in the suburbs.

Now his mother was coming back, Nick and this bloke she was marrying coming with her.

‘Why do you need a strainer?’ Anna broke into his morbid reverie, her tone like his mother’s had been, withdrawn and hard.

Damn, he’d done it again, broken the fragile accord just as she’d started to smile at him at last—either that or she really hated knowing nothing about babies.