His Baby (9 page)

They made polite conversation all the way through the meal. Diana
felt herself relaxing a little. She had only had a few sips of wine, but she
noticed that Melissa drank deeply from her glass and smiled at Sam when he
offered to refill it. Despite a slight tipsiness, Melissa participated in the
talk around the table. Diana was surprised to find that she was well-informed
and well-spoken and shocked to discover that Melissa was studying architecture
in graduate school.

Sam seemed to relax a little as the meal progressed. A
couple of times, Diana caught him studying her with a sly sideways glance that
could be mistaken for an absent study of Lake Michigan, which would be visible
through the trees in daylight.

They moved back into the living room with their coffee cups
and the promise of pastries later. Zack managed to sit alone in a chair. After
a moment's pretty pouting, Melissa chose one end of the long, sectional couch. Diana
noticed a pretty painted and lacquered paper box on the coffee table and asked
Beth about it.

The box had been her first anniversary wedding present from
Sam. It took a little gentle questioning to get the story out of Beth and Sam. To
her surprise, Diana learned that Beth and Sam had started out their married
life very poor. Beth had been teaching school while Sam worked every available
hour in a small stationary store he started downtown, near the Courthouses and
other big public buildings. When she got done teaching school, Beth went over
to the store and helped out. Usually she packed boxes for the goods that White
Stationary delivered to businesses the next day. Sometimes she unpacked new
shipments.

One night, a few weeks before her first anniversary, she had
found the paper box in one of the new shipments. It hadn't been quite so
lovely, Beth explained. It was roughly finished, but charming. She had admired
it and Sam had smiled at her, blessing her admiration for such simple things
because, he said, they were going to be poor for a long time before they became
rich. If ever.

He didn't say anything to her, he didn't reveal by even a
hint that, the next day, he retrieved the box from the pile of discards and
inspected it carefully. Sam took a box of paints from the appropriate shelf and
worked on finishing off and prettying up the paint outside, then covering the
whole thing with layers of lacquer. He filled the small box with a half-pound
of Beth's favorite chocolates and presented it to her on their anniversary.

It had become, for them, a symbol of their love. They kept
it now to remind them of their simple beginnings. In dollar value, it was the
least expensive thing they owned. From a sentimental viewpoint, it was the most
valuable.

Diana asked Sam more questions about his early days in the
store, his move to open more stores, the continued success he found. She paid
little attention to the continued coffee, brought by Harriet, poured by Beth. After
a couple of protests, she had a small piece of exquisitely light chocolate cake.
The three of them talked until Diana caught herself yawning for the second or
third time.

She looked around and realized that at some point, Zack and
Melissa had left the room.

They talked a little longer, carried their dishes to the
kitchen, then had a few words with a sleepy looking Harriet wrapped in a large,
pale pink fake velvet robe, edged with purple.

Diana finally made her way up the stairs. Near the top of
them, she spotted Melissa and Zack. Melissa was standing near the doorway of a
room further down the hall, almost to the end. Light spilled out into the
darkened hallway, throwing the couple into relief, but blurring their features.
Melissa had her arms around Zack, loosely held at the back of his shirt. As
Diana watched, paused on the steps, Melissa stepped forward, closing the gap
between them, pressing her body against Zack's so that there was no light
between them. She brought her hands up and pulled Zack's head down to hers,
encouraging him to kiss her.

He didn't seem to need much encouragement.

Diana repressed a sigh and continued the rest of the way up
the stairs, walking as quietly as she could. Before she slipped into her room,
she looked down the hallway again, just in time to see Melissa break away from
the embrace, then step into the room, pulling Zack by the hand into it. The
door closed quietly behind them, blocking the light that had spilled into the
hallway, now dark and quiet.

Diana took the last couple of steps into her room, then
paused, feeling a sharp twist in her midsection. She wasn't sure for the moment
that she could catch her breath. What else could she expect? She had rejected
him, pushed him away in what she thought was the most effective way possible. She’d
told him, as clearly as she could, she didn't want
him
.

Apparently Melissa did want him. Was he wrong to take what
she offered?

Diana refused to debate the question with herself. It was
too painful. She checked on Lark, then got herself ready for bed, shuttling
from the brightly lit bathroom to the dimmer bedroom. In a few moments, she was
wrapped in her warm robe, hair and teeth brushed, bed turned down, bathroom
light out.

Lark was a little restless, but still sleeping. Diana
propped up a couple of pillows and pulled out her latest book from her suitcase.
She read for a while, glancing up from time to time to be sure Lark was all
right. The silence of the midnight hour seemed absolute, deep, total. She
caught herself listening for sounds from the other end of the hall.

At some point, she must have fallen asleep. She knew,
because she came sharply awake when Lark whimpered, then cried out, her usual
late night distress call. The bedside light was still on, the book abandoned on
the bed. Diana got up quickly and slid out of bed to the crib. Lark looked up
at her sleepily and gurgled, not sure if she wanted to give up yet.

Diana picked her up, then looked around for the diaper bag. Lark
was still whimpering, not as loudly, but the sounds were dramatic in the quiet
house.

The baby giggled suddenly.

"Hey Lark," Zack said from the doorway. He stopped
to close the door behind him. "What are you doing up at this hour?" he
asked her. Lark looked utterly pleased to see him, reaching out for him to take
her.

Zack came forward, tousled and half asleep, barefoot,
wearing long, silky pajama bottoms tied with a drawstring around his waist and
a matching top pulled on but not buttoned. Diana had only a moment to admire
the dark mat of hair on his chest and the flat planes of his belly.

"She's wet," Diana cautioned gruffly.

"Well, then, I'll have to change your diaper, won't
I?" Zack said to the baby and took her anyway. He turned to Diana.

"Will she want a bottle too?"

Diana nodded.

"I put the bottles in the refrigerator in the kitchen. The
big stainless steel one. I'll meet you down there in a couple of minutes."

"Look," Diana protested, "I can take care of
Lark. You crawl back to bed before Melissa misses you," she said, hoping
he missed the sharp edge of her comment. He glanced up at her, a frown pulling
his brows together.

"I wasn't sleeping with Melissa," he said, looking
up from his study of the interior of the diaper bag.

She shrugged, reaching for her robe on the chair. "My
mistake," she said softly.

"No," he corrected her, "your mistake was in
admitting you wanted me."

"But you had Melissa," she said quietly. "I
saw you go into her room."

"You didn't see me come out a few minutes later," he
said.

"That didn't take long," she said cattily as she
stepped by him. "How very disappointing." He reached out with his
free hand and caught her in a surprisingly strong grip.

"Nothing happened," he said intently.

"You kissed her," she said. "I saw you."

"No, she kissed me. There's a difference. I didn't kiss
her back."

"I see," she said, pulling away from him. He let
her go.

"I'll meet you in the kitchen," he suggested
quietly. "We'll meet you in the kitchen, right, Lark?"

"Is there a den, somewhere with a television?" she
asked. "Lark will probably be up for a while."

"Late night television, your secret vice, Lark,"
he said, chiding her gently as he put her down in the crib next to her diaper
and the other supplies he needed. "The things I learn about my girls in
the middle of the night." One hand on the baby, holding her still, he
glanced up at Diana.

"I'll meet you in the kitchen," he said firmly. "Then
Lark and I will watch some television. You can go back to sleep if you
want."

She stared at him for a long minute, wanting to challenge
him, but then broke away first, unable to maintain his intensity.

"I'll join you if you don't mind," she said,
"since I'm awake anyway."

He just smiled at her. Diana thought her heart would break.

Diana prowled around the big square kitchen after she had
warmed the baby's bottle and set it on a small round table. Opening cabinets
and other storage places seemed too intrusive, but she’d never seen a kitchen
so empty looking. Everything was put away. Counters were clear and sparkling
clean. A professional sized stove and two huge ovens gleamed. There was a
coffee machine suspended from one overhead cabinet. It looked new.

The kitchen was clearly a place to work, not somewhere that
people hung out. Harriet had seemed like a wonderful woman, softly rounded -- a
good advertisement for her own cooking -- slightly tatty looking, and vaguely
absent-minded. How did she manage to keep this kitchen so clean? How did she
manage to produce such wonderful meals without leaving some trace?

Diana thought of her own comfortable kitchen, which seemed
homey and functional. By comparison, her place was also total chaos. She had
the uneasy feeling this was what Zack was used to. Maybe that was why he did
dishes all the time.

He pushed the door into the kitchen gently open, murmuring
to the baby as they came in. She was waving her hands, saying something in
nonsense syllables that seemed to make perfect sense to Zack. He had a clean
cloth diaper tossed over his shoulder, ready for burping or cleaning up spits.

"Let's go into the den," he said, after he took
the bottle from her and got Lark started.

"I don't know where anything is in the house, I'm
afraid."

"Except the guest room where Melissa is staying,"
he said quietly. She felt a surge of totally unreasonable annoyance.

"I thought it was your room," she answered him.

He just glanced at her and held the door open until she'd
come through.

The den was in the front of the house, a relatively small
room tucked in the corner, so that there were windows on two sides, floor to
ceiling windows with heavy, dark looking drapes pulled back to reveal long
sheer curtains. This room seemed more lived in. There were two couches in front
of a dark fireplace with a coffee table between them full of magazines and
books, roughly stacked, but not compulsively neat. There was a big, reclining
chair off to the side with a reading light next to it, hovering over a table
with a collection of small electronic devices. A smaller wing chair was placed
near it. Another couch took up the wall space between two long windows. There
seemed to be a broad counter that looked like marble in front of it. Various
bookcases, tall and short, were tucked into wall spaces between other windows
and along one wall of the room, the one that didn't have a fireplace. The
mantelpiece displayed a collection of family photos.

"Have a seat," Zack said, gesturing to the solo
couch.

Diana glanced around, looking for the television.

"It's built into that counter," he explained. "Dad
loves to spend money on devices. I think the high ticket folks and their
installers have him on speed dial."

Diana picked one side of the couch and sat down. Zack pushed
a remote control and the counter began rising, revealing an unexpectedly large
television console. Diana began to wonder if they were too close, but once the
picture came up, it seemed large, but not too large. She focused on little
things so that she could resist the urge to give up, to tell Zack he could take
care of Lark, she was going back to sleep.

"Any preferences for movies, Lark?" Zack asked. She
was still working on the bottle, wasn't falling asleep at all. He walked around
the room picking up cushions and tossing them over towards the sofa. "So,"
he said when he was done, "what are the chances she'll sit on her own when
she's done eating?”

Diana shrugged. "About even," she said. "Depends
on how much she wants to play." This was a new experience for him, she
realized. He'd never been around before when Lark woke up in the middle of the
night.

They found a movie that had only been playing for about
twenty minutes. Diana didn't think she'd seen it; Zack said he could catch her
up on what he remembered in a couple of minutes. They watched the movie and
played with Lark for a while, then settled down with Lark propped up in the
middle of them.

The movie had gotten to a point where the hero had to save
the world, or at least the heroine, and there was lots of gunfire going off. Zack
turned down the sound, trying to spare Lark, who was, despite her attempts to
wake herself up, drifting off to sleep.

"So," Zack said into the quieter room, "do
you still hate me or have you just decided I'm not worth bothering with?"

Diana's first impulse was to ignore him. She didn't need to
answer that question. Was that the question, anyway? She didn't hate him. It
didn't matter whether she thought he was worth it or not, because she had to
deal with him.
Unless
, came the niggling thought,
she just let him
have custody of Lark. Let her go
. But even as she had the thought, she
rejected it.

That answer wouldn't solve the problem of what she felt
anyway, would it? But that didn't matter. If she packed up, went back to
Whitney, and left Lark here, well, she'd never really have to see him again. Christmas,
maybe another holiday or two. Carl and Mary would be there. They would distract
her, as they did now. They would have a baby soon. She could be an aunt for real,
the way you were supposed to be an aunt.

"Have you decided to ignore me?" Zack asked.

That one was easy to answer. "I think so," she
answered.

"I don't like being ignored," he said.

"I'll bet you don't."

"Look, we both know you find me attractive. I'm not so
hard to be with. I've got a daughter I didn't know about, but I adore her now. What's
the problem?"

"I told you, Zack. You were Robin's lover. Robin is my
sister. You're off limits."
"I was Robin's lover, yes, briefly and with apparently quite good effect. Robin
was your sister. Robin's dead now."
"You don't think I know that?"

"Of course you know that, but you always refer to her
in the present tense."

"It's only been four months, Zack."

"Okay, I'm being unreasonable," he said, in a calm
tone of voice that told her he didn't think he was unreasonable at all.

"You don't know anything about grief, do you?" she
asked him, biting back words that rushed out faster than she could edit them. "You
haven't ever had to fight for anything or to lose anything. Your father doesn't
approve of you, but you've already said you've given up trying to get his
approval, so life is easy, isn't it, Zack? Life is good.” She felt reckless,
but it was too bad. She felt angry, she decided. Angry at him. Why couldn't he
understand?

"What do you mean, I don't know anything about
grief?" He was staring at her as if he had never seen her before.

"You know what I mean. Someday all this will be yours. Your
Dad had to fight hard for it, and I guess he's not the most pleasant person in
the world sometime, but he did work hard. I guess that's why he doesn't
understand a son who's never had to fight for anything."

"You don't know anything about me," he said, his
words clipped.

"I know quite a bit about you," she said, crossing
her arms and leaning back.

"You don't know I had a sister, too." Having said
this, he stared forward. She saw the tightness of his jawline, the tension in
him, vibrating through the dark room.

"What do you mean?" she asked finally. It was a
stupid thing to say, but it was something, she thought.

"My sister died when I was nine years old. She was
14." She knew that if he said more, his voice would break. He was still
staring straight ahead, supposedly watching the movie.

"What happened?"

"She was alone at home when a burglar broke in. He
killed her."

"Oh, Zack. I'm so sorry. I can't imagine-- "

He interrupted her. as though he had to keep metering out
information, a small bit at a time. "I was the one who found her," he
said, so quietly she had to stop for a minute to be sure she heard him. Then
the impact of what he said hit her.

"In this house?"

"No. We moved out of that house."

Diana felt oddly relieved although she didn't think she
believed in ghosts.
That was easy,
she thought,
when no one had ever
haunted you
. His sister haunted Zack, at least the memory of her. She felt
she had to say something.

"I'm sorry."

"It was a long time ago," he said, turning to look
at her for a moment. "But I will tell you this, Diana. You never get over
it. The pain just gets to be boring.  You get to the point where you don't pay
it that much attention."

She was silent for a long time, waiting to think of
something to say. She tried to understand how she could have known Zack for
this long, weeks really, spending so much time with him, and not know this
about him.

He was lost, staring at the screen, but not watching the
movie. She knew, because when the credits rolled he didn't move at all, just
continued staring at the screen, as if the name of the second unit assistant
director were some vital thing he had to know, along with the name of the
caterer and the composition of the electrical crew.

Lark had fallen deeply asleep, pushed hard against the
pillows protecting her, little mouth open. Diana reached past the sleeping baby
and picked up the remote control to turn off the movie.

"Diana," he said. She was so startled, she nearly
dropped the remote control. "Don't say anything to my parents. They don't
talk about Lizzie."

Ever? she thought. He was staring at her, waiting for her
answer.

"All right," she said. "I won't tell
them."

She stood up stiffly, stretching a little. It was 3:30.
There
was time for some sleep
, she thought. She reached to pick up Lark, but Zack
stopped Diana with a light touch.

"I'll carry her," he said. She watched him pick up
the baby and hold her close.

Upstairs, he laid her tenderly in the crib and spread a thin
blanket over her. He stood for a long time, staring down at her. Diana sat in
the chair by the window and waited for him to move. When he looked up at her,
she thought she was looking at someone she didn't know, someone gaunt, haunted.

"Can I stay in here with her?" he said. "You
can sleep in my bed if you want. I'm just afraid something will happen to her. It's
irrational, I know that." He swallowed.

"Will you tell me more about your sister?" Diana
said. She moved to the bed and slid under the covers.

Zack stared at her for a moment. She wondered how to say it,
how to tell him she didn't want to know about her death, but her life.

"You don't have to tell me about the end," she
said finally. "What was she like?"

He let his breath out slowly, then moved and sat on the end
of the bed, leaning back a little to rest on the foot board. He turned and
glanced at the baby, then sighed again. Diana reached out to turn off the light
by the bed. They were illuminated now only by the light from the bathroom,
bright light spilling out around an almost closed door.

"Lizzie was tiny," he said finally. "She was
five years older than me, but she was small, fine boned, short. But she was
smart. As smart as a whip, my grandfather used to say. He died a few months
after she did. No one ever said anything but I think he died of a broken heart.

Lizzie had straight black hair, long, and this way of
looking at you, straight at you, when she talked to you. She liked science. My
parents thought she would be a doctor. They made jokes about whether she would
be a surgeon or not. She did like to dissect, to cut things up. She used to
tell me she thought she wanted to be a pathologist, but that Dad kept saying
doctors took care of the living, not the dead." He pulled his legs up on
the bed, folding them so he sat cross-legged.

"My whole life, she didn't want me around," he
went on. "I was the baby. Trouble. Stupid. But I followed her around
everywhere I could. I wanted to be like her, but I knew I wasn't as smart. So
instead, I learned how to be charming. I didn't know what that was when I was
nine, of course. I just knew that she like flowers and pretty little things and
to be told how smart she was and how funny and how beautiful.

"When I first saw Robin, I thought it was Lizzie in
front of me again. Then, of course, Robin talked and she was someone else. Not
what I expected. That charmed me. I could relax because it was clear to me that
she wasn't Lizzie, but somehow, it was comforting to have Robin around. I think
the same thing happened to Dad the first time he saw her. I think that's why he
was so mad at me when Robin threw me over. It was like losing Lizzie
again."

He talked about Lizzie going off to middle school, telling
him how he was already hopelessly stupid, making him walk three steps behind
her on the way to school. But she was the only one allowed to mock or control
him. When a second grader got to be a bit of a bully, Lizzie caught him on the
school yard and made it clear she would beat him up, and that nobody would
believe it, that a girl could beat him up. The bully never bothered Zack again.
She helped him learn to read, drilled him on math times tables, told him
stories that made physics make sense. She taught him how to ride a bike and how
to manipulate a teacher. She convinced him never to lie about his homework.

"Lizzie was the kind of person who got very intense
about things. I think Mom saved all of her stuff. Lizzie was so organized. She
got passionate about rocks for a while, then about dinosaurs, then about hearts.
She had whole files of information about her new passion. She would create
experiments, keep journals, ask questions, write lectures about what she knew. If
she were alive today, she'd make a Web site about it. She would study something
until she was bored and then she would box everything up and label it and
refuse to talk about it anymore."