Nobody's Child (14 page)

Laura Ann's heart sank, drowned by images of bankers demanding payment, fifty stools waiting to be shipped—and a corn crop no doubt decimated by the rain. She reached out and took Ian's hand, leaning her head against his shoulder, drawing on his strength.

Ian put his arm about her and held her tight. “I've got your back,” he said, staring with her at the destruction. “Somehow we'll dig out of this.”

“The baby's kicking.” Sophia lay on the sofa in the living room after dinner and a bath. Her nightgown draped across her belly, she rested her hand on the bump like a ledge. “This drum gets pulled tighter every day.”

Laura Ann moved across the room and squatted at her side. Her heart thumped hard in anticipation. “May I?” she asked, extending a hand toward Sophia's stomach. Her friend nodded, guiding her hand to a hard prominence.

“Push here,” Sophia said. “It might be his foot.”

Laura Ann pressed her fingers gingerly into Sophia's warm stomach. The baby lay just beyond her touch.

“Push a little harder. I won't break,” she said with a laugh.

Laura Ann smiled and put both hands to Sophia's gown, pressing down on the prominence, massaging it about. In response to her pressure, the baby pushed back with a tiny kick. Laura Ann jerked her hands away. The kick shocked her, movement that confirmed the life Sophia carried—Laura Ann's egg become a child.

“It's okay. He's just getting comfy.” She pulled Laura Ann's hands back to the round melon of her belly beneath a cotton gown. “Talk to him,” she encouraged. “Get close.”

Something magic pulsed through Laura Ann, her hands following Sophia's guide, the caress of soft cotton warmed by her friend's skin. The baby moved again, strange bumps moving across the landscape of body and nightclothes.

What should I say?

Sophia released her palms and massaged about her belly, moving the baby into a new position. Laura Ann placed her face close to her own hands and spoke. “Anyone home?”

Sophia smiled, closing her eyes and laying her head back on the sofa, as if relaxing every muscle to make a way for Laura Ann to reach her baby. Two women, one child, all connected. One flesh.

“I know something about you,” Laura Ann said, chuckling to herself. Her face close to Sophia in a private way, she felt her friend laugh with her, their shared secret of the baby's parentage.

“Tell him what's on your heart,” Sophia said, lying trancelike.

Laura Ann shut her eyes, trying to imagine the baby just below her hands. She moved the foot a bit, then laid her cheek on Sophia's stomach, reveling in the warmth of her friend and this home for a child that shared her blood. Like a human pillow,
Laura Ann cradled Sophia and the baby, whispering three words over and over.

Sophia laid her hands in a gentle rest on Laura Ann's head, pulling her closer to the child, her touch a comforting affirmation. Without embarrassment, she clung to Sophia and the incredible life that thrived within her.

Her words resonated in Sophia's womb. “I love you.”

J
UNE 27

Sophia stood on the back stoop, staring toward the barn and flooded fields. She'd been on the washing porch for a long time after breakfast, frozen in one place like a pole. Time wasted away, but Laura Ann resisted the temptation to start the day without her new friend.

“The water's a little lower … but not much,” she said, joining Sophia on the old sloping stoop that joined the back of the kitchen. Great-grandmother did her wash here decades ago, laboring over a wooden tub contraption complete with big rollers to squeeze water out of the clothes. The first washing machine, or what looked like it. The old Maytag stood in the corner behind Sophia, a monument to women long past, and unused for the last fifty years.

Her visitor let out a long breath — some unspoken frustration — then pulled her iPhone out of a pocket and rechecked for service. Laura Ann knew the result before Sophia looked at it. No cell phones worked on The Jug. Too many hills in the way. Uncle Jack continued to complain about that every time he visited, but the mountains never moved.

“I'm working in the woodshop today,” Laura Ann offered,
dusting her hands like it was time to get to work. “Care to join me? Lots to do — and your help would make it twice as fast.”

Sophia nodded, but did not turn. She cleared her throat, then spoke. “Is there any way I can get to town to rent a car?” she asked, then coughed again. “Today?”

Laura Ann chuckled. Surely Sophia could see the problem. Cars would never cross that flood at the neck of The Jug, even with the low-water crossing intact. “We could swim, but I wouldn't recommend it.” She turned and headed for the door. “Seriously, if you're up for it, I can use a second set of hands. We've cut all the jeans. When we do get out to town, I'll need to pick up some more.”

“I
am
serious,” Sophia replied, her voice stern. She turned to face Laura Ann, taking a step toward the kitchen door. “I need to leave, to head back home. Today. What are our options?”

“Is someone waiting to hear from you?” Laura Ann asked. “We could have asked Ian to make some calls. He offered, remember?”

“I know. I was too polite and I should have taken him up on it. I need to get back home, Laura Ann. I'm not worried about the car. I know it will be fine here for a while — if you don't mind.”

“Of course not. But you're welcome to stay too — as long as you need.” Laura Ann thought back on their time together last night. She hoped this need to leave would soon pass. “I could get you out in a few days on the canoe. It would be fun to have you here in the meantime.”

“Thank you, Laura Ann. I'd like to take you up on that offer. But I really do need to leave today. To make some calls, to check in with the office.” She took a deep breath and continued. “And to settle some important legal paperwork.” She gestured toward the flood. “Is there any possible way?”

The first thing that came to mind? The mortgage. Not the
rushing creek or the potential for disaster canoeing with a pregnant woman. Laura Ann's thoughts went straight to the challenge of finishing fifty stools in the next seven days, how to drive them to New Martinsville without a creek crossing — and the twenty-five hundred dollars she needed to cover her next bank payment.

Sophia waited for an answer, her head cocked and eyebrows furrowed.

“Sure,” Laura Ann volunteered with a loud huff. “We can tow your suitcase across a roaring gulch.” She shrugged. “Certain death. Or—we can try to canoe out. I've never done it with this much water.”

“Ian canoed in just yesterday, then back out again. And you told me you've traveled this creek a hundred times.”

“Yes, but never at flood stage. Very dangerous.”

“Dangerous, or very dangerous? There's a difference.”

“Is there?” Laura Ann asked, crossing her arms. “Like the difference between drowned and very drowned?”

“That bad?” Sophia asked, the harsh look on her face fading in a flash. “Is this life-threatening — or just difficult?”

“For a pregnant woman? Possibly threatening to the baby.” Laura Ann felt funny using those words.

Baby? It's my son.

“Have you ever canoed?” Laura Ann asked, struggling to take her mind off the child and last night's intimate connection. “No. But I can learn.”

“I don't want to tell you what Ian would say.” Laura Ann shook her head.

Sophia cut her off quickly. “But what do
you
say?”

She remained silent, watching the face of her visitor. Determination like none she'd ever seen was painted across Sophia's face.

“It's that bad?” Laura Ann asked after a long pause. “You
can't spend a few more days and wait for the water to subside? We might even be able to wade across within a week.”

Sophia shook her head. “I have a client who's working a thorny child custody issue, Laura Ann. I'm key to her arguments. A child's well-being hangs in the balance … as well as the mom's.”

“I guess you can relate.” Laura Ann gestured toward Sophia's hand that rested on her bump.

“Yes, I can. I'm very close to this custody issue — considering.” She took another deep breath, as though trying to calm some inner struggle. “Just presume that this is an emergency, and you're the mom.” Her eyes pleaded. “Could we make it? In the canoe?”

“I know
I
can …” She paused, staring at Sophia's eyes. Daddy said you can see truth in a man's eyes, and hear trouble in his voice. She picked up on both. “It's you I'm not so sure about.”

“I'm very capable.”

“This is crazy.” Laura Ann threw up her hands. “You'll die if we don't get out today?”

Sophia didn't answer right away. She looked down at the floor, then turned to face fields covered in muddy brown water. She seemed to count every risk before answering, then spoke with a quiet forcefulness, a fierce determination — and something more, a tone that Laura Ann couldn't quite read.

“I understand the risks, Laura Ann. I can be packed in a few minutes. We need to go.”

In her twenty years, Laura Ann had never witnessed this kind of devastation. Her sixteen-foot canoe sliced through roiling brown, and eddies of milk chocolate with white latte froth, carrying
with it every imaginable floating scrap of humanity. She guided the canoe through the tops of short trees, pushing debris out of branches that slapped at the canoe, clearing the way for Sophia who sat a few feet behind her. Canoeing between treetops was an experience all its own, the creek still twenty feet above its banks, yet almost ten feet lower than where it crested two nights ago.

An occasional dead animal lay rotting where the cresting flood pinned it in a tree above her reach. A few forest animals were caught up in the maelstrom, along with two dogs, and in the crotch of a half-submerged tree, the swollen and mud-matted carcass of a calf. Water bottles, plastic toys, firewood, and round bales of hay littered the creek. Years would pass before this carnage could be cleaned away, or was consumed by nature. The water moved in a swift whispering current, desperate in its race toward lower elevations, on a terminal trip to the Ohio River, and eventually, the Gulf of Mexico.

Laura Ann dipped her paddle to keep the canoe headed in the proper direction, preferring to steer from the front. Here, she could watch for eddies, avoiding the trouble spots that she knew held submerged hazards. But she'd never been prepared for this. She could only keep the canoe on a rough course down what appeared to be the middle of the creek. Familiar landmarks lay twenty feet beneath her, invisible.

“Hold on,” she warned Sophia, a quick turn of her head to check her passenger, buttoned up tight in a life preserver. Sophia's white-knuckled hands gripped the gunnels of the boat, near an unused paddle. Laura Ann faced ahead, deft in her maneuver to send the boat around a massive tree, its trunk swept over by the flood. She would take no chances today.

She pushed hard on the paddle to control the boat from the front, frustrated with the sluggishness of the heavy canoe
carrying two adults and a suitcase wrapped in a trash bag. Any other time, riding alone, she sped along lightning fast and maneuverable. Not so today.

“Look,” Sophia called out, taking her hand off the gunnel to gesture to the right. Laura Ann shot a glance back, caught the point, and followed it. They were a mile into the journey, past the boundary of the farm. Lodged into the trees, a portable toilet bobbed upright in the current. Downstream of the toilet, what looked like a small shed lay stuck in another tree, water cascading over the remains of a roof, the kind of turbulence Laura Ann feared most today. That the toilet escaped being sucked into the logjam was remarkable. The force of the night flood exceeded anything she could imagine.

“We're a couple of miles from the takeout,” Laura Ann said with a loud voice to avoid turning her head, yet be heard. “We'll pull the canoe out downstream of the crossing, on the right bank.”

She steered around another tree, and continued. “The water will come at us fast and furious from the right when we enter a big pool. That's where the creek meets itself at the neck of The Jug. Ian said the pool is navigable, but we don't want to take any chances.”

For the next two miles, Laura Ann showed Sophia some different paddle moves, coaching her how to dig her paddle in on the right to pitch the canoe to the right, the top priority when they met the swirling confluence at the whirlpool. As they traversed a long straight section of the creek where it made its last mile around The Jug, fewer items were lodged in the trees, most of the upstream trash sucked out by the limbs behind her. “Can you hear it?” Laura Ann asked half an hour later.

“Sounds like a waterfall,” Sophia responded, dipping her paddle at opportune times to help steer.

“That's the logjam. The water will come rushing in from the right. Think right, always right. We have to cross that flow and get to the far bank.”

“But couldn't we stay on the creek all the way to town?”

“We could, but I'd have no way to get back home.”

“Long walk,” Sophia replied, and then added with a point of her paddle, “and here it comes.”

Fifty yards ahead of them, Laura Ann saw it too. On the bluff above the big pool sat The Jug Store, looking over the confluence where waters scoured away rock and clay during the century since her ancestor tunneled through the ridge in the late 1700s. She could see a few people gathered at The Jug Store parking lot, watching the creek below. A quarter mile beyond them, Route 18 collapsed into the water. The last stop at the end of a busted highway, The Jug Store would serve as a gathering place for months to come.

“When we pass the big sycamore, listen for my yell,” Laura Ann hollered, her voice straining above the roaring water. “Unless I say otherwise, paddle right. But don't let us get pointed into the current. Got it?”

“Ready!” she heard in reply.

In less than a minute, they would pop out under the store. Sixty seconds from a rude dunk in the water, or a proud landing on the downstream bank. The creek flowed wide at this point, covering farmlands for half a mile to the left, but the chocolate brown water hid a multitude of deadly hazards. She glanced back at Sophia, guiding the boat well, her oar in the water.

Sisters.

The word popped into her mind, watching the last of the trees pass, the rumble of the waterfall vibrating like a timpani inside her.

She'd always dreamed of a sister. Another girl to share those
things that Daddy, much as she loved him, could not understand or should not hear. She'd grown up with a hoe or a paddle in her hands, with hard work her first priority over malls and boys.

Laura Ann took one last look back at Sophia, her tight pink T-shirt under the orange life jacket a contrast in cultures.

Sister.

Laura Ann counted the seconds after she passed the big sycamore before she dug her paddle in on the right side. Pulling it toward the canoe, the bow jerked right toward the oncoming rush of water that poured over the logjam at the neck of The Jug. Her throat tightened, gooseflesh rising on her arms. This was more than she'd gambled for. No time to check Sophia, she dug in again, fighting the onslaught that hit the canoe like a mini-tidal wave.

The boat pitched and, behind her, Laura Ann could feel Sophia lean into the wave just like she'd taught her. The boat shot left, headed for the trees on the downstream side of the pool below The Jug Store. Any other day, that bank offered a gentle beach, rest, and protection. Today, it represented death.

Water sluiced through the trees on her left like seawater through a whale's baleen, a rushing tide of foaming brown that slammed into trunks submerged twenty feet underwater. She could never navigate that minefield, sure to hit a tree sideways, flip, and spill them both into the torrent. The smack of a head against wood, or a baby crushed against a limb, and a life would end there.

Acid jumped into her throat as she dug in on the right side again, yelling, “Right! Right!”

Behind her, Sophia jammed her paddle in the water, forcing the boat toward the current with a hard stroke, then pulled with the paddle once more. Laura Ann caught a quick glimpse of people gathered at the store, pointing down. She lowered her
eyes back to the water, her tormenter — and her grave, if she did this wrong.

“Don't try anything stupid,” Ian warned her when he visited yesterday. “I can handle things for you in town.”

“If I do need to go, I can do it myself.”

“Don't be stubborn, Laura Ann.”

“I'm not stubborn. I'm independent.”

I'm going to eat those words.

Dirty foam splashed over them as the canoe crossed the swirling pool, bucked by the current that rushed toward them on the right. She caught a brief glance of the towering logjam, through the ridge cut, and shivered.