Public Secrets (6 page)

E
MMA COULDN’T
WAIT much longer. There was a nasty sleet falling outside, but she continued to press her face against the window to try to sec through it.

They would be coming soon. Johnno had said so. She was wise enough to know that if she asked him how soon again he’d snarl at her. But she couldn’t wait. After her nose grew cold, she stepped back to dance from one foot to another. Her da was coming home, with Bev, and her new baby brother. Darren. Her brother’s name was Darren. She tried the name out to herself in a whisper. Just the sound of it made her smile.

Nothing in her life had ever been so huge, so important as having a brother. He would be her own, and he would need her to tend to him, to look out for him. She’d been practicing for weeks and weeks on the dolls that now filled her room.

She knew you had to hold their heads ever so carefully, or they fell way back and broke off. Sometimes babies woke in the middle of the night, crying for milk. She wouldn’t mind, Emma thought. She rubbed her own flat chest and wondered if Darren would find milk there.

They hadn’t let her go to the hospital to see him. That had upset her so that for the first time since she had come to her new home, Emma had hidden in a closet. She was still angry about it, but she knew it mattered very little to adults if children were angry.

Weary of standing, she sat on the window seat to pet Charlie and wait.

She tried to think of other things. Her time in America. Humming to herself, Emma let herself picture all the things she’d seen. There had been the big silver arch in St. Louis. There had been the lake in Chicago that had seemed as big as the ocean to her. And Hollywood. She’d liked the big white sign, and remembering it, tried to picture all the letters.

Her father had played at a huge theater there right outside. They had called it a bowl. She had thought that strange, but it had been run to listen to the cheers and screams rising on the open air.

She’d celebrated her birthday, her third birthday, in Hollywood. Everyone had come to eat the white cake with the little silver balls on top.

They had gotten into a plane almost every day. And every day it had scared her, but she’d been able to battle back the sickness. There had been a lot of people with them. Roadies her father called them. Which seemed silly since they were so often in the air, and not on any road at all.

She’d liked the hotels best, with room service and new beds almost every night. She’d liked looking out the window at new places and new people every morning.

With a yawn, she settled back with the dog snuggled under her arm.

When they went to a hotel again, Darren could go with them. Everyone would love him.

Watching the sleet made her sleepy. And she thought of Christmas. It had been the first she’d ever had with a stocking hanging from the mantel with her name on it. Under the tree they had decorated had been stacks and stacks of presents. Toys and games and dolls in pretty dresses. They’d all played Snakes and Ladders in the afternoon. Even Stevie. He’d pretended to cheat to make her laugh, then had taken her on a screaming piggyback ride through the house.

Afterward her father had carved a big Christmas goose. When gluttony had made her sleepy, she had curled up in front of the fire and had listened to the music.

It had been the best day of her life. The very best. Until this one. The sound of a car roused her. Pressing her face against the window again she peered out. With a screech, she leaped off the seat.

“Johnno! Johnno! They’re here.” She went flying down the
hallway, her shoes clattering on the wood floor that had been painstakingly refinished and polished.

“Hold on.” Johnno stopped scribbling the lyrics that had been playing in his head to catch her on the run. “Who’s here?”

“My da and Bev and my baby.”

“Your baby, is it?” He tugged on her nose, then turned to Stevie who was experimenting with chords at the piano. “Shall we go welcome the newest McAvoy?”

“Be right along.”

“I’m coming.” P.M. stuffed the last of a tea cake into his mouth before he rose from the floor. “Wonder if they managed to get out of the hospital without being mobbed.”

“The precautions Pete took makes James Bond look like a piker. Two decoy limos, twenty burly guards, and the final escape in a florist truck.” With a laugh, he started down the hall with Emma in tow. “Fame makes beggars of us, Emma luv, and don’t you forget.”

She didn’t care about fame or beggars or anything else. She only wanted to see her brother. The moment the door opened, she pulled her sweaty hand from Johnno’s and shot down the hall.

“Let me see him,” she demanded.

Brian bent over, shifting the blanket from the bundle in his arms. For Emma, the first sight of her brother was love. Unconditional, all-encompassing. It was so much more than anything she’d expected.

He wasn’t a doll. Even as he slept she could see the gentle flutter of his dark lashes. His mouth was small and moist, his skin thin and delicately pale. He wore a little blue cap over his head, but her father had told her that he had hair as dark as Bev’s. His hand was curled in a fist, and she touched it, gently, with her fingertips. Warmth, and the faintest of movements.

Love burst through her like light.

“What do you think?” Brian asked her.

“Darren.” She said the name softly, savoring it. “He’s the most beautiful baby in the world.”

“Got that pretty McAvoy face,” Johnno murmured, feeling foolishly sentimental. “Nice job, Bev.”

“Thanks.” And she was glad it was done. None of the books she had read had prepared her for the exquisite, draining pain of childbirth. She was proud to have brought her son into the world
naturally, though it had been touch and go during those last hours. Now she wanted nothing more than to settle down and be a mother.

“The doctor doesn’t want Bev on her feet much for the next few days,” Brian began. “Do you want to go up and rest?”

“The last thing I want is to get into another bed.”

“Come on in and sit then, and Uncle Johnno will fix you a nice cup.”

“Beautiful.”

“I’ll go up and put the baby down.” Brian grinned at the way P.M. stood back and gawked. “He doesn’t bite, old man. He doesn’t have teeth.”

P.M. grinned and stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Just don’t ask me to touch him for a while.”

“Entertain Bev. She really had a rough go of it. We’ve got a nurse coming in this afternoon, but I don’t want her doing anything strenuous in the meantime.”

“That I can handle.” He wandered back toward the parlor.

“We’ll put the baby to sleep,” Emma announced and kept one hand on the edge of the blanket. “I can show you how.”

They started up the stairs with Emma leading the way.

The nursery had been finished with frilly white curtains and rainbows painted on the pale blue walls. The bassinet had a skirt of snowy Irish lace dotted with satin ribbons of pink and blue. An old-fashioned pram stood in the corner guarded by a six-foot teddy bear. An antique rocker waited by the window.

Emma stood beside the bassinet as her father laid Darren down. Once the little cap was removed, she reached in to carefully stroke his downy black hair.

“Will he wake up soon?”

“I don’t know. I get the feeling babies are pretty unpredictable.” Brian crouched down beside her. “We have to be very careful with him, Emma. He’s so helpless, you see.”

“I won’t let anything happen to him, not ever.” She put her hand on her father’s shoulder and watched the baby sleep.

E
MMA WASN’T SURE
she liked Miss Wallingsford. The young nurse had pretty red hair and nice gray eyes, but she rarely allowed Emma to touch baby Darren. Bev had interviewed dozens of applicants, and was well satisfied with Alice Wallingsford. She
was twenty-five, of good family, and had excellent references and a pleasing manner.

In the first months after Darren’s birth, Bev was so tired and moody Alice’s services became invaluable. More, she was another woman to talk with about things like teething, breast-feeding, and diets. Bev was as determined to gain back her willowy figure as she was to be a good mother. With Brian closed up writing songs with Johnno, or in meetings with Pete about the next recording, she struggled to make the home she wanted so badly for them.

She listened when he spoke of things like war in Asia, race riots in America, but her world centered on whether the sun would shine warm enough to take Darren for a stroll. She taught herself how to bake bread and tried her hand at knitting, while Brian wrote songs, and spoke out against war and bigotry.

As her body returned to normal, her mind eased. For Bev, this was the sweetest time of her life. Her son was chubbily healthy, and her husband treated her like a princess in bed.

With Darren at her breast and Emma at her feet, she rocked in the chair by the nursery window. There had been rain that morning, but the sun was out now, and bright. She thought that by afternoon she could take the baby and Emma for a walk in the park.

“I’m going to put him down now, Emma.” Bev shifted her blouse to cover her breast. “He’s fast asleep.”

“Can I hold him when he wakes up?”

“Yes, but only when I’m with you.”

“Miss Wallingsford never lets me hold him.”

“She’s just being cautious.” Bev smoothed the blanket over Darren before she stepped back. He was nearly five months old now, she thought. Already she couldn’t imagine her life without him. “Let’s go down and see about baking a nice cake. Your da loves chocolate cake.”

Knowing she had to be satisfied with that, Emma followed her out. Alice paused in the hallway, holding fresh linens for the nursery.

“He should sleep awhile, Alice,” Bev told her. “His tummy’s full.”

Yes, ma’am.

“Emma and I will be in the kitchen.”

An hour later, when they’d taken the cake out to cool, the
front door slammed. “Your da must be home early.” Bev automatically fluffed her hair before she hurried out of the kitchen to greet him. “Bri, I didn’t expect you until … what’s wrong?”

He was dead pale, his eyes red-rimmed and bleary. He shook his head as if to clear it as Bev held out her hands to him. “They’ve shot him.”

“What?” Her fingers clamped down hard on his. “Who? Shot who?”

“Kennedy. Robert Kennedy. They’ve killed him.”

“Oh my God. Oh sweet God.” She could only stand and stare, horrified. She remembered when the American president had been killed, and the shocked world had mourned. Now his brother, his bright, young brother.

“We were rehearsing for the album,” Brian began. “Pete came in. He’d heard it on the radio. None of us believed it, not until we’d heard it ourselves. Goddammit, Bev, just a few months ago it was King, and now this. What’s happening to the world?”

“Mr. McAvoy …” Alice started down the stairs, her face as white as her apron. “Is it true? Are you certain?”

“Yes. It should be just a nightmare, but it’s true.”

“Oh, that poor family.” Alice wrung her apron in her hands. “That poor mother.”

“He was a good man,” Brian managed. “He would have been their next president. He would have stopped that bloody war, I know it.”

It disturbed Emma to see tears in her father’s eyes. The adults were much too involved with their own grief to notice her. She didn’t know anyone named Kennedy, but she was sorry he was dead. She wondered if he had been a friend of her da’s. Maybe he’d been a soldier in the war her father always talked about.

“Alice, fix some tea. Please,” Bev murmured as she led Brian toward the parlor.

“What kind of a world have we brought our children into? When will they understand, Bev? When will they finally understand?”

Emma went upstairs to sit with Darren and leave the adults to their tears and tea.

They found her there, in the nursery, an hour later. She was
singing one of the lullabies Bev often sang at bedtime while she rocked Darren.

Panicked, Bev started in, only to have Brian catch her arm. “No, they’re fine. Can’t you see?” It eased some of the rawness inside him to watch them. Emma rocked with her feet dangling far from the floor, and the baby carefully supported in her arms.