The Good Father

“I have to run,” I said to James. “Need to see how things are going next door.”

“Of course, of course,” he said, and I heard him say to the men as I headed out the front door, “Isn’t she lovely?” The words made my eyes burn. The people in this family were sometimes two-faced, sometimes back-stabbing, sometimes calculating. But one thing I felt sure of: they loved me. And as I walked across the yard to the B and B, I had to ask myself if a lie of omission was just as bad as the outright lie Debra had told Dale.

In the B and B’s kitchen, I started putting together the casserole for tomorrow’s breakfast, thinking of James’s sweet words and what a miracle my life was turning out to be. My girlfriend Joy, whom I’d known from the cardiac rehab center where we’d both been patients, had been the one to tell me about the job opening at the B and B. She’d been working as a waitress at a Beaufort restaurant and she encouraged me to leave Chapel Hill and move in with her in Beaufort. I’d been at loose ends. Dad was pushing me to go to college. But while college was definitely in my plans, I wanted a taste of freedom. I felt as though I’d been locked in a closet of a life for years, first by my illness, then by my recovery. After my year of rehab, I didn’t feel like studying. I just wanted to enjoy being alive for once.

After the family hired me, Dale gave me a crash course about Beaufort so I’d at least know more than my guests about the area. He walked me along the waterfront, introducing me to every shop owner, pointing out the boats, telling me about their owners. In the distance, we could see a few of the ponies standing in the surf on Carrot Island. Dale and I fell in love on those walks. I was moved by how much he adored Beaufort and how much he wanted to do for its people. Even then, he was planning to be mayor one day, though I didn’t realize he’d be running so soon. I was so attracted to him. I’d forgotten that part of myself while I was sick. The sexual part. It’s so weird when your entire life is consumed by illness. Sometimes I’d felt like a heart instead of a person. With Dale, I felt the rest of me coming back to life. When he took my hand, I felt every cell in my fingers as though I’d just noticed them for the first time ever. And his beautiful gray eyes! I hadn’t yet seen those eyes turn stormy back then. Oh, wow, could you see thunderclouds in his eyes sometimes! Dale had a gentleness to him, a real honest warmth, but there was steel behind it. He didn’t bend easily, and I was learning that if I wanted to do something he didn’t want—to change the way we handled something at the B and B, maybe, or even to watch a movie he wasn’t crazy about watching—I had to approach the subject carefully and slowly if I stood a chance of breaking through that stubbornness. But there were compromises in any relationship. I’d learned that growing up with my father. This was nothing new.

My father was thrilled when I told him I was seeing Dale Hendricks. Since he taught political science, my father had always been tuned in to state politics and he knew exactly who Dale was: heir apparent of the Hendricks empire. Daddy had wanted me to be taken care of. He knew if I became a Hendricks, he’d never have to worry about me again.

I was tired of talking about my heart by the time Dale gave me my Beaufort tour, but he asked tons of questions about it and I answered them all. He said I was amazing, and I said the people who were really amazing were the donor’s family. And then I cried, which is what I always did when I thought about the people I would never know who gave me the greatest gift I’d ever receive. We’d been sitting in the public gazebo looking out over Taylor’s Creek, dusk falling around us and the colors of the sunset in the air and the water. Every single moment of my life was beautiful, but that one was like a painting in my mind, permanently hanging on the inside of my forehead. Dale put his arm around me. He brushed away one of my tears with the back of his fingers. Then he turned my face toward him and kissed me. It had been so long since I’d been kissed, I’d forgotten how the simple touch of lips could send sparks to every other part of my body. How it could make me lose all reason. How it could lead me to do things that were a little crazy, like sleeping with a man I barely knew. Yes, we walked back to Hendricks House, quietly climbed the outside stairs that led to his private apartment, and I was pulling his shirt out of his pants before we’d even reached his bedroom.

I smiled at the memory of that night as I covered the casserole with foil and slid it into the refrigerator. Then I picked up my cell phone and dialed Dale’s number.

“Can you come over earlier tonight?” I asked, leaning back against the counter. “I miss you.”

I could hear my baby crying from somewhere in the B and B, but I couldn’t get to her. I knew I was dreaming, but that didn’t make me feel any better. I ran through the house, which in the dream was made up of rooms that led into other rooms that led into yet more rooms, some of them so small I had to crawl through them on my hands and knees, others as big as a ballroom. The crying was heart-wrenching—she needed me! The sound seemed to come from one direction, then another, and I couldn’t find her. When I looked down at the T-shirt I was wearing in the dream, I had two round wet patches over my nipples.

“Robin!” The voice sounded far away. “Wake up, Robbie. You’re dreaming.”

I opened my eyes. In the darkness, the only thing I could see was the blue LED light from the small TV on my dresser. I was winded from running in my dream and confused about where I was. The hospital? My childhood bedroom? I touched my left breast through my tank top. Dry.

“Sit up, honey.” It was Dale’s voice. I was in the B and B, and Dale’s body was nearly wrapped around mine as he lifted my shoulders from the bed.

“Are you all right?” he asked. “You’re breathing so hard. Is your heart—”

“It was just a dream,” I said, to myself as much as to him. I knew my heart was fine. It was probably stronger than his. It had come from a fifteen-year-old girl killed in a car accident. When I had nightmares, they were usually about her. I dreamed about her last moments, lying injured and alone in a car that had flipped over into a ravine. I dreamed about the life pouring out of her body and into mine. Sometimes I dreamed we both lived and I’d wake up feeling this impossible joy until I remembered.

“Whew.” I leaned forward and Dale massaged the back of my neck. I was embarrassed. “I hope I didn’t scream or anything.” I tried to laugh. “Freak out the guests.” When Dale and I became lovers, we experimented to see how much noise could be heard from my room in the guestroom right above. Dale went upstairs and I stayed in my room and made erotic-sounding noises and rocked the bed to make it squeak. He promised me he couldn’t hear a thing, but the whole thing cracked both of us up. “Was I actually screaming?” I asked now.

“No,” he said. “You were just whimpering and breathing hard.” He locked his arms around me and rocked me a little. He could be so sweet. “Tell me about the dream,” he said.

I hesitated a moment but could think of no reason not to tell him. “I had a baby in the dream,” I said. “She was crying and I couldn’t get to her. I couldn’t find my way through the house to her. It was very … I just wanted to get to her.” My tears were a sudden surprise and I was so glad it was dark in the room. This wasn’t the first time I’d had a dream about my baby in the two weeks since Hannah was born. During the daytime, I was fine. No problem. But when I was asleep and had no control over my thoughts, there she was, crying for me from a distance and I could never, ever reach her. In one of the dreams, I was upset that I didn’t know the baby’s name, just as I didn’t know the name of my own child. What had Travis named her? Was she happy and healthy? I knew she didn’t have my heart problem. My father told me they checked her out right after she was born and she was fine, which was a miracle because of the medications I’d been on when I got pregnant with her. Most of the time, I could push that baby out of my mind. Now, suddenly, she was trying to get in.

Dale laughed a little. “You’re spending way too much time with Alissa and Hannah,” he said. “Seriously, though,” he added quickly, “you’ve been such a help to her. She’s really … She’s not adjusting that well to motherhood, is she.”

“I think her hormones are still screwed up,” I said. “Once she’s back in school with her friends, she’ll probably be fine.” I didn’t really believe it. Alissa was right to be nervous about her future. None of her friends would have to run home after school to take care of a baby.

“You’re going to be such a great mother,” he said and I was glad it was so dark because I didn’t want him to see how I cringed. I’d told him I might never be able to have children. I’d been honest about it. The antirejection meds made it extremely risky. My doctor had said having children was “unlikely but not impossible” for me, and Dale seemed to have completely wiped the “unlikely” part of that sentence from his mind. “We’ll find a way,” he’d said, and I’d let it go, like I always let go of anything that might lead to conflict. I wanted children, but I would have been happy adopting. I knew from the way Dale and his parents reacted when Alissa said she wanted to place her baby up for adoption that it wasn’t an idea they’d take to easily.

I thought I heard the baby again, way in the distance, even though I was now wide-awake. I leaned away from Dale to turn on the light on my night table. The darkness was getting to me.

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