Raising Baby Jane

Because Karen was scared, too.

Allie could see it and hear it in the panicky plans and the jittery movements. First and foremost, Karen was a mother and a wife. She wanted a big, loving, untidy family in her big Victorian house next to Connor’s. But she had a strong creative drive as well.

Her career as a commercial artist and photographer was important to her, this cover for a guaranteed bestseller was her biggest break so far. She needed to continue this success if she and John were to afford that parcel of kids they dreamed of. She didn’t want to blow it, and her camera had jammed, and of course she was scared.

“Sounds do-able,” Connor said. He gave an apparently casual glance at the horizon over the snow-covered mountains that ringed Diamond Lake and added, half under his breath, “More or less. If we’re lucky.” Then aloud he said, “Let’s go, Allie.”

“Don’t hold dinner for me,” Karen told Connor. “Although I’ll definitely be back.”

“Of course you will,” Connor soothed her, as if he hadn’t just spent five minutes trying to convince her she shouldn’t go in the first place. He hunched his shoulders against the growing chill. It was only just past four o’clock, but the day was darkening by the minute. There was bad weather in the forecast, although it hadn’t made its appearance yet.

“And for Jane you’ll need to—” She tucked a strand of light brown hair behind her ear and it stuck out messily, adding to her aura of nervous distraction.

“I know a fair bit about babies,” Connor soothed her again.

“Allie…doesn’t.”

“I gathered that,” he nodded.

He was actually a little put off by how cold Allie seemed toward her cute little niece. Maybe his positive first impressions were going to need some revision. She had neatly ducked the task of getting Jane into her snowsuit and Karen had done it instead, with a tight face. Was she angry at her sister’s lack of interest?

I would be, Connor decided inwardly. It doesn’t take much to show a little warmth toward a baby.

“Look after her—and Allie,” Karen said now.

“Oh. Sure. Of course.” Did Allie need looking after?

“Seriously, Connor.” For a moment, Karen actually held still long enough to look him in the eye. “She’s been through a really rough time, and she’s such a great person. Warm, funny, sincere.” She stopped suddenly, as if rethinking the wisdom of what she’d just said. “Anyway, I’ll be back pretty soon. I know what you said about the forecast, but look at that sky.” She waved in the direction where it was still blue. “Does that look like a storm to you?”

It didn’t, and Connor didn’t waste his breath pointing to the clouds that had begun to build behind them. She could well be right. The storm would pass to the west, or hold off altogether.

“And I have my cell phone,” Karen was saying. “Oh, this is such a nightmare!”

“No, it isn’t. Really, it isn’t.”

She hadn’t heard. “See you later.”

She was gone in a flurry of dirty roadside snow seconds later, and so he turned with a fatalistic shrug and began to walk back down the winding quarter mile of track to Diamond Lake.

Allie stood outside to greet him after he’d brought the snowmobile across the lake and wheeled it around to park it by the front door.

“You said this place was a cabin,” she said accusingly.

“Never did,” he returned lightly, following her inside. She peeled off her coat to reveal black pants tucked into damp leather boots, and a pale blue angora sweater that hugged her small frame.

He decided Allie was an assertive woman, despite her size! If he hadn’t heard it in her voice, he’d have seen it in the lift of her strong, but graceful jaw and in the electric flash of her dark eyes. Eyes like hot chocolate syrup, he could see, now that she’d unjammed that hat from her head.

“Karen said—”

“Karen might have said it was a cabin,” he pointed out, enjoying their trivial conflict. “But I didn’t. I probably used the word ‘place,’ as in, ‘my brother Tom’s place in the Adirondack Mountains.’ She must have assumed it was a cabin, as people tend to, when you mention mountains. I’m sorry if you’re disappointed.”

“Disappointed?” She shivered and stepped toward the warmth of the open fire, a sudden grin lighting up her face and draining away the tension in her that he still didn’t understand. “Are you kidding? It’s fabulous! And you even lit this fire! I’ve been toasting myself.”

“After what you said about blazing fires and good music and hot chocolate, how could I not?”

Knowing what a panic Karen was in, he hadn’t wasted time on coming into the house with Allie after he’d brought her here with baby Jane. And he’d deliberately left the fire he’d lit for her earlier to be a surprise. He didn’t know, at the time, what had prompted the impulse to light it in the first place. The central heating was very efficient.

Now he understood. He’d wanted to imagine her face lighting up like that when she first saw it, and he’d gotten his reward as it lit up again now. It changed her whole personality, hinted at a warmth and softness and sense of fun that he hadn’t seen much of yet in that small package of womanhood. Karen had mentioned those qualities, but he wasn’t going to take them on trust. He liked to make his own decisions.

“Well, it was wonderful,” she answered him. “Thank you. I haven’t even tried to look around or unpack.”

“You haven’t made yourself that hot chocolate yet?”

“No, as I said, I’ve just been toasting myself. And—and Jane.” She frowned.

Remembering what Karen had said about looking after her, and the rough time she’d been through—had she been ill, maybe?—he offered, “I’ll make one for you, after I’ve taken your stuff up to your room.”

“I can do that. I can make the hot chocolate, too, if you’ll show me the kitchen. And I can cook dinner. Karen brought up a frozen casserole and some other stuff. While you look after Jane.”

“Whatever.” He shrugged.

Back to that again. She really didn’t want to be with Jane, he could tell. He was aware of a disappointment nagging at his guts like stomach acid, and he took a few moments to analyze it.

Until recently he hadn’t been in one place long enough to get serious about marriage to any woman, and he wasn’t sure, at the moment, if he was going to be in one place for much longer. He’d been feeling a little restless lately, not totally sure that he’d made the right decision to hook up with his two brothers in their software company. There was still something missing. Something important. Maybe an intuitive voice inside him was telling him, once more, to move on.

Yet he was a family man, at heart. He had loving parents. He had seven brothers he was close to, two of whom had made happy marriages over the past couple of years. He had three little nieces of his own now. He liked extended families, loved his nieces. Deep down, he knew that his sense of family was the best medicine for the times when he had questions about himself and his life that he couldn’t answer, and he didn’t have any qualms about prescribing that same medicine for others.

An outwardly healthy, capable, in-control woman like this should at least like her own sister’s child, he considered. No one was asking her to adopt the kid! What was her problem?

Fortunately, Allie hadn’t noticed his look of disapproval. She was over at the window, staring out at the gathering darkness, and she didn’t seem to notice his curiosity, either. How long was she going to stand there like that?

Minutes, apparently.

Jane was on her tummy on a receiving blanket spread out on the floor at a safe distance from the fire. The central heating had warmed the place up fast, as had the roaring fire in the fireplace. Jane was cooing at the leaping brightness and banging a toy. Needs fully taken care of, but utterly ignored. Allie just kept staring out the window. For some reason it seemed incredibly sad.

Instinctively, he went up to her, needing to understand her. He liked Karen a lot. She was warm, enthusiastic, full of energy and optimism…except when panicking about a jammed camera. Why was her sister so different and difficult?

He’d almost reached Allie when she turned from the window at last. “Those clouds are coming over pretty fast. Is it going to snow?”

“It’s starting to look like it,” he agreed. “I warned Karen about the forecast, but even half an hour ago it looked like it’d probably hold off, and she was desperate about that camera.”

“She’ll make it back, though, won’t she? They won’t close the roads. She guaranteed me she’d make it back tonight!”

The appeal and fear in her face hit him like an electric shock. “Then she’ll do her best, I guess,” was all he could say. It sounded lame in the face of her need.

Something about this situation had her completely terrified. Was it him? He didn’t think so, but there was something. Karen’s appeal to him to “look after” her suddenly made a whole lot more sense. Karen had known Allie would feel this way. How? Why?

And why did he have such a clear, powerful intuition that the answers were going to matter to him?

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