Baby Business: Baby Steps

“Sweetie,” Mercy said gently, “why don’t you call your mom? Let her come help you out.”

“I will, I will. Soon. But one does not spring potentially life-altering news on my mother without a plan. The woman has turned worrying into an art form.”

“I hear ya there. At least let me set up the portacrib—”

Dana took her friend by the arm and steered her toward her door. Not that it wouldn’t make sense to let her stay. Most of Mercy’s sisters were spittin’ out babies like popcorn. No matter when one visited the Zamora household, it was awash in little people. But while Mercy’s presence would have been a great help in many ways, Dana wouldn’t have been able to think. And thinking was the one thing she most needed to do.

And she really didn’t want any witnesses when C.J. arrived. Not because she was going to kill him—she didn’t think—but because Ethan’s sudden appearance had turned a nonrelationship into … well, she didn’t know what, actually. But so much for never having to see the guy again.

Thirty seconds and a heartfelt hug later, Dana was finally alone.

With a baby.

She zipped to her bedroom, rummaging through her bottom drawer for a pair of old shorts, and a faded UNM T-shirt, changing into both at warp speed. The gurgling, drooling six-month-old pushed himself up on his elbows when she walked back to the living room; Dana squatted down in front of the playpen as if inspecting a new life form. Yesterday, she had no idea this child even existed. Now she was responsible for him, maybe for a few days, maybe for the rest of her life.

The thought slammed into her so hard she nearly toppled over. One day, she figured she’d adopt a child or two, when she was ready, both financially and emotionally. At the moment, she was neither. She’d always assumed she’d have some prep time for accepting a child into her life. As, you know, part of a couple?

So much for that idea.

A particularly ripe odor wafted to her nostrils. A byproduct of the earlier grunting, no doubt.

“Let me guess. You messed your pants.”

Ethan grinned and cooed at her, lifting his head at exactly the right angle for Dana to get a good gander at his eyes. Lake-blue, flecked with gold around the pupils, exactly like you-know-whose. On a sigh, she stood and hefted the smelly little dear out of his cage and over to the sofa, where she changed his diaper with surprising aplomb and less than a dozen wipies.

“Now I bet you’re hungry, right?”

In answer, Ethan stuck his fist in his mouth and started gnawing on it with the enthusiasm of a lion ripping into fresh wildebeest. Dana picked up the much sweeter smelling child and plopped him back into his car seat, which she figured was as safe a place as any to try to shovel food down his gullet. But what food, she wondered, might that be?

“Next time you dump a kid on me, Trish,” she muttered, ransacking the paper bag full of little clanking jars Mercy had helped her pick out at Albertson’s on their way home, “don’t forget the dag-nabbed feeding instructions!”

She yanked out ajar, holding it up to the baby hunk with the killer eyes. “Carrots?”

Ethan gurgled, then let out a loud “Bababababababa” while waving his arms. Then he chortled. Not giggled. Chortled.

Dana sort of chortled back, popping open the jar. “Carrots it is, then.”

Except carrots, it wasn’t. It was like trying to shove a video into a malfunctioning VCR—it slid right back out.

She opened another jar, held it up. “Peaches?”

That got a slightly more forceful rejection.

“O-kaaay … maybe orange stuff isn’t your thing. How about green?”

Green beans went in … and green beans oozed out, accompanied by the quintessential “Get real, lady,” expression.

Dana quickly discovered that baby food didn’t exactly come in a wealth of colors. Or tastes. But she gamely tried creamed corn, chicken (that, she couldn’t get past the baby’s lips), squash, pears and beets.

Pears and beets went down. And down and down and down, until Dana wondered if babies, like puppies, would simply stuff themselves until they got so full they threw—

“Oh, gross!”

—up.

At least four times more food came back out as had gone in. Krakatoa had nothing on this kid, she mused while frantically trying to catch the maroon-and-pear colored mess that kept spewing forth from those little rosebud lips.

Three saturated napkins later, Ethan chortled again. Not seeing the humor this time, Dana did not. And she was hot and getting hungry herself. Not only that, but it was beginning to sink in with alarming speed that no one was going to come take this vomiting bundle of joy away in an hour or two. And what if he didn’t sleep through the night?

With a little groan, Dana let her head clunk onto the tabletop, not realizing how close she was to a pair of enterprising little hands.

“Ye-ouch!” Her own hands flew to her head, prying five tiny and amazingly strong fingers from her hair, which was now liberally infused with regurgitated Gerber 1st Foods. Well, hell. Somebody, somewhere, probably paid big bucks for this look. She got it for free.

Rubbing her scalp—man, the kid had a grip—she regarded her little charge, now in deep conversation with the Tiffany-style lamp over the table. She skootched over, out of Clutcher’s way, and laid her head down again.

So many questions and thoughts swarmed in her brain, she couldn’t sort them out, let alone act on any of them. For tonight, her top priority was keeping the child alive. She was off all day tomorrow, and Ethan had to sleep sometime, right?

Dana lifted her head far enough to prop it in her palm, reaching out to the baby with her other hand. Ethan grabbed Dana’s fingers and tried to stuff them into his mouth. The two little teeth on the bottom made their presence known really fast, but she felt ridges on top, too.

“You getting yourself some new teeth, big guy?” she said with a tired smile.

Ethan chortled.

Dana’s heart did a slow, careful turn in her chest. She stood and scooped the baby out of his car seat, cuddling him on her lap. Ethan settled right in, tucking his head underneath Dana’s chin, and her heart flopped again, more quickly.

This was all too unpredictable for her taste. Her cousin might change her mind, C. J. might want … actually, God knew what C.J. might want.

She cursed under her breath, noting that more no-nos had slipped past her lips in the past several hours than in the entire thirty-two years that had preceded them. Insecurities and turmoil and all the unanswerables swirled and knotted together into a nebulous anger no less fierce for its vagueness. Her eyes stung as she realized how furious she was, at Trish, at C.J. (yes, even though he probably didn’t know about the baby), at fate.

At herself.

All her life, she realized tiredly, she’d let people push her around. All her life, she’d been the one voted most likely to say “sure” when she really wanted to say “I don’t have time” or “I’m not comfortable with that idea” or even, simply, “I don’t want to.” Suddenly, she was a kid again, hearing her mother’s gushing to some neighbor or teacher or saleslady who’d admired Dana’s impeccable manners. “Oh, Dana’s never given us a single moment’s worry,” she’d say. “Always does what she’s supposed to do, never gives us any lip. Just a perfect little angel!”

“Just ask Dana—she won’t mind …”

“You can always count on Dana for a job well done and a smile to go with it …”

“You know, I’ve never heard Dana complain, not even once….”

“Dana won’t be a problem. She’d go along with whatever we decide to do. Won’t you, Dana?”

She pushed herself off the sofa, hugging Ethan, realizing there was nowhere to go. So she stood in place, jiggling the baby, fuming and muttering and cussing—but not so Ethan could really hear her—over the finches’ agitated twittering.

Okay, that’s it—Dana Malone’s doormat days were o-ver. No more swallowing her anger when someone pissed her off. No more smiling when she really felt like popping someone upside the head. No more Ms. Nice Lady. She was mad, dammit, and God help the next person who got in her way—

The doorbell rang.

She marshaled all her newfound fury into one hopefully emasculating glare and marched to the door.

The way her topknot hung by a thread over her right ear was C.J.’s first clue that something was very, very wrong.

The baby slung on her hip was the second.

Her voice mail had been short, and not exactly sweet. “Meet me at my place anytime after six,” she’d said, then left her address, finishing with, “And believe me, it’s not what you think.”

“You … wanted to see me?”

Wordlessly, Dana spun around and stomped back inside the apartment, which he cautiously took as permission to enter.

His first horrified thought, when he saw the room, was that she’d been burgled. After he swallowed his heart, however, he realized the damage seemed superficial. In fact, it was all baby stuff. A swing and playpen fought for space between a peach-colored armchair, a glass-topped coffee table; diapers—both clean and dirty, from what he could tell—littered the pastel, Southwest design sofa; an infant car seat took up half the blond dining table, the rest of which was covered by no less than a dozen open jars of baby food and a mountain of dirty napkins or paper towels or something.

She’d gone into the kitchenette, where she dampened a cloth to wipe off the squirming baby’s cheeks. Said child giggled, somehow snatched the wet rag out of Dana’s hand and tossed it with unerring accuracy smack into her face.

A finely honed survival instinct told C.J. to proceed with extreme caution.

“Babysitting?” he asked.

“Funny you should say that.” Dana caught the cloth as it fell, slapping it onto the counter. Hot little flames sparked in her eyes. “Trish breezed back into town today.”

C.J. literally felt the blood drain from his face.

“Oh?”

“Yeah. She brought me a present. Now, it’s a very nice present, to be sure, but heaven knows I wasn’t expecting anything like this. Nor did I realize I wasn’t going to be given any say in whether or not I even wanted this present.”

He looked at the baby, who flashed him a wide, gummy smile, then back at Dana. Somehow, even her hair seemed redder. Okay, Trish in town probably equaled Trish told Dana. But she’d have hardly asked him to come over about that, for crying out loud. And what did the baby have to do with anything?

“I’m sorry,” C.J. said, “but am I missing something?”

Her mouth set, she swept past him on her way from kitchen to living room, bending awkwardly with the child still balanced on her hip in order to pull something out of her handbag. Then she marched over to him and smacked a triple-folded sheet of paper into his palm.

Acid etched at the lining of his stomach as he unfolded the paper, burst into flame when he read it. The first word out of his mouth was particularly choice.

“Yeah. That was about my reaction, too,” Dana said. “Well?”

“Well, what?”

“Did you and my cousin …”

“You mean, she didn’t tell you?”

“She didn’t tell me squat.”

Still staring at the paper, C.J. pushed out a sigh. “Once, Dana. Right after she’d quit. And we both knew it was a mistake.”

He couldn’t quite tell if that was disappointment or flat-out, go-to-hell-and-don’t-come-back hatred that was making her eyes so dark. “And does the date correspond to that once?”

“Yes. But …” He shook his head, as if doing so would make it all go away. “This can’t be right.”

“Why not?”

He lifted his eyes to Dana’s. “Because I had a vasectomy. Five years ago.”

Silence stretched between them, painful and suffocating. Until, on a soft little “Oh,” Dana dropped onto the sofa with the baby on her lap.

The baby, C.J. thought, with eyes exactly like his.

But then, lots of babies had blue eyes. Tons of babies. Millions, even.

And somewhere, some deity or other was grinning his—or, more likely her—ass off.

“Wow,” Dana said. “You weren’t kidding about not seeing babies in your future.”

C.J.’s mouth pulled tight. “That had been the plan. But—”

“Oh, geez, sorry to have come down so hard on you. I should have realized … Especially knowing my cousin …” She frowned. “What?”

“I think I need to sit.”

“Uh … sure. Make yourself at home.”

C.J. shoehorned himself into a half-blocked club chair across from the sofa and stared again at the birth certificate. At the letters that formed, of all the crazy things, his name. Yeah, as screwups went, this one was in a league of its own.

He supposed Trish could have been lying, otherwise why wouldn’t she have surfaced sooner? Still, something deep in his gut told him she wasn’t.

“C.J.?”

He let out a humorless laugh, then collapsed back into the chair, meeting her gaze. “You really believe me, don’t you? About Ethan. Not being mine.”

“Um … yeah. Shouldn’t I?”

“No. I mean, yes, I’m telling you the truth. But for all you know, I could be some bastard who’d say anything just to get out of accepting responsibility.”

“Are you?”

“A bastard?” he said with a weak smile.

“Trying to duck responsibility.”

He shook his head.

“I didn’t think so,” she said, and he hauled in a huge breath.

“The thing is … I’ve been a bad boy.”

She smirked. “I don’t think you want to go there.”

“No, I mean …” He exhaled. “The procedure’s ninety-nine percent effective. About the same as the Pill. Which your cousin told me she was on, by the way. Why are you shaking your head?”

“Trish couldn’t take the Pill, she had bad reactions to the hormones.”

C.J. stared at Dana for a moment, then scrubbed the heel of his hand across his jaw. “I’ll have to get back to you on that piece of information. But as I was saying—”

“Ninety-nine percent.”

“Yes.”

She was quiet for a long time. Then: “Bummer.”

In spite of himself, he felt his mouth pull into a smile. “See, I’m supposed to have things checked every so often. To make sure …”

“I get the picture,” she said, flushing slightly. “I take it you—”

“Oh, I did. Every six months for the first two years. No worries, they said.”

“But they were wrong?”

“Well, something sure as hell was.”

She made a funny noise, like a balloon beginning to leak air. “No wonder you look kind of sick. So you really didn’t know?”

His own anger, at Trish, at circumstances, but mostly at himself, erupted. “Of course I didn’t know! How could I know about something that wasn’t supposed to happen, for God’s sake?”

She hauled the baby up onto her shoulder, as if shielding him. “Sorry. I had to ask. Because you’re right. For all I know—which isn’t a whole lot, obviously—maybe you are a master at sidestepping consequences and I’m a fool for believing otherwise.”

“You’re not a fool, Dana. You’re nobody’s fool.”

“Unlike some people in this room,” she said, and he shut his eyes, his head on the back of the chair.

“I suppose I had that coming.”

She snorted softly, then said, “Hold on a minute. Did you tell Trish you’d been … fixed?”

“It didn’t come up. What I mean is,” he said quickly, pushing his head forward to look at her again, “since she volunteered that she was taken care of first, there didn’t seem to be any reason to mention it.”

“Or to use a condom?”

“You know, I think I liked things better when I thought you were a shrinking violet.” She glowered at him. “No, Dana, we didn’t use anything else. Since we’d both recently had insurance physicals, there didn’t seem to be any point. Especially since I thought, oddly enough, we were doubly safe.”

“One chance in a hundred is still pretty slim odds,” Dana said, nuzzling the baby’s soft, flyaway hair, and C.J. forced himself to take a good look at this kid who may well have beaten the odds, just for the dubious honor of being his son. For a moment, the room spun, as though the earth had shifted under his feet.

“Oh, God,” he said on a rush of breath. “What the hell do I know about taking care of a kid?”

Dana had wanted so badly to hold on to her anger, to not feel sorry for the obviously shattered man in front of her. Staying angry with him gave her some focus for her own turmoil, at least. But the shock contorting his features tore her apart. She’d been left with the child, true—but at least she’d always wanted children. C.J., on the other hand, had every reason to feel duped. By everybody.

Still and all, he was a big boy. A big boy who should be more than acquainted with the actions-have-consequences concept by now. Take enough swings at the ball, sooner or later you’re gonna break a window.

Even, apparently, one made out of safety glass.

However, in answer to his question, she now swept one arm out, indicating the disaster-stricken apartment. And herself. “And does this look like the living space of someone who does know what she’s doing?”

“But you’re such a natural with kids.”

A slightly panicked laugh burst from her mouth. “Loving them and keeping them alive are not the same thing. I’m an only child, never had any little siblings or anything to practice on. I never even babysat, because I was too busy being the nerdy straight-A student. So I don’t have anything more to go on than you do.”

“I somehow doubt that,” C.J. said, and there was no mistaking the bitterness edging his words. But now was not the time to pursue it. Especially when he asked, “Why do you think your cousin lied about being on the Pill? Why would she have taken that chance?”

Dana lowered Ethan onto his tummy in the playpen, then sat on the sofa in front of it, laying her cheek on her folded arms across the padded top. “Logic has never exactly been Trish’s strong suit,” she said, watching the baby. “Who knows? Maybe she …” She gulped down the pain. “Maybe she wanted to get pregnant.”

“That’s nuts.”

“No, that’s Trish.”

“Then why didn’t she tell me about the baby, for God’s sake?”

She shifted to look at him. “Because this wasn’t about you, it was about whatever was going on in my cousin’s head at the time. Although those I’d-rather-eat-scorpions-than-become-a-father vibes you give off probably didn’t help. And no, it wouldn’t even occur to her to fight that. Staying power isn’t exactly her strong suit. Heck, sitting through a two-hour-long movie is a strain.”

C.J. pushed out a groan. “And you have no idea where she is?”

“Not a clue. I did talk to the police, however,” she said, filling him in on the events leading up to her becoming Ethan’s caretaker, including her chat with the officer that morning.

“You think she’ll come back?”

Dana leaned to one side to see if his face gave more of a clue than his voice as to what he was really thinking, then stood up, retrieved the note. Handed it to him with a, “For what it’s worth.”

She watched him read it, watched his expression grow more solemn.

“C.J., until you know for sure that Ethan’s yours, maybe you shouldn’t get yourself anymore tied up in knots than you already are.”

Haunted eyes met hers. “And if he’s not?”

“Then I’ll deal,” she said quietly. “Somehow.”

He held her gaze in his for several seconds. “And if he is, then so will I.” He handed the note back to her, his gaze drifting to Ethan. “What a crappy thing to do to a kid,” he said, the steeliness underlying the softly spoken words sending a shudder up her spine. “No way am I turning my back on my own son, Dana. I’m not hurting financially, he’ll have everything he’ll ever need. But if she wanted you to have custody …” He shook his head, letting the sentence trail off unfinished.

Several seconds passed before she could speak. But no way in hell was she going to just sit here and nod and go, “Okay, sure, whatever.” That Dana didn’t live here anymore. “Excuse me? What happened to ‘no way am I turning my back on my own son’? I didn’t shove that birth certificate in your face in exchange for your checkbook, you big turkey!”

“But Trish left him with you!” he said, and a raw anguish she hadn’t seen before blistered in those deep blue eyes. “Not me.”

And with that, comprehension dawned in the deep, muddled recesses of her brain.

Dana sucked in a steadying breath and said, “C.J., my cousin is so many sandwiches short of a picnic she’d starve to death. But she certainly knew I’d recognize your name, and that I’d contact you. So in her own weird way, I don’t think she deliberately meant to shut you out.”

“Never mind that that’s exactly what she did,” C.J. said coldly, and Dana thought, Ah-hah.

“In any case,” she said, “we’ll deal with Trish later. Maybe. But right now, this is about Ethan. And if he is yours, damned if I’m letting you off the hook like she did.”

C.J. flinched as though she’d poked him with a cattle prod. “Dammit, nobody’s letting anybody ‘off the hook!’ Believe me,” he said, his mouth contorted, “nobody, nobody, knows more than I do that this is about a helluva lot more than money. But pardon me for needing more than fifteen minutes to get used to the idea of being somebody’s father!”

The last word came out strangled. His throat working overtime, C.J.’s head snapped toward Ethan, sprawled on his tummy in the playpen. The baby had been contentedly gumming a teething ring; now he lifted his face to them, his drooly grin infused with a trusting curiosity that twisted Dana’s heart.

She shifted her own gaze to C.J., thinking, This is not a bad man. Screwed up, maybe, but not bad. And expecting him to turn on a dime was not only unfair, but unrealistic. Especially when she remembered how she’d felt after receiving her own life-altering news not all that long ago. It takes time to regain your balance after getting walloped by a two-by-four.

At that, Dana rammed her fingers through her hair; it finally succumbed to the inevitable and came completely undone. “Look,” she began again, more gently, “this is a really bizarre situation, and I don’t know any more than you do what the next step’s going to be. I mean, it all hangs on what you find out, right?”

“Yeah. I suppose.”

“All righty then. So. Ethan and I are good for now. And you …” she pushed herself away from the playpen to take C.J. by the arm and steer him toward her door “… need to go home.”

Genuine astonishment flashed in his eyes. “You’re throwing me out?”

“What I’m doing, is giving you some time to adjust. Trust me, you’ll thank me later.”

At her doorway—which he did a remarkable job of filling—he twisted, his eyes grazing hers, rife with emotion. “Later, hell. I’m thanking you now.”

“Whatever.” Then, with a half-assed shove, she turned him back around. “But if you don’t leave immediately,” she said, so tired she was beginning to wobble, “I’ll have to sic the birds on you.”

C.J. looked over her shoulder at Ethan for a full five seconds, gave a sharp nod and left. Dana leaned back against the closed door, watching the small person happily smacking the bottom of the playpen, and thought, Well, this has been one swell day, hasn’t it?

Back home, C.J. turned on the air-conditioning, ignored his mail, which Guadalupe had left neatly stacked on the kitchen island, and changed into a pair of holey jeans he couldn’t imagine any woman putting up with. From the center of the bed, the cat did the one-eyed stare routine and it hit C.J. with the force of a tidal wave that his unencumbered bachelor days were, in all likelihood, history. Because while he’d be an idiot not to get proof that Ethan was his, he’d be a lot more surprised to find out the baby wasn’t.

C.J.’s stomach growled. His bare feet softly thudding against the uneven, cool tiles, he stalked to the kitchen and threw together a sandwich without paying much attention to the contents. One set of nitrates was as deadly as another, right?