Annie's Song (27 page)

“You surely have a grasp of the rudiments.”

“Rudiments? Leave this room, and I’ll settle the matter by lookin’ in yon bedcovers for an egg, mark me words.”

“You wouldn’t’!”

“I would.”

Alex narrowed an eye at her. “Maddy, someone has to explain the facts of life to the girl, and it certainly can’t be me. We can’t let her continue to believe she’s about to lay an egg, for Christ’s sake. It’s—well, it’s—” He broke off for lack of a word. Finally, he finished with, “Irresponsible, that’s what it is.”

“Then tend yer responsibilities.”

“This sort of thing is not my responsibility, not given the sort of relationship she and I have, which is no relationship at all.”

“Coward.”

“Don’t be absurd. It wouldn’t bother me to discuss the subject with her. The concern here is how she will feel if I do.”

Maddy folded her arms beneath her breasts. “Then have her mama come talk to her. The way I see it,

‘twas Mrs. Trimble’s duty to educate the lass in the first place, and seein’ as how she failed in that, it’s her mess to tidy.”

“Over my dead body.”

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“Well, then?”

Alex threw up his hands. “All right, fine! But if she gets upset, the blame for it will be on your doorstep, not mine. A subject of this nature would best be handled by a kindly older woman, someone she trusts.”

Feigning a confidence he was far from feeling, he took Annie by the hand, led her over to the table, pushed her gently down onto a chair, and sat across from her. Resting his folded arms on the table, he leaned forward, holding her bewildered gaze with his. “Annie, honey, there are a couple of things you need to understand.” Listening from the sidelines, Maddy harrumphed and clicked her tongue. Alex chose to ignore her sarcasm. He would do this, and with a minimum of fuss. “Babies and chicks—well, there are a few basic differences in the way they’re born.”

Those eyes of hers. Alex looked into them and felt as if he were shriveling inside. How could he possibly enlighten her about something so ... He couldn’t even think of a word. Base? Personal? It was definitely not a subject men usually broached to young ladies. The trick, he decided, would be to give her an adequate explanation without becoming too explicit. Simple terms, that was his aim.

“You understand that there’s a baby inside you. Correct?”

She nodded.

So far, so good. Acutely aware that Maddy was watching with a smug look on her face, Alex tapped his fingertips on the tabletop. “Mothers,” he said softly, “have a special place inside them made just for babies. That’s where their babies stay and grow until they’re ready to be born, in that special place. Do you understand?”

Again, Annie nodded. Alex wanted to look anywhere but into her eyes. He saw so many questions there, and so much innocence. If he said the wrong thing—just one wrong word—he could send her into a panic and make this pregnancy one of dread for her.

“Good. I’m glad you understand.” He tapped his fingers a little more sharply against the wood.

“Anyway, when your baby is finally ready to be born,” he went on, “the special place inside of you will open up and the baby will come out.” At her look of bewilderment, he quickly added, “It’s a very wonderful thing, the birth of a baby! Everyone will be really happy, and we—” He broke off and threw a helpless look at Maddy. “We’ll probably have a big party to celebrate. Won’t we, Maddy?”

“A party.” Maddy pumped her chin up and down. “We’ll have a shindig such as ye never saw, to be sure. A grand day, it’ll be. A grand day!”

Annie’s cheeks flushed with pleasure, and her face went radiant with a sweet smile. Convinced that he had said just enough to clear up her misconceptions without adding to them, Alex was about to heave a sigh of profound relief when she frowned slightly, poked a finger into her bellybutton, and arched inquisitive brows at him.

Rat-a-tat-tat. Rat-a-tat-tat, his fingers went on the tabletop, his gaze riveted to her navel. He greatly feared that if she didn’t stop drilling her finger so deeply into the depression, she might do herself an injury. Damn. Thinking back to his childhood, Alex could distinctly recall his own youthful misconceptions about the birth process, namely his belief that the baby inside his stepmother’s protruding belly would make its exit through her navel. At the time, it had seemed a perfectly reasonable explanation to him, and to this day, he could remember how shocked he had been when an older boy had told him differently.

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“Not there, Annie,” he hastened to explain in a gravelly voice. “The baby doesn’t come out there.”

She ceased poking her navel and fastened a perplexed gaze on his, clearly awaiting further explanation.

Rat-a-tat-tat. Trying to think of a suitable way he might explain—or, for that matter, any way that he might explain without terrifying her—Alex swallowed a lump in his throat that felt as big as a rubber ball.

Then, keeping his expression carefully blank, he pushed up from the table, brushed past Maddy, and descended on Annie’s bed.

“Now what are ye about?” Maddy demanded.

Alex’s only response was to gently lift one of Annie’s blankets and give it a careful shake.

Alex spent the remainder of the morning closeted in his study. After making arrangements for the attic to be cleaned, he dispatched two messages, one to Dr. Daniel Muir requesting that he pay a house call to Montgomery Hall posthaste, another to Hooperville’s one and only dressmaker, Pamela Grimes, saying that he wished to have his wife fitted for a new wardrobe.

Only after those three details were taken care of could Alex settle down to what he truly wanted to do, which was to pore over the Montgomery Ward & Company catalog for things he might buy Annie. Ear horns were at the top of his list. The company carried three styles, a trumpet-type contraption that came in three graduating sizes, a carryable horn in a convenient pocket size, and a conversation tube, one end of which sported a mouthpiece for the speaker, the other a listening device to fit into the deaf person’s ear. Uncertain which type might work the best, Alex ordered a dozen of each style and size, determined that Annie would have at least one effective hearing aid in every room of his house. Other people had their ears with them wherever they went, he reasoned, and so should she.

The cost of so many ear trumpets was substantial, and Alex had always prided himself on being a frugal man. When it came to Annie, however, money was the least of his concerns. She had been given so little in her young life, and he had it in his power to change that. The way he saw it, he had been working his ass off all his life. And for what? So he might spoil his brother? Now, for the first time, Alex had someone in his life who truly had needs. He wanted to fulfill every single one of them.

Every time he remembered her parlor in the attic, his guts knotted. From this day on, he was making it his priority to turn the girl’s fantasies into realities. Beautiful clothes. Delicate china. Music ...

Remembering her enchantment with his old flute, Alex flipped to the musical section of the catalog.

Before he was finished, he had ordered her a six-octave Windsor organ, a rosewood concertina with leather-bound bellows, a harmonica, a kazoo, a set of three-octave orchestra bells, a French horn, and a rack of musical sleigh bells.

From the music section he went to the toy section and ordered a toy zither, a game of Hopity, a parlor tennis set, a Ding Dong Bell game, tiddledywinks, a combination set of board games, including fish pond, checkers, and dominoes.

After tallying the amount of his order, Alex went from his desk to the liquor cabinet. Even as he poured himself a snifter of brandy, however, he knew he was more than happy to spend the money on her. In fact, he couldn’t recall having had so much fun in a very long while. One smile from Annie—just one—would more than make up for the expenditure.

Shortly after lunch, Dr. Muir arrived. Once Alex had explained that he wanted Annie carefully examined and why, the two men went upstairs to the nursery. At first, Alex feared that, despite his earlier
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explanations to Annie, she might be frightened by the good doctor’s unwanted attentions, but he soon realized that he had sorely underestimated Daniel’s abilities. As he might have with a timid child, the doctor made the process seem more like a game than a medical examination. To get a peek into Annie’s ears, he first did a magic trick, pretending to pluck a piece of candy from her ear and feigning astonishment. Annie, of course, was astonished as well, and before Alex knew it, she was allowing Muir to insert an instrument into her ear canal, presumably to see if more pieces of candy were rattling about inside her head. Annie seemed to think it was all great fun. Alex, who stood off to one side, couldn’t help but laugh at the amazed expressions that crossed her small face.

His urge to laugh faded abruptly when Daniel’s examination of Annie moved from her ears to her torso.

Here, he felt sure, the physician would find himself with a panicked young woman on his hands, and Alex was dreading the moment that he would be called upon to help subdue her. But, again, Daniel surprised him. Continuing to use sleight of hand, Muir plucked candy from the neckline of Annie’s frock, from its sleeves, from under the hem. Before Alex knew it, the doctor had palpitated his wife’s breasts and abdomen, evidently to his satisfaction, and had listened to her heart. In the end, Annie had a sizable collection of hard candy lying on the table, which Dr. Muir allowed her to keep.

On their way back downstairs, the physician related his findings to Alex. “As far as the immediate concerns go, her pregnancy seems to be progressing normally,” he said. “Without doing a pelvic examination, I’m unable to be absolutely certain of that, but at this point, I believe a closer look would do the girl more harm than good.”

Alex expressed his complete agreement with that and told the doctor of Annie’s revelation to him and Maddy that morning.

“An egg?” Muir chuckled and shook his head as they entered Alex’s study. “Ah, well, I can’t see as how letting her continue to believe that will hurt. At least she has the general idea and understands that there is a baby growing inside her.”

Alex felt a flush creeping up his neck. “She may be a little disappointed when it’s born, minus the booties and bonnet.” He described the picture he’d drawn for Annie to explain her pregnancy to her. “At the time, not realizing she could read lips, it was the only way I could think of to get my point across.”

“It worked. That’s all that matters.” Muir deposited his satchel on the floor at his feet and sat down in one of the comfortable leather chairs positioned before the hearth. “You’re correct in your diagnosis, by the way. The girl is deaf. It’s only my guess, mind you, but judging by the scar tissue, I would wager that the fever that robbed her of her hearing was probably caused by a very severe ear infection.”

“Which went untreated,” Alex said bitterly, unable to hide the resentment he felt toward the Trimbles.

“True,” Muir conceded, “but there’s nothing to say I could have prevented the hearing loss, even if I’d treated her.”

“They might have at least given you the opportunity to try.”

Daniel sighed. “In all fairness to Edie, Alex, chronic ear problems aren’t always easily detected by parents. I’ve seen cases where a child’s ears were so bad that they were bleeding, and the frantic mother and father still hadn’t a clue what was wrong. The child may be cranky, feverish, nauseated, yet manifest no sign of earache. One little boy I once treated was congested and had had a serious cough for days. In the mornings, when his mother found pus and blood on his pillow, she mistakenly believed that it was coming up from his lungs. She was terrified he had consumption.”

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“In other words, I shouldn’t hold Annie’s parents accountable?”

Muir pursed his lips and gazed sightlessly into the firebox for a moment. “For many things, yes, but not for the deafness. If Annie’s middle ears were abscessed, which I believe they may have been, she could have run a raging fever until they broke and drained, which could have occurred in a matter of hours after the onset of the fever. Afterward, she may have seemed to be on the mend, and her mother may have believed she was fine. Kids get sick. Quite often, they run high fevers over the least little thing. A mother does her best, but she isn’t infallible. Neither am I, for that matter.”

Remembering Annie as he’d found her in the attic, Alex found it difficult to let go of his anger toward the Trimbles quite that easily.

“Would you mind my giving you just a bit of advice?” the doctor asked.

Alex smiled slightly. “Not at all. That’s why I sent for you.”

“Look forward,” Daniel said softly. “For years, I’ve had to watch that girl live half a life. Now you have a chance to give her so much more. Concentrate on that, not on the Trimbles and the dozens of ways in which they have failed. You can’t go back and undo all the injustices Annie has suffered. But you can try to make up for them. The girl can receive help now. Think of it that way.”

“It’s my hope to give her as normal a life as possible,” Alex mused aloud. The admission turned his thoughts to other matters. Sitting straighter in his chair and clearing his throat, he said, “In regard to that...” He met the doctor’s questioning gaze. “If things work out well between Annie and me, and I’ve every reason to hope, will it be harmful to her or the baby if—” Alex gestured vaguely. “I’ve heard it both ways, that it’s okay for pregnant women to have marital relations and that it’s not.”

Pressing his hands to his knees and pushing to his feet, Daniel chuckled. “Trust me, Alex, you’ll do no harm.” He gave him a rakish wink. “Just take care not to dislodge the infant’s booties. Annie may be a trifle upset if it’s born missing a sock.”