Maternal Instinct (28 page)

"It's so cute, Mom!"

Nell hadn't been able to resist the delight shining on her daughter's face. In one breathtaking moment, she remembered other times, other occasions. Kim had always lit up when she was happy, and Nell suddenly saw a toddler's face when she tasted her first ice-cream cone, the triumphant pleasure on a kindergartner's face when she read a whole sentence by herself, the astonishment when Mom had agreed to buy a fifth grade Kim an outfit that cost more than a DUI fine, just so she could wear stuff like the other girls did.

This morning, Hugh had insisted Nell buy a bunch of other clothes while they were there—half a dozen shirts, a denim jumper, two other pairs of pants and a nightgown. She'd cringed at the total, but he paid it without wincing.

"You'll need more, but this will hold you for now," he'd said casually.

She was beginning to wonder how well-off he was financially. He'd suggested several times that they sit down and talk about money, but she'd made excuses. She'd had to work so hard for everything she and Kim had, it scared her to have to trust someone else. What if he made a terrible investment with her money? Or shopped recklessly?

An inner voice whispered,
But what if he has so much money, you could quit worrying?

That idea scared her, too, enough that she decided she wouldn't think about it right now. For the rest of today, she'd concentrate on being nice, too. If Hugh could be noble, she could.

Even if it killed her.

"This is a short trail," Hugh was saying as he shrugged into a well-worn day pack. "It's too warm a day for anything arduous. Especially since your mom's pregnant, and you—" he bent a critical look at Kim's feet "—don't have any decent shoes."

Kim wriggled her toes inside canvas tennis shoes.

"I lost my Adidas along with my PE clothes the last day of school. When I went back, nobody had turned them in."

"Surely nobody would steal somebody else's stinky PE clothes," Nell felt compelled to say, even though she knew she'd said the same at the time.

"Mo-
om
." Her daughter rolled her eyes. "
Kids'll
steal
anything.
Or just, like, take it and throw it away. For fun."

Neither Hugh nor Nell was naive enough to argue. The scum they saw on the job had to come from somewhere, and unfortunately that somewhere was at times Port Dare High School. Pity the teachers.

"We'll buy you new ones," Nell said with a sigh. "We should have done it today while we were at the mall."

"But then we never would have gotten out of there, and this is so cool!" Kim started up the trail, walking backward, her head tilted so she could look up at the deep green canopy.

"Watch where you're stepping," Hugh said mildly.

She turned just in time to leap nimbly over a tree root.

The hike was to a small falls. Hugh had suggested they go up to the Hoh River rainforest someday, when they had more time. "The interpretive museum is terrific," he'd said with unmistakable enthusiasm. "But it's too long a drive for today."

Although logging was a depressed business here on the Olympic Peninsula, thanks to environmental concerns, the evidence of it was still everywhere. During the drive up the Elwha River, they'd seen clear-cut land everywhere, raw stumps and weedy growth taking advantage of the sun. Nell was shocked to see such devastation so close to the boundaries of the national park.

The untouched forest was lovely once they stepped into it, a world apart from any Nell had visited. The trees were enormous, with girths so large it would take all three of them with outstretched arms to encircle the trunks. Others had fallen, some recently, some in the ancient past, to the moist, fertile earth where they served as "nurse logs." Along their rotting lengths grew dozens of new trees, roots deep in the rich soil made from the decomposing tree that might have been five hundred years old when it fell. Moss coated the forest floor and crept up the trunks of the spruce and cedar, draping from lower branches like a woman's shawl.

Silence enclosed them as they walked deeper into the woods. The moss seemed to swallow sound, so that even a whisper felt like sacrilege. The trail crossed the same small creek several times, and even it ran quiet, water slipping over stones in shimmery darts.

Hugh talked occasionally, in a low voice, telling them about the rainfall that made this landscape so green and dense, a rare temperate rainforest. Even Kim knew the disputes about logging—she had classmates whose fathers were bitter, unemployed loggers, and others whose parents fought the destruction of a forest that could not be
regrown
in fifty years, or a hundred. Hugh told them about climbing Mount Olympus, the glacier-clad peak at the heart of the national park.

"I was just your age," he added as an aside to Kim.

"Really?" Her eyes were wide and admiring. "Do you think
I
could climb it?"

"Technically it's not that tough a climb," he said, "but it's a two-day hike to get to it, and you have to carry all your gear. You'd better start a little smaller. If you're not scared of heights, we could try Mount Constance…" He stopped. "Listen."

Nell had to hold her breath and strain to hear before she realized that the silence had become threaded with a powerful sound—the far-off roar of the falls.

"Oh, wow!" Kim said, her eyes shining again. "How come we've never done this before, Mom?"

When Kim hurried ahead, Nell mouthed, "Thank you," to Hugh, who grinned.

"Do you think she's really a climber?" he asked quietly.

"No…" Nell started to answer, but stopped herself. "I don't know. I wouldn't have said she'd be interested, but … who knows? She's strong, and sometimes I think she's bored with her life. She could use a challenge."

"We've run out of summer, but maybe she and I could take a quick scramble up a small peak. We've still got a month or more of good climbing weather. I'll think of a one-day trip. I don't want to leave you any longer than that."

"I'm not exactly due, you know," Nell pointed out.

Hugh shrugged. "I'd worry."

He said it so simply, so matter-of-factly, as though he was supposed to worry about her. It disturbed her, the way he could do that. How could he worry if he didn't love her? Perhaps his mother was right that he wanted to be a father, now that it had been thrust on him. Following him, feeling bereft, Nell decided that must be it—he was afraid that if left alone she'd do something dumb, like fall off a ladder, and lose the baby.

The roar became louder in their ears, the air cooler and more humid, until they breathed the chilly spray. The trail turned, and the froth of falling water came into sight.

It was no Niagara Falls, especially at this, the driest time of year. Nonetheless, Kim was delighted. In her short shorts and baby tee, she stood at the railing and held her face up to the falls as if drinking in the moisture.

Ferns grew in profusion from every crack, their fronds shining with moisture. The handrail was rotting, and Nell guessed it had to be replaced every couple of years.

Hugh led them above the falls, where they could just see the first tumultuous cascade and hear the roar. They sat on rocks and ate their lunches, careful to tuck away the wrappers in his day pack.

All of them were quiet on the hike back to the Explorer. In these woods, Nell felt small, insignificant and very, very young.

On the way home, Hugh told funny stories about growing up with two older brothers, which Kim drank in as thirstily as she had the sight of the falls.

"I wish I'd had a sister or brother when I was younger," she said finally, with a sigh. "Now, it's like, when the baby can walk and talk, I'll be gone to college."

Nell turned her head to smile at her daughter in the back seat. "You can still be a sister. You'll be home enough vacations that this little one," she laid a hand on her stomach, "will love you and think you're the coolest big sister ever."

"Yeah?" Kim mulled over the idea, her ego visibly inflating. "I will be, won't I?"

The casual words,
I'll be gone to college,
replayed in Nell's head. She
loved
those words! She could listen to them a thousand times. Only… What had happened to 'maybe I'll go?' Or 'maybe I'll just go to the community college?' Or—shudder—a snide, 'I might be married, you know, Mom.' Had Kim somehow, magically, passed the danger point without Nell even noticing?

At home, Hugh parked in the gravel driveway. Hopping out, Kim cocked her head. "Is that the phone ringing? Can I have your key, Hugh? Thanks!" She gave him a blinding smile and raced for the back door, calling over her shoulder, "It might be Colin!"

"And I was just thinking she might have cooled on Colin." Nell sighed. The fantasy had been wonderful while it lasted.

"I've been wondering, too," Hugh said. He'd come around to her side of the SUV as if to open her door. She, of course, had beaten him to it.

"Really? You've noticed?" Waiting for him to lock up, she sounded way too eager, Nell thought ruefully.

"Mm. We had a talk about sex the other day." He sounded remarkably, exasperatingly offhanded.

"About … sex?" Nell grappled with the idea.

He took her arm, as if she needed help rounding the

Explorer and walking up her own path. "Yeah. Kim wanted to know what guys
really
think about girls who 'do it.'"

Nell stopped dead, forcing him to stop with her. "And you told her … what?"

Sounding meditative, he didn't seem to recognize the danger in her tone.

"I said that, as adults, most men assume women have as much right to sex as they do. We maybe look down on a woman who sleeps around too much." He shrugged. "But unless things have changed a whole hell of a lot since I was in high school, sex discrimination is still alive and well. Guys want girls to put out, then they sneer at them if they do."

Relief washed through Nell. Able to breathe again, she prodded, "What did she say?"

"She just nodded and said she'd kind of thought that's the way it was. Unless a couple was, like, in love
forever
first." His mimicry of Kim's breathless way of talking was perfect.

"Does that mean Colin is pressuring her?" Nell worried aloud. "Or has she already done it and now Colin is acting different toward her?"

"Could be she's just thinking out her decision," Hugh said easily. He frowned as they walked in the back door. "Damn it, I hate rap music."

The deep staccato throb came from upstairs. The tenant, a guy in his
midtwenties
, was mostly good about keeping the music down and parties low-key, but Nell had to remind him sometimes.

"It's the middle of the afternoon. Chris will turn the stereo down once he realizes we're home."

Hugh faced her, the same frown lingering. "Have you considered letting him know we want the space back? The baby will need a bedroom. We could turn this house back into a one-family home."

A flutter of panic made her voice sharper than she'd intended. "The income has been really important to me. The baby can sleep in a bassinet in our bedroom for now. And then share with Kim for a while. Like she said, she'll probably be off to college in two years. Then we won't need more space."

His dark brows rose. "Unless we have more children."

"More?" Oh, boy, now she
was
scared. He was talking as though this marriage was permanent. A regular, normal, melding lives kind of union. Not because he wanted that, but because he thought he owed it to her and to his unborn child.

And what terrified her most was the knowledge that she, too, wanted exactly that kind of marriage and family. But she wanted it born out of love, not convenience and especially not duty.

Hugh was watching her, his gaze steady and unreadable. "You heard Kim. She'd have liked to have a sister or brother closer in age to her. I always figured, if I had kids, I'd have at least a couple."

"I
do
have a couple," she said shortly, then amended,
"Will
have." Seeing his expression close, she realized how that sounded. How bitchy she was being, again. Taking a deep breath, she moistened her lips and said, "I think I need to deal with the idea of one more, before we start planning a litter. I'm barely adjusting to being pregnant, okay?"