Never Again Good-Bye (6 page)

“That’s what my mommy used to call me,” Amy said. “Princess.”

Laney’s eyes darted to Wes, but he was looking pensively at Amy.

“Will you stay until I go to bed and tuck me in?” Amy asked Laney.

Laney smiled and looked at Wes for approval. He nodded that it was OK. “Of course. I’d love to.”

Wes moved to the couch and pulled Amy into his lap. He wrapped his arms around her small waist and made her lean back against his chest. “Pumpkin, Laney and I want to talk to you about something. It’s important, and I want you to listen very carefully.”

Amy sat up on her father’s lap, her face serious. “OK.”

Laney felt a stir of emotion at the expression so close to fear on the girl’s face. Was that how he’d led in to telling her that her mother was dead?

“Do you remember when Mommy and I told you about how you were adopted?” Wes began.

Amy nodded. “I remember.”

He took a deep breath and looked at Laney again. “Well, we never talked much about the lady who was your mother before we adopted you, did we?”

Amy rubbed her nose and shook her head. “No. You said you didn’t know who she was and that it didn’t matter because I was yours.”

Wes paused a moment, as if he didn’t know how to go on. His gaze coasted to Laney, measuring her for the help he needed. It was there in her dark eyes, filling in strength where he had weakness, the way his wife had once done. Finally he turned Amy to face him in his lap, and he dropped his forehead against hers. “Well, I know who she is now, pumpkin. And I think it’s time you knew her too.”

Amy stiffened in his lap, a tiny frown clefting her brows. She drew back to look at him, as if she couldn’t believe until she saw it in his eyes.

Laney set a hand on Wes’s shoulder when she realized he couldn’t go on. He looked at her mutely, his groping expression inviting her to take it from there. She scooted closer to them, closer to the warmth the two of them exuded as a family, closer to the circle of love that was foreign to her. Struggling not to let the fierce emotion overwhelm her, she looked at her daughter.

“Amy, the other day when your daddy had me arrested in the park, it was because he saw me taking pictures of you. I didn’t mean any harm. I just wanted to see you. Ever since you were born and were taken away from me, I’ve wanted to see you.”

The worry lines on the child’s innocent face deepened, but she looked at Laney as if she still didn’t quite grasp what she was being told.

Laney arched her brows emphatically and struggled to make the words clear. “Amy, I’m your mother.”

Amy’s black eyes widened guardedly, and a flustered color traveled up her cheeks. “No, you’re not. My mother died.”

“But I’m your re—” She caught herself on the word
real
and tried again. “I was your first mother.”

The silence in the room was almost deafening, and the denial in the child’s eyes was piercing. Would she love her when she believed? Laney asked herself. Would she invite Laney to fill the void her mother had left? When Laney thought she could take the suspense no longer, Amy turned to her father, the only anchor she had in the world, and whispered, “Was she, Daddy?”

Wes squeezed her more tightly. “Yes, baby.”

Tears welled in the child’s eyes, and Amy’s bottom lip began to quiver. Her words were an octave higher than they had been before, revealing the terror in her bruised heart. “Are you going to give me back to her?”

Wes caught his breath, as if the question had scalded him, and framed Amy’s face with his big, protective hands. “No.” The word came out long and whispered. “It’s you and me. We’re a team.”

Laney felt the joy within her deflate as if it had never existed, but the hope still bobbed precariously in her heart. She watched in misery as Amy slid her arms around her father’s neck and buried her face into his chest. His expression became cold, almost vicious, as he held her. They had made a mistake, Laney thought frantically, and he was blaming her.

Amy pulled back, and Laney’s stomach coiled into a million knots at the dull, resigned expression on her face. “I’m tired,” the child said, climbing off her father’s lap. “I think I’ll go to bed. I don’t need to be tucked in.”

The words slashed at Laney’s heart like a knife. But
she
needed to tuck her in and sing her a song and read her a story, Laney thought. Yet Amy’s needs were more important. Laney felt the chilling rejection in the loneliest regions of her heart, but she refused to let the child see her cry. Amy was under enough pressure, enough stress, without having to deal with that. It was ironic, Laney thought. This was one of those times when Amy desperately needed a mother … except that the only mother she had left was responsible for her pain.

“Good night, Amy,” Laney said.

Amy stopped at the door and turned back to Laney, her eyes bearing as much bitterness as seven-year-old innocence would allow. “I’m not going to call you Mother,” she said defiantly.

“That’s OK,” Laney choked out. And as the little girl disappeared up the hallway like an elusive image in a dream, Laney felt as if her heart had been ripped out.

Wes’s cold silence made things even worse. She dropped her face into her hands and gave in to a rending sob. When she thought she could speak again, she wiped her face and looked up at him.

His eyes looked weary, lifeless, as he stared in the direction Amy had gone.

“I’m so sorry, Wes,” Laney said. “It was too soon. She wasn’t ready. I should have seen—”

“I was afraid this would happen,” he whispered miserably. “I shouldn’t have told you to go ahead.”

Laney took a few steps toward the door. “She needs someone, Wes. Don’t leave her alone back there. She’s so little …”

He nodded agreement but turned back to Laney. “Look, it was an experiment that failed. It’s better if from now on you just stay away. I know it’s asking a lot, but I don’t want her traumatized.”

Laney stood up to face him. Had she come so close only to lose everything? Was this just another trick that life had played on her? Dangling a treasure before her only to snatch it away, the way everything she’d ever wanted had been? No, she told herself defiantly. Amy needed her, whether she knew it or not, and Wes couldn’t stop Laney from filling that need.

“Wes, I can’t disappear now when she finally knows who I am. She’ll think I abandoned her again!”

“You owe her some peace, Laney. She doesn’t deserve all this.”

Since her father had robbed her of her child, Laney hadn’t felt such helpless frustration. She had pled with him too—and lost.

“Wes, please. She liked me. Even you had to see that.”

“Well, she doesn’t like you now,” he said, growing angry.

“And that’s all that matters, isn’t it? Now please, give me some time alone with her.”

Laney got her purse and clutched it tightly against her stomach. She started out the door, unable to bear looking up at him.

Oh, hope could be such a cruel emotion, a mocking weapon. It took people at their most vulnerable and shattered them when they surrendered to it. Laney had let herself hope today for the first time in years. And in one fell swoop her fragile, newly constructed world had come crashing down. All it took was a child’s denial. All it took was the frost in a pair of green, grieving eyes.

N
either the grief nor the anger had subsided a week later when Wes’s sister burst into his office. “You’re an idiot, you know that?”

Wes looked up from the books spread out on his desk and rubbed his hands over his tired eyes. “Leave me alone, Sherry,” he told her as she leaned in the doorway with her arms crossed judgmentally. “I’m in a bad mood.”

“Of course you’re in a bad mood,” she said, walking toward him, her abrupt footsteps jarring the walls of the tiny trailer they worked in. “You should be.”

“I mean it, Sherry,” he warned. “Don’t provoke me today.” He really didn’t think he could take it. Ever since he had told her about Laney and the night she had made spaghetti, his sister had been hounding and badgering him. “Provoke you?” Sherry said, pushing her shoulder-length, blond hair back from her face. “I ought to shoot you! You’re digging your own grave, Wes. She called again!”

Wes’s eyes snapped to attention and that wariness Sherry had grown so used to crept back into them. “I told you, I don’t want to see her or talk to her.”

She let out a disgusted breath and set her hands on her hips, trying to steady her voice. “Wes, Laney Fields is a very determined woman. She’s getting impatient with you. I’m really worried about what she might do.”

“Do you honestly think I’m not? Birth mothers file suit against adoptive parents every day. And sometimes they win, regardless of the best interests of the child.”

Sherry sat down knee to knee with him. “Wes, if she does file suit, you don’t have the money to fight it. But you could cooperate a little and avoid all of this.”

Wes looked down at his books, at the figures that told him the office building his company was just finishing was way over budget, at the notices from hostile creditors breathing down his neck, at the hospital bills that would have broken a rich man. He had never been rich.

“Just let her see her again,” Sherry said. “Just a harmless little visit.”

“I can’t cooperate at Amy’s expense,” he said.

“But, Wes, if she gets you in court and it comes out that you can’t even pay your grocery bill these days, how do you think that’ll look?”

His arm flailed across his desk, knocking the books and papers off with a loud clatter. “I have no choice!” he shouted, the tendons in his neck straining against the skin.

Sherry’s silence was all the condemnation he needed for his outburst. He steepled his shaking hands in front of his face, and his eyes softened as he looked at his sister who had literally prayed him through the despair and depression in the toughest times of his life. Even now, she worked for him for free when she wasn’t waiting tables or attending her fashion designing classes because he hadn’t been able to pay his secretary. “I’ll do what I have to do, Sherry.”

“I’m just saying that maybe you have alternatives,” she said quietly.

He dropped his head down and cupped his hands over the back of his neck. “Sherry, you don’t have a child. You don’t know what it’s like.”

“I have a niece,” she reminded him.

He squeezed his eyes shut. She’s afraid I’m going to give her back to Laney. She doesn’t understand, and she doesn’t trust Laney. “I can’t make her spend Sundays at the zoo with a woman who threatens her security. I’d sell everything I have if I could keep Amy from getting hurt and being afraid.”

Sherry only studied him for a long moment. Finally she leaned across his desk and dropped a kiss on his forehead. “And I’d sell everything I have to keep from seeing my brother so scared,” she whispered. “But I don’t have anything except a stack of IOUs for back pay and a little objective, unwelcome advice. One of these days you’ll listen to me.”

“One of these days,” he agreed, looking up again, his sad eyes breaking her heart. “But not today.”

Sherry straightened and gave him a regretful smile. “Then I’ll keep telling her you’re not available to take her call,” she said. She started for the door, but Wes stopped her.

“Sherry?”

Sherry turned back to him, the beginning of a smile tugging at her lips.

“Thanks,” he said.

“No problem,” she answered, then closed him into the tiny office, alone with a million problems for which he had no solutions.

L
aney sat in her car and propped her elbow on the open window as she gazed wistfully at the busy playground of Amy’s school. After several days of watching, she had determined the time every day that Amy’s class had recess. She had watched day after day, learning small details about her daughter that she hadn’t known before. She knew that her two best friends were a little blond girl with a pixie haircut who followed Amy around like a shadow and the redhead named Sarah, who had played with her at the park. She knew which boys she liked to have picking on her from the way she smiled and fought back when one pulled her hair or tripped her. And she got to know a bit about Amy’s teacher from the way she punished the rowdy children and slackened the reins on the behaved ones. What she didn’t know, however, was whether Amy had come to terms with what she had learned and whether she would react with hostility or pleasantness when Laney confronted her again.