To Begin Anew (Blue Jay Romance) (16 page)

~*~*~

Debra found that - even though her sister was still asleep by the time she returned from taking the boys to school, she continued to sleep until almost noon and taking care of Annie seemed to be a job Nikki thought Debra was perfectly suited to doing while she slept like a kitten - that on top of all of the above, a song lilted underneath her breath and she hummed the bits she didn’t know at random moments of the morning.

Debra thought to catch herself, to admonish herself for thinking that anything good could come out of being with Eric, but she found that she didn’t have the heart to stop. Her heart was otherwise occupied.

In the short time that she had known Eric, he’d found a space in her heart that she thought had been sealed off and closed for public viewing. Debra had thought that the scars left there, that marred her, prevented anyone from getting close to her as if they instinctively knew that she was damaged.

The hum and skip in her step told her that she’d been lucky enough to find the one person who saw past all that, who was just as marred by their life experience as she was. In a way, she thought Eric could understand what it was like to have lived so long wallowing in grief that it was like being born when there was a light finally shone upon you.

Annie was crying again, perhaps for the third time that morning and Debra moved to pick her up, to cuddle the little girl to her chest. She didn’t understand how Nikki could be so inattentive to a child, or how she couldn’t realize how blessed she was that she had a child of her own.

Debra frowned when she thought about what having her own child would be like, and then she laughed into Annie’s hair. She knew what being a mother was like, since in most every sense of the word, she had been a mother to both her brother and her sister. She was now a sort of mother to both David and Danny, even though she had a feeling that both boys were doing their share of healing her.

Before she’d been saddled with taking care of the twins, she’d been all for the solo life without the responsibility of taking care of someone who couldn’t take care of themselves. Now, as charmed as she was by the pair of them, as healed by them as she was, she couldn’t imagine what she saw in the days upon days of quiet loneliness she‘d been looking forward to.

Debra set Annie down, glad that the baby was quiet now and yet sad that all it took for her to settle was a bottle and a cuddle here and there. Annie looked like her father, Debra thought to herself and then, in the same thought, she forced it to go away. She did her best not to think about the man her sister married - he wasn’t a bad man, she knew, but he was misguided and fickle.

The surfacing of a memory couldn’t be stopped once it belched forth, and Debra found that she was no exception to it. Once she thought of how much Annie looked like Robert, she thought of Robert, and the memories associated with him.

Debra looked to Annie as she braced herself on her counter, as she realized that the whole of her existence as she’d lived in her house of cards could be blown down and swept under the rug in a matter of minutes. Who was she? Why did she exist? Why
couldn’t
someone love her? What was she going to do about Eric - was being with him, knowing how things were going to end with him, fair to him?

“What’s wrong with you?” Nikki said as she walked into the kitchen still dressed in her pajamas.

Debra blinked, straightened and slipped her mask back over her face. When there were people around to keep her glued together, the pain from her past, the feeling that she was the cause of the misery in the lives of people she loved, disappeared.

Debra said, “Just waiting for Annie to finish with her bottle so I can get her down for a nap.”

Nikki yawned as she took the bottle from her child’s mouth and picked her up from the highchair she was seated in. “She’s not going down for a nap now - what are you thinking? If you feed her and she sleeps now, then she’ll be up all night long.” Nikki sighed, and stuck her hand on her hip. “Do you really think I want to be up all night?”

Debra said, her eyes directed to the bottle that was teetering on the edge of the kitchen counter, “After sleeping all day, being up all night shouldn’t be a problem for you.” She turned to her sister after righting the bottle, and added, “Do you even know when Annie last had something to eat?”

“She’s
my
child, not yours. I’m glad and all that you’re letting us stay here, but you keep your nose out of how I’m raising
my
baby.” Nikki glanced down at her daughter playing on the floor before she glanced up at Debra.

Debra wondered if it was a talent of her sister’s that she could ruin a good mood as if it had been a turkey dinner she’d forgot was in the oven. She said, “Don’t harp on me when I give your daughter something to eat when you can’t even bring yourself to get out of bed to change her diaper. Who do you think takes care of her when you sleep for ten hours straight?”

Nikki rolled her eyes. “You sound
just
like Robert. It’s all he ever complains about. Take care of Annie, wash the dishes, do the laundry, blah, blah, blah.”

Debra stared at her sister, her face first coloring with disbelief and then anger. “You said that Robert was the one who wanted to leave, that he was the one who was gonna take Annie away and file for a divorce. Did you lie to me, Nikki?”

Nikki scoffed, looking away from Debra as she used to do when she was caught and knew there was no way she’d be able to talk her way out of it. Usually at this point, Nikki started spewing the truth as if she were allergic to it.

“If I told you I was leaving him because I couldn’t stand him anymore, would you have taken Annie and me in? Would you have thought I was doing the right thing?” Nikki scoffed, “Robert couldn’t order pizza by himself, what makes you think he’d up and leave
me
?”

Debra blinked, and wondered why she was surprised that Nikki had lied to her about how things were going with her and Robert. She also wondered why she wasn’t surprised that for the umpteenth time that day, she had to figure out what she was going to do with her sister.

Sunday morning felt to Debra as if it was the first Sunday in the whole of history - there was such an air of expectancy that, even though she knew it all stemmed from the small family sitting in her living room, she couldn’t help but feel nervous as well.

Debra fretted with the dress she was wearing, not used to the nylon underneath and the feel of the fabric as it brushed against her knees and she knew as well as she stood there that by the end of the morning she was going to fall flat on her face. Simply put, she was not a woman that mixed well with heeled shoes.

“Are you alright in there?”

Debra scoffed at Eric’s voice calling to her from the living room, sure that at some point she had told him she was almost ready and that he needed to be patient, and as she ran a hand through her hair, she called out, “Be out there in a second!”

Eric smiled as Debra called to him from her room, knowing that when a woman told you that she was going to be ready in a second, what she really meant was that it was going to be at least another twenty minutes before she had her shoes on and her purse on her shoulder with her keys in hand.

Eric looked to David, who, along with his brother, was dressed in his Sunday finest. David looked up at him impatiently, and not for the first time that morning, Eric wondered why his children seemed so eager to get to church. It was as if they had a special mandate from the Big Man himself, and that under no circumstance were they to miss going to church.

Sighing, Eric moved from his seat on Debra’s sofa and was stepping into the hall just as Debra was coming close to entering the living room. They were out of sight from the boys, and because he thought she might stumble backwards and fall, Eric took hold of Debra and swung her so that her back was against the hall wall.

When they came to a stop, Eric noticed for the first time that Debra was wearing a dress, that her hair was down around her shoulders and her perfume, while delicate, tickled his nose in a nostalgic way. He inhaled as he looked her over, and before he could say anything at all, he touched his lips briefly to hers and whispered, “You look beautiful.”

Just because he could, Eric kissed Debra again, lingering longer this time, and relished the knowledge that Debra was kissing him back. Eric closed his eyes, inhaled one more time just before he let Debra loose and said, “I think we should be getting to the living room.”

The only thing Debra could think to do was nod and she was walking with Eric into the room without having given the signal from her brain to her legs to do so. She was back on Earth as she took the boys in, thought that they looked entirely too precious in their little suits and ties. When they saw her, their eyes lit up as if they were rockets about ready to set voyage to the moon.

“Miss Brown!”

David and Danny were up from their seats and running to wrap their arms around her waist before she could hold out a hand to keep them from wrinkling her dress, and she had to laugh as she realized that she would have let them do it anyway. God knew, and probably planned it, that she would do anything for that set of twin angels.

~*~*~

Debra never realized before this Sunday how uncomfortable church pews were, and if she’d known that her rear was going to go numb within five minutes of sitting down, she would have brought a little pillow with her so she would at least be able to enjoy the service the way it was intended. How could a person maintain a state of grace when their rear was protesting as much as hers was?

The uncomfortable pews didn’t seem to matter much to David and Danny, who insisted they sit in between their father and their nanny, and it also didn’t seem to matter that, as they’d gone to find a pew to sit in, every eye in the entire church had been set to them.

Debra was certain that Eric noticed, but as she knew he would, he actually lifted his chin and gave an air about him that said he couldn’t care less about what other people thought of him. As Debra thought about it, she realized that she couldn’t care less either.

As was usual before the service even got going, the ushers appeared at either end at the front row on the inside aisles of the seating area and as they walked forwards, Debra could feel how restless David and Danny were, as if they were going to wiggle right out of their skins before the ushers could even get to them.

For a while, Debra thought that the twins’ goal was to put their special prize into the collection basket so that they could make a wish for their mother. Now, as she watched their faces dart from the collection basket to their father, she was certain it had more to do with him than it did with their mother, though she would bet that it had been their mother who put the idea in their heads.

Debra thought the whole thing was pricelessly endearing, that it took the mind and faith of a child to hold onto the simple fact that prayers in whatever form they took could sometimes be answered. As an adult, it became harder to have that simple rock-solid understanding.

An usher at the end of their row handed the donation basket to Eric, and as he went to pass over the twins and give the basket to Debra so that she could pass it on to the others that were sitting with them in the pew, David made a face as if all of his ice cream had spontaneously melted, and Debra took the basket from Eric and held it for David and Danny so that they had a chance to put their prize in.

David looked to his brother, knew as he always knew, that Danny was silently thinking the same thing he was thinking, and as he put his hand into the basket and dropped his precious treasure inside, he whispered softly and no louder than the fluttering of a bird’s wings, “Be happy, Momma, where you are up in Heaven. Me and Danny are taking care of Daddy, just like you asked us to.”

Debra could just barely hear what David was muttering over the basket, but in the next instant, she was pulling it away and handing it to the couple sitting next to her. She doubted highly that anyone would notice the little metal frog that David had tossed in with the dollar bills, and to anyone that had been watching, it looked as if the boy had  just tossed in some coins. As she looked back to the boys, Eric was eying her as if he wanted to ask her a question, but before he could open his mouth, the reverend took the podium and commanded the congregation’s attention.

~*~*~

Eric stood over his children after he’d gotten them home from church, after they’d gone out for Sunday dinner and for about a good five minutes before he flicked the light off in their room he watched their soft faces as they slept, then he returned to the living room where Debra sat on his sofa waiting for him to come back.