Gemma watched Mary running through the backyard with Shawn right behind her. Katy had a doctor’s appointment, and she had asked Gemma to baby-sit Shawn for the afternoon. The two children had played together several times since the picnic at Patty’s, and they were well suited. Whenever Shawn visited, Mary seemed to evolve right before Gemma’s eyes, as if she had just needed a role model so that she could learn how a child was supposed to act. On the other hand, Shawn was learning how to behave with a younger child, which was good, since Katy had told Gemma over lunch that she was pregnant again.
Right now the little boy was holding himself back, as if he were afraid that if he really caught Mary, the game would be over. Mary stepped into the rope net that webbed the skeletal pirate ship and began to climb, giggling as she crept higher and higher.
Gemma held her breath, but her foster daughter didn’t stop or even falter until she had reached the top. It was a new milestone in Mary’s development. This was not the child who had clung so pathetically to Gemma and Farrell. This was a child growing confident, a child who was growing in all the important ways.
A child who might one day be Gemma’s very own.
Gemma dropped to the picnic bench and watched Mary begin her descent. She suspected a new game would ensue now. Mary would climb up and down until she tired of this new achievement, and Shawn would find some way to work this strange behavior into his own game. In years to come, would Shawn continue to adapt for this girl cousin? In ten years, or fifteen, would they still be friends, or would the rivalries and passions of adolescence separate them until they were adults again?
Whatever happened, it seemed that Gemma would be there to watch Mary grow, to suffer the pangs and joys of growing up with her. Thanks to Farrell Riley.
The grass was warm against her bare feet, and she wiggled her toes, taking her eyes off the children for a moment. Toes were as good for contemplation as belly buttons, and there were more of them. But more didn’t change a thing. She could contemplate all day and well into the night, and nothing was going to change. She could not bear children. One man had already left her because of her infertility, and she could not ask another to give up having a family of his own.
Last night she hadn’t gotten any sleep after Farrell left. She had tried to convince herself she was wrong, that her inability to bear children wasn’t a good enough reason to destroy her future happiness. But as many times as she had gone over it, she hadn’t changed her mind. When Jimmy had left her, she had sworn she would never be that vulnerable again. She would rather be lonely than pitied or resented.
Tears stung her eyes, and she took a deep breath. She loved Farrell Riley. She knew that she had never really loved Jimmy. She had loved Jimmy’s image, the glow that surrounded him, the man he pretended to be. But the Farrell Riley she loved was the man inside the human shell, the passionate, sensitive, yearning man. The man who deserved the biological ties, the family he’d never had.
“Ma…” Mary ran full tilt in Gemma’s direction and threw herself into her lap. She clasped Gemma around the neck and buried her face in Gemma’s shoulder. And again she used the word she had heard Shawn use with Katy. “Ma…”
Gemma hugged her until the little girl began to wriggle in protest. There were no breaths deep enough to keep tears from sliding down Gemma’s cheeks. “Oh, Mary.”
“Ma…” Mary touched her cheek and frowned.
“I’m just happy,” Gemma explained. And she was. Mary was going to be her real daughter now. In the ways that mattered, she already was. Gemma hadn’t even dared to dream this might happen so soon. Yet even while she stroked Mary’s hair and murmured her name, the tears continued to slide down her cheeks.
The box under Farrell’s arm was as heavy as lead. His heart was nearly as heavy. He had taken the afternoon off work, and he had spent it digging memories out of his attic. He hoped he never spent another afternoon exactly the same way. He would rather take his chances on the worst streets of Hazleton than dig through his past. But if this was what it took to convince Gemma that he wanted her forever, then he would do it every day without flinching until she saw the truth.
He hadn’t told her when he would be coming, and he hadn’t called before he left the house. He imagined he was catching her at dinnertime, which was what he had hoped for. He wanted to see Mary. If he couldn’t make his case tonight, he didn’t know how often he would see the little girl in the future. The thought of losing Mary, like the thought of losing Gemma, was something he couldn’t contemplate.
As a child, he hadn’t been able to fight for what he wanted.
But he was not a child anymore.
He knocked and waited, looking around as he did. The pansies in planters flanking the front steps were wilting in the late-afternoon sun, as if Gemma had forgotten to water them. Mary’s plastic tricycle lay turned on its side next to the front door, and dried leaves huddled against the morning paper, which had never been taken inside.
Gemma appeared at the front door, a Gemma without a smile or one trace of makeup. Her eyes widened. “I thought you’d be by later.”
His other reason for coming at dinnertime was to throw her off guard. He could see he’d succeeded. “I was hoping you’d feed me. I brought dessert.” He held up a bakery box containing a fresh apple pie. “If you don’t have enough, I could just eat the pie.”
She smiled, almost as if she couldn’t help herself. Then she sobered. “Don’t you think we should do this after Mary goes to bed?”
“Absolutely. I’ll wait.”
She shook her head, but she let him in. And once inside, he had no intention of leaving until this was settled in his favor.
Mary covered the awkward silence in the hall by dashing into Farrell’s arms. Gemma grabbed the pie just in time, and he lifted Mary with one arm, protecting the box under his other arm.
“Can I take that, too?” Gemma asked.
“I’ll put it in the living room.” He didn’t explain. He carried Mary with him, setting the box on a table out of her reach.
In the kitchen, he watched Gemma open the refrigerator and peer inside. She didn’t look at him. “I was just going to cook a hamburger patty for Mary. I have some carrots from last night. I hadn’t even thought about what I’d make for myself.”
“Why don’t I order a pizza?”
The suggestion seemed to startle her. “Pizza?”
“Yeah, you know, crust, sauce, pepperoni. No work for anybody except dialing the telephone.”
“I never order pizza.”
He suspected there were a number of things she hadn’t learned in her first marriage that she would learn in her second. He was not marrying her to be taken care of. He was marrying her to share her life.
“Sit,” he ordered. “All you have to do is think about what toppings you want.”
“I don’t care.”
“Then I’ll get a supreme, and you can take off whatever you don’t like.”
She sat, almost as if she were in a trance. He grinned at her, forcing a confidence he didn’t feel, and picked up the telephone. He knew the number by heart, since pizza was a cop’s best friend. When he hung up the phone, she was still sitting and staring at him as if he’d just been transported to earth from a spaceship.
“Okay, where’s the hamburger? Our little girl may like this pizza just fine, but she needs something healthier to start her off.”
“Oh.” Color rose in Gemma’s cheeks, and she started to get to her feet.
“Sit,” he ordered again. “And stay there. You look beat. Just tell me where to find everything.”
She didn’t argue. With her supervision, he found and unwrapped a hamburger patty and started it sizzling in a small frying pan. He found the cooked carrots next and slipped them into the microwave; then he poured Mary a plastic tumbler of milk and set her in her high chair with a slice of bread and jam.
By the time the hamburger and carrots were on a plate in front of Mary, he had found two ice-cold beers and poured them for himself and Gemma. Mary filled the strained silence with comments on the food in front of her, some of them amazingly close to standard English. As soon as she started putting sounds together in a slightly different order, Farrell’s little girl was going to be quite a linguist.
The pizza arrived before the silence between the two adults stretched too thin. Farrell retrieved it and paid the deliveryman. Then, back in the kitchen, he dished it up, with a small piece for Mary, too.
He joined Gemma at the table. “You’ve given me a good taste of your life. You need a taste of mine. That way, when you marry me, you’ll know exactly what you’re getting.”
“Farrell—”
He shook his head. “Eat up before it gets cold.”
Mary was an instant pizza convert. She gobbled her slice, then a slice of apple pie, fretting when she couldn’t have another. Farrell made the disappointment up to her by giving her a horsey ride around the house while Gemma cleaned the kitchen.
Gemma rescued the little girl after a good long gallop and took her upstairs for a bath, but Farrell was the one who read her a good-night story and tucked her into bed. Mary pointed at pictures in the simple storybook, as if she was memorizing the names of every animal and object. Just as soon as she had the vocabulary she needed, Farrell’s little girl was going to be quite a reader.
He left the door open, just in case she needed anything, but one last peek in her direction convinced him she was falling asleep. He stood at the top of the stairs for a moment, girding himself for what was to come; then he went down to find Gemma.
He found her in the living room. “Do you want your pie now? I could make some coffee to go with it.”
She shook her head. “I couldn’t eat another thing.”
“Then we’ll save it for later.”
She looked as if she wasn’t sure there would be a later. In fact, she looked as if she was sure there wouldn’t be. “She adores you.”
“She knows it’s mutual.”
“You’re so good with her. You’re a natural with children.”
“Who would have guessed it?”
She didn’t ask him to sit beside her, but he did, anyway. “I had some news this morning.”
“Oh?”
“I’m moving up to detective.”
“That’s wonderful.” For the first time that evening, her eyes lit up. “That’s really wonderful…. Is it a dangerous job?”
He smiled, because she hadn’t managed to keep the concern out of her voice. “No more so than any other job on the force. And I’ll be spending a lot more time on investigations. The hours won’t be as regular, and I’m sorry about that. But if I work long hours one week, I can take time off the next.”
“I’m proud of you.”
He wondered what else he could say about the promotion. He wanted to keep talking about other things. He would have been happy to talk about almost anything to keep from discussing what he’d come for. But the time had arrived.
“Farrell, I—”
“Gemma, I—”
They both stopped. Gemma flushed. “I’ve given this a lot of thought, Farrell. That’s all I’ve done. And I still—”
He held up his hand. “I have some things to show you. Can I do that first? Then you can tell me what you think, and I promise I’ll listen. I promise I’ll always listen to you. But this time, I need to go first.”
She looked doubtful, but she nodded.
He stood and retrieved the box from the table where he’d set it; then he brought it over to the sofa. “Come sit beside me. You can see better.”
She scooted closer. “What is it?”
“It’s my childhood, Gemma. My life.”
He had been very careful about how he had placed things in the box. Now he opened it, spreading the cardboard flaps so that the contents were in view. He lifted out a worn scrapbook with a padded plastic cover. The cover was torn, but it had been neatly taped. One of his foster mothers had discovered the scrapbook in the destructive hands of a foster brother, and she had helped Farrell repair both the cover and some of the inside pages. She had been one of the important people.
He was not a man to make speeches, but now he knew he was about to make the longest speech of his life. “I’ve told you a little about the way I grew up. But not enough.”
“I thought it was something you probably didn’t want to talk about.”
“You were right. But you need to know me better.” He balanced the scrapbook on his knees and opened it to the first page. Dust filtered through the air. The scrapbook had been stored away for years, and although he had carefully wiped off the cover, he hadn’t touched the inside pages.
The photo on the first page had been imprinted on his brain from hours of staring at it as a child. He hadn’t seen it for a long time, but he hadn’t needed to.
“This is my mother. Her name was Noreen, Noreen Wakefield. She grew up on a small farm in Iowa. Wakefields owned that farm for five generations.”
“She was lovely.” Gemma touched the edge of the photograph. “You look a little like her.”
“I’ve been told that before.” He did resemble the woman in the photograph—the same dark hair, the same straight nose. But his mother was smiling with the exuberance of youth, and he had never felt that kind of joyful abandon.
He touched the edge of the photograph. “She was seventeen when this photograph was taken. Just out of high school. She moved to Des Moines right afterward. She moved to bigger and bigger cities after that to escape her roots. She did a good job of it.”
He turned the page. “These are her parents.” The snapshot, probably taken with an ancient box camera, was faded and unfocused. It showed two people in front of a small frame house. An old pickup was parked beside them. “I never met my grandparents. A great-aunt, my grandfather’s stepsister, sent me this photo when I was in high school. She would write me occasionally. She was very old and unwell, but even though we weren’t related by blood, she tried to stay in touch with me. Her name was Hattie.”
He turned the page again and pointed to the first of two photos. “That’s Hattie.” The snapshot was slightly more focused then the one of his grandparents. Hattie was a prim-looking woman, with the weathered face of someone who had worked hard and seldom pampered herself.
“This is Hattie’s sister, Clara. I never met her. I think she died before I was born.” The photo was similar to the one of Hattie, and he moved on to the next page.
There was no photograph here, just a small plastic bag filled with dirt. “This is soil from the family farm. When I got out of high school and the state of Illinois couldn’t tell me what to do anymore, I hitchhiked to Iowa. Hattie was dead by then, but I wanted to see where my family had lived. The farm is still in cultivation, but it’s owned by a huge conglomerate now. The house is used for hay storage.”
Gemma gazed up at him. “What happened? Didn’t anyone in your family want it anymore?”
“It was auctioned to pay off debts back in the seventies.” He turned the page to one showing two young men, standing with cocky indifference under a large oak tree. “These are my mother’s two brothers, Alfred and Gary. I lived with Gary once for a few months, until the state stepped in and put me into a foster home.”
“Why?”
“Let me show you the rest of the album first.”
She looked puzzled, but she nodded. “Okay.”
He turned the page and revealed a stack of letters. “These are Hattie’s letters. I kept every one of them.”
He turned the page again. “This is my father, Paul Riley.”
The man in the photograph didn’t resemble Farrell in any way. He had a wide face and curly blond hair. He was dressed in a cheap polyester suit, and his shirt was unbuttoned to show a substantial portion of bare chest and three gold chains. “And this is my father,” he said, turning the page.
The second picture was a fading newspaper photo of the same man, but this time he wasn’t wearing a sly smile. He looked surly and mean. The headline beside it read Local Man Arrested In Robbery.
Farrell turned the page again without looking at Gemma. “This is the transcript of a hearing dated just after my birth. I filed for and got this when I was twenty-one.”
“A hearing?”
“My mother tried to get child support from my father, but he claimed that I wasn’t really his son. For all I know, he may have been right. I saw Noreen on and off through the years before she died, just often enough to keep the state from severing her parental rights, but she never would tell me if Paul Riley was my real dad. The court seemed to think he was. They told him he had to pay support for me, but it didn’t really matter, because he never had any money—at least, none that he could claim on his income tax.”
He turned to the last page. It was a collection of short newspaper articles, all detailing the conclusion of criminal trials or subsequent sentencing. Paul Riley was the subject of them all.
Farrell closed the scrapbook. “I had similar articles about my mother, Gemma. I tore them out and threw them away the last time I looked through this. I’m not sure why. Noreen wasn’t any better than Paul, although at least she admitted I was her child. She and her brothers left the farm in Iowa and never looked back. She wanted the good life. She told me once that she didn’t want to end up like her mother, bitter and depleted, so she went looking for something else. Only, she didn’t take any of the values she’d learned in church as a child. She stole and lied and used her body to get whatever she could from men. She got pregnant with me and tried to use me to get money from Paul. When that didn’t work, she gave me to the state to raise.”
“What about your grandparents? Didn’t they try to help you?”
“I was born late in my mother’s life. My grandparents were old, and they had washed their hands of all their children by the time I was born. Alfred and Gary had turned out like my mother, using whatever they could to get whatever they wanted. My grandparents had mortgaged the farm to help their sons out of one jam or the other. In the end, they were so deeply in debt they couldn’t recover.”
“But none of that was your fault, Farrell. How could they take it out on you?”
“In one of her letters Hattie said that my grandparents were rigid people who only saw the world a certain way. They thought that anything that didn’t fit into their views was no good. My mother was obviously no good, and so, in their eyes, I couldn’t be, either. And a child born out of wedlock didn’t fit into their picture. They never even wrote to me.”
“Maybe your mother turned out the way she did because of them.”
“Maybe she did. And maybe I was better off not having them in my life. Unfortunately, like I said before, I had one of my uncles for a while. Gary took me in when I was seven. He looked good on paper, I guess. He had a wife, a job. He’d been in trouble with the law, but the court thought that he’d cleaned up his act. They didn’t know he wanted me because he needed a child to stand watch for him.”
“Stand watch?”
“His talents ran to burglary. He set me up with an ice cream cone and a puppy he got from the pound, and the puppy and I would walk back and forth, up and down the block, while he broke into houses. If I saw a police car, I whistled. Unfortunately, Gary was cockier than he was smart. He got caught on our third trip out. I got sent back to foster care, and the puppy went back to the pound.”
“Farrell…” Gemma laid her hand on his arm. “You’re breaking my heart. Why are you telling me this?”
“Those are the people I came from, Gemma. They’re my blood, the stuff that I’m made from. At the worst they were criminals. At the best they were rigid and bitter, with no joy or love in their souls for their only grandchild. I thought you should know.”
“Why? Do you think it matters to me what your family was like? You’re you, and you’re nothing like them!”
He let that sink in a moment. He wanted her to think about what she’d said. “I’m not,” he said quietly. “You’re right. I’m the man I am because of some people I met along the way. Not because of the people whose bloodlines I carry.”
Gemma watched Farrell’s face. He had not shared this story of his family often. She knew him well enough to know that. But he wasn’t ashamed. She knew that, too. Farrell had grown past the family who had given him life. He knew who he was and what was in his own heart. He knew which side of the law he stood on, and he was a proud, confident man.
Gemma couldn’t think of anything to say in response to what she had learned about him. Farrell’s family was as different from hers as the county jail was from Shore Haven. She understood what he was trying to say, and she wanted to accept it, to reach out to him and tell him that they could make a different kind of family together. But she was still so tied up in her own misery, her own failures, that the words wouldn’t come.
Farrell seemed to understand. He reached inside the box for a second album. This one was stuffed full. He opened it before she could speak. “I had ten foster homes. Six of them didn’t make it into this album. Four of them did.”
He opened the album to the first page. “These are the Jensens. I was only with them a year, but Sarah taught me to read. She wasn’t a warm, welcoming woman, but she took her job seriously. I was a shy seven-year-old. I’d been moved twice in first grade. At the beginning of second grade I went to live with Gary, and he didn’t send me to school. By the time the Jensens got me, I was so far behind that the schools decided I was slow. Sarah wouldn’t have that. No child in her care could possibly be slow. So she drilled me every night until I was in tears. But she taught me to read, and I never had trouble in school after that, no matter how many schools I attended. Sarah made me understand I could do anything I wanted if I just tried hard enough.”
He smiled at the picture of the Jensens. It wasn’t a photograph, but a childish drawing of two blond and overweight adults. He turned the page to a yellowing school paper printed neatly on wide lines. “My first A. Sarah’s doing. She’s the one who bought me this scrapbook.” He turned the page again. “My first good report card. Sarah smiled when she saw it. It might be the only time she did.”
Gemma put her hand on his arm. “You don’t have to go on, Farrell.”
“I think I do.” He continued showing her mementos of the other homes where he’d learned the things he needed to become an adult. She listened to him tell about the Watkinses, who had taught him to take care of himself with older, rougher boys. The Petersons, who had given him music lessons and bought him exactly the right kind of clothes so that he would fit in with the other thirteen-year-olds at his school. The Lamberts, who had attended every school conference and even every football game the year he had warmed the bench for junior varsity.
He ran his finger along the snapshot of a nondescript older woman. “Mrs. Lambert was the one who helped me repair that first scrapbook. When the county tried to move me in my senior year, she and her husband threatened them with a lawsuit. She was there when I graduated from the police academy, too, although she was in the last stages of cancer. Through the years I started to think of those four families as ‘the important ones.’ They weren’t my families by blood, but they gave me the things I needed to become a man.”
He closed the second album with its collection of photographs and pictures, its school papers and report cards.
He set it back in the box, then turned so he could see Gemma’s face. Her eyes were clouded with tears, and she couldn’t speak.
He did. “You were right when you said I needed my own family, Gemma. You were right, because I do have things I need to pass on to my children. I need to teach them that they can do anything if they try hard enough, just the way Sarah Jensen taught me. I need to teach them to take care of themselves and not to be afraid, the way Sam Watkins did. I need to show them I understand how important it is to explore new parts of yourself and to fit in, the way the Petersons did. And I need to show them that I care what they do and what they feel, the way the Lamberts did.”
He took her hand. His was warm and strong, a hand that wrapped around hers protectively. “Those are the things I need to pass on to my children, Gemma, the very best parts of myself. Not my genes. Not my heritage. The man I am despite that heritage. You’ve come to terms with your inability to bear children. Now you have to come to terms with my acceptance of it.”
“Farrell…”
He spoke the next words slowly. “I don’t care where my sons and daughters come from, Gemma, but I do care desperately who their mother is.”
Tears flowed down her cheeks—healing, renewing tears. She hadn’t meant to cry. It seemed wrong, when her heart was so filled with hope and with love for him. He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it. “Marry me. Share my life. Let’s make a real family together.”
She moved into his arms as naturally as if she had never moved out of them.
He kissed her, and she kissed him back. As he held her, in her mind she saw the family they would make, a family filled with love and warmth and laughter.
She pulled away at last, and he wiped the tears off her cheeks with his thumbs.
“I love you,” she whispered. “I will forever. When we have grandchildren and great-grandchildren—”
“Ma?”
Gemma turned and saw Mary standing in the doorway. Her thumb was firmly in her mouth and her blanket was trailing behind her. Mary, the first of the children they would raise and love together. Farrell put one arm around Gemma and held out the other. Mary flew across the room and scrambled into his lap.
Farrell Riley enclosed his family in his arms.