Gia wiped a tear from her eye as she hung up the bedside phone.
After hearing from Jack last night about the child he’d saved, Gia had called Vicky’s camp first thing this morning, just to make sure everything was okay there. She trusted the camp and its security, trusted the counselors, but she’d had this steamrolling urge to hear her daughter’s voice.
The director had told her that Vicky and the other kids were at breakfast. Was it an emergency? No, just ask her to give her mother a ring when she was through.
Gia had spent the next ten minutes thinking about child molesters and how the horrors they subjected their little victims to should be visited upon them a hundred—no, a thousandfold.
The call came while she’d been making the bed. Vicky was fine, great, wonderful, having the time of her life, and wanted to tell her about the hippo she’d made in her clay modeling class, rattling on about how she’d started out making a pony but the legs wouldn’t hold up because she couldn’t get the body right so she’d made the legs thicker and thicker and shorter and shorter until the horse could stand without collapsing or tipping over but by then it looked like the fattest horse in the world so instead of calling it a horse she told everyone she’d made a hippo. Wasn’t that the funniest, Mom?
It was. So funny it had been all Gia could do to keep from breaking down and sobbing.
God, she missed her little girl.
Gia couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt lonely, but with Jack out running an errand, and Vicky off in the
Catskills, the house seemed more than empty. It was barren, a wasteland, an echoing shell with no heart, no life.
Get a grip, she told herself. It’s not that bad. Vicky will be back soon. In just four days and three hours, to be exact. It seemed like forever.
And when Vicky returned, should she tell her about the baby?
No. Too soon.
All right, but if not now, when? And how? How to tell her daughter that Mommy screwed up big time and got pregnant when she hadn’t wanted to.
Who’s the daddy? Why, Jack of course.
Which meant that the new baby would have a daddy while Vicky didn’t. Vicky’s father, Richard Westphalen, was missing and officially presumed dead. Gia knew, unofficially, that Vicky would never see her father again.
No big loss. While alive, Richard had been a nonparticipant in his inconvenient daughter’s life. Over the past year and a half, Jack had become Vicky’s father figure. He doted on her and she loved him fiercely. Partly, Gia was sure, because Jack was in many ways a big kid himself. But he took time with her, talked to her instead of at her, played catch with her, came along and sat with all the other kids’ parents to watch her T-ball games.
He was everything a good father should be, but his real child was now growing inside Gia. Would Vicky see the new baby as a threat, someone who’d come between her and Jack and usurp his love? Gia knew that would never happen, but at eight years of age, could Vicky grasp that? She’d already had one father abandon her. Why not two?
All excellent reasons for Vicky to hate the new baby.
Gia couldn’t bear the thought of that. One possible solution was marrying Jack. A hopelessly mundane, pedestrian, bourgeois solution, she knew, cooked up by a terminally mundane, pedestrian, bourgeois person, but as her husband, Jack could officially adopt Vicky as his daughter. That symbolic cementing would give Vicky the security
she needed to accept the new baby as a sister or brother rather than a rival.
The marriage was a problem, though. Not a matter of would Jack marry her, but could he? He’d said he’d find a way. She had to trust that he would … if he lived long enough.
Some godawful mess I’ve made.
She yawned as she finished tucking in the sheets and straightening the spread. Little wonder she wasn’t sleeping.
Bad enough to be worrying about Vicky and the new baby, but then Jack comes in last night with a thick bandage on his side. Told her he’d been stabbed by the very man he’d been hired to protect, who’d turned out to be some sort of pedophile.
She’d changed his dressing this morning and gasped at the four-inch gash in his flank. Not deep, just long, he’d told her. Doc Hargus had sewn him up. Gia inspected the neat running suture that had closed the wound. She’d never liked the idea of Jack going to an old defrocked physician, but last summer she’d come to trust Hargus after he guided Jack’s recovery from other, worse wounds.
She was angry with Jack for getting hurt. Would he ever learn?
But then, if he did learn, did change, would he still be the same Jack? Or would some fire within him go out and leave her with a hollow man, a wraithlike remnant of the Jack she loved?
Add that to the list of things to keep her awake at night.
And then, last night, when she’d finally fallen asleep … visions of the mysterious little girl she’d seen in the Kenton house drifted through her dreams. Her eyes … Gia had caught only the briefest glimpse of them as the child had glanced back over her shoulder, but their deep blue need haunted Gia, in her dreams, and even here and now in her waking hours.
Who was she? And why such longing in those eyes? It seemed a need Gia might fill if she only knew how.
No question about it, she had to go back to that house.