The Black Sheep’s Baby

Chapter 16

“‘D on’t blame Devon…’?” Lucy read from the paper in her hands. Aroused and bristling with outrage, she reached for Devon’s hand and gave it a squeeze. “As if we would. Our own son-how could he think such a thing?”

Mike’s arm, lying in a comforting way across the back of Lucy’s chair, tightened momentarily around her shoulders. “I don’t think he knew the whole story,” he told her in a private sort of way. “He was so young when he left, we hadn’t told him.” His face was gray with regret.

“You should blame me.” Devon’s voice was gray, too-flat and dull. “It’s my fault-all of it. If I had only-”

“No.” Mike’s quiet eyes searched for hers, commanded their full attention, and for the first time she saw his son in them. Her throat filled again with the tears she hadn’t been able to shed. “You’re a victim, as much as anyone. More than anyone.”

Devon stolidly shook her head. “You don’t understand.”

“No, dear,” said Lucy, “it’s you who doesn’t understand.”

They were sitting at the kitchen table, still cheery in its Christmas dressing, Lucy and Mike close together on one side, Devon at the end, coffee cups in front of them more for warming hands than drinking. Outside, a gloomy dawn was breaking. It had begun to snow again.

Lucy looked at Mike, who nodded. Her eyes came back to Devon’s and she began to speak in a halting way that was most unlike her usual blunt and forthright manner. “Devon, this isn’t the first time our family’s had to deal with this kind of tragedy. Chris-my brother Earl’s wife-you met her yesterday-had a childhood very similar to yours. Only she wasn’t able to block it out, the way you did. Her way of escaping was to get married, when she was just sixteen, to an older man who abused her, too…in a different way. When she left him, he stalked her, and would have killed her if my brother hadn’t gotten there in time.” She paused, cast glistening eyes toward her husband and drew a breath. “So you see, dear, we do understand.”

No, Devon thought as she gazed down at the small brown hand holding so tightly, so confidently to hers, you don’t. Devon, please don’t leave me… The truth was something that could never be understood, or forgiven.

Too exhausted to argue, she gently removed her hand from Lucy’s and picked up her coffee mug. “I’d better get packed…”

“Oh, Devon,” Lucy cried in dismay, “you don’t have to go. Not so soon.”

“I need to get back. There are some things I have to do.”

“But, if Eric should contact us-”

“He won’t-not for ‘a while.’ He says so in his letter.” What did that mean, a while? Days, weeks, years? She pushed back from the table and stood up. “If he does, you can tell him there’s not going to be any challenge to his custody of Emily. My parents will be withdrawing their suit.” She added grimly, “I’ll see to that.”

She turned and walked out of the warm, bright kitchen for the last time, leaving behind a silence broken only by the sound of Lucy blowing her nose.

Snowflakes settled onto Devon’s curls as she lifted her overnighter into the back seat of the Lincoln and slammed the door. It had been snowing all morning, not a howling blizzard, but fat, lovely flakes-Christmas card snow, Devon thought as she brushed the spun-sugar accumulation from the windshield-nothing the big Lincoln’s all-weather tires couldn’t handle.

Her hands, gloveless as usual, began to ache, and she stared down at her cold-reddened hand, at the bandage on her index finger. “It’s not a Christmas card. Don’t you know it’s cold out there?” Is this what it’s going to be like? she wondered. For the rest of my life, hearing his voice…remembering…

She turned from the car as the dogs came barking from their den under the porch. Shielding her eyes from drifting snowflakes, she watched a car, an unfamiliar dark SUV, churn its way up the lane in four-wheel-drive. It stopped a short distance away, its windows reflecting back a pale sky and the charcoal tracings of tree branches. The driver’s door opened, and a man got out.

Devon put out a hand, groping blindly for support; finding none, she swayed, then steadied herself.

“Forgot your hat again, I see.” His voice was nothing like the tender, gentle voice in her memory. It was harsh, and tortured her ears like sandpaper on raw nerves.

She didn’t know what-or even if she answered him. As if in a dream she lifted a hand and touched her hair, and was surprised at the cold wetness of snow on her fingers. She’d forgotten the cold. Her face burned with heat; her heart thundered, filling every part of her with its echoes.

His narrowed eyes shifted from her to the Lincoln and back again. One hand went out to grip the car’s doorhandle, as if to physically prevent it from moving from that spot. “Thank God I got here in time.” His voice, still a growl, held a different urgency now. “I couldn’t go-I can’t let you leave-”

“Where’s Emily?” Devon found her voice at last.

“In a safe house. She’s in good hands. Devon-I have to talk to you. There’s something I have to tell-”

“Wait-I have to tell you something-” The rest caught in her throat as he grabbed her roughly by the arm.

“We can talk in the barn,” he grated, walking rapidly through fresh-fallen snow, towing her like a broken tether.

“Eric, wait.” She pulled back, throwing all her weight and determination into resisting him, and he turned to look at her in scowling surprise. She jerked her arm from his grasp and gulped in cold, wet air as if it were an elixir to give her strength. Dry-mouthed and breathless anyway, she gasped, “Please listen to me-you don’t have to run. You don’t have to take her away. I’m not going to fight you, Eric. I’m going to make my parents give up their claim. Do you understand? You can keep her. Emily’s yours…”

He’d gone utterly still. Even after her voice had run down and faded to nothing he didn’t move, even to release the faint whisper of sound. “You remembered…”

“Yes.” Her voice, tight with control, sounded clipped and hard. “Yes, Eric, I remembered. Everything. You were right-”

Suddenly, shockingly, his face seemed to crumple, and he threw up both hands to cover it, trying to hide it from her. After what seemed like forever, his hands moved out and upward to rake through his hair. He drew in air in a long sniff, then released it in a rush and a whispered, “Ah…God.” Bringing bright, red-rimmed eyes back to hers, he touched her arm and said thickly, “Come with me, Devon…please? We have to talk.”

She didn’t want to. More than anything, she wanted to run away, crawl into a hole, a dark quiet place, and hide. She was tired of emotions, tired of pain.

As she turned to go with Eric, Devon threw one brief look back toward the porch steps, where Mike and Lucy stood weeping with their arms wrapped tightly around each other-each, it appeared, keeping the other from following.

He didn’t know how to begin, how to say to her what he’d come with such terrible urgency to say. What had seemed so simple and clear to him when he’d rehearsed it in the car now seemed neither, and the words themselves the most difficult he’d ever spoken.

As it turned out, he didn’t have to begin. He’d barely got the barn door closed and latched before Devon whirled on him.

“How could you do that to them?” she demanded in a fury, whispering though there was no one but him to hear her. “Don’t you know you almost broke their hearts?”

What about you? he wanted to ask. Did my going do anything to your heart?

What he said to her, turning from her so he wouldn’t have to see her icy eyes and pale, frozen face, was an almost surly, “I came back, didn’t I?”

“Why did you?” Her voice broke and he jerked back to her, but not before she had spun away, hiding her face from him. “You’d made it, free and clear. Your letter said you weren’t coming back. So I’ll ask you again.” It was her courtroom lawyer’s voice. “Why did you?”

“God, Devon, don’t you know?” He flung it at her, in a voice like a shovelful of gravel. “I came back because of you.” She was backing away from him, shaking her head, her eyes dark and rejecting. Every part of him wanted to reach for her, haul her back and into his arms, his whole body ached with the need to hold her. It took all the self-control he possessed to make his body still, his voice quiet and calm. “Once I’d gotten Emily to that safe house, I realized I had to come back, even if it meant going to jail. I couldn’t leave things the way they were between us.”

“There’s nothing between us!” She hurled it back at him like shards of broken glass. “It was once. We both said it.”

“Once isn’t enough for me, Devon.” He made his voice warm, warm as rain. Moving closer, he saw the beginnings of her melting… “I want more nights like that one, a whole lot more. A lifetime of nights.” He felt her face, cold and damp between his palms, and held it firm and fast when she tried to shake her head in frantic denial. “Yes-I’m going to fight you, Devon. That’s why I came back. I’m going to fight you…for us.” He paused to draw a knife-edged breath. “I guess what I’m trying to say is that I love you.”

She uttered a cry as if he’d dealt her a mortal wound, and wrenched herself from his grasp. Crouched, she faced him like a wounded, cornered animal. “No-you don’t. You couldn’t possibly. If you think you do, you’re wrong.”

His crooked smile formed slowly. Was it more painful, he wondered, to have love rejected…or denied?

“Why can’t I possibly love you?” he asked, stalking her relentlessly. Backed against a stall, she could only whimper and turn her face away when he pulled her into his arms.

“You don’t know,” she whispered. “You don’t know…”

“I know you weren’t to blame for anything that happened to you,” he said, more roughly than he meant to. The pain in his throat, in his heart, was almost more than he could bear. Pain for her. “Don’t you even think about blaming yourself.”

But she was struggling against him again, pounding his chest with her fists and sobbing, great tearing sobs that must have hurt her throat…that hurt him to hear. “No-you don’t understand-you don’t know. You don’t know anything. I left her, don’t you understand? Susan…I left her there.” She stared up at him, now, with dry eyes, the green of them swallowed in darkness. Her mouth twisted with self-loathing. “She begged me not to. She begged me…and I…left…her…with…him. My little sister. What kind of person would do such a thing?” Her voice was a desolate whisper. “What kind of person am I?”

He didn’t know what to say to her. He tried to pull her close, to wrap her in his arms, but she shook her head and pressed her palms against his chest.

“I meant to go back-I did. I told her I’d come back for her, when I could. But I…I didn’t…I…don’t remember why…”

“You blocked it out,” Eric murmured. “Your mind erased it for you. You didn’t go back because you didn’t remember why you should.”

Her eyelids quivered down. He lifted her into his arms as her face crumpled.

He carried her into the stall and laid her down on the clean straw he’d put there only two days ago. He reached up and turned on the heat lamp and took off his jacket before he stretched himself out beside her. Then, carefully as he would have undressed Emily, he eased Devon out of her city coat. “Shall I tell you what kind of person I see?” he said as, gazing down into her hopeless eyes, he slipped his hand under her sweater and fanned his fingers wide across her stomach. “I see a woman who was once a little girl, a little girl who was horribly, terribly wounded by the very person she should have been able to trust to keep her safe.” His voice was husky, his throat ached with tenderness. His eyes burned with unshed tears as they held on to hers, held them as if there were a line stretching between, and she dangled from it over a yawning chasm. “And yet, she managed, that little girl, to grow up and make a life for herself in spite of her wounds. Managed to grow into a beautiful, successful woman, capable of warmth and kindness, capable of giving and receiving love-”

“How do you know that?” she asked him, breathless and disbelieving.

“I’ve seen you,” he told her softly. “With Emily…”

“I ran away from her! I was afraid to even hold her.” But he saw her eyes kindle with the beginning of hope.

Eric thought about what his dad had said and smiled. “I know,” he murmured, and leaned down and slowly, deeply kissed her. And kissed her, and kissed her, and while he kissed her he slowly, slowly undressed her, and himself as well. “I know,” he whispered, caressing her lips with the words, “that you are beautiful in all ways. And I intend to spend the rest of my life showing you how beautiful you are-as beautiful in your soul as you are here, and here, and here.” And with his mouth he showed her just where she was beautiful-her throat, her breasts, her belly and thighs, and all the sweet soft womanly places between…

When she was honeyed and wet and trembling on the edge of breaking, he surged up and over her and grafted her to him with one tremendous thrust, and in that union was all the power of his love for her and faith in her, all the strength of his will and conviction. He felt what resistance and doubt there was left in her melt away, felt her shatter, and then himself, too. Felt himself come apart with her, then form again, both of them whole, and at the same time, forever and ever a part of each other.

Afterward, she wept at last. “That’s right, cry, my love,” Eric whispered, kissing the tear-pools on each eyelid. Let the healing begin.