Father Found

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He’d pointed out that dealing with children every day seemed very brave to him.

Then she’d smiled and he’d seen something final in her eyes.

He’d pulled her toward him and kissed her, then he’d lifted her mask and looked into the sweetest face he’d ever seen.

She’d looked back at him with undisguised longing, then run off when Mayor Beasley had come in search of him to introduce him to a guest.

He’d run after her as soon as he’d been able to get free, but there had been a storm outside and there’d been no sign of her.

He’d had a surveillance job the following day, and during the long, tedious hours of waiting and watching, he’d called Information for Pansy Junction, California, and gotten the telephone number for the school.

With that, it had been a simple thing to check the roster of teachers at the Pansy Junction Elementary School, then to call Information again with her name. He’d gotten her telephone number and her address but knew he’d get nowhere calling her. So he’d hopped a plane the following weekend.

She’d been working on flower boxes and, when she’d turned to watch him climb out of his rental car, he’d seen both delight and surprise in her eyes.

And then she’d run into his arms.

As his closed around her, he’d known that she was what his life was supposed to be about, that his search was over.

And somehow, over the intervening eight months, that delicious discovery had turned into this desperate hiding out from the man who wanted to take it all away from him.

GUSTY LISTENED to the rhythmic strikes of Bram’s ax and felt as though she would cheerfully give up a year of her life if she could remember just a minute of her life with Bram before she’d surfaced in the river. It was becoming as important to her to know who he was as to know herself.

He was her husband, and the baby tied them to each other inextricably, but was he the caring, gentle person he seemed to be? Or had she glimpsed something else last night when he’d caught her going through his backpack?

He hadn’t shouted or accused, but she was sure she’d detected anger. Because she’d been snooping, she wondered, or because she’d caught him in a lie?

The uncertainty put her on edge.

Her back aching from a morning spent baking cinnamon bread, she went into the bedroom, intent on lying down for a few minutes. Then she saw herself in the three-way mirror on the old-fashioned vanity near her bed.

She groaned as she approached the mirror and sat down on the small stool. She looked like an obese bag lady, complete with big, loose dress topped with the flannel shirt. She’d braided her hair to keep it out of her face while she was cooking, but she’d done it quickly because she’d overslept, and now she looked disheveled and pathetic, like Pippi Longstocking on a bender.

Pippi Longstocking. Was that knowledge or memory? She was tired of asking herself that question.

Quickly she unbraided her hair and ran a brush through it, determined to pile it up into a tidy knot. This afternoon she wanted to clean kitchen cupboards. She felt both exhausted and frenzied, as though she was too tired to do anything, but had to or die.

She was drawing the brush from the crown of her hair through the long, rippled mass to the ends when she caught her triple reflection and felt something akin to a lightning strike right between her eyes.

Crack! Sizzle! Truth! Triplets. She was a triplet. Bram had told her that. She’d known it, but she hadn’t understood, hadn’t remembered it until this moment.

She was Gusty Ames. Triplet! And the other two images she saw were Lexie and Athena. But in her mind, she couldn’t see them as adults. All she could remember were three little girls peering into this mirror, pouting, crying.

Why?

“Disneyland!” Lexie said. She threw something. Gusty could see it flying but couldn’t tell what it had been.

She remembered suddenly that they’d been promised a trip to Disneyland but something in their parents’ schedule had changed and they took off for some other destination without them and left them with Aunt…Aunt…Sadie! Aunt Sadie!

Excited by the memories, Gusty pursued them, trying to remember more.

And as her mind chased those few details, it was as though a mist fell between her and them, closing them off.

She wanted to throw something but forced herself to calm down. She’d been warned this would be a slow and unpredictable process. She had to be patient.

Briskly she brushed her hair and wound it into a loose knot. She pulled out a few tendrils at her ears and her temple, then studied her reflection in surprise.

Why had she done that? Was that memory or habit? At least it was a new variation on the old question.

Momentarily tired of that worry, she brushed the sides up tidily, retied the knot and looked in her closet for something more stylish to wear.

But there was nothing. Bram said she’d lost everything she’d had with her when the rental car sank with her luggage. They’d left home quickly after the mysterious calls and she’d brought only the clothes on her back—this dress. He had bought her a few things—the overalls she wore all the time because they were comfortable, and a pair of black maternity slacks and a big white sweater that hung in the closet beside the overalls.

That was it.

And for reasons she couldn’t explain, that made her dissolve into tears.

She ripped off the offending flannel shirt and the dress.

GUSTY WAS STANDING in front of her closet in a long slip and a very no-nonsense white cotton bra when Bram found her. He’d stacked the wood and had gone looking for a cup of coffee when he’d seen the pot was empty and she wasn’t in the kitchen cooking or in the living room, working on the baby sweater she was knitting.

“What?” she demanded, crossing her arms over her chest. Her large belly rested under her breasts like some globular support. She looked tearful and cross. “What do you want?”

He advanced into the room with some trepidation. She was the dearest woman he’d ever known, but she had a temper to rival his own when it was aroused. What had done it this afternoon?

“A cup of coffee,” he said carefully. “But the pot’s empty. What’s the matter?”

“Just because I can cook,” she said angrily, snatching up his old flannel shirt off the bed, “It doesn’t mean I have to, does it? I mean, you’re perfectly capable of making coffee!” She jammed an arm into a sleeve.

“I didn’t mean you had to make it. I just…”

“You just wondered why I hadn’t!” One sleeve on, she reached behind herself for the other, growing testier as it eluded her. “Well, maybe I didn’t feel like cooking! Maybe, if we’re going to be stuck out here for all eternity, I’m giving some thought to spinning yarn and weaving cloth and making myself something to…damn it! Where the hell is the…”

Knowing he was risking life and limb, he came behind her, put her arm into the sleeve and danced back quickly as she rounded on him, yanking the fronts of the shirt together. Or trying to. They gaped over the baby.

That made her cry.

He shifted his weight and analyzed the situation, knowing touching her wouldn’t be safe. This was new territory for him. He’d faced her temper before, but not without a valid reason behind it. He had to find out what the problem was.

“Gus?” he asked reasonably.

“I don’t want to be Gus!” she snarled at him, then stomped out of the bedroom and into the living room, where she didn’t seem to be able to decide where to go from there. She turned in circles.

He stood aside and waited.

“I don’t want to be huge and ugly and completely unfamiliar to myself.”

“You’re not unfamiliar to me,” he put in quietly.

That didn’t help. “Well, you’re unfamiliar to me!” she shouted back tearfully. “I don’t know my own husband! Can you have any idea what that feels like?” She put a hand to her stomach, her voice quieting a decibel. “I don’t remember making this baby. If I could, it might make up in some way for the fact that I look like a polar bear with a red wig! A polar bear with nothing to wear!”

Well, now he knew what the problems were—and there were several of them—but he couldn’t do anything about most of them.

He concentrated on the one for which he had a solution.

“He was conceived after we went dancing,” he said. She’d stopped at the window looking out onto the rainy meadow, an amusing picture in tennis shoes, a long slip, and a flannel shirt that didn’t close. “We’d had a little champagne and the orchestra played a tango.”

She turned to him in surprise. “We can tango?”

He grinned. “No, we can’t. And we proved it that night. We were at the American Legion dance in the Baptist church’s community hall and ended up in a very undignified pile at the foot of the stage.”

She winced. “What happened?”

He shrugged. “As I recall, it was a physics problem. I had swung you out and was reeling you back in when you tripped, crashed against me and we both went down.”

“Did they throw us out?”

“No, they applauded. I think they appreciated our guts. Or our stupidity. I’m not sure which.”

Her smile crumpled suddenly and a tear fell. “I wonder what happened to my guts,” she asked plaintively. “I’m scared and tired and…” She lost her last shred of composure. “Really, really fat!”

He wrapped her in his arms, half-expecting her to resist, but she stood docilely against him, weeping as he rubbed her back.