Leigh (28 page)

But this little one wasn’t. And the wayward father didn’t even know about the sweet little girl. The midwife handed Chloe
the naked, squalling baby. And Chloe took her to the nearby plastic basin in the kitchen sink and gave her great-granddaughter
her first bath, just as Jerusha had bathed Bette and she and Jerusha had bathed Leigh. Kitty hung over Chloe’s shoulder, watching,
cooing. Then the two of them carried the baby, clean and dressed in a pale-yellow newborn gown, over and laid the child in
Leigh’s arms. “She’s beautiful,” Chloe said.

“She’s outstanding,” Kitty said.

“She’s here.” Nancy yawned.

Leigh couldn’t believe that the ordeal was over. The Lamaze classes had prepared her, but going through childbirth had not
been what she expected. Now she fully understood why they called labor, “labor.” She felt as if she’d been dragging stones
large enough for a pyramid.

All that fell away, though, when she looked down. Tears hovered close as she gazed at her precious little daughter.
I’ll never make you feel unloved, my darling.

The women around her, the ones she loved, cooed and patted the baby The midwife said in a crisp voice that a nurse
would be coming in the morning to check on Leigh and the newborn, to call the hospital if anything came up. Then she left,
waving good-bye.

“What have you decided to name her?” Chloe asked.

This was something Leigh had given a great deal of thought. “I’m going to name her Carlyle Leigh Sinclair.”

“Carlyle? My mother’s family name?” Chloe asked.

Leigh saw that her grandmother didn’t want to say she didn’t like the name.

“Yes,” Leigh explained, “because even if my mother wants to deny she exists, she’s the next generation.”

Chloe squeezed her granddaughter’s shoulder. “Don’t be bitter, honey. Bitterness is poison.”

“I’m not bitter. I’ve put it into perspective,” Leigh said, though her mother’s cool treatment of her over the pregnancy still
pained her. “Our family carries on in spite of all the changes, all the wars, all the political stuff like Watergate. Ivy
Manor still stands, and I’ll stand, too.”

“Of course, you will.” Kitty sat down on the edge of the bed. “And so will we.”

As Leigh struggled against the sudden weariness that overtook her, a knock came at the door. “Who could that be at nearly
6:00 a.m.?” Kitty commented as she went to the door and opened it. “Dory!”

Chloe and Leigh turned to see Leigh’s younger sister enter. She was wearing jeans and a yellow T-shirt and carrying a duffle
bag.

“Oh, the baby!” Dory squealed, rushing forward. “You had the baby!”

“Dory!” Leigh felt her heart lift, buoyant and refreshed.

“Dory, what are you doing here at this time of the morning?” Chloe scolded. “Where’s your mother?”

A policeman stepped inside. All together, the older
women gasped. Leigh, disbelieving, tried to cover herself and her daughter. Dory ignored them all and bent to look at her
niece.

The officer stopped short, obviously embarrassed at having walked into such an intimate scene. Backing up a pace, he stood
by the door and cleared his throat. “Dory, is this your sister?” He gestured at Leigh, who was still shocked to see a stranger
standing in front of her birthing bed.

Dory nodded, cooing over the baby.

Leigh finally found her voice. “She’s my sister,” she replied faintly.

“She’s my granddaughter,” Chloe said.

“She’s my great-niece,” Kitty crowed. “And this, Dory, is your little niece, Carly.”

“Cool,” Dory crowed. “She’s so cool.”

Leigh continued to stare at the policeman—the handsome, auburn-haired policeman. Her hand absently smoothed her hair and pulled
the bed sheets closer to her chest. “What’s going on?” she asked. “Dory?”

The policeman nodded, looking as if he were drawing up his professionalism for this occasion. Leigh could see, though, how
his eyes softened as he looked at her and the new infant in her arms. “We picked up your sister at the train station. We routinely
pick up a lot of runaways there.”

Carly suddenly whimpered, and the policeman, along with everyone else in the room, smiled. Leigh felt his kind eyes move over
her and her child, and suddenly she didn’t mind his attention. He looked like he liked babies.

“I told them I wasn’t running away,” Dory declared suddenly, raising up and giving her grandmother a wary eye. “I was just
coming to see my sister. But they wouldn’t believe me so they drove me here.”

Leigh knew her mother would never have let Dory travel
alone to New York City, especially not to see her sister and her sister’s illegitimate child. So she was sure that Dory had,
in a sense, run away. Well, that was their mother’s fault, one she’d never learned to stop. But this policeman didn’t need
to know all the details.

“Thank you, officer. We didn’t realize Dory was coming this early, or one of us would have met her at the station. But as
you can see, even coming early, she missed the grand entrance of our newest family member.”

“Bummer,” Dory said.

The policeman looked at each of the women in turn, obviously uneasy, but unwilling to pursue it further. Finally, he smiled.
“Well, I’ll be going then. Congratulations.” He nodded to Leigh and walked out the door.

As the rest of the women descended upon Dory demanding explanations, Leigh stared at the closed door and thought about the
man who’d suddenly been thrust into her life, however briefly. She thought of his eyes, the softness that had come over them
as he looked at her and Carly. She couldn’t help herself from the unexpected, wistful thought,
Why couldn’t I have fallen for someone nice like that?

Six weeks later, in early autumn, Leigh headed down the street toward the subway station. Back into her pre-pregnancy skirt
size, she was almost feeling normal again, and she was starting to go in for half days this week. She hoped to be full-time
again at the magazine by the time Carly was two months old.

“Leigh.” Without warning, a familiar, but upsetting voice summoned her from behind. She turned and there he was. Trent Kinnard.
The shock was overwhelming, especially her physical reaction. Images from their one night together
flooded her consciousness. She nearly reached for him, but then she turned to run.

Before she could take a step, he caught her wrist. “We need to talk. Let’s go somewhere for coffee.”

“I don’t want to talk to you.” She pulled from his loose grasp as if his hands were unclean. “We don’t have anything to discuss.”

“Yes, we do.” He looked angry with her. “Do you think I don’t know that you just had my baby? I can count to nine, you know.”

She stared at him, her heart pounding so hard it made her nauseated. “How did you find me?”

“When you dropped out of my life last fall, I hired a PI to find you. It wasn’t hard, and he’s sent me reports about you every
week. When our baby—”

“
My
baby—just
mine.
I don’t want or need to have anything to do with you.” She swept him away with her hand.

“Why? Leigh, I thought we had the start of something good—”

“Good?”
You have gall, all right. “
I didn’t know you were married. I don’t
do
affairs with married men. You can’t imagine how I felt…” Her throat started to close up on her. “I’ve never been so insulted,
so humiliated.”

She paused to calm herself so she could breathe. All the things she’d wanted to scream at him over the lonely months since
last November clamored to be unleashed. She suppressed them. She didn’t want him, couldn’t let him know how much he’d hurt
her. “I don’t want anything to do with you.” She looked down at the broken sidewalk.

Trent moved closer. “Would it make any difference,” he said, urgent and low, “if I told you that now I know I’m in love with
you? I’ve been miserable every day since you walked away. Doesn’t that count for anything?”

“No, it doesn’t.” She wanted to hit him. How dare he try that line on her? Didn’t the man know when to give up? “You should
have realized that I wasn’t what you thought I was. You knew…” She refused to continue.

“I knew that I was the first, and yes, now I see that should have caught my attention. But it didn’t at the time.” He paused
as if trying to come up with words. “Please, can’t we work out
something
between us?”

“No. You’re a married man. I’ll take my share of blame for what happened that night, but my defense is naivete. What’s yours?”

He had the grace to hang his head, chagrined. “I can’t divorce—”

“I’m not asking you to,” Leigh tossed at him. “
I
didn’t come looking for
you,
did I? And you don’t have to worry about a paternity suit. I want nothing from you.” Fearing she might burst into tears or
start screaming, she whirled away. “Good-bye.”

“Leigh!” He called her name once and then subsided.

She ran from him to the subway steps. As she hurried down the stairs, her heart felt as if it would burst with the pain, the
guilt.
God, forgive me. Help me. Don’t let any of this hurt my sweet child.

L
eigh didn’t like visiting police stations. Ever since Chicago in ’68, she’d despised the decaying institutional decor and
the sweaty, musty smell, which could have been bottled as “Old Police Station” to men with very odd taste in cologne. But
now she had pinned a bright and engaging smile on her face and not even the old dinosaur in uniform sitting across from her
would wipe it from her face.

She was here to get what she needed for a story, and she wouldn’t let anything stop her. “But Captain Dorsey,” she said, not
betraying her frustration, “I’m not doing an expose on the NYPD. I just want some leads on the new trend of girls joining
gangs or forming their own.”

He snorted. “And I keep tellin’ ya. It isn’t new, and we don’t want you encouraging gang activity of any kind.”

“I’m not encouraging it. I just want to write about it and try to stop it.”

“You—” He pointed his ballpoint pen at her. “—write
about it and it gets publicized, and you’ll end up making it even more popular.”

She felt like hitting him in the head with a two-by-four. But it would probably take more than that to get through to this
man. “Well,” she said, rising and holding out her hand, her false smile holding, “I won’t take up any more of your time then.
Thank you for your help.”
Or lack thereof.

He stood and shook her hand with his large paw. “You be careful. A pretty woman like you shouldn’t be messin’ around with
gangs. It could be very dangerous. You’re out of your league, lady.”

Now in her mid-thirties, Leigh was inured to the compliment he paid her. For once, she wished a man wouldn’t feel he had to
tell her how pretty he thought she was. To be honest, she had traded on her good looks to get information—but only when no
other way was open to her. And today she’d dressed in a stylish black suit with a flared skirt and had left her hair down,
knowing she would be trying to get what she needed from a man.

After expressing her empty gratitude, she flashed a charming smile at him—who knew when she might need him or someone he knew
to help her on another story—and then exited. As she walked down the narrow hallway back to the entrance, a broad-shouldered
man brushed against her. She got a tantalizing whiff of his English Leather. She leaned away from him, unaccountably irritated.

But then she felt him slip something into the outside pocket of her suit jacket. She gave him a startled look, and he gave
her the slightest shake of the head as if to stop her from speaking. She gave him a nod and went on outside.

A block away, she pulled out the business card he’d slipped into her pocket. It gave his name, his rank as a plain
clothes detective, and contact information. She turned it over and in ink, he’d written: “Call me.”

Ten-year-old Carly, in a plaid winter coat over her white ballet tights and pink Care Bear boots, was waiting for her. Leigh
approached the poorly lit doorway of the dance studio where Carly went with friends after school for tap and ballet. Her expression
broadcast that she was vexed with her mother again.

“Don’t look so growly at me. I just proved I
can
get here on time,” Leigh said as she smoothed wisps of her daughter’s long black hair away from her pretty, oval face.

Carly looked up, her gray eyes serious as always. “I was afraid you weren’t going to be, and I don’t like it when I’m the
last one picked up.”

Yes, lay the guilt trip on me. “
I know, but today you weren’t. I really try to get here early, but sometimes things happen. You know what to do when I’m delayed,
right?”

“Yes, I’m supposed to wait inside the doorway until you come,” Carly recited as she walked alongside her mother toward the
subway station. “But I don’t like being last. Everybody walks by me and asks me why I’m standing there.”

Leigh only half listened to her daughter’s oft-expressed complaint. The business card in her pocket kept generating questions.
Who was Nate Gallagher, beyond the fact that he was a plainclothes detective with a face that looked like it grinned a lot?
Why did he want her to call him? Was it professional, or was he just using a unique pickup line? She hoped it wasn’t the latter.
But if it were, she was experienced in keeping men at a distance. In fact, by now she had perfected rejecting unwelcome advances—or
any advances really—to a
fine art. She’d decided she was busy enough with work and Carly. Men took up too much of a woman’s time.