The Unsung Hero (24 page)

Jenna sat quietly through the brief speech.
Perhaps she should have been relieved; she had won, hadn't she? He
wasn't going to try to force something on her she didn't want or
wasn't ready for. Neil had come through, after all.... As she had
known he would? She hadn't known that, and the thought was
jarring.

"I love you, Jenna."

Jenna opened her mouth—but nothing happened.
Her throat constricted tightly against the words uttered so easily
up until that moment. They simply refused to come, and it was
several seconds before she finally found her voice. "I—I love you,
too."

"Then I'm forgiven?"

Her fingers tightened on the receiver.
"Y-yes."

He didn't seem to notice the almost
imperceptible hesitation, and they went on to talk for several more
minutes. But while she was on the phone with Neil, the hazy shroud
of doubt that had plagued her these past few days at last began to
slip away, and she finally felt able to see her way clear through
the uncertainty, the shadow of the past

Her thoughts were a strange mixture of hope
and fear as she tumbled into bed that night. Later, she thought.
Later she would sort out this jumble of emotions about Neil, but
for now it would have to wait. Her marriage would have to wait.
Everything would have to wait. And she could only hope that Neil
would understand, because she had the feeling he would never have
brought up the subject of a child if he'd known what it would
trigger.

Because in the past few minutes Jenna had
come to a very important decision and a startling realization about
herself. She had once promised herself she would never look back,
but she couldn't go on any longer as she had been—floundering in
limbo, caught somewhere in time, trying to forget and never quite
being able to, not wanting to go back and yet afraid to take that
first step forward to sever all ties.

She was trapped and there was only one way
out. In her mind there was no right, no wrong, no past and no
future. There was only now . . .

And an overpowering need to see her son once
more.

CHAPTER TWO

The decision finally made, Jenna was left
feeling oddly at peace with herself. She slept the sleep of the
dead that night, awakening the next morning feeling far more
refreshed and revitalized than she had all week. She had never been
one to wallow in indecision for long; once her mind was made up,
she wasted no time making clear her intentions. "Willful" was what
her mother called her. She smiled a little as she showered and
slipped into jeans and a pale yellow T-shirt. Her father wasn't one
to mince words. "Pigheaded" was how he often referred to his
daughter.

She made several quick calls to the florist
and caterer. But once she sat down to address the wedding
invitations she'd started a week earlier, her brief respite of
peace began to shatter once more. She had to force herself to plod
through the remainder of the guest list. It was well after lunch
when she drove over to the post office, but once there, she stood
before the big blue mailbox outside for a full minute before slowly
dropping the bundles of envelopes inside. Without being consciously
aware of it, she found herself at her parents' house a short time
later.

She glanced up warily at the threatening
purple storm clouds gathering overhead as she switched off the car
engine. A gusty wind blowing in from the Gulf rattled the leaves of
the huge cottonwood tree bordering the sidewalk as she hurried
toward the white two-story house, wrapped on three sides by a wide
porch. Jenna had come to live in this house when she was five years
old, and even though she had been on her own since she'd finished
her nurse's training, this was the one place in the world she would
always think of as home.

A drenching sheet of rain began to fall just
before she reached the shelter of the porch. Mindful of her wet
feet, she ran around to the back entrance and slipped off her
sandals.

"Whew! Just in time!" she muttered, stomping
into the kitchen. She reached for a towel and smiled at her mother
as she wiped the moisture from her face.

Marie Bradford looked worriedly from her
daughter's rain-spattered cotton blouse to the moisture trickling
freely down the windowpanes. "Oh, dear," she murmured, "your father
will be dripping wet by the time he gets back."

"Dad's gotten lazy since he retired," Jenna
said with a shake of her head. "I suppose he's out fishing
again."

Her mother nodded. "I'll have to dig out the
hot water bottle before he comes home. His circulation isn't what
it used to be."

"Oh, come on, Mom," she said softly. Already
she could feel herself relaxing, and her lips twitched as she held
back a smile. "Can't you think of a better way to keep him
warm?"

"Like what?"

"Like body heat, for instance," she murmured.
"If it were my husband out there getting soaked to the bone, that's
the first thing I'd recommend. And as a nurse, I can't think of a
better remedy."

Marie Bradford turned to face her daughter
with her hands planted squarely on her hips. "I know what you're
trying to say, young lady, and I don't think I need to remind you
that you and Neil are half our age!"

Jenna didn't miss the amused glimmer in her
mother's brown eyes. She sat back and eyed her as she bustled
around the kitchen, wiping the counter and spooning fragrant
grounds into the coffeemaker. Her mother was in her mid-sixties,
and if it hadn't been for the snowy white hair that she wore in a
loose bun on her nape, she might have been taken for a woman twenty
years younger. Her skin was smooth and free of wrinkles, her brown
eyes snapping and vivacious.

"I hope Neil and I are as happy as you and
Dad have been all these years," she said suddenly, last night's
argument with Neil abruptly jumping into her thoughts. Her parents
had been married for forty-five years, and she couldn't help but
wonder—would her own marriage last that long?

There was a hint of wistfulness in her tone,
and Marie looked at her in surprise. "I'm sure you will be," she
said softly, moving to sit across from her daughter. "Dad and I
were happy and content before you came to us, but there was
something missing. I'll never forget how you looked the first time
we ever saw you. You were so tall and straight, and you tried to
look so brave—" She shook her head in remembrance. "But I could
sense how lost and alone you were." Her eyes lifted to Jenna's and
a soft smile lighted her face. "And I knew then how much joy you'd
bring into our lives."

Jenna's thoughts drifted fleetingly backward.
When she was four years old, her parents had been killed in a
collision with a train. Miraculously she had emerged with barely a
scratch. With no family other than an eighty-year-old great-aunt in
Maine who was too old to be burdened with a small child, custody
had been given over to the state. Her memories of that time were
few: stark white walls, hard narrow cots, being shuffled from
foster home to foster home for over a year. She had been too young
to understand the whispered excuses...too quiet, too
withdrawn...but old enough to understand the loss of warmth, the
absence of love from her young life. Two people whom she had loved
and depended on had been wrenched from her, and there was no one to
replace them. No one who willingly gave what her tender
four-year-old self craved so desperately: a warm pair of arms to
hold her, the solid strength of a shoulder to lay her head
upon.

Not until Jerry and Marie Bradford had
entered her life.

She smiled across at Marie, her heart filled
with tender emotion for this unselfish woman who had given her so
much. She reached across the table and squeezed her mother's hand.
"And you brought love back into mine," she said softly. Their eyes
met and held, but suddenly a troubled light entered Jenna's.

"Mom—" She traced an idle pattern on the
tablecloth, trying to find the right words. "What you said
before... were you trying to say that children have a way of
bringing people together?"

Marie shrugged. "I suppose so. Some
people—the right people." She paused. "Not that I think it's a way
to cure a troubled marriage, but I know that my own marriage to
your father wouldn't have been nearly as meaningful without
you."

Jenna took a deep breath. "I suppose a lot of
people feel that way. People like—like Megan and Ward Garrison."
Her fingers closed tightly around her coffee cup.

Marie regarded her steadily. "There's nothing
wrong with that, Jenna."

"I never said there was," Jenna said quickly.
She hesitated, then blurted out, "Neil... he—he'd like to have a
baby right away."

For a long moment her mother's eyes remained
riveted on Jenna's carefully controlled features before drifting
to the white-knuckled grip of her hands around her cup. After all
these years, there was still so much that Jenna held inside—Marie
offered a quiet statement, "And that bothers you."

There was a tight little silence. "Yes and
no," she finally admitted, her tone carefully neutral. Fingers that
weren't entirely steady traced the rim of her coffee cup. "We—Neil
and I had decided to wait a while before we had a baby, but now
he's changed his mind." She hesitated. "And nothing would make me
happier...eventually. But right now...right now it brings back so
many memories, and I can't help but think of—" She broke off, stung
to the core by her suppressed pain.

"Robbie," her mother finished for her softly.
Again her hand reached out to cover Jenna's.

She nodded slowly, drawing both strength and
comfort from the touch of her mother's hand. "Tomorrow I'm going
to Plains City to see him, Mom," she said quietly. "Even if they
won't let me touch him or hold him." Her eyes seemed two huge pools
of longing in her pale face. "I have to do this, Mom. I have to."
She looked across at her mother, somehow not surprised to see a
kind of gentle comprehension reflected "in the soft, brown depths.
Instantly the years fell away—

***

It was a newspaper article
that had first caught Jenna's eye nearly five years earlier,
"
childless couple seeks surrogate
mother"
was how the headline in the Houston
newspaper had read. Since her adoptive mother had been unable to
have children, Jenna was intrigued by the unique approach to the
problem of infertility. On reading the story, she discovered that
Megan and Ward Garrison, a couple who lived in northern Texas, were
actively searching for a woman to bear Ward's child. Married for
fifteen years and puzzled by Megan's inability to have a child in
all that time, both had undergone a battery of tests several years
earlier, only to find that Megan's fallopian tubes were blocked by
scar tissue and she could never become pregnant.

Jenna was working as an office nurse for a
physician with a family practice in Texas City at the time, and
both the receptionist and the bookkeeper could talk about little
else.

"You wouldn't catch me offering to have this
guy's baby," Vera, the bookkeeper, declared later that morning. She
flicked a disdainful finger at the newspaper. "My sister was sick
for weeks on end when she was pregnant—and she looked like a cow
from the time she was two months along!"

Marsha, the mother of a ten and a
six-year-old and infinitely more mature than Vera, held a different
viewpoint. "Your sister also had twins," she pointed out. "And some
women love being pregnant—"

"Not me!" snorted Vera.

Marsha had simply smiled and shaken her head.
"Wait until you're married," she said with a smile. "You might feel
fat and ugly and you might be so sick you feel like you could never
hold your head up again, but the minute you hold that tiny bundle
of life in your arms, it's all but forgotten."

Vera cast a wary eye at the older woman.
"That might be," she sniffed a little indignantly, again waving a
hand at the newspaper, "but if you ask me, this is a little weird.
I'd say that any woman who volunteers for this is doing it
strictly for the money!"

"I'm not sure," Marsha said thoughtfully. Her
eyes skimmed over the article. "It says here that the man is an
engineer, and I doubt if they make all that much money. And though
it says all hospital and legal expenses will be taken care of, it
doesn't specify how much the fee is."

"It would have to be one heck of a lot before
I'd do it," Vera snorted.

Jenna and Marsha exchanged a glance that
seemed to indicate Vera needn't worry about the possibility. Marsha
glanced down again at the newspaper. "It also says that any woman
applying will be tested physically and psychologically." She
frowned, then said slowly, "I guess that makes sense. I suppose
that they would want to make sure she really knew what she was
getting into, and after all—" she shrugged "—if a person went to
all that trouble and expense, I guess they'd want the mother to be
reasonably intelligent."

"Good Lord." Vera looked disgusted. "Imagine
having to apply to have a baby—just like applying for a job!"

"It wouldn't be easy giving up a baby," Jenna
put in pensively. "I suppose if you looked at it in terms of a job
right from the start, it might make it a little less traumatic when
the time came to hand over the baby."

"And that's not all," Marsha added. "It says
here that single women are preferred. Apparently both the couple
and their lawyer seem to think a woman who's never had a baby
wouldn't be as likely to have second thoughts about giving it
up."

"Well, they can count me out!" Vera's voice
rang out loudly. "I might be single, healthy and intelligent, but
there's no way I'd get involved in anything like this!"

There was a pause, and then two pairs of eyes
simultaneously turned to Jenna.