“Maybe this isn’t going to be as easy as I thought,” he finally said.
Cooper called New York to check the messages on his answering machine in the morning, while Josie was in the shower. Nothing. His friends had all called back to say that they didn’t know anyone who was eager to adopt two small children who came with an extended family. He dialed the phone number of the Nashville private investigator he’d hired to track down the rest of Carla’s family. The man wasn’t in his office, but his secretary reported that to date he’d come up with nothing, and was recommending Cooper drop the investigation before it became too expensive.
He called Travis Beaujelais, and after the man gave him directions to the foster home Ben and Lucy were staying in, he told Cooper that the chill’n could only stay in foster care for a limited amount of time. The lawyer wasn’t sure exactly how long, but was guessing it was somewhere in the six to nine month range.
The idea of those kids living in a temporary foster home rubbed Cooper the wrong way. Ben and Lucy needed stability in their lives. They needed permanence, not indecisiveness.
But there was just no way he and Josie were going to be able to keep the kids. No way. With their work schedules, Ben and Lucy would be shuffled about in day care for almost every single one of their waking hours.
That
wouldn’t do them a hell of a lot of good, either. But what were they going to do?
Josie came out of the bathroom, and Cooper smiled at her, hiding the worry that was growing inside of him.
Josie squinted at the scrawled directions Cooper had written to the foster home where Ben and Lucy were staying. The house was in Fisher, a neighboring town about twenty miles east of Walterboro.
“You should have been a doctor,” she said, trying to read his handwriting. “I think you’re schizophrenic, Coop. You write so neatly on your drawings. But
this
. . .”
“I was in a hurry,” he said, glancing at her with a smile. “Beaujelais isn’t the easiest guy in the world to understand. I wanted to make sure I got it all.”
“What’s this?” Josie asked, holding the directions up. “I can’t figure out what this word says. Is it ‘case?’ ”
“Casa,”
Cooper said. “It’s Spanish for—”
“House,” Josie said. “It’s probably the one word of Spanish I can recognize. Of course, I wasn’t expecting these directions to be in another language.”
“Sorry,” he said. “It happens sometimes.” He reached over and covered her hand with his. “This
is
going to work out, Joze.”
She was silent, looking down at their two hands. Cooper’s fingers were so big and strong compared to hers. She knew he was really as scared as she was. So where was he finding the ability to sound so confident and certain?
“The thought of letting strangers take Ben and Lucy makes me sick,” she said softly. “But, Lord help me, I honestly don’t want them, and I can’t pretend I do. I’m just not ready to give up my freedom. I’m not ready to be tied down the way having two children would tie me down. And I know that must make me seem terribly cold-hearted—”
“No,” Cooper said, squeezing her hand. “Just very realistic. Our lives are already insane, babe. We couldn’t take on the responsibility of two children without something snapping.” He grinned. “And that something would probably be my mind. We’ve just got to be prepared for Ben and Lucy to stay in foster care until the adoption agency comes up with people who want to take them both. I know it’s not the best case scenario, but it’s also not the end of the world.”
“Turn right here,” Josie said, double-checking the street name. “I think. It should be the third house on the right,” she read from the directions. “Number fifteen sixty-four.”
Fifteen sixty-four was a drab green ranch with peeling paint and an overgrown lawn. A rusty trike sat in the driveway, along with a two-wheeler that looked as if it had seen better days.
The house looked closed up. All of the window shades were drawn and the front door was tightly shut. It looked unfriendly and cold.
Cooper took the directions from Josie, double-checking the numbers he had written. Fifteen sixty-four. Yep, this was it.
“It probably looks better on the inside,” he said for his own benefit as well as Josie’s. “With all the rain lately, they probably haven’t had a chance to cut the lawn.”
But each of the neighbors had, he realized as they walked up the overgrown sidewalk to the front porch. The screen door was sagging on its hinges. So what, he tried to tell himself. So maybe these people weren’t good at home maintenance. That didn’t mean they weren’t great with children, right? Cooper rang the doorbell.
From inside the house, a baby began to wail.
The door swung open. “
Goddamn
it, Bobby-Joe, you woke that baby up. I tol’ you if you rang that bell again, you little son of a—”
A skinny woman, wearing a worn out pink bathrobe, her hair in curlers, blinked at Cooper and Josie through the screen. “You ain’t Bobby Joe,” she surmised correctly.
Through the screen, Cooper could hear the sound of a television turned up way too loud. If anything had awakened the baby, it had been the sudden burst of an explosion on the television’s blaring speakers. A second baby’s cries joined the first. “No, we’re not,” he agreed calmly. “I’m Cooper McBride and this is Josie Taylor. We’re here to see Lucy and Ben Taylor.”
The woman didn’t look happy. “I
told
that Travis Beaujelais you shouldn’t come out here until one o’clock. I ain’t ready for you. You’ll have to come back later.”
She started to close the door, but Cooper pulled open the screen and leaned one hand against the peeling paint of the door. “I don’t think so,” he said.
The woman was young. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-nine or thirty, but her face was pinched and sour, aging her by a good ten to fifteen years.
Josie stepped forward. “I’d like to see my niece and nephew please,” she said, her voice soft but firm. “And I’d like to see them now.”
“I haven’t had time to clean the house,” the woman objected as Cooper pushed the door open and stepped inside.
Josie was right on his heels, but she hesitated as the stench of dirty diapers hit her. Sweet Jesus, how could anyone put up with that godawful smell?
An uncovered diaper pail sat in the entryway. Big black flies buzzed around it.
Cooper grabbed Josie’s wrist and pulled her with him into the living room.
The television was on, its volume near deafening. Four small children sat huddled on the floor in front of a cartoon. Only one of them, a red-haired boy who looked to be about six years old, glanced up in curiosity at the strangers.
“There’s Lucy,” the pinch-faced woman said shortly. “Ben’s upstairs, making that racket. You might as well come up and help.”
Josie followed the woman up a cluttered set of stairs. Despite the bright sunshine outside, the house was kept dark, with all the shades pulled down and curtains drawn. It was uncomfortably warm and, Lord, the smell was almost too much to take. They’d gone past the kitchen on their way to the stairs, and Josie had gotten a peek at counters filled with dirty dishes, food out on the table, and more of those horrible black flies . . .
Cooper looked uncertainly at the backs of four little heads. Okay, he
knew
Lucy wasn’t the red-haired boy. And there was another tiny little kid who also looked like he might be a boy, and besides, he was much too small to be a four-year-old—or at least Cooper thought so. To be honest, he wasn’t sure exactly how big a four-year-old should be.
But assuming he was right, that left the kid with stringy black curls, wearing a red T-shirt, and the kid with stringy brown curls, wearing a worn-out blue dress.
“Hey,” Cooper said. “Which one of you guys is Lucy?”
The red-haired boy was the only one who turned around again. This time he had annoyance in his eyes.
“Excuse me,” Cooper said, louder this time. He crossed to the television and clicked it off. “Who’s—”
Four pairs of eyes stared up at him, filled with varying degrees of reproach. But Cooper didn’t notice. Cooper was unaware of anything except Lucy.
He would have recognized her anywhere.
She was grubby, with a streak of dirt across her round face. She had a halo of dark curls and eyes so brown they were almost black. Her nose was impossibly tiny and her mouth exquisitely shaped.
She was a dead ringer for Josie. She was the four-year-old model, sure, but the family resemblance was uncanny.
Lucy was scared. Cooper knew from her eyes, from the tight set of her little shoulders. “I’m Lucy,” she said. “Are you gonna take me home?”
Cooper looked around, at the clutter and grime of this horrible place. He looked back into the child’s eyes, eyes so like Josie’s, eyes that held a glimmer of hope, and something in him broke. “You bet, sweetheart,” he whispered. “You bet.”
“I
cannot
believe you told her that we’d take her home,” Josie said, her eyes blazing with anger. “Cooper, where the
hell
did you leave your brain? You obviously didn’t bring it with you today—”
Cooper slammed the palm of his hand onto the hood of the rental car. “Look me in the eyes, and tell me you had any intention of leaving those kids in that dump,” he said hotly. “Hah! See? Can’t do it, can you?”
She pushed her hair off her forehead in exasperation. “There are many different options between leaving those kids here and taking them back to their
home
,” she said. “And the sooner you get in this car and drive to a pay phone, the sooner we can call Beaujelais and start exploring those options. Obviously, you didn’t consider the possibility of having Ben and Lucy transferred to another, more acceptable foster home.”
Cooper ran his hands across his face as he drew in a deep breath and exhaled loudly. “Josie, I look at that little girl, and I see you,” he said softly. “And there’s no way in hell I’d leave you in a place like that.”
“Cooper, we can’t keep Lucy—
or
that sweet little baby,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “We can’t give those children what they truly need.”
Cooper looked at Josie across the hood of the car. “Maybe we can,” he said.
“Weren’t you listening before?” she asked, blinking her tears back hard, determined not to cry. Damnit, she should have known something like this would happen. Cooper’s heart was way too soft. “You said it yourself—we can’t give them what they need,
and
they would make our lives way too complicated. We barely have enough time for each other as it is.”
He was silent, looking down at the road. He didn’t meet her eyes as he slowly climbed into the car. Josie got in on the passenger side and closed the door behind her.
“Cooper,” she said, reaching out to touch his arm.
But he shook her off, starting the car’s engine with a roar. “No,” he said. “It’s all right. You’re right.” He pulled away from the curb. “Let’s go call Beaujelais and get those children moved out of there.”
SEVEN
“H
ERE’S ONE
that looks good,” Cooper said, waving a book at Josie.
“Dr. Spock?” she said, glancing at the cover. “Cooper, just because the guy’s named after your favorite space alien doesn’t mean he knows anything about children—”
“Dr. Spock?” the bookstore’s salesclerk said helpfully as she overheard them talking. “He’s the best. Are you two planning to have a baby?”
“We’re going to be taking care of a four-year-old and a nine-month-old,” Cooper said.
“Temporarily,” Josie added.
“Do you have anything that gives point by point instructions on changing diapers?” Cooper asked cheerfully. “You know, something along the lines of an infant owner’s manual?”
“Oh dear,” the clerk said. “Well, there must be something here, though your best bet might be to sit down for a few hours with the children’s parents and—”
“That’s not possible,” Josie said. “Cooper, I think we’ve got enough.”
As Cooper paid for the books, Josie started to read. Lord, there was so much they didn’t know. What the heck was colic? It sounded terrible. Thank God it usually ended when the baby was three months old.
How often were they supposed to change the baby’s diaper? Once a day? Three times a day? More? And what exactly did a nine-month-old eat? God, Cooper was right. Someone
should
write an owner’s manual.
“This is insane,” she said as they carried the books out of the shopping mall. Cooper was wearing a shirt and tie with his jeans, but his long hair was loose around his shoulders. He was getting quite a number of stares from the locals, but with his height, the length of his hair, and his startling good looks, he was usually stared at wherever they went. As usual, he seemed unaware. “We’re way out of our league here, Coop.”
“We don’t really have a choice,” he said.
Travis Beaujelais had told them that in order to request a transfer for Ben and Lucy, the social workers would first have to check out their current location. It would be, at the very least, a few days before that would happen. Chances were that the house would be cleaned up for the visit, and the request for a transfer denied.
The only way they could get Ben and Lucy out of there immediately was to request custody.
Josie looked at her watch. “We have another three hours before Mr. Beaujelais will have the papers we need to get the children,” she said. “Why don’t we grab some lunch?”
Cooper slipped his arm around her shoulders. “Why don’t we go back to the motel?” he said. “Most of these books have more than three chapters on how to get babies to sleep through the night. Something tells me this might be our last opportunity to be alone for awhile.”
Josie pulled away from him. “This was
your
idea, remember?”
He sighed. “Don’t be mad at me,” he said. “We’re on the same team here.”
Josie crossed her arms. “Are we?” she asked. “I get the impression this is some kind of adventure for you, some kind of game. I don’t know what your deadlines are with work, but
I’m
supposed to be back in the office on Monday—”
“The child psychologist said we should give Lucy at least two weeks to get used to us in a familiar setting,” Cooper reminded her. “After that, we can take the kids to New York—”
“If
they’re not adopted by then.”
“If
we still want someone else to adopt them.”
Josie laughed in exasperation, throwing up her hands. “Oh, perfect, Cooper. Just perfect,” she said. “You’ve already decided you want to keep them, haven’t you? Thanks a lot for talking to me about it first.”
“Josie—”
But she was gone. Out the doors and across the parking lot, heading toward the rental car. Cooper followed, but didn’t try to catch up.
“What’s she looking for?” Josie whispered as she watched Lucy go from room to room in the old farm house, opening closet doors and peering inside.
Brad’s house was a lot like the other houses in town—old and decaying. But it was evident from the fresh coat of paint in the kitchen, the new stove, and the gleaming new linoleum floor, that Brad and Carla had been trying to make some changes, to fix the place up.
Most of the paint on the outside of the house had been scraped off in preparation for a fresh coat. The hardwood floors in the living room and dining room had been sanded and polished to a shine. The entire upstairs had new, airtight windows.
As Josie watched, Lucy disappeared into the room that had been Brad and Carla’s bedroom. She met Cooper’s eyes.
“She’s looking for her mom and dad,” Cooper said softly.
From down in the kitchen, Ben gave a snuffling cry, waking up from a nap.
He was still in his car seat. It had seemed easier to just unfasten the entire thing from the car rather than extract the sleeping baby from all the straps and buckles.
With one look back at the room Lucy had gone into, Josie followed Cooper downstairs and into the kitchen.
Ben stared up at them from his tiny throne on the floor. His eyes were lighter than Lucy’s—more hazel than brown, but he had the same dark curls on his little head.
Josie crossed her arms nervously. “I saw a baby once,” she said, “but that’s the extent of my experience.”
“The book I was reading said that babies liked to be held,” Cooper said. “And fed, and played with, and talked to, and—”
“Go for it,” Josie said, gesturing toward Ben.
The baby looked from Josie to Cooper and grinned, a big, fat, drooling grin, complete with two little white bottom teeth.
Somehow Cooper managed to unfasten all of the buckles and pick the baby up. He held Ben under both arms and they stared at each other. Ben smiled again.
“So far so good,” Cooper said, smiling back.
Ben was crying.
He was crying with great loud, raspy wails that made his face turn red and his entire body shake. Josie sat on the sofa with the baby on her shoulder, wishing that she were anywhere,
anywhere
in the world right now, rather than here, with a twenty pound loudspeaker screaming in her car.
“We changed his diaper,” Cooper said, looking up from the pile of books he had opened and scattered across the living room floor. “He’s not wet.” He flipped a few pages of one of the books. “He just ate, so he’s not hungry, and he had a bottle, so he’s not thirsty . . .”
“Did you burp him?”
Cooper and Josie both looked up in surprise to see Lucy standing at the foot of the stairs.
“Babies gotta burp,” the little girl said. She looked from Cooper to Josie. “If you don’t burp him, he’ll spit up.”
Cooper quickly looked at the index at the back of one of the books and found the pages that discussed burping. “ ‘Hold the baby upright, against your shoulder,’ ” he read loudly over Ben’s crying. He looked up at Josie. She already had the baby in that position and was watching him impatiently.
“ ‘Pat the baby firmly on the back, while applying pressure to his abdomen with your shoulder,’ ” Cooper said.
“This better work,” Josie muttered, following Cooper’s instructions.
As if on cue, Ben gave forth a loud belch, and after several seconds, his crying slowed.
Josie looked at Cooper, hardly daring to breathe, hardly daring to hope. But Ben was definitely about to stop crying. She pulled him back to look at the baby’s face as he took in one last deep, shuddering breath and then quieted. He blinked sleepily at her and smiled.
“Praise the Lord,” Josie said, and Ben threw up. All over her.
“Cool,” Cooper said from across the room. “Projectile vomiting. I was just reading about that.”
Ben started to cry again.
“Cool,” Josie repeated, standing up and handing Ben to Cooper. “Not quite the word
I’d
use.”
Ben was crying.
Josie flipped on the lamp on the bedside table and looked at Cooper.
Three a.m.
“Your turn,” she said, shaking him awake. “I was up at two.”
Cooper nodded groggily and staggered out of the bedroom.
Josie closed her eyes. She heard Ben quiet down, heard Coop talking in a low soothing voice. She couldn’t hear the words he was saying, but his tone was unmistakably loving.
When was the last time he’d spoken to her that way?
Not since they’d picked up the children from foster care. It had only been two days, but it seemed like two hundred years.
Ben cried almost nonstop. Josie was willing to do damn near anything to get that baby to stop crying.
It was driving her nuts.
And on top of her blossoming insanity, Cooper was distant, reserved, almost cold when he talked to her.
And whose fault was that? Josie couldn’t help but ask herself. As if the answer weren’t glaringly obvious. It was her own damn fault.
Act like a royal bitch, and people don’t fall all over themselves, trying to be nice in return.
The sad truth was, Josie was losing it. Something about the sound of the baby’s cry really got to her and twisted her all up into knots. The stress made her head pound and her stomach burn in a way she hadn’t felt in a long time. And Lucy . . .
Lucy flitted from room to room like a silent little ghost, watching with her reproachful brown eyes, checking to be sure Josie and Cooper weren’t torturing her baby brother too badly. Lucy didn’t say much, didn’t eat much, didn’t do much of anything but watch them as they danced attendance upon Ben.
Every time Josie turned around, Lucy was there, watching. She tried to involve the little girl, tried to include her in caring for Ben, but Lucy only shook her head “no.” Coop tried playing with Lucy, reading books, doing puzzles, playing games, but Lucy wouldn’t have any part of it.
The child needed more attention than Josie or Cooper could provide.
And as far as attention went, David had called four times yesterday with four different problems that needed Josie’s full and immediate concentration.
Josie’s stomach churned again. She breathed shallowly, trying to make the burning sensation go away.
Between all the work she was missing, Ben’s constant crying and Lucy’s problems, Josie could safely say that this little experiment in parenting was simply not working.
Lucy squinted suspiciously down at the grilled cheese sandwich Cooper had made for her.
“Are you sure I can eat this?” she asked.
Cooper tried to be casual. Lucy was actually sitting at the kitchen table—the closest she’d come to eating anything besides a fistful of crackers and cookies in days. He glanced at her now, taking in the somber set of her mouth and the frown that creased her forehead.
“I used to love this kind of sandwich when I was a kid,” he said.
He smiled at her, trying to block the sound of Ben’s persistent crying. Josie was with the baby, trying to get him to quiet down and take an afternoon nap. While she was at it, she might as well try to squeeze water from a rock, he thought. Ben did not sleep. He was adorable, or at least he would be if he’d only stop crying, but the truth was, the baby was some kind of mutant. He only slept in two-hour snatches, and never more than forty minutes during the day.
“Are you a lady or a man?”
The question startled him for more than one reason. In the few days they’d been home, Lucy hadn’t asked either Cooper or Josie one single question, hadn’t volunteered any information besides the advice on burping Ben, hadn’t said much of anything at all.
Cooper turned to look back at her. She was watching him somberly as he buttered the bread for another sandwich, her eyes serious. “I’m a man,” he said levelly.
“Why do you have hair like a lady?” Lucy’s soft Tennessee accent was impossibly cute.
“Where I come from, lots of men wear their hair long like this,” he answered. The butter hissed as he put the sandwich on the hot surface of the frying pan.
Lucy considered his reply carefully. “Do you come from MTV?” Again, the question was asked with supreme seriousness.
Cooper hid a laugh with a cough. “MTV?”
Lucy nodded. “Yes, sir. Lots of men on MTV have hair like yours. Do you play the guitar?”
“No, I’m an architect.”
Lucy frowned slightly, not understanding, and Cooper searched for a way to explain. “I draw pictures,” he said, “of houses and buildings.”
There was genuine interest in Lucy’s dark eyes, and Cooper felt a flare of hope. Maybe he’d finally found something they could do together. Maybe—
“Can you draw puppies?” Lucy asked. “I’d rather draw puppies than houses.”
“Yeah,” Cooper said, grinning at her. “You want me to draw you one?”
“Yes, sir.”
The telephone rang, and Lucy watched as Cooper picked it up. He stretched the long cord across the room and flipped the second grilled cheese sandwich as he said, “Hello?”
“Yeah, Cooper. David here. I need to speak to Josie.”
Cooper tucked the handset under his chin. “Dave! How’s it hanging?” He looked up at Lucy. “It’s Dave, from New York. That’s where I’m from. New York City.”
He could hear David sigh. “Please, could you put Josie on? This is important.”
Cooper found a used envelope on the cluttered counter underneath the telephone, and he quickly sketched a cartoon-style puppy dog for Lucy. “Yeah,” he said, “but first, Dave, I want to ask you a favor.”
Silence. Cooper counted almost to five before David cleared his throat.
“A favor.”
“Yeah,” Cooper said. He handed the drawing to Lucy with a wink. She stared down at it, eyes wide. “I want you to tell Josie everything’s swell and that it’s okay if she spends another few weeks away.”
Ben had stopped crying. Cooper tilted his head in the direction of the stairs, listening. No, he was right. The crying had definitely stopped.
“But everything is
not
—
“
Cooper stopped David with “Shh.”
“What?” David asked.
Cooper took a deep breath and smiled. “The baby’s finally asleep,” he said. “Josie did it. Hot damn.” He looked at Lucy. “Dog,” he said. “Hot
dog.
”
“Cooper.” David was starting to get annoyed. “Everything here is
not
‘swell.’ In fact, I’m calling because there’s a problem. We need Josie back here ASAP.”