Another Man's Child

Beth stared at Lisa, obviously shocked. “But I thought…I mean he…the night she was born, he…”

“He what?” Lisa asked. She and Marcus had never talked about that night, other than for Marcus to tell her how awful he felt for her, how sorry he was this had happened.

“He was here, sitting right on that chair, all night.”

“Marcus was here?”

“Uh-huh.” Beth nodded. “Watching Sara. I found him here about four o’clock in the morning just staring at her crib. And other than when he left me to go call your father, we sat here together until the six-o’clock shift change. He left then just long enough to go home and get your bag.”

Hope bubbled up in Lisa as she listened to Beth. Marcus had been here. He’d watched over their daughter for the whole night. He did care. He was the man she’d thought him to be. She’d gambled on him and won, after all. Her thoughts sprang ahead to the dreams that might yet come true, the years of living and loving that might be waiting just around the corner.

But they slammed to a halt when she remembered his words to her in the kitchen several nights before.

“That must have been what he meant when he said he’d tried,” she said softly, sadly, almost to herself. She hadn’t thought it possible for her heart to break any further. “He told me he’d tried to accept her, but he just couldn’t.”

She looked through the window at Sara, still sleeping silently in her odd little bed, seeing her as Marcus must have seen her that night. Knowing him as she did, she could just imagine the torture he must have put himself through as he watched his wife’s baby, unable to get beyond the fact that her tiny features, her little fingers and toes, genetically belonged to another man.

Remembering the agony she’d seen on his face that day he’d walked in on her baby shower, she could almost feel the anguish he must have suffered sitting through an entire night of watching her baby. And as she sat there suffering in sympathy, she finally understood that Marcus wasn’t ever going to come around, not because he didn’t want to or wouldn’t let himself, but because he couldn’t. He had as little choice in the matter as she did. And knowing that, she couldn’t go on hurting him. She couldn’t force him to live the rest of his life watching from the outside. Bringing Sara home to him wasn’t only unfair to Sara, it was unfair to Marcus.

“Maybe if he had some counseling,” Beth suggested somberly, her gaze fixed, like Lisa’s, on the infant on the other side of the glass.

Lisa shook her head. “Marcus isn’t confused. He sees things clearly. Too clearly, really. It’s just that his vision is different from mine. I think being a father starts with the heart. He thinks it starts with the body. It’s an argument no one can win.”

“I can’t believe this.” Beth rubbed her hand down her face.

“Me, neither,” Lisa whispered. “Every time I pray for Sara, I know that the answer to my prayer means the death of my marriage. If my baby lives, I lose the other half of myself.” Lisa started to cry. “Oh, God, Beth, what have I done?”

Beth’s arms wrapped around her, and Lisa lay her head against her friend’s shoulder, taking the comfort that Beth gave so willingly, the same comfort Beth had taken from Lisa those months immediately following her husband’s death.

“It’s not what you’ve done, Lisa. It’s what we’ve done. I’m so sorry I ever talked you into this.”

Lisa pulled back, shaking her head. “Don’t be sorry, Beth. Don’t ever be sorry.” She looked toward the nursery again and the tiny baby lying there. “I wouldn’t trade her for anything,” she said, swiping at the tears spilling from her eyes. “I just wish Marcus could feel as I do. I wish he could find a way to accept the gift I’ve tried to give him.”

“The man’s a fool,” Beth said, but Lisa could tell she only half meant it. If Marcus was a fool, if he was wrong, if she could be angry with him, it wouldn’t be so hard to do what she had to do. But he wasn’t wrong. He was simply a man who had strong convictions and who lived his life as his conscience dictated. Even now, even in this, he was the man Lisa had fallen in love with.

She and Beth watched the baby silently for a moment, both women considering the magnitude of what they’d set in motion that morning so long ago.

“Have you told Oliver that you’re leaving Marcus?” Beth asked a few minutes later.

Oliver? He’d always been “Dr. Webster” or “your father” in the past.

Staring at her friend,

Lisa shook her head. “I haven’t even told Marcus yet. Sara’s still got a long way to go, and I’m just not strong enough, or maybe it’s that I’m not unselfish enough, to leave him before I have to,” she said, wondering if there was something else going on she should know about. She’d been so wrapped up in Sara these past few weeks that she’d barely been aware of a world outside home and the hospital.

Beth nodded, saying nothing more, but Lisa had the most uncomfortable feeling that she was missing something. It was the way Beth had said her father’s name, the familiarity in it. Lisa didn’t like it. She didn’t like it at all.

A nurse came in to put a new diaper under Sara’s bottom, and Lisa and Beth watched as the young woman took the diaper over to the counter to weigh it. But Lisa sneaked a couple of surreptitious glances at her friend, as well. The years of missing John had taken their toll on her friend, adding lines around her eyes that hadn’t been there before, lines that had nothing to do with the smiles Beth wore so easily.

Lisa shook her head. She was really losing it if she thought Beth had any interest in her father. The two hardly knew each other. And not only was her father a generation older than Beth, but her friend was still in love with the husband she’d lost so tragically. Thinking of her father and Beth together was ludicrous. Ashamed of herself, she apologized silently to both of them.

But as she walked back to her office later that day, her thoughts drifted to her father once again. Was it possible he would someday take an interest in another woman? Lisa had never really thought of him as a man before, only as a father, and she found it unsettling to do so now. She supposed a lot of women would find him handsome. And, in his early fifties, he was still relatively young. Certainly young enough to have sexual interests. Except that he was still so in love with her mother.

Thinking of Barbara, of the mother she’d lost too soon, Lisa felt the familiar pangs of loss and regret. And she knew her father felt them, too. He might be young enough to begin a relationship with another woman, but Lisa knew he wouldn’t. He’d already had the best.

SARA BARBARA CARTWRIGHT was one day short of five weeks old when she finally opened her eyes for the first time. Marcus heard all about it the minute he got to the hospital that night. Regina rushed over to him as soon as she spotted him outside the nursery window.

“Dr. Cartwright was here when it happened,” she said, grinning as she recounted the joyous moment