Becca's Baby

“Don’t make this a moral issue, Bec.”

“How can I not?”

He was still working on that one himself. “You have to be logical about it.” He prevaricated with the only thing he knew—sound reasoning. “Instead of an abstract issue of right and wrong or things that can’t be weighed or proved, you’ve got to focus on the factual pros and cons and come up with an answer from there.”

“I’ve spent more than half my life wanting a baby,” she whispered. “If I were thirty, even thirty-five, I’d be ecstatic.”

“There hasn’t been that much change in the last six or seven years, Bec,” he said. “We’re active, we eat well. We’ve kept ourselves in shape.”

Becca nodded. And then sat silently beside him for a while longer. She had another whole day before she had to make her decision. He had another day of standing at the precipice of a nightmare from which he couldn’t seem to save either one of them.

“You coming to bed?” she asked when the wee hours of the morning were firmly in place.

Because he couldn’t think of a better alternative, Will walked her down the hall to their bedroom, quietly undressed and slid between the sheets. Any other time he would have reached for her, fitting his body snugly around hers, but now he found himself lying flat, instead, staring up at the ceiling. He couldn’t turn his back, but he couldn’t move close to her, either.

Despite an exhaustion that went much deeper than the mere need for sleep, one fact remained constant in his mind. No matter what Becca decided, a certain amount of damage had already been done. At some point, without his even noticing it, he and Becca had grown apart.

Not just a little apart. Not something that could be fixed with a bit of attention. He and his wife of twenty years weren’t even living in the same world anymore.

“MRS. PARSONS! Mrs. Parsons! Sit over here!”

“No! It’s my turn, Brian! She said she’d sit by me this time. Didn’t she say that, Miss Bonnie?”

“Yes, Lillie, it’s your turn,” Bonnie Nielson told the precocious four-year-old who not only never forgot a thing, but felt it was her duty to make sure nobody else did, either.

“She’s gonna wanna hold the babies again. Everyone wants to hold the babies.”

That was from Brenda. Only four years old and her glass was already half-empty, instead of half-full.

“We ain’t got none today,” Mick told her pompously.

“Uh-huh,” little Gwen nodded, her sweet fat cheeks puffed out more than usual with her certainty.

“Funny Bo is here. They just brung him in.”

Becca’s heart skipped a beat at the mention of the Down Syndrome infant who was a regular at the day care where she volunteered on Thursday mornings. Only three months old, Bo was clearly a Down’s baby, but it was too early to tell how severely he’d been affected. She, like almost everyone in town who knew the Roberts, hoped that Bo’s case wasn’t severe at all. His parents were just out of high school and were hardly ready to cope with having a first child, let alone a handicapped first child.

And yet, as Becca finished reading to the four-year-olds and made her way to the nursery to take a peek at Bo, she had to admit that never had a baby been more loved than this one. He was always clean, neatly dressed and almost always smiling. His bag, full of everything a baby could possibly need and then some, was packed fresh every day.

“He’s a cutie, isn’t he?” Sharlyn, the nursery “teacher,” came over to stand beside her.

“Yeah.” But how heartbreaking to think of the life that awaited him. Watching him in the crib, his eyes skewed as they tried to focus on the colorful mobile swinging gaily above his head, Becca knew that her decision had been made. How could she possibly bring a baby into the world knowing that she had a better chance than Bo’s mother of having a baby with serious birth defects? How could she knowingly do that to a child?

“Wanna help with finger-painting?” asked Alice, teacher of the three-year-olds, poking her head in the door of the nursery.

“Sure!” Turning, relieved, Becca followed the young woman into the loudest room. She needed the noise. And loved the children.

When it had become obvious, at least to her, several years ago that she wouldn’t be having any babies of her own, Becca had made up her mind to find other ways to bring children into her life. She’d been volunteering at the day care ever since. There, her mothering was lavished on young chil

dren whose own mothers had to go out to work, to earn a living to support their offspring. She liked to describe the arrangement as a kind of partnership parenting. Other volunteers she knew felt the same way. She got to be a parent, and the parents of those children got maternal love and care for their children during the hours they themselves couldn’t provide it.

And the children—they got the best of both.

Maybe if Will understood that, he’d understand why Becca was no longer so desperate to have a child of her own.

BAD KARMA seemed to be following Will. Which was a damn clever feat, since he didn’t believe in it. Problems at home weren’t enough; now he had a potential disaster waiting for him at work, as well. He’d received a couple of reports from different sources, and while he didn’t want to believe there might be any truth to them, he didn’t dare assume their lack of validity; he had to verify it. And then he had to figure out how to kill the rumors before they hurt his colleague and good friend.

“Todd, have a seat,” he said warmly early Friday morning as Todd Moore, dressed in his usual khakis and polo shirt, approached. Will had deliberately set up this meeting in the diner downtown before classes started for the day. He didn’t want anyone, including Todd, to think this was official.