Maggy's Child (46 page)

“Hold still! I’ll get him!” Still laughing, obviously concerned for the fate of the bird rather than Nick, Magdalena came running down the stairs toward him.

“Come up!” she said to the bird when she reached them, holding out her hand. The blasted creature hopped onto her fingers without any hesitation at all, and sat there regarding Nick with baleful orange eyes.

“Stupid bird,” Nick muttered, glancing down at his jacket with repugnance.

“Bad boy!” Horatio said with loathing.

“Don’t worry, Mr. King, I can clean that off your jacket,” the housekeeper said, sounding friendlier than Nick had ever heard her as she came down the stairs with a big grin on her face. Maggy bore Horatio back upstairs, Nick shed his jacket and gave it to Louella, and David and Herd came down the steps toward him.

“Did you really know my mom when she was a little girl?” David asked curiously when he reached the hall.

“I sure did.” Nick was cautious, not wanting to say too much, but David suddenly grinned at him.

“I bet it made you mad when all the kids started calling you Junior Birdman.”

“It did,” Nick said, nodding. “Real mad.”

“Did you beat them up?” David sounded almost wistful.

“Some of them. The ones that weren’t bigger than me. But your mom was the worst of all, and I couldn’t even hit her. She was a girl.”

“Yeah,” David said. “It’s like that at school. The girls are the worst, and there’s nothing you can do.”

The boy started to walk past, then hesitated, looking back at Nick. “Me and Herd are going digging for night crawlers. You wanna come?”

“I’d like that,” Nick said, mentally consigning both his jacket and his plans for the afternoon to the Devil. “I’d like that a lot. Do you have a can?”

“Herd does,” David said, pointing to the large tin can in the gardener’s hand. Nick fell into step with his son and the silent smiling black man and felt his heart take wing like that stupid bird.

T
hat day marked a turning point in Nick’s relationship with David. Maggy felt a warm glow inside her whenever she watched the two of them together. It was obvious that David liked Nick, and she knew, without Nick ever having to tell her, just how the love of her life felt about David. Given the chance, Maggy thought that Nick would prove to be a far better father to him than Lyle would have been. In the twelve years that she and Nick had been apart, she had not been the only one who had matured: Nick, too, had grown up.

David blossomed under Nick’s casual approval. Whereas Lyle had expressed pride in David only when David excelled at the things Lyle considered important, Nick was interested in everything David did, even if David didn’t do them particularly well. Where Lyle had been fiercely competitive, Nick was laid-back. When David played him in tennis and beat him, Nick grinned while David crowed. And when David took Nick to the Club and discovered that his new pal didn’t even know how to play golf, he insisted on taking him around the course there and then for his first “lesson.” Maggy, seated in the golf cart watching Nick swing at the ball and hit nothing but air three times in a row, was convulsed. So, too, was David. But Nick was cheerful about what to Lyle would have been a painfully humiliating experience, and pretty soon Maggy joined in the game because she couldn’t be any worse than Nick. So the three of them
played, and they had a fabulous time sending balls careening all over the place. David’s fun was compounded by the fact that he won.

One Saturday Nick drove them out to the farm. Sarah had called the day before to say that Virginia was pining for Windermere, and Lucy, who had about as much tact as a tank, had announced in front of David that she was appropriating Louella and Herd (so that Virginia could have familiar attendants) and flying down to be with her mother during her final days. Maggy had confirmed with her mother-in-law’s doctor that Virginia was not in any imminent danger, but still David had been upset. Taking him to the farm had been Nick’s idea, to cheer the boy up. And it worked. David was entranced with the animals. He proved far more adept than Maggy at feeding the chickens, and wasn’t even particularly afraid of the cows, though Maggy still eyed them askance. Link was there, and Nick made hamburgers for lunch, and the four of them sat around munching companionably as Maggy had once dreamed they would.

After lunch, while Nick stayed inside to talk to Link, Maggy and David wandered back to the barn. He wanted to go up into the loft, so she followed him. They were sitting cross-legged on a bale of hay, chatting about nothing in particular and watching the progress of a spider as it leapt from one rafter to another trailing its silky cord, when Nick joined them.

“You guys about ready to go?” he asked, standing over them.

“Do we have to?” David groaned, stretching out on his back.

“I thought you wanted to catch the four-o’clock movie.”

“Oh. Yeah.” It was
Terminator II
, and David was thrilled that he was going to be allowed to watch it. They would have to see it on a smaller screen now, some months after its release, because Maggy had refused to let
him see it when it first came out. But Nick had persuaded her to grant permission
this one time
, and Maggy thought that David was going to expire of gratitude toward him when she gave in.

“I thought you might show David your paintings first.” Her tone was supercasual.

“Oh, yeah?” Nick looked at her sharply. Maggy smiled at him. She knew that he was afraid to push David too far, too fast, but she also knew how bad David felt because his great talent was considered sissy. But if so macho a guy as Nick did it, painting would immediately gain a new legitimacy in David’s eyes.

“You
paint
?” David said, incredulous.

“I sure do.”

“So do I.”

“I know. Your mom told me. She said you’re very good.” Nick held out his hand to David, and Maggy was thrilled to see her son put his fingers in Nick’s with no hesitation at all. Nick pulled him to his feet.

They crossed the loft together while Maggy hung a little behind. Today, with the hay door closed, the end of the loft where Nick painted was in shadow. But Nick pulled on the rope that swung the hay door open, and suddenly bright sunlight illuminated the easel and table and the stacked, covered paintings.

Nick was still working on the landscape of the farmhouse, Maggy saw as she approached.

The two males were absorbed in talk about palettes and colors and knives and brushes, to which she paid scant attention. Instead, she leaned in the hay door and breathed in the sweet, fresh scent of the farm.

Her gaze turned to her son and his father. She watched them together, Nick’s swarthy-skinned face as absorbed as David’s paler one as they engaged in their earnest discussion, and the thought that grew inside her mind was, “I’m happy. I am truly, truly happy.”

Nick was well on the way to putting what she had
done behind him. She knew it without his having to say a word. Though their physical relationship was still on hold, there was a new intimacy between them as they both strove to make the world right again for their son. And now David was growing attached to Nick. Maybe Saint Jude, by way of recompense for his previous misfire, was coming through for her at last.

“Can I look at some of your paintings?” David asked finally.

Nick pulled the canvas away from a couple by way of reply. David commented, Nick replied, and then Nick pulled the canvas off the portrait of Maggy.

“That’s my mom,” David said after a minute, glancing from the painting to Nick and back.

“It sure is.” Only Maggy, who knew him so well, would have divined that Nick was a little nervous about David’s reaction.

“She was young.” David sounded surprised, as children are always surprised to discover that their parents were once near their own age.

“Sixteen.”

“And pretty.” David’s observation was almost accusing. His eyes darted to Maggy, who smiled at him.

“Yes, she was.”

“Were you her boyfriend then?”

“Yep.”

“Why didn’t you marry her?”

“I wanted to. But she married somebody else before I could.”

“My dad.”

Nick didn’t reply. David was silent for a moment.

“If you’d married my mom then, you’d be my dad, wouldn’t you?”

Nick’s expression was inscrutable. “I suppose I would.”

David stared at him, then made a horrible face. “Man, that would really suck!”

“David!” Maggy cried in consternation, straightening
away from the wall. But David was already whirling and running toward the ladder. Nick caught her arm when she would have gone after him.

“Leave it alone.”

“I’m sorry,” Maggy said, looking up at him.

“Kid’s got a right to his opinion.” Though he said it lightly, Maggy knew Nick was hurt.

“I’m sorry,” she said again, helplessly. “He must have felt he was being disloyal to Lyle.…”

The hand on her arm suddenly tightened. “How could you have done it, Magdalena?” Nick burst out, his hazel-green eyes burning as they bored into hers. “How could you have robbed me of my son?”

He dropped her arm and stalked away, leaving Maggy to follow him a few minutes later in miserable silence.

The drive back to Windermere was not a pleasant one. Later, as Maggy supervised David’s bath and tucked him in, she was unaccustomedly terse. Finally, when she bent down to give him his good-night kiss and straightened, meaning to leave him, he caught her hand.

“Okay, Mom,” he said, sighing. “Spit it out. You’re mad at me, I can tell.”

“You were extremely rude to Nick today.” Her voice was severe.

“I know. I couldn’t help it.” He hesitated, then burst out: “It just seems—you like him so much better than Dad. You’re always smiling when you’re with him. And—I like him, too. It doesn’t seem fair.”

“You hurt Nick’s feelings.”

“I didn’t mean to. But it was like, for a moment, I almost wished he was my dad. Then I thought of Dad, and I felt bad for liking Nick.”

There was a pause.

“David,” Maggy said quietly, “don’t you think, if Dad really loved us, that what he would want most now that he’s gone is for us to be happy?”

David pondered that for a minute. “Yeah,” he said slowly. “I guess.”

“Being with Nick makes me happy. I think it makes you happy, too.”

“I guess so.” David’s admission was grudging.

“Okay.” Maggy flicked his nose with her finger. “I forgive you. But in the future, be polite to Nick.”

David grinned. “Okay.”

“Good night.”

“Good night, Mom.”

Maggy turned out his light and went along to her own room. Horatio was in his cage in the corner, his head tucked under his wing. When she turned on the lamp at her bedside, he untucked himself and glared at her bale-fy.

“Sorry, Horatio,” she murmured and walked into the bathroom to run a bath. She brushed her hair, her teeth, and bathed, then pulled on her nightgown and robe. Perhaps half an hour had passed since she had left David. If she knew anything at all about her son, he would be sound asleep.

Barefoot, she padded along the hall to check on him. For a moment she stood over him in the dark, listening to the rhythmic sounds of his breathing. She had been right: he was asleep.

Then she headed downstairs to confront Nick.

H
e was hurting, and he was
mad
. Nick used those two facts to justify his inroads into Lyle Forrest’s brandy. He was in the elegant, book-lined room they called the library, sprawled on a fat burgundy leather couch with his feet in their grungy white athletic socks propped on what was probably a thousand-dollar coffee table. He took a drag on his cigarette and flicked his ashes into a faceted crystal ashtray that looked as though it had never before seen actual use. An unlit marble fireplace was directly across from where he sat. Above it was a painting of a pair of glossy-coated Thoroughbreds. The painting was beautifully executed and had obviously cost a mint. Everything that had belonged to Lyle Forrest had cost a mint. He had to hand it to the slimy bastard, Nick thought as he swilled down another shot glass brimming with the aromatic golden liquid and stared moodily at the painting: everything he possessed had been of the finest. The finest paintings, furniture, clothes, cars, liquor. The finest woman. The finest kid.