Finding Her Dad

CHAPTER TWO

JON DIDN’T KNOW how he got through the day. He had several other appointments, and had to attend a potluck dinner at a seniors’ center and then, later in the evening, a volunteer fair at a community center. The brief talks he gave to the seniors and the volunteers came by rote, for which he was grateful. He was getting good at running for office, which these days seemed to matter more than whether he’d be an effective sheriff. He could tell his tough-on-crime stance went over better with the old folks than it did with the activist kinds at the fair. They were inclined to be softhearted. He found their suspicion of him ironic, considering his core belief was that every person should take responsibility for his or her own actions. He believed in a kind of morality that was very personal. Wasn’t it that same sense of morality, a need to take responsibility, that had driven all of them to give of their precious time to some cause?

The whole time he talked, listened, smiled, shook hands, he felt as if he was having an out-of-body experience. He would have sworn he was standing outside himself watching critically.

Knowing the guy he watched was a hypocrite.

He argued for a morality that should govern every choice a person made, a sense of responsibility that wouldn’t let you look away when it was convenient to do so.

Responsibility. Now, that was funny, coming from a man who’d sold his sperm. Who might have a whole bunch of unacknowledged kids out there. Kids who were deeply wanted, he’d told himself back when he was twenty-one and saw the sperm donation as a quick and easy way to bring in bucks. He was doing the world a favor. After all, he was healthy, smart, athletic; he carried no genetic booby traps of which he was aware. What was wrong with helping women have babies, if their husbands were sterile or they’d chosen to go the single-parent route?

He’d returned to the clinic two or three times, hating the sordid feel of the process itself. But he’d been working as many hours as he could and still keep his grades up, and yet struggled to pay his tuition and rent and buy food and books. He’d been damned if he would take a cent from his father. He would do anything not to have to surrender his pride enough to ask for help from his parents.

He worked his butt off. And, when necessary, he’d sell sperm, and he’d sell blood. He had done both.

Personal responsibility wasn’t the strong suit of twenty-one-year-old boys. He’d been blithe enough about jacking off and handing over the tube of milky liquid, until one day he was waiting for a bus near a medical clinic. A pregnant woman came out and sat on the bench near him. He remembered looking at her sidelong. He didn’t know how pregnant she was. She was round, but not waddling. Five or six months, maybe. No husband with her. He’d wondered a little disapprovingly why not. A pregnant woman shouldn’t have to wait for the bus. What if it was full and she had to stand? Or she got jostled and bumped hard against the sharp edge of the seats? There were punks who hassled lone women on buses. And then he’d thought, Oh, my God. She might not have a husband, or a boyfriend. She could be pregnant with my baby.

He’d sat there in shock, trying not to stare but unable to help sneaking looks. Of course the kid she was carrying wasn’t his; that was stupid even to think. What were the odds? The sperm bank supplied fertility clinics all over the country and even abroad. Not just locally.

But it could be.

Man, that had given him cold chills. After that he’d stuck to donating blood when he was desperate. It wasn’t as if the money had been that fabulous. He pretended to himself he didn’t even notice the pregnant women who seemed to be everywhere.

It was a couple of years before an obviously pregnant woman didn’t seem to light up like a neon sign to him, and before he succeeded in putting from his mind the fact that probably some of his sperm had been put to use, that at least a few babies had been born that were blood of his blood.

And now, he thought as he stood outside himself and watched while he went through the motions of politicking, he’d met one of those children. Sierra Lind.

The question was, what was he going to do about it? About her?

Had she meant it when she said she didn’t expect anything? That she wouldn’t tell anyone he was her father if he didn’t want to acknowledge her?

Maybe. He thought she did mean it now. Which wasn’t to say she wouldn’t change her mind.

It would matter less later, once he’d won the election, if he could put her off.

He felt cold-blooded even thinking that.

Even if Sierra kept her mouth shut, what about her foster mother? Ms. Malone had started dubious and moved right along to mad because all she could see was that he was hurting her precious chick’s feelings.

And he had. Jon didn’t like to remember the wounded look in those blue eyes or the pride with which Sierra—his daughter—had carried herself when she assured him that he had no obligation to her. Sierra might even believe that she’d been operating on mere curiosity, that she had no secret wish for him to hold out his arms and gather her into the bosom of his family. But he knew better. She’d lost her mother, and her only other relative didn’t want her. She’d gone to extraordinary effort to find him. Of course she hoped, desperately, that he would feel an immediate bond. Curiosity to match hers.

So…what did he feel?

He had no idea.

No surprise, even after having downed a shot of straight Scotch while watching the late-night news, that he couldn’t sleep.

The day had been muggy enough that he’d left the ceiling fan running. He slept naked, the moving air cooling the sweat on his body. Lying on his back, arms crossed behind his head, he gazed at the pale square of moonlight that fell through the open window onto the bed. Most of him was in the dark, leaving only his knees, calves and feet exposed by that cool light.

He wondered if she was able to sleep tonight. What had she felt, meeting him? Anything in particular? Had there been some sort of recognition, on a cellular level, or did she imagine there was? Was she lying awake right now, too, hungrily remembering his face or the pitch of his voice and the set of his shoulders, deciding which bits and pieces of him had been echoed in her by the genes that had imprinted her?

He muttered a soft imprecation. Those long, skinny arms and legs… He’d gone through that phase. In middle school he’d taken to hunching and hunkering low in his chair, because he towered over everyone. He’d been ridiculously, embarrassingly skinny. PE was a nightmare for him, when he was required to wear shorts that exposed stick-thin legs. Jon smiled a little, thinking about the boy he’d been. A boy with size-thirteen feet that sometimes seemed to be only loosely attached to him. Getting interested in girls, and knowing he looked ridiculous to them.

Sierra’s body still wasn’t quite finished, but she hadn’t looked as if she was clumsy, not the way he’d been. But maybe she had been when she was younger. He wouldn’t be surprised. By sixteen, he’d finally been gaining some muscle, some coordination. By twenty, he guessed Sierra would be a beauty, model-slender and graceful. Did she know that, or still despair?

She had to be smart, or she wouldn’t have been able to track him down. He had a feeling Ms. Malone hadn’t helped. She’d radiated too much disapproval. So Sierra was enterprising, too. Creative. He’d never heard of a kid using DNA to find a sperm-donor father. And she must be a dreamer, or she wouldn’t have embarked on her plan in the first place. He’d been driven, but he wouldn’t call himself a dreamer. At that age, he’d been engaged in ice-cold warfare with his father. Sometimes he thought his every decision had been made in anger and rebellion. He’d been consumed by that anger.

Sierra’s decisions were being made in grief and loneliness.

“Damn,” he whispered to the moonlit room.

His mind drifted. What would Mom think of her? He knew. His mom would be shocked at first, that he’d sold sperm, that she had unknown grandkids out there. She would look as disapproving as Lucia Malone had. But she would love Sierra, given her innate dignity and vulnerable eyes the exact color of his.

His sister, Lily, would, too. Although it would be awkward explaining to her two kids why they’d never met—or even heard of—this cousin.

After the election…

Jon gritted his teeth. That was almost three months away. Three months, during which Sierra would believe her father didn’t want anything to do with her. He wasn’t her father, not in any meaningful sense. There had never been any such expectation of him. Her mother had known the deal when she purchased sperm. He should be able to feel detached.

He couldn’t.

She might not be his. There was clearly a relationship to his mother—the DNA test confirmed that. But he probably had dozens of second and third and fourth cousins he didn’t know. Either he’d have to give a DNA sample, or they’d go to the sperm bank or fertility clinic together and ask for confirmation.

But he knew. He knew.

And he also knew he couldn’t live with himself if he turned away from that girl.

Election or no election.

“IT’S OKAY if he doesn’t call.” Sierra sat on one of the two tall stools at the breakfast bar in the kitchen, watching as Lucy put together a salad to go with the leftover casserole she was reheating. The teenager’s arms were akimbo on the tiled bar. Lucy heard her feet lightly bumping the cabinet as she swung her legs. Sierra was always in motion, even when she was at rest. “Really,” she said, convincing neither of them.

Chopping a carrot, Lucy said, “Give him time.”

Behind her reassuring facade, she roiled. The son of a bitch had better call. Or she was personally going to hunt him down.

Wham. She wielded the knife with unnecessary force. Wham.

No, she didn’t blame him for being shocked. She did blame him for being so careless with something as personal as sperm. She couldn’t imagine giving away her eggs. Men, of course, were a whole lot more likely to strew their sperm hither and yon with no thought for consequences. Except he’d known darn well that his would produce consequences. That had been the whole point, after all.

She didn’t even know why she was so mad. Her sympathies had—somewhat—been with him when this started. What Sierra had done was outrageous. It should have been impossible. Because of the publicity about his campaign, Lucy knew that almost seventeen years ago, when Jonathan Brenner gave/sold sperm, he’d been only twenty-one. Hardly older than Sierra was now. Lucy had done stupid things herself at that age. Who didn’t?

But she’d felt things when she first saw him stepping out from behind his desk, smiling at Sierra and holding out his hand. A quivering inside. Because he was perfect. Not perfect-perfect—his nose was too big for his face and looked as if it had been broken, his hair was cut shorter than she liked, to suit his law-and-order persona, and she couldn’t imagine that smile was sincere. And yet her first idiotic thought was that he would win the election because he embodied strength and razor-sharp intelligence and a gritty determination to protect.

She had done her best to convince herself that he could just as well be a cardboard cutout, with no more substance.

Except that he did have an excellent record on the job. The current sheriff had endorsed him rather than his opponent.

But then she saw the shields he erected when Sierra told him she believed he was her father. There was an instant of understandable shock, then…nothing. Blank. Except Lucy had the sense that he had immediately begun to calculate the pros and cons and develop a strategy. Would this pretty daughter be an asset or a huge detriment? His gaze had flicked over Sierra’s piercings, lingered briefly on her bright blue hair. None of which could be good, in his view. If he admitted he was her father, could the fact be kept secret? Would she go away if he made no admissions?

So okay. Wham. Wham. Lucy didn’t actually know that he’d thought anything of the sort. He was a cop. Of course he was good at hiding what he was thinking. She shouldn’t succumb to her own prejudices.

But oh, it was very hard not to.

Sierra had been watching in silence, but now she said wistfully, “How much time should I give him?”

“As much as he needs. Unless you plan to pester him?” Lucy took the salad dressing from the refrigerator, then handed it and the bowl of salad over the breakfast bar. “Put this on the table.”

Sierra took the bowl. “I said I wouldn’t,” she said, looking offended. “Just because he’s probably my dad doesn’t mean anything. Maybe he never wanted to have kids.”

Then he should have kept his sperm to himself, Lucy thought but didn’t say.

“I was hoping,” Sierra said. “That’s all.”

Lucy set the casserole dish on the table. She half wished she’d heated some rolls or a baguette, but she didn’t really need bread, too. She must have put on ten pounds in the past year. The financial risk and long hours required to get a small business off the ground added up to stress. Lots of stress. Lucy ate when she was stressed. She’d vowed to lose those ten pounds this year. One pound a month. How hard could that be?

The phone rang. Sierra quivered, but didn’t move.

“Do you want to get it?” Lucy asked.

“It’s probably for you.” Head bowed, Sierra stirred casserole around on her plate.

Lucy looked at her thoughtfully. Sierra was boisterous, cheerful and bold. Vulnerable yes, but she hid it well.

Usually Lucy ignored calls during dinner. Although she carried a cell phone, she didn’t believe everyone should be available 24/7 to any demands. But if there was a chance the caller was Captain Brenner…

“Excuse me,” she said, and went to the kitchen. She caught the phone on the fifth ring, before it went to voice mail. “Hello?”

There was a momentary silence. “Ms. Malone?”

Oh, Lord. It was him.

“Yes?” she said cautiously.

“This is Jonathan Brenner. I called to speak to Sierra.”

Lucy kept her back to the dining room and her voice low. “I hope you intend to be kind.”

After another pause, he said, “You weren’t predisposed to like me, were you?”

She hesitated, a little embarrassed to have been so obvious. “That’s not it,” she said finally. “I’m sorry if I’ve given that impression. I actually, um, felt a little bit sorry for you, blindsided that way.”

“Then why the hostility?”

Because my father was a sperm donor of a different kind. A one-night stand. But she wasn’t going to say that.

She felt herself making an apologetic face, which, of course, he couldn’t see. “I’m scared for Sierra. I suppose I was…”

When she didn’t finish, he did it for her. “Striking preemptively?”

Chagrined, Lucy admitted, “Something like that.”

He sighed. “I hurt her feelings. I lay there in bed last night thinking about the expression on her face. When you were in my office, I was too stunned to be as sensitive to her feelings as maybe I should have been. Part of me was thinking it all might be nonsense, or even a con. Maybe I wanted to think that. I don’t know. But…” He was the one who didn’t finish this time.

“She looks like you.”

“Yeah. Enough that…it’s possible. I looked at the DNA results, and she’s definitely a close relation to my mother.”

“Does your mother have siblings?”

“Three. Two of them have sons somewhere in the right age range. And there are probably second cousins. I don’t know.”

“So Sierra jumped to conclusions,” Lucy said slowly.

This silence shimmered with tension. His voice was tight when he said, “But seventeen years ago I gave sperm. What are the odds that any of my male cousins did?”

Startled at the admission, Lucy only murmured, “Oh.”

“May I speak to Sierra, Ms. Malone?”

“Lucy,” she heard herself say. “You can call me Lucy.”

“Not Lucia?”

“No.” She’d never gone by Lucia, although it was her legal name. Her mother told her it was a tribute to her Hispanic heritage. She didn’t want anything to do with the father who didn’t want her. Lucy wasn’t sure why she’d said Lucia and not Lucy when she first met him.

“I go by Jon,” he said, sounding…gentle, as he hadn’t been earlier. Less wary, anyway.

She took a breath, on the verge of asking what he was going to say to her foster daughter, but instead said, “I’ll get Sierra.”

“Thank you.”

She took the phone with her to the dining room. She mouthed, “It’s him,” and handed it to Sierra, who had a deer-in-the-headlights look. In a normal voice Lucy said, “If you want to take the phone to your room, that’s okay.”

Sierra sat frozen. The hand gripping the receiver was white-knuckled. After a moment she gulped. “No, that’s okay. I—I don’t mind you listening.” She visibly girded herself, then put the phone to her ear and said, “Hello?”

She listened. Lucy could hear the low rumble of his voice, but not his words. Surely, surely he wasn’t brushing Sierra off, not after admitting to her that he might be Sierra’s father. Not after the way his voice had softened.

She ate a few bites, chewed and swallowed, and she might as well have been putting foam packing peanuts into her mouth. Expressions washed over Sierra’s young face with such rapidity, Lucy couldn’t pin any one down.

“I— Yes.” She nodded. “Uh-huh.” Listened some more. “No, Mom never said.” Pause. “Okay. I—” More rumbles from Jon. At last Sierra said shakily, “Thank you. Okay. Um, bye.”

She dropped the phone, which clunked on the tabletop. Tears welled in her big blue eyes. “That was him!”

Smiling, Lucy said, “I know.”

“He…he… Oh, Lucy!” Her mouth trembled.

Oh, Lord. He hadn’t rejected Sierra after all, had he? Lucy jumped up and circled the table to hug the teenager. “What did he say, sweetie?”

Sierra buried her face against Lucy’s shoulder and hugged her fiercely. “That he’s going to call the clinic,” she mumbled. “He thinks that, with both of us giving permission, they’ll tell me who my father is. At least, they will if it’s him.”

Lucy laid her cheek against Sierra’s bright hair and closed her eyes in relief. Mostly relief. She was surprised to discover some other emotion tunneling beneath. It felt furtive, as if she should be ashamed of herself. In astonishment, she wondered if she could be jealous.

“Oh, Lucy,” Sierra whispered. “I’m so happy. He was really nice.”

The position was awkward, but Lucy held her tight as she sobbed. Maybe, she thought, I am a little jealous, but mostly I’m glad. If Sierra really had found her father, if he accepted her—no, wanted her—that was the best thing in the world for a girl who eight months ago had been left with no one at all.

JON HALF EXPECTED TO GET the runaround when he got in touch with the sperm bank. Probably he should have started with the fertility clinic Sierra’s mom had gone to, but Sierra didn’t know what one it was. Why would she? So the next morning he looked up the phone number of the sperm bank on his BlackBerry and called from his car, where he could be sure no one would hear.

He explained his mission to three different people; he wasn’t surprised when the first two hastily passed the buck. All three expressed shock and dismay, which he fully understood. If they couldn’t guarantee anonymity to donors, how many men would be willing to give? Jon had no trouble imagining what his own reaction would have been if he had a wife to whom he’d have to explain the teenage daughter who’d shown up unexpectedly on his doorstep. Yeah, this wasn’t the 1950s. Times had changed. He still doubted that most women would be thrilled to find out their husband might have God knows how many children out there who could come a-knocking.