The Baby Gift

Visions of the Bahamas and statuesque blondes fled. Instead his mind was taken total hostage by a slim brunette woman—and a very small girl with very big glasses.

Troubled, haunted by images of his ex-wife and his daughter, he went on to the next fax. Again it was from Carson.

“Morris, Your wife called again at one. She says she needs to talk to you as soon as possible. Please phone her, no matter what the hour. She says it’s an emergency. Yours, Carson.”

The last fax was from Carson.

“Morris, Your wife phoned again at four, Eastern Time. She says please call as soon as possible. It’s urgent. Yours, C.”

Josh swore under his breath, not from anger but from a deep and instinctive terror. He rose out of the tub, knocking the glass of whiskey to the floor. It shattered, and he stepped on it, cutting his heel. He hardly felt it.

He wrapped a towel around his middle and grabbed the bathroom phone.

Getting connected to Missouri from Moscow was approximately as difficult as arranging a rocket launch to the moon. Josh’s imagination ran to places that were haunted and dangerous.

He bled on the marble floor. While the transatlantic connections buzzed and hummed, he had time to pull the shards of glass from his heel and pack the wound with tissues.

Briana, Briana, Briana, he thought, his pulses skipping What’s wrong?

From across the ocean, he heard her phone ringing. He pictured the little farmhouse—tight and cozy. He pictured Briana with her dark hair and mysterious dark eyes, her mouth that was at once stubborn and vulnerable. He imagined his daughter, who resembled Briana far more than him. His bright, funny, unique, fragile little daughter.

Then he heard Briana’s voice, and his heart seemed to stumble upward and lodge in his throat.

“Briana?” he said.

“Josh?” she said in return. She didn’t sound like herself. Her tone was strained, taut with control.

He heard voices in the background, those of adults, those of children.

“Are people there?” he asked.

“It’s Larry’s birthday,” she said. “Just a minute. Let me take the phone into the bedroom so we can talk.”

He heard the background noise growing dimmer. “There,” she quavered. “I shut the door. They can’t hear.”

“Briana, what’s wrong?” he said desperately, but he already knew. “Is it Nealie?”

“Oh, Josh, she’s sick. She might be—so sick.”

He had the sensation of falling toward a devouring darkness. “How sick? Is she in the hospital?”

“I don’t know how sick. It’s—it’s in the early stages. She doesn’t know yet. Nobody in the family knows. You’re the first one I’ve told.”

“Briana, what is it? What’s wrong with her?” Damn, he thought, his hands were shaking. His hands never shook, no matter what.

“It’s a—an anemia,” she stammered. “It’s very rare. And—and serious.”

“How serious?” He sat on the edge of the bathtub, his head down. He felt as if he was going to pass out.

“She could—she could…”

Briana started to cry. Josh put his hand over his eyes. “Okay,” he told her raggedly. “You don’t have to say it. What can be done? What can I do?”

She seemed to pull herself together, but she still sounded shattered. “Can you come home? I mean come here?”

“Yes. Yes. I’ll be there as soon as I can. I’ll book a flight as soon as I can. But what can we do for her?”

“Oh, Josh,” she said, despair naked in her voice, “I’ve thought and thought. I think there’s only one thing. One thing in the world.”

“What? I’d do anything. You know that.”

She was silent a long moment. He knew she was having trouble speaking.

At last she whispered, “To save her, I think we have to have another baby.”

CHAPTER TWO

JOSH WAS STUNNED, stupefied.

“What?” he said.

“I—I said,” she stammered, “I—I think we have to have another baby. To save her.”

“Another baby.” He repeated the words, but they made no sense. They fell like great, meaningless stones on his consciousness.

Briana began to talk, low and swiftly. She said Nealie had something called Yates’s Anemia.

Josh had never so much as heard of such a disease. Now she was telling him his child—their child—might die of it.

“It’ll lead to aplastic anemia,” Briana said. “Her blood count’s unstable. Her system can’t fight infection. She gets tired too easily. She bruises too easily. When she’s cut, she doesn’t heal right. She could have complete bone marrow failure. Or other diseases. Even—stroke.”

Stroke? How could so young a child have a stroke?

He shook his head to clear it. Briana sounded as if she were on automatic pilot now, as if she’d rehearsed saying this to him a hundred times. Her words tumbled out in a breathless rush.

“Wait,” he begged her. “You’re sure of all this?”

“Yes. Yes. I took her to a doctor in St. Louis. She had a complete blood count and a—a chromosome test. It had to be sent away to a special lab. She has what they call chromosome breakage. It’s Yates’s anemia and it’s life-threatening. It’s one of the hereditary anemias.”

He put his hand on his bare stomach because he was starting to feel physically ill. “She inherited it?”

My God, he thought, was it from me? Did I somehow give my own child a death sentence?

Briana seemed to read his thoughts. “Yes. But, listen, Josh. She had to inherit it from both of us. We—we both carry a recessive gene.”

“Briana—I don’t get it. This runs in both our families? I never heard of it.”

“Neither did I. It’s recessive—and rare. Very rare. We couldn’t have known.”