Home Before Dark by Susan Wiggs Page A

for a check to come in…
    Ian wanted to be a death-row attorney. She didn’t really understand what that meant at the time. She thought marrying a lawyer meant stability, freedom from want. She envisioned a substantial house in a shady, old-Austin neighborhood, parties packed with interesting—no, fascinating—friends. Their future was set, golden with promise.
    The one dark spot was the fact that Jessie and Ian disliked one another at first sight. They weren’t rude about it, but…strained. When she asked them about it, separately, neither one really articulated the problem. Jessie said, “I want to make sure you’ll be happy with a guy like him.” And Ian said, “She’s a flake.”
    Luz defended her sister, as she always did, but Jessie and Ian never did warm up to one another. Then, two weeks beforeLuz and Ian were to marry, Jessie had shocked everyone with the news of her pregnancy and the fact that she couldn’t keep the baby.
    When Luz asked who the father was, she simply said, “He’s not an option.” Luz assumed he was married. She offered to help Jessie. It wasn’t as though Jessie would be the world’s first single mom. Jessie admitted she truly wanted to have the baby, but it was impossible. She was so scared. She’d cried straight through an entire night; Luz knew because she sat up with her. “I couldn’t even keep a goldfish alive,” Jessie sobbed, referring to some long-ago childhood pet.
    Simon had invited her to join a photography project under-written by the BBC, which would begin in the fall overseas and end, perhaps years later, with a traveling global exhibit. The work would be hard for someone who was single and unattached. For someone trying to raise a baby, it would be impossible. Still, Jessie wanted to go. She had to go. It meant everything to her. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
    A baby was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, Luz remembered thinking.
    Jessie had said, “I’m a terrible person. I’m so ashamed. But I’d be even more terrible as this baby’s mother. That would be the real cruelty.”
    Luz told Ian she wanted them to adopt the baby when it was born. He turned white as flea powder and asked why. She told him she couldn’t let Jessie give it away. Their unorthodox childhood had rendered Jessie incapable of being a mother. Yet it had the opposite effect on Luz. She wanted to mother the world. “That child is my own flesh and blood,” Luz said.
    Ian stammered out a question about the baby’s father, and Luz explained her suspicions about Simon. Luz would always think of Ian’s agreement as a surrender. She had won the battle. She was always secretly jealous of those adoptive coupleswho embraced the idea with a unified ecstasy. The truth was, she had dragged Ian kicking and screaming into fatherhood.
    It had made her love him all the more. Instead of the planned honeymoon in Hawaii, they had a baby at Women’s Hospital. They promised each other they’d take a trip later, when the baby was old enough to travel.
    Seven months into Jessie’s pregnancy, something went wrong. Weeks premature, the baby girl came almost without warning and was born too quickly for the doctors to stop the contractions. The newborn was put on life support. From the moment of the birth, Luz loved the tiny girl with a fiercely protective intensity that burned like fire.
    Jessie went a little crazy when the doctors told her the prognosis. She insisted on signing the adoption papers mere hours after the birth. Since the chances of Lila’s survival were so slim, Luz and Ian went ahead and signed, if only to give the baby two parents to grieve for her and a name other than Baby Girl Ryder. Luz asked Jessie if there was anyone she should call—meaning the baby’s father. But Jessie only said, “He knows.” Luz thought she was delirious.
    Lila became her