Baby.com
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Molly Liholm
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Chapter 1
THE BABY CRIED.
Sam Evans frowned at his computer screen. If he changed the cosine to y+2, his calculation should work. He quickly typed the changes into his program and then waited for the computer to make the calculation.... Damn, the wrong answer flashed on the screen. He’d been stumped on this problem for a week, but he knew he was getting closer. If he changed the variable of y to x, then he could... The baby cried again. Sam looked up, scowling at the interruption. He needed quiet, no distractions, no people, so he could concentrate on his work.
“Ellen, will you go see what that infernal racket is?” he shouted before he remembered he’d said goodbye to her—he checked his watch—over three hours ago. He always lost track of time once inside a programming equation.
Three hours was nothing. On more than one occasion he’d worked over forty-eight hours straight—if he was left alone. That’s how he liked it.
The only person who ever dared to pull him away from his beloved numbers was his cousin Ellen. Sometimes, when she left to close one of their business deals, she placed alarm clocks in different locations in their office, set to ring at varying times, all part of her plan to jar him out of his concentration. Otherwise, she would claim with her bright smile, she might return four days later to find he hadn’t moved from his chair. Someone had to take care of
him, Ellen said. As his partner, she figured it was part of her job description.
Sam listened for the cry. He was sure the noise he’d heard wasn’t an alarm dock. Then he smiled, pleased to have come up with the solution. “Damn the girl, she’s bought one of those novelty clocks,” he muttered happily to himself and turned his attention back to the computer screen. Except he couldn’t concentrate. He heard the plaintive wail again and couldn’t get the image of a lost baby out of his mind.
Don’t be ridiculous, he told himself. There weren’t any lost babies in Portland, Maine, especially not in the neighborhood that housed his office and his home. Still, he closed the computer file, turned off the machine and looked out of the window but, other than the dark waters of Casco Bay, he didn’t see anything. Or was that a person moving behind a bush in the park across the road? He focused... no, it was only a bird taking flight.
“This is why I don’t spend my days dreaming out of windows,” he muttered. “It’s foolishness.” Plus he liked his world of numbers and logic much better.
What had Ellen said to him as she’d left? She was going to call him once she arrived at her hotel in Seattle. Considering it was a four-hour flight from Portland, Maine, to Seattle, then adding the time she needed to get to her hotel, she’d be calling him around midnight—not long enough for her to have to set the alarms. Five hours was really a warm-up stretch for him, so Ellen wouldn’t have been worried.
She looked after him, and he appreciated it. What they said about blood being thicker than water was only too true. If anyone had told him twenty years ago, when he and Ellen used to spend summers in Portland with their aunt Gwen, that they would be partners in a very successful business enterprise, he would have believed them. Ellen and he had shared a bond from that first summer
they’d spent together. Both of them lonely and miserable, a pair of misfits who had fit together. They had shared all their dreams and, after every miserable winter apart, they had begun to build upon their dreams to create a business together.
All of Sam’s good childhood memories involved numbers. He had loved their beauty and logic. There were no lies with numbers. To hide from his parents’ endless fighting, he learned to stay in the library until closing time and then to hide in his room, so that his parents might forget about him. His teachers recognized his genius for mathematics and accelerated him, but that meant he became the child prodigy in a class filled with students much older than he. Once again, he was an outcast.
Ellen had pushed him to ignore the taunts of his much older classmates and to excel. That first summer together had happened because he’d failed a class—he’d been so bored by it, he’d spent that period hanging out at the local video arcade instead—and his parents had despaired of what to do with him, a big, awkward, socially inept and hostile boy. Aunt Gwen had invited him to come visit her and his cousin. His parents had been relieved to get rid of him so they could fight to their hearts’ content. Sweet Ellen, with her glasses, lank hair and baggy clothing hadn’t despaired of either of them. If anything, she had driven them both. Sam to his Ph.D. in artificial intelligence and she to her business degree from Harvard.
Then they had struck out on their own, to make it big. And they’d succeeded beyond their wildest imaginings. The past seven years had been the best years of his life.
So why had Ellen looked at him rather wistfully after she’d closed her briefcase and asked if he was happy?
He’d been lounging on the couch in their large work area, watching Ellen arrange all of her presentation materials for her Seattle trip, part of his concentration, as always, dealing with the problems of his next project. Ellen’s
question had taken him by surprise and focused his attention on her. He took his feet off the coffee table and straightened. “Of course I’m happy. We’re doing what we always wanted to do. You run the business end of our company and I get to think and invent.”
“And that’s enough to make you happy?” Her brown eyes were worried and she fluffed her bangs with her fingers.
Ellen played with her hair whenever she was troubled. “Is something wrong, Ellen? Are you worried about the deal with ComputExtra?”
“No.” Ellen waved off that topic, her mother’s emerald ring catching the sunlight pouring in through the large windows of the Victorian building. Ellen fiddled with the lock on her attaché case and then sighed. “It’s just that sometimes I wonder if we aren’t fooling ourselves. We’ve accomplished what we fantasized about as children.”
Sam nodded. “We formed our partnership.”
“Right, we’re rich,” she muttered and then turned on him, her face alive with some emotion. “But is this enough? All we do is work. You create and invent, I market and negotiate the deals.”
“They’re more than just deals,” he’d insisted. “A lot of our programs have helped medical researchers—”
“And help children learn, and your probability programs on sudden weather shifts will help future generations plan for severe weather occurrences like El Niño. I know all that and I know we’re doing good. Moreover, we give away almost as much money as we make.” She let out a sigh. “It’s just that I’m thirty-two and I go to bed alone every night. Not to mention there was Martin’s wedding last week.”
“Don’t tell me you’re pining for him.” He hadn’t thought she’d been in love with Martin. “You dumped him over three years ago.”
“I didn’t dump him. We both agreed that we were better off as friends. I’m not in love with Martin.”
“Well then, what is it? If you think we’re making a mistake in selling our program to ComputExtra—”
“No, nothing’s wrong.” Ellen pulled on her gloves and straightened her scarf against her brown cashmere jacket. “I’m just being silly.” She walked over to the window looking out at the bay. “Sometimes I forget how beautiful our view is.”
Now Sam was concerned about her. It wasn’t like Ellen to stare out the window to see the view. Usually she saw the future. But he decided to try to humor her. “We chose to set up our operation in Portland because it’s a beautiful place to live.”
“I know. We could be anywhere but we picked Portland because it’s so picturesque and friendly. All of my good childhood memories are of us in this place. Aunt Gwen and Theodore may have moved to Chicago, but I always think of this place as home.” She turned away from the window and picked up her briefcase. “Now we’re doing exactly what we dreamed of as kids but we never take the time to enjoy it.”
Sam got up from the sofa and stepped toward her. Something was very wrong. “Ellen, what is it?” Once she told him, he was sure they could fix it. There wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do for Ellen Evans.
She shrugged her shoulders. “Nothing. I’m just in a funny mood. I’ll call you as soon as I’ve settled into my hotel.” She patted him on the cheek. “Don’t forget to eat.” Ellen had left and he’d gone back to his desk and worked until the sound of a baby crying had disturbed him.
“You’re being ridiculous,” he told the empty room. “There’s no baby—” Another wail filled the air. “What the hell?” He got up and looked outside the window. He saw the bay, a few boats on the water, but no people on the street. “Because it’s dinnertime. Families are home together
having dinner, getting ready to watch ‘Wheel of Fortune.’” But still Sam felt uneasy and he left the office area of the large house. He decided to go to his own apartment, nuke a frozen dinner and turn on the sports channel. Out of habit, he locked the door to the offices of E2, the name he and Ellen had christened their software company. They had chosen it years ago when they realized that developing computer programs was what Sam would do while Ellen ran the business end of things. The name, E2, played on their initials as well as Einstein’s famous formula of E=mc2, achieving a strong identification for themselves in a very competitive market. As usual, the marketing strategy had been Ellen’s.
Sam considered E2 his baby—and the only baby he wanted.
He stopped in the hallway of their shared Victorian when he reached the front door. He had the apartment on the second floor while Ellen had taken the smaller third floor and attic, saying she liked its coziness and the view. What the hell, he might as well open the front door and prove to himself that he was hallucinating. Ellen’s peculiar behavior must have rubbed off on him.
He opened the door and looked out at the empty street. There were a couple of cars parked across the road, where the parkland ran along the bay. “Nothing,” he muttered. “I am an idiot—” The very definite cry of a baby stopped him and made him look down. On the porch, inside a white wicker basket, lay a pink blanket and shiny little face.
“What the hell?” Sam felt dizzy as he kneeled down to touch the basket. He wasn’t hallucinating. It was real. A white wicker basket with a yellow bow. A soft-looking wool blanket inside. And a baby.
Stepping over the basket very carefully, Sam moved onto the porch and looked around. Still no one in sight. He leaned over the railing and poked the bushes. Nothing.
“Come out, I can see you,” he shouted, his voice sounding rather desperate to his own ears.
No response.
“Martin, this is a stupid joke. Stop trying to change my life.” He was greeted with silence and remembered that Martin and Cynthia were on their honeymoon in Aruba.
This couldn’t be happening to him.
Something moved in the bushes to the right of the porch and he raced down the stairs, jumping over the last two steps to land dead center in the bushes. He heard a squeak and felt the brush of something by his leg as a squirrel ran for its life. “Damn.” Sam refused to believe that all he had heard was a squirrel. Squirrels didn’t drop off babies on doorsteps, the stork did that, and even he—a man who didn’t pay much attention to the everyday world—knew the story about the stork was make-believe.
He searched every foot of his property, turning around in circles until he became dizzy. Nothing. He found no one hiding behind a tree, laughing at the practical joke being played on Samuel F. Evans.
No one was around except the baby in the basket on his front porch.
Slowly, carefully, he went back up the steps. Despite blinking several times, the basket and baby were still there. He wished he could go inside and pretend he’d never heard the baby’s cries. Then someone else could come by and find the baby and be responsible for it. He knew absolutely nothing about babies. Moreover, he wanted to keep it that way.
Awkwardly he picked up the basket and went back inside his house. Somehow, the house felt different. He took the steps to his own apartment, careful not to trip over anything and drop the baby, unlocked the door to his apartment and entered his home. Everything looked the same, but it wasn’t. He shook off the weird feeling and went down the long corridor to the back of the house, put
the basket down on his kitchen table and then stepped back. Now what was he supposed to do?
“A note. There’s always a note with a baby in a basket,” he said, remembering the plot of several movies he’d seen on late-night television that involved abandoned children, and moved closer to the table, peering inside the wicker basket. All he could see was a pink ball of fluff. Awkwardly he poked his finger under a corner of the pink blanket and searched, but he found nothing except the baby’s foot. The baby kicked him.
“Damn. I’m sorry,” he said to the baby, “I didn’t mean to swear, but I’m not used to little people like you.” He was barely used to people. In fact, now that Sam thought about it, he’d never been alone in a room with a baby before. He leaned his large body over the infant who scrunched up its face and made a gurgling sound.
“What? Are you all right?” The baby repeated its actions and then waited for Sam to respond. “You should have a note,” he told the child, wishing the little thing could talk. At what age did they begin to speak? he wondered, realizing he knew absolutely nothing about babies. Who would have left a baby on his doorstep? What if he hadn’t been home? While it was early fall, the nights became cool quickly. This little bundle of pink fluff could have become seriously ill or worse.
Sam shivered and blocked out the image his imagination had conjured up. Instead, keeping his voice jolly, he continued looking through the basket. “There is a fine tradition of leaving a note, maybe even a locket, with a baby on a doorstep. Perhaps they didn’t tell you the rules.”
He found an odd package at the baby’s feet and he pulled it out, glad that he was right about part of this mystery. But when he opened the brown paper bag he found six disposable diapers. He stared at a diaper and its plastic tabs, wondering exactly how it all worked. Hopefully, as soon as he dialed 911 and contacted the authorities, he
wouldn’t have to learn. Changing diapers was not in his life plan. Along with the diapers were two baby bottles filled with what he assumed was milk. Everything was so tiny in his massive hands.
The baby smiled. The little rosebud mouth fluttered and Sam felt a curious sensation in his stomach. The big brown eyes looked up at him and then blinked, exhibiting long, dark lashes. Sam felt another peculiar sensation, this one further up in his chest around his heart. The baby waved a chubby fist at him and, without thinking, Sam extended one of his big fingers so that the little thing could touch him. As the small delicate fingers grabbed one of his, Sam felt a band tighten around his heart. “Oh, no, you don’t,” he said as he finally saw the note that he’d been looking for. “There it is,” he exclaimed too loudly, and the baby scrunched its face in complaint, the lips trembling, the rosebud mouth opening.
“Hush, little baby, it’s okay. I was just being too loud,” he cooed, cursing himself. He had to remember that he must seem like a giant to the little thing. He towered over most adults. “Everything will be okay. No one’s going to hurt you.” The baby smiled at him again, sighed and then closed those big brown eyes. He waited for the baby to fall asleep and, after a few minutes when he thought the baby might be sleeping, he unpinned the note from the blanket.
The baby didn’t stir, so he unfolded the note and read the message, hoping for enlightenment. A small part of him had been wishing that the note would be addressed to Ellen. He knew the baby wasn’t hers. Even as caught up in his own world as he got sometimes, he would have noticed something that obvious. Besides, when it came to Ellen, he was pretty in tune. For example, over the past few weeks, he’d begun to realize that she wasn’t happy, but he also didn’t know what the source of her troubles was.
So, no matter how absentminded and removed he was
from the day-to-day world that most people lived in, he would have noticed if Ellen were pregnant.
Still he’d been hoping that some friend of Ellen’s had left the baby on their doorstep. It was their doorstep, after all. To his dismay, the typed note was addressed to him. Moreover it was short: For Sam Evans. From www.baby.com.
“What the—” He stopped himself from swearing in front of the baby again. He needed to get to his computer and access the baby’s homepage. The baby’s homepage? The situation was becoming more and more surreal.
Who would deliver him a baby with an internet address? He no longer doubted that the child was meant for him, the computer connection proved it.
After all, he was one of the leaders of the information age. In college, he had been wooed by every large computer company, and afterward had been approached by every firm in Silicon Valley. But he’d always preferred being independent. Ellen called him a loner.
He liked being responsible for himself and only himself. And Ellen, of course, but she was strong and knew how to stand up to him and to deal with him when necessary. They had the best kind of partnership—a meeting of minds along with the tie of family. She was the only person he wanted to be connected to. He’d learned better.
Only now someone had given him the responsibility of an infant.
He headed back toward the office, to his most powerful computer, and had reached the door when he remembered the baby on his kitchen table. He couldn’t leave the child alone. What if the basket fell off the table? Without stopping to think too much, he scooped up the basket, holding it straight out in his arms, trying to keep it steady as he walked so as to not wake up the baby.
Back in the office downstairs, he booted up his computer with one hand while putting the basket at his feet on the floor. He looked down at the pink-cheeked little infant
who had woken up and was returning his stare with equal curiosity. “Who are you?” he asked. The baby didn’t answer so he turned his attention back to the computer, which knew how to communicate with him. He understood rational, logical thought. People were too often beyond his comprehension.
In minutes, he had accessed the baby’s homepage. The baby screamed. He looked down at the infant from whose rosebud lips eminated a cry that would have made a primal scream therapist proud. He held his fingers to his lips, “Hush, this is what I do. I’m just going to click some keys and find out—” The baby wailed louder.
“What’s wrong?” he crouched forward, putting his face close to the infant’s. The baby opened its mouth further and screamed at a pitch and volume Sam found astonishing for anything so small. Fervently wishing for a mute button, he made a hushing motion with his hands. “Shh, you need to be quiet so I can learn who you belong to.” The child ignored him and scrunched its face, turning a peculiar shade of purple. This couldn’t be good for the little thing.
As the baby continued to cry and grow a darker shade of violet, Sam stared at it helplessly. “What do you want?” he demanded, raking a hand through his hair.
The baby wailed in response and punched its tiny fists at him.
Unable to take it any longer, Sam got out of the chair and began to pace as the sobs and hiccups continued. He wished he’d been around a baby at some point in his life, but he’d always managed to avoid any such entanglements. When he’d been engaged to Darlene, he’d looked inside a baby stroller or two, trying to imagine what it would be like to be a father, but had never felt any paternal stirrings. Obviously, the biological dock stirrings were female only. He’d assumed that Darlene would take care of that and eventually he would get used to the baby. Now
he was having to get used to a baby a lot sooner than he’d expected.
As the baby continued its display of obvious displeasure, Sam sighed and then went back to the basket. People were always holding babies; indeed he remembered Walter, one of their workers, spending hours holding his little baby—a boy, he thought—singing and playing with the child. How hard could it be?
Taking a deep breath, Sam scooped the child out of the basket. The head, he remembered. He had to support the head. With some maneuvering, he managed it so that the baby’s head was cradled on his elbow and the rest of its body was hugged against his chest. The baby made a cooing sound, looked up at him with those big brown eyes and sighed. Now what? he wondered once he finally broke the spell the baby had cast on him. He managed to sit down on his chair, at his desk, staring at his beloved computer. He had only one hand with which to keyboard. The baby gurgled. He looked back down at those dark eyes but broke contact before he could be distracted again. He needed answers, not this strange warm feeling he got whenever he looked at the baby.
With his one free hand using the computer mouse, he clicked the Enter command and the screen lit up with a number of questions.
“A security check. Clever.” He answered the questions: the color of the baby’s blanket—pink, the color of the bow on the basket—yellow, hair—blond curls. Then he was past the security check and gained access to the web page. He blinked and read the page again feeling light-headed.
“Welcome, Sam Evans,” he read. “Thank you for agreeing to be my father.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I haven’t agreed to anything. I have no intention of being a father. I don’t want to be a father.” He found he was shouting at the computer and stopped. The baby looked at him curiously but didn’t
complain. “Sorry,” he said anyway. “Whoever set this up is crazy. Maybe I should stop reading right now and call the police.” The baby looked back at him intently, trusting him to do the right thing.
No, he couldn’t just abandon the child to the proper authorities. Someone had entrusted the child to him so that the child-care workers wouldn’t be responsible for the baby. He glared back at the computer screen. “I want to know the child’s name.”
He scrolled further down the screen and found the stats on the baby. “So you’re a girl,” he told her, glad to have some kind of association with her. According to her birth date, she was five months old. Five months today. “Happy birthday,” he said, searching for her name, but it wasn’t listed anywhere. He found instructions on diaper changing, food preparation, bathing instruction and other references on where to find information on babies, but no mention of her name.
“I can’t just call you baby girl,” he told her. He’d named each and every one of his computers; the little femme fatale needed a name. He looked at her and considered as she studied him with equal concentration. She reminded him of someone.
Sam froze as a new thought hit him. Surely he couldn’t really be the father of this adorable little girl. Who was he dating—five plus nine—fourteen months ago? Around that time, when he’d been developing the program that Ellen was presently selling to ComputExtra, there had been Louise, or was it Lulu? But they’d only gone out twice and then he’d gotten obsessed about his new program that would make time management easy for even the most computer illiterate and then he’d...? He’d forgotten to phone her. He hadn’t seen her after their two dates and he’d certainly forgotten to have sex with her.
After that was a brief interlude with Marianne six months ago, but that had ended after a month, and while
they’d had some very good sex, she couldn’t have had his child and delivered it to his doorstep in only five months. Plus, he always took precautions.
The baby scrunched her eyes at him and he remembered his first-grade teacher, Miss Juliet Sommers. She had had the same brown eyes and rosebud lips, and he’d fallen as desperately in love with her as any Grade One boy could. Especially a very lonely and out-of-place Grade One boy. Juliet Sommers had been nice to him, he remembered. “Juliet,” he told the child. “I’m going to call you Juliet. Until I find your real parents and learn your real name.”
Which brought him back to the search for her parents and the rest of the web page. A little voice inside him said it was time for him to call the authorities; they would know what to do. Did he dial 911 or the regular police? “The regular number, I guess, since it’s not an emergency,” he told Juliet who smiled trustingly back at him.
The authorities would come and...? Social workers and foster homes. He’d watched television cop shows—he knew the drill. And what if they never found little Juliet’s parents? He’d heard too many horror stories about the system. Sam knew how awful it could be with your natural family; without one, it would be even worse.
He had an alternative, he realized.
Someone had entrusted the child to him. Could he really turn his back on her so easily? In front of him on the computer screen was all the information he needed to take care of Juliet for one night. He could feed her and change her diapers. All kinds of ordinary people did it every day.
At the bottom of Juliet’s web page there was the promise to send him a new e-mail in the morning about the child. He was an adult male of thirty-three with a doctorate in artificial intelligence. He was considered a visionary when it came to imagining what computers could do for people. Surely he could look after one little baby girl for one night.
Sam touched Juliet’s nose with the pad of his index finger.
Her skin was as soft as rose petals. She giggled. He’d keep her, just for tonight. First thing in the morning, he’d read the new electronic post and find someone to look after Juliet. One night, no more. “Well, Juliet, it looks like it’s just us two. I don’t know what’s going on here, but I’m not going to abandon you. I know what it’s like to have bad parents, so trust me, I’m going to check yours out completely before I give you back.”
Juliet nodded, as if she had found her very own Romeo, he thought. Which just proved how ridiculous he was becoming. And then he remembered that love story had a very sad ending.
“Not for you,” he promised her, realizing he meant every word. “You’re going to have a happy ending.”
