Not exactly.”
Even Kimberly found herself more than a little exasperated with Daniel’s cagey answers. Am I going to have to drag it out of him bit by bit? I only have the summer! I have to find this woman, have to know if she can tell us anything that will help Marissa. “What can you tell us?” she asked.
He closed his eyes. For a few beats, he said nothing, only sat there, his arms folded across his chest.
Kimberly fought the urge to strangle him in frustration at his long silence. Finally he opened his eyes and gazed at her with a directness that jolted her. He compressed his lips and gave her a small, almost undetectable nod.
But his next words?
“Not much. I can’t tell you much at all.”
Then her heart did a double beat as he leaned forward and asked, “But how about I show you?”
DANIEL PARKED HIS pickup in the slot marked Chief and glanced in the rearview mirror. Yep. There was the little Toyota, with the mom and the daughter, pulling up behind him. They’d tailgated him the whole ride back into town from the farm.
He rubbed at a head that ached from too little sleep and too much sun. Between the new job and harvest time just gearing up, he felt as if he’d been run ragged.
And now this.
Blowing out a long breath, he opened the door. Gravel crunched under his foot, and behind him he heard the flags clanking against the pole. Wind was coming in from the west today, hot and dry. Unbidden, he found himself hoping there’d be no car fires on the interstate with such a stiff breeze.
Slamming the door, he saw that the girl and the woman had gotten out, as well. What was the mom’s name? Kimberly? Yeah, Kimberly. She wasn’t what he’d expected. He didn’t know what he’d expected. Adoptive parents didn’t have to look like their kids.
And Kimberly and Marissa didn’t match at all. Marissa had taken after Miriam, who’d been tall and had given Marissa her strawberry blond hair. Kimberly was slimmer and darker and much more petite. And she looked almost too young to be Marissa’s mother.
But like Miriam, Kimberly possessed courage of a sort. Miriam had ginned up the courage and the fortitude to escape a dangerous situation, and he figured Kimberly had shown a similar bravery to tackle the red tape required to adopt a baby.
“So it was here?” Kimberly asked him.
Daniel tore his mind away from the razor-sharp memories of that day—ten years ago? No, eleven. Almost twelve, actually, this coming July Fourth.
“Yes.” He found himself guarding his words. What could he tell them? What should he? Legally, he was in a bind, because Miriam was covered under Georgia’s safe-haven law. But more than that, he remembered the girl’s abject terror of her boyfriend’s parents finding out about Marissa.
He’d given Miriam his word. And it was up to him to keep it.
Beckoning for them to follow him, he walked out to the patch of lawn between the firehouse and the street. One of the crew had just mowed the grass, and it smelled fresh and green. Unlike that summer day, there was no redolent smell of charcoal and sizzling burgers from a July Fourth cookout by the crew, no shrieks from kids playing tag under sprinklers on the side yard.
“She pulled up here,” Daniel told them. “She was driving an old four-door. I was standing...” He pivoted, replaying the day in his head. “There, leaned against the side of the building. Everybody else had gone inside to eat.”
It was all fresh—the grief he’d felt over his dad not being with them on that day, the fact that he had angered and worried Ma with his sudden move to follow in his father’s footsteps as a firefighter, the last time his father had held his hand—his dad swathed in bandages, a mummy of a man in the burn unit.
Take care of your brothers and your sisters and Ma.
Keep your word, Danny, keep your word, no matter the cost.
The last words his father had spoken to him, an entreaty wrung out of a man in agony, a man needing assurance that his eldest son would take his place as the family’s leader.
And Daniel had promised his father that he would.
On that July Fourth, he’d been bent on escaping the day’s festivities, and that was why he’d been the one to see Miriam.
“What...sort of car?” Kimberly asked, behind him.
The question pulled him away from his own tangled emotions of that day and into the present. “You know, it was old. Like a 1970s Nova? I remember it had about four different colors of paint on it.”
Daniel turned back to face Marissa. Yes, she had Miriam’s red-gold hair, and it looked as though she was well on her way to achieving her biological mother’s height. Funny how they both twirled their long strawberry blond hair around their index fingers.
Funny how he could remember that small habit of Miriam’s at all.
“Is that why she dump—” Marissa broke off, apparently taking in the same look of exasperation that Daniel saw on Kimberly’s face. “Is that why she gave me up? Because she was poor?” Her words trembled with emotion.
“She gave you up because she cared about you. Because she couldn’t figure out a way to keep you safe and still keep you, so she decided that keeping you safe was the better choice.” Daniel fought a strange sense of protectiveness for Miriam, as though even the little he’d shared somehow violated his promise to her. “I honestly don’t know if she was rich or poor or even if the car was hers. All I can say for a fact is that you were born here, in this spot, on July 4, 2003.”
“I was born here? Right here? I thought...”
“You were born on the Fourth, right?” Now Daniel worried that maybe they’d gotten confused, that maybe this wasn’t the same Marissa after all. No. No she was definitely Miriam’s child.
“Yeah. I mean, yes, sir. People call me a firecracker baby. Because of my hair and being born on the Fourth and all...” Her face wrinkled as she said this, and her fingers settled for a moment on her hair and again twisted a strand of it. She didn’t sound too enthused about the moniker.
Kimberly spoke up. “I didn’t know she was born here, either. The court papers said Marissa’s birth mother had tried to surrender her here at the fire station, and you were the firefighter who’d helped her. So...what can you tell us?” Kimberly asked. “What all do you remember? About that day?”
This Daniel could do. He smiled. “I was out here, minding my own business, and then this car comes roaring up, and I go to check it out...” He closed his eyes. The memory was still so sharp he could smell the charcoal. “And there you were, Marissa. Busy getting born, all on your own. You didn’t even wait for the EMTs, and they were inside.” He jabbed a finger over his shoulder to indicate the firehouse.
Again memories flooded him: the sweet weight of Marissa in his arms, the goofy feeling that swamped him as he held her.
The
