Page 62 of SEAL'S Baby Surprise
Because it is getting late, and Richard doesn’t want to step into something and throw his back out, we take their jeep. Richard parks it near the path to the van.
When I approach it, the van is strangely silent. My heart plummets. Ark should be running out to greet me.
Lee almost always has the television or one of her audio books going. I break into a run, not waiting for Richard.
The door to the van is unlocked. I open it and flip the lights on. No one is in it, I can tell. It has that deathly silence of a house that is missing its most vital component: the people.
Just in case, I look in the bathroom, my bedroom, and finally in Lee’s little closet.
A sheet of paper is on her pillow. It has some words scrawled on it. The ink has run a little for what looks like wet splotches. Lee had been crying.
The note reads, “I’m pregnant. I think I’m pregnant. I’ve gone to the family clinic to ask for help. Mrs. Hubbard gave me their card. I’m sorry. I think I’ve messed up again. I love you and Julia and Ark. I won’t mess your lives up with my mess. My messy mess.”
XOXO
Lee”
“Oh, my God!” I burst out. “Lee!”
Richard sticks his head around the corner. “What the hell, Austin?”
I thrust the note at him, push him into the bathroom — which is the only place he can go to get out of my way — and hurry past him to where our bicycles are chained up. Where they are supposed to be chained up.
Richard comes boiling out of the trailer, and would probably have gone for me, but he trips over the dog bowl in the walkway and falls heavily against the van.
It’s a reminder that he isn’t the man he was when we were in college, and that he’d spent several months in intensive care thanks to a football injury.
I don’t have the emotional time or energy to pay attention to my friend. Lee’s bike is gone. It is nearly dark, and her bike doesn’t have lights on it.
It’s miles to the city where the family clinic is located. She’s not a strong rider. She could take a tumble. She hasn’t even recovered from the last one. The newsies could be after her.
She could be in a ditch somewhere!
I must have made a noise. Something that was somewhere between a sob and a shout.
Richard comes up behind me, looking at the two bikes chained up where there were spaces for three. The fall must have given him a chance to collect himself, or maybe my obvious distress gets to him.
“Now you know how I feel,” he says. “Unless she left right after you did, she can’t have gotten far. Let’s go see if we can track her down.”
“Ark’s with her,” I say. “That should make it easy to ask which way they went. Girl on a bike with a big dog — pretty easy to remember.”
“Ark?” Richard asks, blankly.
“My dog. He’s combat trained, and I told him ‘guard’ and ‘protect’ before I left. So she should be safe until we can get to her.”
He nods. “Come on, then,” he says. “Let’s get looking.”
28
LEE
The Family Clinicis just closing as I pedal up the front walk. I’m covered with sweat — there was no “perspiration” or “glow” about it. “Wait!” I cry out. “Wait!”
It is only seven miles from the village to the clinic, which is located at the edge of the city. In a motorized vehicle, it is an easy ten or perhaps fifteen minutes if the traffic is bad.
On a bicycle, in the blazing afternoon heat, it is a subjective million miles. A million difficult miles, filled with zooming cars with motorists flying the bird at me from their air conditioned, gas-powered bubbles of security.
I had fallen off the bike twice. Once when a motorist hadn’t seen me, and I was forced onto the grass between the sidewalk and the road. The other had been scarier.
