me. I can’t goddamn believe it. And nothing is going to sway her. Believe me, I tried. She is absolutely determined to have this baby, and she doesn’t give a good goddamn if I participate or not. I think she’d almost prefer it if I didn’t.” And in some ways that was true. He could sense it in the way she had told him. She expected nothing from him, which somehow made the situation even harder for him. She was being so gracious about it that it made him look even worse for his violently negative reaction. It was visceral for him. He didn’t want the baby.
“Does she seem like a nice person?” Jim asked with interest. He was still stunned by what Mike had just told him.
“Maybe. I think so. All I can focus on is this baby she’s foisted on me.”
“If she’s not asking you for anything, it doesn’t sound like she’s doing much ‘foisting,’ ” Jim pointed out fairly.
“Not financially, but she’s sticking me with the responsibility of fatherhood for the rest of my life if she has this baby,” Mike said, looking angry about it again.
“Maybe that’s not the worst thing that could happen to you,” Jim said thoughtfully. He was two years older than Mike, had been happily married for fourteen years, and had three children he was crazy about. He had been telling Mike for years that he should find a nice woman, get married, and have children. Mike was always adamant when he said no. “Since she’s going to have the baby anyway, why don’t you spend some time with her and get to know her, and see how you feel about it then? It’s hard not to fall in love with your own children,” Jim pointed out to him. He had been there when each of his were born, it had been a life-changing event for him, but he had never had the resistance to having children that Mike very obviously did, and Jim loved his wife.
“Funny, my parents seem to have managed not to fall in love with me,” Mike said with a rueful grin. “I don’t think parenting is for everyone. That notion is probably the only thing I have in common with my parents. They never wanted children, as they say at every opportunity, and I’m smart enough not to try.”
“Destiny seems to have decided otherwise,” Jim said as he stood up, and went to sit in the chair at his own desk, only a few feet from Mike’s. He was the paper’s leading art critic, and like Mike, he had a number of gallery show critiques to write. He often invited Mike to go to openings of art shows with him, and whenever he could, Mike took Jim along when he went to check out a new restaurant to review. He was sorry he hadn’t taken Jim with him the first time he went to April in New York. If he had, none of this would have happened. “I think you ought to give this some very serious thought,” Jim said carefully. “This could turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to you. There’s nothing more miraculous in life than having a child.”
“Whose side are you on?” Mike asked, looking irritated as he tried to concentrate on his computer screen again and ignore everything that Jim had said.
“I’m on your side,” Jim said quietly. “Maybe this happened for a reason,” he said cryptically. “God moves in mysterious ways,” he added smugly as Mike almost snarled in response.
“This has nothing to do with God. It has to do with two very drunk supposed adults, who had way too much wine and got into a hell of a mess of their own making,” Mike said, willing to take responsibility for the mistake and the dubious behavior, but not the child.
“Don’t be so sure,” Jim said, and then concentrated on his own computer screen, and for the rest of the afternoon, neither of them said another word.
*
April didn’t hear from Mike for the next three weeks, and didn’t expect to. She told Ellen that it wouldn’t surprise her at all if she never heard from him again. He so much didn’t want the baby that his solution to the problem might be complete denial, of her and the child. She was startled in fact when the week before Christmas he called her on her cell phone. It was midmorning, and she was getting ready for the lunch crowd. They were booked solid straight through the holidays for the next four weeks. She had even decided to keep the restaurant open on Christmas Day and New Year’s, for their regulars, who wanted a place to go.
“April?” He sounded somber and tense when she answered.
“Hi. How’ve you been, Mike?” She tried to keep it light. He sounded so unhappy.
“I’ve been fine.” He sounded busy. “I’m sorry to call you with news like this. But I was just turning in a story, and all hell is breaking loose here. I thought you’d want to know. It’ll be on the news in a few minutes, and I wanted to give you a heads-up. There’s a hostage situation going on at the network where your mother works. They think it’s been taken over by half a dozen men. No one seems to know yet how it happened, or who they are. The screens have gone blank over there, and your mother was on air when they did.” She did a morning show several times a week, and an evening show. April glanced at her watch as he said it, and realized that he was right. She was right in the middle of the morning show.
“Is she okay? Did something happen to her?” April sounded panicked, and he felt sorry for her. He had realized during his dinner with her how close she and her family were, even if it was hard for him to understand.
“I don’t know. The screens just went blank. I think they’re holding two floors, and the building is full of SWAT teams on other floors. They haven’t moved in on the hostage-takers yet. And they’ve managed to keep it off the news for the last half-hour, but the story’s about to break. I didn’t want you to see it on TV.” He sounded sympathetic and worried about her.
“Thanks, Mike,” she said, fighting back tears. “What am I going to do? Do you think I can go over there?”
“They won’t let you near it. Stay put. I’ll call you if I hear anything. Turn on your TV. I think the story’s coming on now.”
“Thank you,” she whispered, and hung up, panicked by what was happening to her mother. She turned on the TV in the kitchen immediately, and the report was alarming. Six armed gunmen had taken over the network building an hour before. It was hard to believe they could pull it off, but they had. Once they took their first hostages, they kept gathering more, on two floors of the building. The report said that they were heavily armed with machine guns and automatic weapons, were of unknown nationality and origin and could have been from the Middle East or even American terrorists, and they had sealed two floors of the building. All the hostages were being held on those floors and no one had dared to try to free them yet for fear that the hostages would be killed. The broadcaster mentioned which floors were being held, and April realized instantly that one of them was the floor where her mother did her show. Her show had gone dark right after the introduction, as had several others. There were a number of studios on those two floors.
As she kept her eyes glued to the screen, April quickly dialed her stepmother and told her what had happened. She told her to turn on her TV, and five minutes later, her father called her, in tears. He was as frightened as April was. It reminded them all of 9/11. This wasn’t as dramatic, but the potential risk was huge. It had occurred to everyone that they might blow up part of the building in a suicide bombing and take hundreds of people with them, in a major public statement. Or there was also the possibility that they wanted to use the network to disseminate their message. No one knew yet. But everyone feared that the hostage-takers were extremists of some kind to attempt such a desperate act.
Within five minutes, responsible Middle Eastern governments and religious groups had denied all association with the attack. Their assessment was that it was possibly a fundamentalist splinter group, and there was no question, the risk factor was major to everyone in that building and possibly within blocks around if they had enough explosives on them to do major damage. No one knew for sure if that was the case. April was sitting with her eyes riveted to the screen, her heart pounding as she listened to the broadcast, and she turned when she felt a hand on her shoulder, not sure who it was. She was stunned to find herself looking at Mike. He had come to the restaurant to be with her. Their vigil lasted all day, as crisis teams tried to make contact with the hostage-takers. By six o’clock that night, the building was still under siege. A few people had trickled out from one of the two floors, when the gunmen moved everyone to a single floor so they could control them better. The SWAT teams had since taken over the abandoned floor, to get closer to where the hostages were being held on the floor above. And those who had escaped said that several people had been shot. There were two bodies in the corridors on the floor that the SWAT team reclaimed, but their identities had not been announced. April prayed her mother wasn’t one of the victims.
There were SWAT teams on the roof, on the floor below, and the lobby and none dared make a move so far, for fear of endangering the hostages further. Neighboring buildings had been evacuated, as the street below swarmed with crisis teams, equipment, firefighters, and police, waiting for something to happen.
And through it all, Mike sat with April and held her hand. The restaurant opened for business, and she never
