Distant Shores - Marco Palmieri [129]
“It fits you,” she said. I thought I heard admiration in her voice.
After a long silence, a wistful smile slowly appeared. “I can see you want to ask. He’s someone I’d prefer not to think about, Aeson.”
“The baby’s father?”
“Yes.”
At that point, I didn’t care how she knew I had wanted to ask about the father. Instead, I asked her if it was really that bad. She nodded, and said, “The child may be the only good to come of it, and he was almost taken from me before I knew he existed.”
That comment piqued my interest. Once I’d discovered that Mareeza was pregnant, I had begun studying every local obstetrics text I could find. Nothing mentioned the mother being able to know the sex of the child without highly specialized testing equipment. If she’d had the tests run, it wasn’t at my hospital. “Do you know the gender, or are you guessing?”
Mareeza simply smiled.
I came to the conclusion that it was probably not the proper time to pursue the subject. If she wanted to believe she was having a son, then who was I to try to disabuse her of that notion?
Four days later, Mareeza had recovered enough to be discharged. I volunteered to take her home, as it appeared I was the only one she would trust. As the evening was cool and clear, and walking wasn’t a danger to the baby, we decided to walk the route to her apartment.
Mareeza had, it seemed, been working on a composition in her mind while she lay in bed-the ode to the Sky Ship that she had been researching when we first met. When she remembered my interest in music, she was willing to hum the melody for me as we walked. It sounded almost like a piece from Delvok, or even Bizet.
I couldn’t help myself. I began humming along in harmony, even though I didn’t know the melody at all. As luck would have it, we achieved a fascinating blend of music.
By the time we reached her apartment, I had achieved an objective that I hadn’t realized I was after. Mareeza laughed like I hadn’t heard her laugh in days. “Aeson, thank you. I’ve really needed that,” she said, taking my hand.
Before I could even respond, the front door to her building opened. A Neanderthal of a man carried a box of what appeared to be books down to a small transport. “Tabreez, what the schkix are you doing back here?”
Mareeza sighed, and then asked, “What’s going on now, Razmad?”
“Leeram wants you out. Says if you want to disappear like that, you can go.”
“But I contacted him!”
She’d mentioned Leeram as being something of a benefactor to her. If her reaction to hearing the name was anything to go on, I began to suspect that he might also have been the baby’s father. “She was in the hospital, if the ill-mannered buffoon had bothered to inquire,” I said.
Razmad dropped the box of books on the sidewalk. The left corner of his lip turned slightly. He almost looked bemused with the whole situation. In two steps, he was standing right in front of me, trying to use his rather ample height to his advantage. “Look, mister, inquiring ain’t my job. Leeram says he wants Tabreez’s place emptied, I empty it. Got a problem with that?”
Unfortunately for him, I’ve faced down more menacing foes.
Immediately behind him was a public comm station. I took a step to walk around him, which he stopped with one enormous hand.
It took several reassurances that I was not going to call the authorities, but finally he settled for watching me closely as I took a step around his destined-for-cardiac-problems physique, entered the personal code with which I’d been entrusted, and made contact with Darek Rez.
I made the usual conversational niceties, and then proceeded to explain the situation to him and ask the biggest favor I’d ever asked of anyone. If Darek would be willing to take Mareeza in, I could at least content myself with the knowledge that she and her child would have a place to