Alias Mommy. Linda O. Johnston

up. It was the same doctor who had come in earlier: R. Snyder. The one who looked and sounded familiar. Standing beside her, he seemed tall, though it was hard to tell how tall while she was lying in a hospital bed. His gingery hair, lighter than his brows, was tousled, as though he had just gotten out of bed. There was a shadow beneath his deep-set eyes and a gauntness in his cheeks that also indicated he could be tired. But the boyish smile he aimed at her with his wide mouth was contagious, and she found the corners of her lips twitching in return.

      “I think they’re fine,” said the nurse. “Both of them.” She was much shorter than the doctor, and her platinum hair formed a mass of short waves about her round face. Her chin was just a little too shallow, but she beamed at Polly and the baby as though she had something to do with everything being perfect.

      Maybe she did. “How did I get here?” Polly asked. “And the baby…I mean the delivery…Were either of you here? I don’t remember anything about it.” She felt sore all over.

      “You were in good hands for the delivery,” the doctor said. “Dr. Larry Fletcher is Selborn Community Medical Center’s obstetrician. The baby’s heartbeat was a little weak, so he delivered her by cesarean section nearly as soon as you were brought in.”

      “Don’t be so modest, Doc,” the nurse ordered. “I’m Nurse Frannie Meltzer, Polly. This is Dr. Reeve Snyder. He stopped you from bleeding to death from that lacerated arm of yours at the accident site. And then, soon as she was born, he took care of the baby. Right, Doc?”

      “Well, more or less.” The man sounded nonplussed. Polly had to be reading that wrong. Doctors were like politicians, weren’t they? Egotistical? Never wrong?

      She shuddered, and the movement enhanced the pain in her head, her arm. “Thank you,” she said stiffly. She noticed that his expression froze. Had she sounded aloof? She didn’t have to trust him, but neither did she need to be rude. “Thank you,” she repeated more fervently, gently hugging the baby to her. “For everything.”

      “You’re very welcome.” He smiled once more—not with the same warmth as before, though. She felt suddenly sorry, as though she had somehow lost a friend.

      She shook her head a little. He wasn’t her friend. No one here was her friend.

      No one anywhere, except for her former roommate, Lorelei.

      “So where am I?” she asked. The doctor had mentioned the name of the medical center, but Polly couldn’t recall it.

      “Selborn Peak, Colorado,” the nurse said, arranging a blanket around the baby. “It’s a ways west of Denver, but much, much smaller.”

      “Our medical center serves half a dozen communities around here,” Dr. Snyder told her, crossing his arms in his lab jacket. Even when he spoke about trivialities, his voice was low pitched and soothing. Polly enjoyed listening to it. “If you had to be injured at all, you were fortunate,” he continued. “You were closest to Selborn Peak, even though we’re several miles off the interstate. But when I first saw you in the car…” A haunted expression that she couldn’t interpret crossed his face but it made her suddenly want to offer him words of comfort. Strange. He was the doctor, she the patient.

      And she was hardly in a position to comfort anyone.

      “I’ll stop in later,” he said, “if that’s all right.”

      The baby began to cry, a gaspy, sad sound, and Polly rocked her gently. “Please come back,” she said to the doctor, realizing she meant it. Maybe she could pretend, at least, that she had a friend here.

      “Okay,” said Nurse Meltzer after Dr. Snyder had left. “We’ve been taking care of this little one, but I know she’s been waiting for you.”

      She discussed with Polly how to breast-feed, then showed her how to hold the infant, who quieted immediately.

      Then they were alone—Polly and the baby, whom she moved again, into a position that didn’t put so much pressure on her aching side. Laurel. That was what she would call her, after Lorelei. Laurel Black, just as her ID showed her to be Polly Black.

      Polly reveled in the tiny, uneven tugging as the newborn suckled at her left breast. She hugged her warm, sweet baby to her, watching her in wonder.

      Her baby. Hers alone.

      “We’re going to be just fine, Laurel,” Polly whispered. “Just you and me.” She began to hum a soft, soothing song to the nursing infant, moving again slightly to ease her pain.

      This hadn’t happened the way she had planned: to give birth by C-section in a hospital in some small Colorado Rockies town while running away from everything she had ever known. Or not known, which was closer to the truth.

      To have an aching, mixed-up head, an arm that burned when she moved.

      To have been so banged up that she had to postpone the rest of her flight for…how long? She didn’t yet know.

      But nothing in her life was the way she had planned. She, of all people, would never have pictured herself a single mother thousands of miles from the town where she had grown up. A fugitive. All by herself, with Laurel, being cared for by the kindness of strangers.

      She had learned, so abruptly, to count on no one’s kindness.

      Still, she thought of Reeve Snyder. His profession was to help people. But he’d done more than just help. He had saved her life, hers and Laurel’s. Maybe that was why he seemed so familiar. Perhaps she had been conscious of him, somehow, as he took care of her.

      A kind man? It certainly seemed that way. Good-looking, too; despite how frightened and miserable she had felt, she couldn’t help noticing his handsome features, youthfully pleasant yet maturely masculine.

      Even those golden-brown eyes of his looked sincere. Concerned. Kind.

      But why had he suddenly appeared so troubled?

      It didn’t matter. She would never know him well enough to find out. The only thing that counted now was survival.

      Survival for Polly and Laurel Black.

      LATE THAT AFTERNOON, sitting on the stiff, ancient leather chair in his medical center office, Reeve tried to go over some of his insurance billings. But his mind wasn’t on preferred providers and allowed amounts and deductibles.

      It was on the woman in the building next door, whom he had last seen that morning. Polly Black.

      From what he had heard, the records office hadn’t been able to find her family from the scanty information on her ID. Had she contacted her husband yet? Even now, a frantic man could be on his way here from some unknown town, scared to death about the condition of his wife and baby.

      Reeve could identify with him.

      So much so, in fact, that he had to know. “Donna!” he called to his receptionist as he hurried down the hall. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

      “But—”

      He didn’t stay to hear her objection.

      The door to Polly’s room was partly closed. He knocked.

      “Come in.” Her voice was stronger now, healthy. Feminine, yet not too high or shrill. A pretty voice. Reeve wondered how it would sound singing lullabies to her baby.

      He pushed the door open. “Hello, Polly. I—” He stopped.

      The hospital bed had been mechanically cranked up to support her back as she sat. She held the baby at her side, its tiny head against her small, firm breast as it suckled.

      Though he took care of both adults and children, this kind of scene was one he seldom viewed. He felt embarrassed at interrupting such a private, intimate moment. But only for a second, for then a rush of tenderness and something else Reeve could not immediately identify swept through him, and he found himself clutching the door frame for support.

      Loss. Sorrow. He realized anew that this woman,