Page 2 of Wired Courage

“Where’s the baby?”

Sophie woke to a gentle shake on her shoulder, a whispered question in her ear. She opened gummy eyes and sat up, her hand falling to her belly—a flat, empty belly, deflated as a balloon with the air let out. She glanced at the empty bassinet beside the bed, then up into the warm brown eyes of her child’s father. “Jake must have her.”

Alika squeezed her shoulder. “I’ll go check. Get some rest while you can.”

Sophie slid back down, her cheek finding the soft pillow as her heavy eyes fell shut.

Her whole body felt like it had been pummeled with rubber hammers. The midwife said it had been a textbook delivery, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t been eighteen hours of hard labor that made going ten rounds in a mixed martial arts ring seem lightweight.

Momi Tasanee Wolcott Smithson had been born twelve hours before, two weeks premature but a healthy length and weight. Sophie smiled even as she drifted off, picturing her daughter’s full head of curly black hair, her velvety skin, her tiny fingers and toes with their shell-like nails. Nothing her mother had been through during her pregnancy appeared to have marred Momi’s perfection; the baby was rightly named “pearl” in Hawaiian.

Such a relief. Sophie had never stopped worrying about that ugly first trimester.

Sophie startled awake as the door opened again. She sat up.

Alika and her boyfriend Jake both stood in the doorway, and they both wore identical worried expressions. Sophie’s breasts ached with fullness. “Where’s Momi? I can tell she needs to be fed.”

Jake cleared his throat, advancing into the room to sit on the bed beside Sophie. He slid a hand over her shoulder and drew her close, kissing the top of her head. She leaned into him, and his thickly muscled arm tightened around her.

She smelled an acrid tang on him—fear.

“We can’t find her,” Alika said. “We’ve checked the house.” He advanced into the room and opened the closet, the bureau, searching restlessly as if he couldn’t stop himself, his big body vibrating with tension.

Alarm flushed through Sophie like a blast of arctic air. She wrenched away from Jake. “What do you mean, she’s gone? I nursed Momi and put her to bed beside me in the bassinet. Jake, you saw me do that. One of you must have picked her up! There’s no one else in the house, right?”

“No one that we know of,” Jake pushed a hand through military-short dark hair, his eyes the color of ash.

Alika lifted the skirt of the bed to peer underneath. “I don’t know what could have happened. Where could she be?”

“What, you think I hid her under the bed?” Sophie’s voice had risen. “This isn’t happening.” She surged out of bed. “There has to be an explanation. I’ll find her . . .”

Sophie was out of the bedroom and running, heedless of pain, of dizziness, of the heavy aching of her breasts as she tore through the upstairs bedrooms of Alika’s showplace of a home, where she’d been ensconced since she’d arrived a week before. Jake tried to calm her and support her, but Sophie batted him aside as she clung to the railing and hurried down the main staircase into the great room of Alika’s mansion.

Sophie checked the living room, the kitchen, the downstairs guest room, the bathroom, the office. Her and Jake’s dogs, Tank and Ginger, nudged and chased her, sensing her distress as she frantically looked for the baby.

“Momi!” Sophie cried. “Momi!”

The baby couldn’t answer. She knew that. She knew it! But Momi was gone! It was impossible but true. Who had taken her? How? Why?

Sophie’s body felt disconnected from her churning mind and flaring emotions—a painful, irrelevant meat-bag that no longer held her precious daughter.

When she’d searched the whole place, run around the grounds and through the four-car garage, Sophie collapsed on the bluestone steps of the mansion, staring up at a deep blue sky filled with Kaua`i’s high white cumulus clouds.

The dogs crowded close, licking whatever bit of bare skin they could reach. Sophie wrapped one arm over her eyes to shut out the light, and the other over her hard, full breasts, feeling wetness saturate the soft fabric of her shirt as her milk let down.

She heard a keening sound off in the distance.

She was the one making that strange cry.

Arms, the heat of a human body, motion, soothing sounds. Jake picked Sophie up and carried her inside. He took her into the downstairs guest room and shut the door. He settled her in his lap on the bed and rocked her as if she were the child, murmuring into her hair, stroking her back. “It will be okay. We’ll find her. She’s going to be fine.”

His mantra helped shut out the terror, the blackness of an unspeakable loss. Sophie closed her eyes and clung to him, breathing in his familiar scent, comforting even when bitter with stress. “She needs me, Jake. And I need her.”

“I know, honey. I know.”

Outside the bedroom, voices—Alika on the phone, then talking to his grandmother, then both of them making calls. The bustle of other humans, searching for her daughter.

Time passed.

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