Soon after we started dating, James and my father bonded over the ancient Victrola that to this day still occupies a spot in our living room. Glenn Miller. Frank Sinatra. Billie Holiday. James enjoyed these artists as much as my father, and for years, every time they met, my father would pull out his stack of fragile shellac 78s. To my father’s surprise, James had his own modest collection of 78s. Rather than collect recording artists, James’s 78s were all of songs written by Harold Arlen, Johnny Mercer, and the Gershwin Brothers. Whenever my father and James met over a glass of port, a tumbler of Scotch, or a fine red wine, the conversation would turn to the Great American Songbook, a term I scarcely knew existed until hearing the two of them sing its praises.
One day, James hit up my father for $100,000 to back him in one of his investment follies. Because of their shared interests, James considered my father a friend, but even then, my father recognized James for what he was: an amiable huckster. “Don’t let that man flimflam you,” my father said, taking me aside into the wood-paneled hideaway nook behind the retractable facade of an elaborate, custom-carved walnut bookcase on Savory Mew’s second floor. The wood-paneled nook was his private lair, a secret room in this ancient house where he beckoned me whenever we were to have a serious conversation and the room that he’d flee to whenever my mother sulked after finding out about another of his affairs.
“You don’t like him, do you?” I asked. My father chuckled to himself. “Ah-umm. On the contrary, I like him the way I like every raconteur who crosses my path. But be aware he’s a weak man. As long as you insulate yourself, and your money, from his weakness, he might be good for you—he’s tall, handsome, and, ah-umm, eminently presentable.” Rather than plowing money into James’s investment schemes, my father made a few calls and found James the job he still holds to this day.
I close my eyes and listen to Anne Elise nursing. It sounds so pure, so wholesome, the little movements of her lips, her sighs, her short breaths.
“Listen, Laurel. We may have started on the wrong track yesterday. I said a lot of mean things, but in all honesty, you can’t trust James. Some people are born with a sense of responsibility, and then there’s James. He is not a responsible person. Don’t rely on him to help you or support you or even to be there when you need him,” I say, purposely painting James in the worst possible light to get Laurel more inclined to leave him. “He’s not the man you think he is. He’s debonair and handsome, but he has no real money and no real follow-through on the promises and commitments he makes.”
Laurel stares at me, struggling with two different emotions: embarrassment and contempt. The contempt is for me, the embarrassment reserved for herself and the mistakes she might’ve made in overestimating James’s good qualities.
“You’re wrong,” Laurel says, raising Anne Elise to her shoulder with such innocent and gentle care that I feel ungenerous for bringing up James’s faults. The baby’s about to fall asleep. Laurel looks at me with big, droopy eyes. “You’re jealous. That’s why you’re making up these lies about Jimmy. I know he drinks, but I can deal with that. I can get him to change. Love can do that, you know, make someone go against their instincts to become a better person.”
Romantic notions cloud Laurel’s mind. It’s almost endearing how protective she becomes of James. Surely, in her way, she loves him; she hasn’t yet learned, as I have, that love has its limits.
“I hope you’re right,” I say.
“I am.”
And then Laurel does something that surprises me: she hands Anne Elise to me.
“Can you lay her down in her bassinet? Doctors don’t want me to get up from bed if I absolutely don’t have to.”
Anne Elise’s eyes flick open. Her eyelashes are long and beautiful. There’s something sublime about holding a baby who looks straight into your eyes. She smiles. I walk her to her bassinet, lay her down on the spongy sleeping pad. She stretches her short arms and yawns. By the time I stop gazing at Anne Elise, Laurel, too, is asleep. When she said she was unable to stay awake for a full hour since giving birth, I thought it was one of the hyperbolic complaints a new mother might make, but something is clearly wrong with her. Her breathing is loud and labored, not the near-silent snooze of her baby but the wretched snore you might expect from a geriatric asthmatic.
It seems unfair to banish Anne Elise to a stainless steel bassinet just because her mother’s too tired and infected to care for her. Listening to Laurel wheeze and snore, I realize that this is my opportunity to have Anne Elise to myself. Was not Lois Belcher virtually begging me to take Anne Elise out for a walk whenever Laurel conked out?
Chapter Ten
LAUREL
It’s a dim, dim world when I wake up, and my mind is a feather in the breeze, the thoughts drifting in and out. My face bumps against the stainless steel bed railings, and it’s like I’m behind bars again, but then the realization of my current circumstances pounces on me. The room is dark, the blinds closed. Beyond the room’s closed door comes the muffled sound of babies crying. My thoughts leap to Zerena. I’m uncannily aware she’s not in her bassinet. Someone has taken her, and then I remember how Tricia crazily pleaded with me not to trust Jimmy.
I press buttons on the control panel at the side of the bed to summon a nurse, but the buttons I press must be the wrong ones, for they do nothing but activate the bed, pushing my legs up and then my head up, wedging me V-shaped between the mattress. Another button tilts me sideways. I bump again into the bed railings. The slim plastic IV tubing tangles around my neck. Somewhere in this room, buttons exist to reset the bed, turn on the lights, summon assistance, and bring Zerena back to me, but it’s like any button I press, any choice I make, will be the wrong one. The door opens. A shaft of light from the hallway enters into the room. From the doorway, a woman gasps. She flicks on the light and stares at me, speechless, her hands on her hips, and only after some moments do I recognize her as the hospital’s lactation consultant.
“Where’s Zerena?” I ask, wedged against the bed rails. I’ll be damned if I’ve given birth to Zerena and suffered the consequences of this botched episiotomy just to have her be snatched away from me. “Someone stole Zerena. We’ve got to find her!”
“Are you all right?” the lactation consultant asks.
Which is, like, the stupidest question in the world, because any idiot should be able to see I’m not even close to being all right. A grown woman should not be held hostage by her bed. Emotionally exhausted, I can’t even answer her. The lactation consultant strides across the room and presses a button on the control panel. The bed frame rumbles beneath me. Gears crank mechanically, loudly. The mattress begins to lower itself, first at my legs and then at my head. No longer is the mattress V-shaped. No longer am I splayed into an awkward position, but lying flat and seeing the button to correct my wrongs had been within my grasp all along, I feel doubly incompetent.
“Who are you?” I ask. “Tell me again. I forgot your name.”
“Lois Belcher,” the lactation consultant says, extending her hand toward me. She’s uncontrollably happy. “I’m so glad I came here when I did. Please tell me you weren’t tied up like that for a long time.”
“We’ve got to find Zerena. Someone stole my daughter!”
Lois puts a consoling hand on my shoulder and grins.
“It’s not funny,” I say, unable to comprehend this woman’s inability to take me seriously. A baby girl has been stolen. We should call police officers, summon hospital administrators, but this woman fluffs a bed pillow as if comfort is my overriding concern. “We have to do something about it. My baby’s gone.”
“Your daughter is with your mother.”
“My mother?”