“Oooh,” Belinda says, the first to understand the implications. She sits down beside me, runs her hand through my unwashed hair. There’s compassion in her face, compassion she never expressed while I was growing up. In this moment, when I’m more desperate for compassion than ever before, it’s exactly what I need. “I’m so sorry. I feel so bad for what you must be going through.” Belinda puts her arm around my shoulder, drawing me into a sideways hug. “It’ll be all right. You’ve got the hospital doing everything they can to find your baby girl.”
Tully drums his stubby fingers on the side of the nightstand. “Wait. Wait. Hold everything. Are you telling me Jimmy’s not even your man?” Tully’s face reddens. He paces the room, walks back, drums his fingers on the wall next to the IV stand. He’s a caged animal, Tully is, indignant and trembling with anger. He points his finger at me. “Don’t you know you shouldn’t be having babies with other women’s husbands?”
“Quit picking on your little girl,” Belinda says. “Don’t you think she knows this? Don’t you think she’s been trying to figure out what to do without you shouting at her?”
“I’m not shouting. That man took our money.”
Tully makes a fist, and at the sound of that fist smacking his other hand, Belinda panics. Tully looks as if he’s about to explode. Belinda lets go of me and, getting up from beside me on the bed, edges up to him. She slips her hand consolingly onto his bicep to calm him, her voice the soothing voice of an elementary school teacher trying to pacify an angry child. I’ve seen her try to calm him down before, but rarely did it work. “Don’t worry, honey. It’ll work out. Everything will be okay.”
“How do you know?” Tully asks. Suddenly, he starts yelling. “He’s not the family man we all thought he was, is he? Don’t you get it? He’s not family. He’s not our family, anyways.”
One of the security men lays a hand on Tully’s shoulder and, with the patience of a man trained at managing stressful situations, says, “Sir. Sir. Please don’t shout. This is a hospital.”
Tully thrusts out his chest. No one’s quicker to take anger, or quicker to amp that anger into violence, than Tully. That’s one thing I remember as a child: the bar fights he got into, the parking lot melees that began with someone stealing a parking space he wanted. Belinda urges him to stay calm, but he shoos her away. Turning toward the security man, he stares him in the eye. The security officer is huge, beefy. Standing up to him, Tully’s a comparative pipsqueak. “Get your hands off me, buddy, and don’t fuck with me. I’m not shouting. I’m upset is all.”
“Sir. Sir. Do you wish us to call the police on you?”
Tully’s going to pounce on the security man, or—worse—the security men will pounce on him. Any moment, something bad’s going to happen. My mother hides her face beneath her hands. Tully grabs the clock radio from the nightstand, rips its cord from the wall, and makes as if to throw it. The security men, sensing danger, stand tall and unflinching, broadening their shoulders and puffing out their chests.
“What are you going to do with that clock?” one of the security officers asks.
“Sir. Sir. Do you wish us to get the police involved here to calm you down?” the other asks.
“The police?” Tully repeats.
“Yes. The police.”
The recognition that he’s about to have the cops called on him comes slowly to Tully. He raises his hands up in a classic “Don’t shoot me!” posture and steps back half a step, which amazes me. Never before has he flinched at the prospect of a police confrontation. Maybe he really has changed. Or at least become smarter about when to pick a fight. “Don’t you go calling the police. I haven’t done anything, and you know that. It’s you two who’s done something—losing my daughter’s baby.”
“Sir. We’re working on that.”
The clock’s still in Tully’s hand, its four-foot cord dangling against his knee. He lowers it gently, the other hand still in the air in a nonthreatening position. “Well, don’t go bothering me then just because a baby’s gone missing. I had nothing to do with that. And I wasn’t shouting.”
I expect Tully and the officers to apologize to each other, but instead, the officers turn their attention back to me.
“Can we ask you more questions?” one of the security officers says. He says again, “on behalf of the entire hospital,” how sorry they are for what happened to Zerena and pledges to help get her back. And then he asks questions that all concern Tricia. Unfortunately, I barely know her. Pressed to recall her, my mind goes blank.
“She’s really slender, right?” I say. I’m woozy and feverish, panicked and in despair, but one thing pops to mind: her eyes. “She’s got these eyes . . . eyes like . . . like, blue.”
“Her eyes?” one of the security men asks, looking up from his clipboard.
“Yes. Her eyes. She kept saying her eyes were the same deep-blue color as Zerena’s.” I expect the security officers to jump all over this description—it’s the only real identifying feature I’ve yet offered—and yet they shake their heads, unimpressed, because, without Zerena, they’re unable to color match her eyes. I dig deeper into my memory. I tell them how she seemed to think she knew all about my college years, which was off-putting. And then I remember something else that might do the security men some good.
“Jimmy says Tricia’s been depressed lately. She’s been self-medicating on Valium,” I say, recalling Jimmy’s worries about the pills she’s popping. “He says she’s taking so many that she’s becoming illogical, loopy.” In my mind, she must have worked her way into an irrational froth that culminated with her stealing my baby. “That’s probably why she kidnapped my baby.”
“So what about the man? Jimmy. Your, uh, boyfriend. What can you tell us about him?”
“Jimmy?” I’m jarred they don’t see the relevance of my suspicions about Trish. They can’t be totally stupid, and yet when I ask them—implore them—to look into Trish, they shake their heads dismissively. Clearly, they’ve got their own suspicions about what happened to Zerena.
Lois Belcher clears her throat purposely to catch everyone’s attention. There’s a perturbed look on her face, a scowl. “If you don’t mind me saying so, I don’t think I’ve seen Trish all day. I’m usually on top of things like this too.”
The security officers nod at this assertion. No doubt they’ve worked with Lois Belcher before and view her as a trustworthy person. One of the security officers puts his hands on his hips. “And even if this Trish person were here today, she couldn’t just walk away from the hospital because of all the security systems we have in place.”
I glance back at Lois Belcher. Instead of gloating, she looks down at the floor, wide-eyed, her mouth ajar as if in shock.
“Usually it’s the man in the relationship who takes the child or the baby,” one of the security officers says.
“Jimmy wouldn’t steal a baby. He’s way too classy to do something like that.”
But the security officers are insistent that I provide them a description of Jimmy, so I tell them how warm and caring he is, how kind he’s always been—but they direct me to the immediately necessary facts concerning his identifying features—height, age, race, hair color, birthmarks, and visible tattoos, which, in his case, means none. I tell them about Jimmy’s midnight-blue Volvo station wagon, how, while driving me home from my first sonogram appointment, he said it was the perfect car for a man setting out to start a family. At the time, I wept, thinking he was committed to me and the family we would have together.
“So where does he live?”
“I don’t know.”
The security men look at each other. “Are you serious?”
Although Jimmy bought the riverfront apartment for me, he doesn’t live there. At least not yet. The security officers ask other questions. I know so little about Jimmy. Place of birth? Social security number? Place of employment? Nope, nope, and nope.
“How about his birth date? Do you at least know that?”