“Hey, you need a ride?” someone asks.
I turn around. A taxicab has pulled up right behind me, its engine running. Perhaps the cab has been standing there all along, or perhaps it just arrived, dropping off its passengers while I stared out into the snowy surroundings. The cab driver, a Middle Eastern–looking man in a blue-and-gray hoodie, sticks his head out through the driver’s side window and asks again, as if I hadn’t heard his first question. And then he adds, “Hey? Are you all right? Do you need me to walk you back into the emergency room?”
“Huh?” Beneath my peacoat, I’m still wearing my maternity ward–issued pink hospital gown and the pair of fuzz-ball slippers I’ve had since college.
“You’ve been standing there for five minutes, leaning against the parking sign.”
I let go of the sign, flex my cold-stiffened fingers, and notice it stopped snowing. Despite my earlier gusto, I feel weak. “I have?”
“Do you need a ride?”
“I need to go home.” I tell him the name of my apartment complex. I’ve lived there only a couple of weeks, and the place still strikes me as some dream reality where everything is beautiful and well maintained. So new is the apartment to me that I mistakenly gave my old apartment’s address when checking into the hospital, which will make it next to impossible for them to find me if I’m needed. Tomorrow, I’ll track down Tricia’s address and hunt for Zerena, but tonight I want to cocoon myself in a bed that doesn’t have stainless steel safety railings at its sides.
The cab driver screws his eyes. “You live there?”
“It’s nice,” I say, wobbling over to the cab and opening the door to let myself into the back seat.
Five buildings comprise the Watergate complex, three devoted to co-op apartments and the other two containing a hotel and office space. The complex’s name, now synonymous with arrogance and corruption, derives from a large wooden gate in the water at the spot where the now-defunct Chesapeake and Ohio Canal entered into the Potomac River. History has a way of rearing its head, repeating and transforming itself. Someday when it’s warmer, I intend to rustle through the brush at the river’s edge and find what remains of that gate, but when the cab driver lets me off at the front of my building, snow starts falling again. With only slippers on my feet, I must be the worst-shoed person ever to shamble into the building. Jimmy is probably out, maybe even spending the night with Tricia, but my anticipation builds throughout the elevator ride upstairs. When the elevator door dings open, it’s like I can smell the briny, woodsy wake of Jimmy’s Acqua di Giò as if he, too, has stepped off the elevator moments earlier.
Inside the apartment, things are tidier than I remember. Before my water broke, I watched the Weather Channel for three days straight, fearful some freak storm was about to descend upon the city, stranding me snowbound when the time came for me to go to Sibley. A window, somewhere, is open, letting a winter draft into the apartment. Lights flicker in the nursery. Approaching that room, I’m astounded to see the nursery’s ceiling aglow with stars and a crescent moon, the stars twinkling softly, poetically, as if in a lullaby. I tiptoe closer, peer inside. Jimmy’s on the rocking chair. The nightlight star projector that he bought last week sits on the floor by his feet, beaming its stars upward. He hasn’t seen or heard me. It’s sweet, watching him in this quiet starlit room. He has no idea that our baby’s gone missing, but I know that after I tell him what’s happened, we’ll be able to handle this situation together. He strokes his chin; as strange as it sounds, I’ve never felt closer to him than I do now.
I step inside the nursery and try to close the window, but the window hardly budges. The sound the window makes startles Jimmy. He glances up at me, alarmed.
“Jimmy, I’m so glad to see you.” Perhaps because I’ve startled him, he looks angry, scowling mad, so I rest my hand on his shoulder to calm him, thinking that, together, we’ll support each other. We’ll be the shoulder the other can lean on, the solace we each seek. “Zerena’s missing. They can’t find her anywhere at the hospital.”
“Shut up,” Jimmy says, knocking my hand away. “I’ve about had enough of you.”
PART THREE
Chapter Twenty-Eight
JIM
Anger is the least effective emotion when it comes to getting what you want in this get-along/go-along world, but unable to control myself, I hurl a plastic baby rattle so hard it shatters against the wall above Laurel’s head. Grains of brown rice burst from the rattle like shrapnel, settling onto her hair, the shoulders of her peacoat, and the carpet at her feet. She looks at me wide-eyed, astonished, fearful for her life.
I’ve spent the last hour contemplating what I want in life. A week ago, I dipped a brush into a can of glossy yellow paint that smelled of linseed oil and painted the walls. The impression I hoped to create was of sunshine, happiness, and limitless opportunities. I wielded a Phillips-head screwdriver, a new Craftsman socket wrench, needle-nose pliers, and a ball-peen hammer to assemble the crib, the changing table, and this rocking chair upon which I sit. I made preparations, bought cases of Huggies disposable diapers, a Playtex Diaper Genie II Elite diaper-disposal system that billed itself as “your companion in your journey through early parenthood,” a half dozen refills for said Diaper Genie, snap-on onesies of every color imaginable, Vaseline, baby oil, baby wipes, and an industrial-sized hamper to accommodate the baby’s dirty clothes. I foresaw every contingency save the possibility that the baby wasn’t mine. Nor had I figured her mother would finger me to the police as suspect numero uno in the event of her disappearance.
“You’re evil. That’s what you are,” I say, clapping my hands together loud enough to make Laurel jump. “After all I’ve done for you. After all I’ve done for Anne Elise. What the fuck were you thinking? Dragging me into your white-trash life? You hoodwinked me, lied to me, fucked me silly until I was good and under your spell so you could convince me I was the father of another man’s child.”
Laurel cringes. She’s no lily-white flower, no angel with feathery wings and ethereal longings. The love child of a lowlife criminal and a druggie, she spent years locked up behind bars, but she wants me to believe she’s so innocent as to be offended by my accusations.
“But, Jimmy—”
“Don’t ‘but, Jimmy’ me!”
I lift up my phone, play for Laurel’s benefit my recorded conversation with Simpkins. Listening to the money negotiations between Simpkins and me, she’s confused, but during the meat of the conversation, Laurel stiffens. She listens to Simpkins talk about the photos in her phone and how he’s sure the blond-haired, blue-eyed man sharing a bed with her in one of the photos is the father of her baby. I’m watching Laurel as she listens. An icy breeze ruffles the open window’s lace curtains. Her cheeks are red from tears, red from the cold. She brings her arms together and shivers.
I click off the phone, tap my foot to the floor. “So?”
“I should’ve been honest. There was another guy I was seeing back when we met.” Laurel wipes back her tears with the back of her hand. “When I realized I was pregnant, I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know if you’d understand. I wasn’t sure whose it might be, but I was sure hoping it was yours. I should’ve been more honest.”