The officer peers into the car. Seeing me, her eyes widen, making me afraid Jimmy’s right—I might really be dying. “Wait until I get back into my car, and then follow me, sir. You got that? I’ll escort you to Sibley.”
We follow the police officer onto the Whitehurst Freeway and then onto Canal Road and MacArthur Boulevard. She’s got her lights flashing and her siren wailing, the sea of traffic on these congested streets parting to let us through. There’s something exploding inside my head, a nervous pulse thrumming my heart. I feel like a trapped bird, a feathered thing too hot and feverish to flap her wings. Nor can I figure out why we’re going back to Sibley. It’s the one place I don’t want to be. Is he taking me back there so they can finish off what they’ve already started—trying to kill me? The police officer must have radioed ahead, for two EMTs, a nurse, and an orderly stand outside waiting for me at Sibley’s emergency admittance door. Everything is happening so quickly. Someone—maybe Jimmy, maybe a doctor—squeezes my hand, kisses me, tells me everything will be all right. I’m trembling, sweating. The orderly notices my hospital ID wristband and the plastic medallion dangling from my wrist, and someone else scans the barcode on the wristband with an iPad. The EMTs look at each other. “So you’re the one,” one of them says. Someone guides me into a wheelchair. I look around and panic.
“Where’d Jimmy go?” I ask.
“Never mind that—we need to get you upstairs immediately,” the nurse says.
The elevator door opens. The orderly wheels me inside. The nurse takes my pulse. “You’ve lost a lot of blood,” she says, as if I need her to state the obvious.
Chapter Thirty-Six
LAUREL
Somewhere near me, a baby cries when I awake, and it’s impossible for me to hear a baby and not think of Zerena. In my mind I imagine Zerena crawling down the hallway, searching for me. She’s a blur of a girl dressed only in a disposable diaper and white knit baby booties, her hands and knees supercharged and moving so fast she’s leaving skid marks on the gleamingly clean hospital floors. I picture her peering into elevators, stairwells, broom-filled closets, and other patients’ rooms trying to find me, her mommy, the one person capable of bringing her comfort and joy. She’ll climb up my bed, navigate her way over the stainless steel bed railings so she can nestle in my lap, but then I grab one of the stainless steel bed railings and see it for what it would be: an impediment to Zerena’s climb. The bed’s elevated several feet off the ground, and I wish I was lying on the floor with no more than a blanket or a couple of sheets beneath me, a lowlying setting that my gummy-mouthed Zerena could mount without difficulty, but then this vision, too, comes crashing down with the crushing realization that she’s too young to crawl, too young to do much of anything to get herself back to me.
Karma has its limits. No matter how much I wish, there’s no Zerena nestled in my lap, no baby at my breast. Instead, the tubing from two different IVs—one for an antibiotic-laced saline solution and the other for a blood transfusion—is taped to my arm. Clamped to my index finger is an electronic sensor connected by wires to a computer near the nightstand, and on the computer’s screen, a running graph displays my temperature and heart rate.
“You’re doing well,” Lois Belcher says. She reaches over and pats the back of my hand.
“How long have I been here?”
“Maybe an hour. The antibiotic you’re on is really strong. Stronger than the vancomycin they gave you yesterday. A nurse already washed out your episiotomy wound and stitched it up better. We work quick around here when we have to.”
I’m in the exact same room on the maternity ward as I had been in, which doesn’t quite make sense. I hear babies cry outside my door, and my heart pangs. “Do you know where Zerena is?”
“I’m afraid we don’t have good news on that front.”
My heart sinks.
“The detectives can’t issue Amber Alerts unless they’re certain an abduction occurred. In your case, they thought it suspicious that both you and your baby vanished within hours of each other. That’s what they said: ‘suspicious.’” Disappointment lines Lois Belcher’s voice. She shakes her head. “Or maybe the word they used was ‘convenient.’ Maybe that’s the word they used.”
“But I don’t have anything to do with Zerena’s disappearance. I was asleep when it happened.”
“I know, but the detectives are going to need some convincing. I’m supposed to call them as soon as you’re well enough for them to interview.”
I glance around the room. Everything seems as it had been. Tricia’s flowers stand in a vase on the nightstand right next to the box of chocolates Jimmy gave me. But though the room is the same, it feels emptier, sadder. Zerena’s stainless steel bassinet is up against the wall, unoccupied.
“Is, um, Jimmy . . . Jimmy Wainsborough, my, uh . . .” After all that’s happened, it’s awkward asking about Jimmy. Lois Belcher, sensing my embarrassment, blushes. I don’t know how to refer to him anymore. “Is my, uh, acquaintance Jimmy waiting for me in the waiting room?”
Lois Belcher shakes her head slowly. “He said he had something important to do.”
Important, I want to yell out. Important? Like, why doesn’t Jimmy think I’m an important enough reason for him to stay put and be with me?
“By the way, we found this on the floor by the closet,” Lois Belcher says, handing me my cell phone. I haven’t seen it since the previous night. “I’ve been holding on to it, hoping you’d come back.”
After thanking Ms. Belcher, I tell her to let the police know I’m ready to talk. Before she leaves, she apologizes for what she’s done. Later this afternoon, she’ll attend an administrative hearing in the personnel department. She’s going to lose her job, she says. Under the circumstances, it’s hard for me to feel sorry for her, but I wish her good luck. She leaves to fetch the police.
While I wait for the police to arrive, I give my cell phone a little hug. My whole life is tied up in its computer chips and wiring. Never have I been separated from it for so long. I press a button, and its screen opens to a picture of Jimmy and me standing hand in hand in the Jefferson Memorial. Dozens if not hundreds of photos of Jimmy reside in my phone. Now, though, I don’t want to look at a single one of them.
Instead, I notice a voice mail message has been waiting for me since last night—and then I remember how my phone started ringing when one of the doctors jabbed me with a hypodermic needle. The voice mail is from Tricia . . . making me wonder how she got my number. Had Jimmy given it to her? Against my better judgment, I play it.
“Laurel . . . Jimmy’s going to kill me if he finds out I’m calling you,” Trish says, her voice urgent and serious. I press my phone to my ear. She sounds seriously afraid. Might James have actually been near her when she called? “I just found out about your adorable baby being missing, and I’m heartbroken. I feel so sorry for you. What I’ve got to tell you is shocking, but yesterday Jimmy told me he was going to find a way to make sure you never had any contact with your baby. He was going to steal it, he said. He’d been drinking, and I thought it was just the alcohol in him that made him say crazy things. No woman deserves to have her baby stolen. I’m worried he’s responsible for Anne Elise’s disappearance. I’ve told the police everything I know, but I’m afraid, frankly, that DC cops are so incompetent they might never find out what he’s done with Anne Elise. Laurel, I’m sure you know this by now, but you really can’t trust him. Please don’t say I didn’t try to warn you.”