“Why don’t you come with me? I can better answer these questions sitting.”
We walk down a carpeted hallway. Seals of different police branches dot gray-painted walls. Another steel door is propped open at the end of the corridor. I pass through it into a bright room full of wooden desks and fluorescent lights. A few officers are hunched over computers. Most of the desks are empty at this hour, though. An American flag stands in one corner, several feet away from the New York State version. I flash back to grade school and the Pledge of Allegiance.
Officer Campos sits at what I presume is his desk and gestures to the visitor’s chair opposite. He withdraws a notepad and pen from a drawer.
“I really don’t wish to talk to anyone without seeing my husband. I’m sorry. It’s not that I don’t want to be helpful, but he was very upset.”
Again, the detective gestures for me to sit. Some part of me that wants, desperately, to be agreeable, as any innocent person would be, pulls back the chair and perches on the edge of it. Fine, I’ll sit. But I don’t have to get comfortable.
“Mr. Jacobson, your husband, knew Nick well?”
“They were law partners.”
“So it was mostly a work relationship?”
He looks at the paper, as though he’s posing routine questions, checking boxes off a list. Nonchalance in a detective is not a good sign. This question is more pointed than he wants it to appear.
“No. He and David have been close since law school.”
“What did you think of their friendship?” This time, he makes direct eye contact.
I fucking hated it. The words reverberate in my head in Beth’s voice. I don’t verbalize them. There’s no reason for me to have felt that strongly about their friendship. Most wives don’t love their husband’s “bros.” Most single guys don’t relish the presence of the woman who tied down their wingman. “They worked well together.”
“Did you see them together much?”
I shrug. “They saw each other at work.”
“But you felt they worked well together?”
Why is he pressing this point? “They built a successful firm. Isn’t that evidence?”
“Did they see each other socially?”
My left eye starts to twitch. Not another headache. Not now. “David, I’m sure, can tell you all about how often he saw his friend. I’d like to see him now.”
“Did they—”
The overhead bulbs seem to glow brighter. Harsh yellow beams pour from each pot light. I shut my eyes and press my thumb and forefinger against the lids, trying to block out the spotlights. “No more questions. If you want to formally interview me, I’d be happy to come back with David present as my attorney.”
Officer Campos leans forward in his chair. “I thought you wanted to help.”
“I want to see my husband.”
“He’s answering—”
My stomach seems to drop into my bowels. I need to get out of here. “I’ll wait outside then.”
The detective rolls his chair back from his desk. He stands with a sorry expression on his face, as though he feels terribly for me for some inexplicable reason. “Word of advice? You might want a different attorney.”
Chapter 12
I pay cash for a cab to the Forty-Second Street ferry terminal and then drop a twenty for round trip tickets to Weehawken. The boat skims across the gray water at a speed that car commuters could never hope to achieve in the Lincoln Tunnel. Eight minutes later, I am walking over a metal gangplank to the terminal. Another minute and I’m facing the bedrock cliff that supports the majority of the town above sea level.
I cross the street and climb up a rickety metal staircase bolted to the rock face like a fire escape from suburbia. My mom lives on top of the hill, several blocks back from a pricey apartment complex overlooking the city, on a postage stamp lot reminiscent of how the area used to look before developers realized they could build condos overlooking Manhattan and charge three thousand dollars a month for the privilege of waking up to the midtown skyline.
My thighs tremble as I ascend the last step into a narrow park. The past five hours was more exercise than my body was equipped to handle. I am not in shape. The biggest pain, however, isn’t in my wobbly legs. The night without nursing has swollen my breasts into two water balloons. One of my nipples has already sprung a leak. A circular stain darkens the fabric on the left side of the tank top. I’m lucky it’s black.
It’s 6:30 AM when I ring my mother’s doorbell. She welcomes me in with a yawning smile. The circles beneath her eyes are darker than yesterday. Victoria still wakes up every two hours at night. Interrupted dreams are a form of torture.
“What are you doing here so early?” she asks, pulling me inside as though the summer air isn’t a balmy seventy degrees already.
I gesture to my top. “I need to nurse. The pump doesn’t work like the baby.”
My mom pokes my hardened breasts. A vein that I didn’t know existed bulges beneath the cleavage popping above the tank’s scoop neck. “That looks painful, Beth!”
She steps back into the house and gestures to the stroller. “I fed her a bottle about an hour ago. She likes it better in there than the Pack ’n Play.”
I lift Vicky from the bassinet. Her tongue protrudes from her petite mouth at my scent, though her eyes remain closed. I pull the right breast up over the tank top’s neckline. She latches on in her half-asleep state and pulls the milk from my body. It’s a release better than any I have ever known. I could fall asleep like this.
Milk dribbles down the tank from the leaking left breast. My mother asks if I need a towel.
“I hate this shirt anyway,” I say.
“It looks nice on you.” My mom tilts her head. “The pants aren’t right though. Maybe the waist is a bit boxy.”
Vicky starts coughing. I remove her from my chest and pat her back while the spray from the right nipple soaks whatever dry fabric remained on my top. “Sorry, baby,” I say as I hold her upright against my shoulder.
“Let me get you a towel.”
“It’s all right, Mom. You know what you could get me though? Something from my old closet. A T-shirt. Maybe a pair of old jeans.”
“Everything is from college.”
“I’ll squeeze.”
I put Vicky back into nursing position. She fusses as she drinks from one milk fountain and then the other, annoyed by the speed at which the liquid rushes from my body. When I burp her, there is a deep gurgling sound. Moments later, my clothes are coated in sour milk vomit.
Vicky settles down right after. Possibly she’d already been full and had only nursed because she wanted to be near me. More likely, there was something wrong with my milk. All the adrenaline in my blood stream probably poisoned the supply. I fed my baby rotten milk. Tears threaten to fall from the thought. I’d rather be a murderer than a bad mother.
As I’m placing Victoria back in the bassinet, my mom comes down the stairs holding a blue Columbia tank top and drawstring sweat pants, one of those college gym outfits that everyone lives in for four years. I probably left it here because I was sick of wearing it.
She wrinkles her nose as she looks at me. “Give it here.” She holds out one hand with my outfit and the other for the soiled clothing clinging to my chest. “I’ll wash it.”
I grab the hem of the tank and bring it up to my breasts, distributing the baby vomit. “It’s done, Mom. I’ll put it in the trash.”
“But—”
“It didn’t fit right, anyway.”
I ball up the top and walk it, near naked, to the kitchen garbage. As my mom protests, I push it deep inside the plastic bag with the other refuse: uneaten pasta and red sauce from the smell of it. “Really, Mom, that outfit was ruined.” I slip the shirt over my head and then go into the bathroom where I jostle into the oversized sweats. Colleen’s pants follow her shirt into the trash.
“I could have washed those.” My mom shakes her head at me as though I am the most wasteful woman in the world for throwing out perfectly good clothing saturated in human fluids.