“She’s the new one,” Fix said, his voice gone suddenly sharp, like Cousins was an idiot, like this was the reason some guys had to be lawyers rather than cops. “She’s the one in the fancy dress. It’s her party.”
The crowd shifted around Cousins, opening to him, closing around him, pushing him through. In the dining room every platter was stripped, not a cracker or a carrot stick remained. The conversation and music and drunken laughter melted into a single indecipherable block of sound from which the occasional clear word or sentence escaped—Turns out he’s had her in the trunk the entire time he’s talking. Somewhere down a distant hallway he couldn’t see, a woman was laughing so hard she gasped for breath, calling, Stop! Stop! He saw children, plenty of children, several of whom were pulling cups straight from the unwitting fingers of adults and downing the contents. He didn’t see any babies. The room was over-warm and the detectives had their jackets off now, showing the service revolvers clipped to their belts or holstered under their arms. Cousins wondered how he had failed to notice earlier that half the party was armed. He went through the open glass doors to the patio and looked up into the late-afternoon sunlight that flooded the suburb of Downey, where there was not a cloud and never had been a cloud and never would be a cloud. He saw his friend the priest standing still as stone, holding the little sister in his arms, as if they’d been dancing for so long they had fallen asleep standing up. Men sat in patio chairs talking to other men, many of them with women in their laps. The women, all the ones he saw, had taken off their shoes at some point and ruined their stockings. None of them was holding a baby, and there was no baby in the driveway. Cousins stepped inside the garage and flipped on the light. A ladder hung on two hooks and clean cans of paint were lined up on a shelf according to size. There was a shovel, a rake, coils of extension cord, a bench of tools, a place for everything and everything in its place. In the center of the clean cement floor was a clean navy-blue Peugeot. Fix Keating had fewer children and a nicer watch and a foreign car and a much-better-looking wife. The guy hadn’t even made detective. If anyone had bothered to ask him at that moment, Cousins would have said it seemed suspicious.
About the time he started really looking at the car, which seemed somehow sexy just by virtue of its being French, he remembered the baby was missing. He thought of his own baby, Jeanette, who had just learned to walk. Her forehead was bruised from where she had careened into the glass yesterday, the Band-Aids were still in place, and he panicked to think he was supposed to be watching her. Little Jeanette, he had no idea where he’d left her! Teresa should have known he wasn’t any good at keeping up with the baby. She shouldn’t have trusted him with this. But when he came out of the garage to try and find her, his heart punching at his ribs as if it wanted to go ahead of him, he saw all the people at Fix Keating’s party. The proper order of the day was returned to him and he stood for another moment holding on to the door, feeling both ridiculous and relieved. He hadn’t lost anything.
When he looked back up at the sky he saw the light was changing. He would tell Fix he needed to go home, he had his own kids to worry about. He went inside to find a bathroom and found two closets first. In the bathroom, he stopped to splash some water on his face before coming out again. On the other side of the hallway there was yet another door. It wasn’t a big house but it seemed to be made entirely of doors. He opened the door in front of him and found the light inside was dim. The shades were down. It was a room for little girls—a pink rug, a pink wallpaper border featuring fat rabbits. There was a room not unlike this in his own house that Holly shared with Jeanette. In the corner he saw three small girls sleeping on a twin bed, their legs crossed over one another’s legs, their fingers twisted in one another’s hair. Somehow the only thing he failed to notice was Beverly Keating standing at the changing table with the baby. Beverly looked at him, a smile of recognition coming over her face.
“I know you,” she said.
She had startled him, or her beauty startled him again. “I’m sorry,” he said. He put his hand on the door.
“You’re not going to wake them up.” She tilted her head towards the girls. “I think they’re drunk. I carried them in here one at a time and they never woke up.”
He went over and looked at the girls, the biggest one no more than five. He couldn’t help but like the look of children when they were sleeping. “Is one of them yours?” he asked. They all three looked vaguely similar. None of them looked like Beverly Keating.
“Pink dress,” she said, her attention on the diaper in her hand. “The other two are her cousins.” She smiled at him. “Aren’t you supposed to be fixing drinks?”
“Spencer left,” he said, though that didn’t answer the question. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been nervous, not in the face of criminals or juries, certainly not in the face of women holding diapers. He started again. “Your husband asked me to find the baby.”
Finished with her work, Beverly rearranged the baby’s dress and lifted her up from the table. “Well, here she is,” she said. She touched her nose to the baby’s nose and the baby smiled and yawned. “Somebody’s been awake a long time.” Beverly turned towards the crib.
“Let me take her out to Fix for a minute,” he said. “Before you put her down.”
Beverly Keating tilted her head slightly to one side and gave him a funny look. “Why does Fix need her?”
It was everything, the pale pink of her mouth in the darkened pink room, the door that was closed now though he didn’t remember closing it, the smell of her perfume which had somehow managed to float gently above the familiar stench of the diaper pail. Had Fix asked him to bring the baby back or just to find her? It didn’t make any difference. He told her he didn’t know, and then he stepped towards her, her yellow dress its own source of light. He held out his arms and she stepped into them, holding out the baby.
“Take her then,” she said. “Do you have children?” But by then she was very close and she lifted up her face. He put one arm under the baby, which meant he was putting his arm beneath her breasts. It wasn’t a year ago she’d had this baby and while he didn’t know what she’d looked like before it was hard to imagine she had ever looked any better than this. Teresa never pulled herself together. She said it wasn’t possible, one coming right after the next. Wouldn’t he like to introduce the two of them, just to show his wife what could be done if you cared to try. Scratch that. He had no interest in Teresa meeting Beverly Keating. He put his other arm around her back, pressed his fingers into the straight line of her zipper. It was the magic of gin and orange juice. The baby balanced between the two of them and he kissed her. That was the way this day was turning out. He closed his eyes and kissed her until the spark he had felt in his fingers when he touched her hand in the kitchen ran the entire shivering length of his spine. She put her other hand against the small of his back while the tip of her tongue crossed between his parted teeth. There was an almost imperceptible shift between them. He felt it, but she stepped back. He was holding the baby. The baby cried for a second, a single red-faced wail, and then issued a small hiccup and pressed into Cousins’s chest.
“We’re going to smother her,” she said, and laughed. She looked down at the baby’s pretty face. “Sorry about that.”
The small weight of the Keating girl was familiar in his arms. Beverly took a soft cloth from the changing table and wiped over his mouth. “Lipstick,” she said, then she leaned over and kissed him again.
“You are—” he started, but too many things came into his head to say just one.