“Mr. Novacek,” I said, trying hard to keep my voice from rising. “You called for a noise disturbance, and I don’t hear anything.”
“It’s coming from this dump over here.” The old man pointed to the house next door. It had a flat roof and boarded-up windows. Garbage in the yard. A clothesline with no pins. An empty doghouse. “The mewling won’t stop.”
“It’s a cat? You should’ve called animal control.”
“But I see Mexican kids coming in and out of that house all day. Drinking and doing drugs and God only knows what. They probably tortured that poor cat in there. That’s why I called the cops.”
I got out of the cruiser and stood with my hands on my belt. Under my uniform, beads of sweat traveled down my spine, landing in that space just below my bulletproof vest. When would this day be over?
Then a soft mewling sound rose.
“You hear that?” the old man said.
“Yeah, I hear it.”
I called it in. With one hand on my sidearm, I walked up to the house. There was no lock on the front door, just a bit of wire that looped through the knob hole and connected it to the doorframe. I unfastened the wire, but the door was heavy and I had to push hard until it gave in with a loud creak. The smell of dust, bird shit, and old newspaper made me want to gag. The house was so dark I felt as though I had fallen into an abyss. I turned on my flashlight and aimed it straight ahead. A small living room appeared, with a low ceiling and a brick fireplace. On the far wall, someone had spray-painted GO HOME in red block letters. There were crushed beer cans all over the floor. Hypodermic needles. Cigarette butts. Playing cards. Except for an old couch with big holes where the seat cushions should’ve been, there was no furniture.
Then there was a movement, a faint rustling I might not have heard if I hadn’t been standing still. I turned my flashlight on the couch and moved closer, my pulse quickening with anticipation. Deep in the hole was a heap of blue blankets, from which arose a tiny little fist. The milky smell of the infant was so strong in my nostrils now that I wondered why I hadn’t noticed it sooner. I set the flashlight on the dirty wood floor and dropped to my knees. The baby’s eyes were wide open and as soon as they landed on me the crying started, this time with the full force of expectation. I slid both of my hands inside the hole and brought out the blue bundle. Cradling the infant in my arms, I parted the blanket and was relieved to see no obvious sign of injury. A soiled diaper, though. The crying intensified. “Shsh,” I whispered, “shsh, little buddy, it’s okay.” I gave him my index finger and immediately he grabbed it. Holding him close in my arms, I walked back out of the house, pushing the front door open wider with my leg. In the yard, the neighbor was waiting, squinting in the sunlight. “I’ll be darned,” he said.
I turned my back to the sun, so the baby would be in the shade, and radioed dispatch again. I couldn’t remember what the procedure was in a case like this, I had to wait for instructions from the sergeant. But for once, Vasco was nice. “Stay put, Gorecki,” he said. “We’re sending help right away.”
The moment the paramedic put his stethoscope on the baby’s chest, he started to cry again, kicking his feet inside the blankets. “Heartbeat’s good,” the medic said with a smile. He was an older guy who dyed his hair and wore a thick layer of ChapStick, trying, I think, to hold on to what remained of his surfer looks. When he was finished taking the baby’s vitals, he brought out a bottle of water. “He’s got crystals in his diaper. He’s completely dehydrated.”
“How long do you think he’s been in there?” I asked.
“Hard to say. If I had to guess, twenty-four hours. Maybe thirty six.”
“Jesus.”
Behind us, the neighbor was giving a statement to the detective, spelling out his last name carefully. “N-o-v-a-c-e-k.” The suspect I’d almost forgotten about was still waiting in the back of the cruiser. Two deputies were checking the house one more time for evidence. And all the while, Sergeant Vasco was giving an interview to a reporter from the Hi-Desert Star. The next morning, his picture was on the front page of the newspaper, with the baby in his arms. “Police Rescue Abandoned Baby” the headline said.
He didn’t ride my ass so much after that.
Maryam
Memory is an unreliable visitor. For a long while, I couldn’t remember the name of the young man who had brought Nora to the cabin when her car key broke, although he looked familiar to me, and I knew I had seen him somewhere before. Then one day, while I was taking the recycling out to the garage, it all came back to me at once, not only his name, but his father’s name, too. The summer before Nora went to college, I needed an electrician to fix the wiring on the garage door, and one of the mothers at school said that she had hired this man, Mark Gorecki, so I called him. He didn’t just fix the garage door, he kept finding new things that needed to be done, like a three-way switch that didn’t work, or a broken light fixture on the deck. He repaired everything perfectly, but I could smell beer on him at noon, and I didn’t like that he had racked up a $300 bill by the time he was finished, so I never called him again, not even when the fan in the bedroom stopped working and we had to sleep with the windows open.
Coming back in from the garage, I went to the front hallway and stood looking at the framed photos on the wall, pictures from all the important moments in my family’s life, and especially my daughters’ lives, their birthdays and graduations and achievements. At length, I found the young man, standing in a suit that looked too small for him, in the middle of Nora’s jazz band. Running my finger over the list at the bottom, I found his name: Jeremy Gorecki. It was nice of him to drive her back that day, I thought; waiting for Triple A in the heat would’ve been tough, especially since she was by herself.
I hadn’t expected to see him again, but a few weeks later, while I was waiting in the express lane at the Stater Brothers, he came to stand behind me in line. At first, he didn’t see me, he was texting on his phone, smiling at whoever he was talking to, and only after he finished his conversation did he put down his items on the conveyor belt, a canister of coffee, a pack of sugar, a box of condoms, and a blue-and-white carryall with a zipper pocket on one side. It was my carryall, the one I had used to bring Tupperwares of food to the cabin, and I had left it hanging on a nail in the kitchen, in case Nora needed it for groceries, but now here it was, in the hands of Jeremy Gorecki. I reached for the plastic divider and put it down on the conveyor belt between us.
“Thank you,” he said, reflexively, but when he looked at me, I saw recognition come over him. I turned to look at the tabloids, their covers screaming about celebrities’ addictions to drugs or affairs with the nanny, then pulled out a copy of People, just to give myself something to do, and made a show of reading it. “Mrs. Guerraoui?” he asked.
How strange it was to hear my husband’s name in this stranger’s mouth. What did he know about us, and why did he want to talk to me, here at the grocery store, with that box on the conveyor belt between us? To my relief, the line moved forward, and I stuffed the magazine back on the rack and pulled a few bills out of my wallet to pay for my groceries. I was planning to make stuffed bell peppers with lamb for my son-in-law—that was his favorite dish, he and Salma were coming to have dinner with me—but the thought of cooking an elaborate meal was far from my mind now. All I wanted was to get out of this place.
“Eleven eighty is your change,” the cashier said. She took out two bills from the register, then stopped. “The change machine is broken, and I’m low on quarters and dimes.”
“It’s okay.”
“You don’t mind so many pennies?”