Lambiase says he hasn’t heard of it.
“Well, believe you me. She’s got terrible taste in books.” A.J. laughs.
Lambiase nods and drinks his wine. “Nobody’s saying you have to keep her.”
“Yeah, yeah, of course. But do you think I could have some sort of say in where she ended up? She’s an awfully smart little thing. Like she already knows the alphabet and I even got her to understand alphabetical order. I’d hate to see her land with some jerks who didn’t appreciate that. As I was saying before, I don’t believe in fate. But I do feel a sense of responsibility toward her. That young woman did leave her in my care.”
“That young woman was out of her mind,” Lambiase says. “She was an hour away from drowning herself.”
“Yeah.” A.J. frowns. “You’re right.” A cry from the other room. A.J. excuses himself. “I should just go check on her,” he says.
BY THE END of the weekend, Maya is in need of a bath. Though he would rather leave such an intimate activity to the state of Massachusetts, A.J. doesn’t want to surrender her to social services looking like a miniature Miss Havisham. It takes A.J. several Google searches to determine bathing protocol: appropriate temperature bath water two-year-old; can a two-year-old use grown-up shampoo?; how does a father go about cleaning a two-year-old girl’s private parts without being a pervert?; how high to fill tub—toddler; how to prevent a two-year-old from accidentally drowning in tub; general rules for bath safety, and so on.
He washes Maya’s hair with hemp-based shampoo that used to belong to Nic. Long after he had donated or thrown away everything else of his wife’s, he could not quite bring himself to discard her bath products.
A.J. rinses her hair, and Maya begins to sing.
“What is that you’re singing?”
“Song,” she says.
“What song is that?”
“La la. Booya. La la.”
A.J. laughs. “Yeah, that’s gibberish to me, Maya.”
She splashes him.
“Mama?” she asks after a while.
“No, I’m not your mother,” A.J. says.
“Gone,” Maya says.
“Yes,” A.J. says. “She probably isn’t coming back.”
Maya thinks about this and then nods. “You sing.”
“I’d rather not.”
“Sing,” she says.
The girl has lost her mother. He supposes it’s the least he can do.
There is no time to Google appropriate songs for babies. Before he met his wife, A.J. had sung second tenor for the Footnotes, Princeton’s all-male a cappella group. When A.J. fell for Nic, it was the Footnotes who had suffered, and after a semester of missed rehearsals he had been axed from the group. He thinks back to the last Footnotes show, which had been a tribute to eighties music. For his bathtub performance, he follows the program pretty closely, beginning with “99 Luftballons” then segueing into “Get out of My Dreams, Get into My Car.” For the finale, “Love in an Elevator.” He only feels mildly foolish.
She claps when he is finished. “Again,” she commands. “Again.”
“That show runs one performance.” He lifts her out of the tub and then he towels her off, wiping between each perfect toe.
“Luftballon,” Maya says. “Luft you.”
“What?”
“Love you,” she says.
“You’re clearly responding to the power of a cappella.”
She nods. “Love you.”
“Love me? You don’t even know me,” A.J. says. “Little girl, you shouldn’t go throwing around your love so easily.” He pulls her to him. “We’ve had a good run. This has been a delightful and, for me, at least, memorable seventy-two hours, but some people aren’t meant to be in your life forever.”
She looks at him with her big blue skeptical eyes. “Love you,” she repeats.
A.J. towels her hair then gives her head an appraising sniff. “I worry for you. If you love everyone, you’ll end up having hurt feelings most of the time. I suppose, relative to the length of your life, you feel as if you’ve known me a rather long time. Your perspective of time is really very warped, Maya. But I am old and soon, you’ll forget you even knew me.”
Molly Klock knocks on the door to the apartment. “The woman from the state is downstairs. Is it okay for me to send her up?”
A.J. nods.
He pulls Maya into his lap, and they wait, listening as the social worker ascends the creaky stairs. “Now don’t be afraid, Maya. This lady’s going to find a perfectly good home for you. Better than here. You can’t spend the rest of your life sleeping on a futon, you know. The kind of people who spend their lives as permanent guests on a futon are not the kind of people you want to know.”
The social worker’s name is Jenny. A.J. cannot recall ever having met an adult woman named Jenny. If Jenny were a book, she would be a paperback just out of the box—no dog ears, no waterlogging, no creases in her spine. A.J. would prefer a social worker with some obvious wear. He imagines the synopsis on the back of the Jenny story: when plucky Jenny from Fairfield, Connecticut, took a job as a social worker in the big city, she had no idea what she was getting into.
“Is it your first day?” A.J. asks.
“No,” Jenny says, “I’ve been doing this a little while.” Jenny smiles at Maya. “What a beauty you are.”
Maya buries her face in A.J.’s hoodie.
“You two seem very bonded.” Jenny makes a note in her pad. “So it’s like this. From here, I’ll take Maya back to Boston. As her caseworker, I’ll fill out some paperwork for her—she obviously can’t do that herself, ha ha. She’ll be assessed by a medical doctor and a psychologist.”
“She seems pretty healthy and well adjusted to me,” A.J. says.
“It’s good that you’ve observed that. The doctors will be on the lookout for developmental delays, illnesses, and other things that might not be obvious to the untrained eye. After that, Maya will be placed with one of our many preapproved foster families, and—”
A.J. interrupts. “How does a foster family get preapproved? Is it as easy as, say, getting a department store credit card?”
“Ha ha. No, of course, there are more steps to it than that. Applications, home visits—”
A.J. interrupts again. “What I mean to say, Jenny, is how do you make sure you aren’t placing an innocent child with a complete psychopath?”
“Well, Mr. Fikry, we certainly don’t start from the point of view that everyone who wants to foster a child is a psychopath, but we do extensively vet all our foster families.”
“I worry because . . . well, Maya’s very bright, but she’s also very trusting,” A.J. says.
“Bright but trusting. Good insight. I’ll write that down.” Jenny does. “So after I place her in an emergency, nonpsychopathic”—she smiles at A.J.—“foster family, I go to work again. I try to see if anyone in her extended family wants to claim her and if that’s a no, I start trying to find a permanent situation for Maya.”
“You mean adoption.”
“Yes, exactly. Very good, Mr. Fikry.” Jenny doesn’t have to explain all this, but she likes to make Good Samaritans like A.J. feel like their time has been valued. “By the way, I really have to thank you,” she says. “We need more people like you who are willing to take an interest.” She holds out her arms to Maya. “Ready, sweetie?”