“It’s not my baby,” A.J. continues to whisper.
“Whose baby is it?”
“A customer’s, I guess.” A.J. reaches into his pocket and hands Lambiase the note.
“Oh, wow,” Lambiase says. “The mother left it for you.” Maya opens her eyes and smiles at Lambiase. “Cute little thing, ain’t she?” Lambiase leans over her, and the baby grabs his mustache. “Who’s got my mustache?” Lambiase says in a ridiculous baby voice. “Who stole my mustache?”
“Chief Lambiase, I don’t think you’re showing an adequate amount of concern here.”
Lambiase clears his throat and straightens his back. “Okay. Here’s the thing. It’s nine p.m. on a Friday. I’ll place a call to the Department of Children and Families, but with the snow and the weekend and the ferry schedule, I doubt anyone will make it out here until Monday at the earliest. We’ll try to track down the mother and also the father, just in case someone is looking for the little rascal.”
“Maya,” Maya says.
“Is that your name?” Lambiase says in his baby voice. “It’s a very good name.” Lambiase clears his throat again. “Someone’ll have to watch the kid over the weekend. I and some of the other cops could take turns doing it here, or—”
“No. It’s fine,” A.J. says. “Doesn’t seem right to keep a baby in a police station.”
“Do you know anything about child care?” Lambiase asks.
“It’s only for the weekend. How hard can it be? I’ll call my sister-in-law. Anything she doesn’t know, I’ll Google.”
“Google,” the baby says.
“Google! That’s a very big word! Ahem,” Lambiase says. “Okay, I’ll check back with you on Monday. Funny world, right? Someone steals a book from you; someone else leaves you a baby.”
“Ha,” says A.J.
BY THE TIME they arrive at the apartment, Maya is full-on crying, a sound somewhere between a New Year’s Eve party horn and a fire alarm. A.J. deduces that she is hungry, but he has no clue what to feed a twenty-five-month-old. He pulls up her lip to see if she has teeth. She does and she uses them to try to bite him. He Googles the question: “What do I feed a twenty-five-month-old?” and the answer that comes back is that most of them should be able to eat what their parents eat. What Google does not know is that most of what A.J. eats is disgusting. His fridge contains a variety of frozen foods, many of them spicy. He calls his sister-in-law Ismay for help.
“Sorry to bother you,” he says. “But I was wondering what I should feed a twenty-five-month-old child?”
“Why were you wondering that?” Ismay asks in a tight voice.
He explains about someone having left the baby in the store, and after a pause Ismay says that she will be right over.
“Are you sure?” A.J. asks. Ismay is six months pregnant, and he doesn’t want to disturb her.
“I’m sure. I’m glad you called. The Great American Novelist is out of town, and I’ve had insomnia these last couple of weeks anyway.”
Less than a half hour later, Ismay arrives with a bag of groceries from her kitchen: the makings of a salad, a tofu lasagna, and half an apple crumble. “The best I could do on short notice,” she says.
“No, it’s perfect,” A.J. says. “My kitchen is a fiasco.”
“Your kitchen is a crime scene,” she says.
When the baby sees Ismay, she bawls. “She must miss her mother,” Ismay says. “Maybe I remind her of her mother?” A.J. nods, though he thinks the real cause is that his sister-in-law frightens the baby. Ismay has stylishly cut, spiky red hair, pale skin and eyes, long, spindly limbs. All her features are a little too large, her gestures a little too animated. Pregnant, she is like a very pretty Gollum. Even her voice might be off-putting to a baby. It is precise, theater-trained, always pitched to fill the room. In the fifteen or so years he has known her, A.J. thinks Ismay has aged like an actress should: from Juliet to Ophelia to Gertrude to Hecate.
Ismay warms up the food. “Would you like me to feed her?” Ismay asks.
Maya eyes Ismay suspiciously. “No, I’ll give it a go,” A.J. says. He turns to Maya. “Do you use utensils?”
Maya does not reply.
“You don’t have a baby chair. You’ll need to improvise a structure so she won’t topple over,” Ismay says.
He sets Maya on the floor. He builds three walls out of a pile of galleys then lines the galley fort with bed pillows.
His first spoonful of lasagna goes in without any struggle. “Easy,” he says.
The second spoonful, Maya turns her head at the last moment, sending sauce everywhere—on A.J., on the bed pillows, down the side of the galley fort. Maya turns back to him with a huge smile on her face, as if she has made the most fantastically clever joke.
“I hope you weren’t planning to read those,” Ismay says.
After dinner, they put the baby to bed on the futon in the second bedroom.
“Why didn’t you just leave the baby at the police station?” Ismay asks.
“Didn’t seem right,” A.J. says.
“You’re not thinking of keeping it, are you?” Ismay rubs her own belly.
“Of course not. I’m only watching it until Monday.”
“I suppose the mother could turn up by then, change her mind,” Ismay says.
A.J. hands Ismay the note to read.
“Poor thing,” Ismay says.
“I agree, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t abandon a child of mine in a bookstore.”
Ismay shrugs. “The girl probably had her reasons.”
“How do you know that it’s a girl?” A.J. asks. “It could be a middle-aged woman at the end of her rope.”
“The voice of the letter sounds young to me, I guess. Maybe the handwriting, too.” Ismay says. She runs her fingers through her short hair. “How are you holding up otherwise?”
“I’m okay,” A.J. says. He realizes that he hasn’t thought about Tamerlane or Nic for hours.
Ismay washes the dishes even though A.J. tells her to leave it. “I’m not going to keep her,” A.J. repeats. “I live alone. I don’t have much money saved, and business isn’t exactly booming.”
“Of course not,” Ismay says. “It wouldn’t make sense with your lifestyle.” She dries the dishes then puts them away. “It wouldn’t hurt you to start eating the occasional fresh vegetable, however.”
Ismay kisses him on the cheek. A.J. thinks that she is so like Nic but so unlike her. Sometimes the like parts (the face, the figure) seem hardest for him to bear; sometimes the unlike parts (the brain, the heart) do. “Let me know if you need more help,” Ismay says.
Although Nic had been the younger sister, she had always worried about Ismay. From Nic’s point of view, her older sister had been a primer on how not to live her life. Ismay had chosen a college because she had liked the pictures in the brochure, had married a man because he looked splendid in a tuxedo, and had started teaching because she’d seen a movie about an inspirational teacher. “Poor Ismay,” Nic had said. “She always ends up so disappointed.”
Nic would want me to be nicer to her sister, he thinks. “How’s the production coming?” A.J. asks.
Ismay smiles, and she looks like a little girl. “My word, A.J., I wasn’t aware that you even knew that there was one.”
“The Crucible,” A.J. says. “Kids come into the store to buy copies.”
“Yes, that makes sense. Awful play, really. But the girls get to do a lot of screaming and yelling, which they enjoy. Me, less so. I always come to rehearsal with a bottle of Tylenol. And maybe in the midst of all that screaming and yelling, they accidentally learn a little about American history. Of course, the real reason I picked it is because there are so many female roles—less tears when I post the list, you know. But now, with the baby coming, it’s starting to seem like, well, a lot of drama.”
Because he feels obligated to her for coming over with the food, A.J. volunteers to help. “Maybe I could paint flats or print programs or something?”
She wants to say How unlike you, but she resists. Aside from her husband, she believes her brother-in-law to be one of the most selfish and self-centered men she has ever met. If one afternoon with a baby can have such a refining influence on A.J., imagine what could happen to Daniel when the baby is born. Her brother-in-law’s small gesture gives her hope. She rubs her belly. It’s a boy in there, and they’ve already chosen a name and a backup name if the original name doesn’t suit.
THE NEXT AFTERNOON, once the snow has stopped and even begun to melt away into mud, a body washes up against the small strip of land near the lighthouse. The ID in her pocket says that this is Marian Wallace, and it does not take long for Lambiase to deduce that the body and the baby are, in fact, related.
Marian Wallace has no people on Alice, and no one knows why she was here or who she came to see or why she decided to kill herself by swimming into the icy waters of the Alice Island Sound in December. That is to say, no one knows the specific reason. They know that Marian Wallace is black, that she is twenty-two years old, and that she had a twenty-five-month-old toddler. To these facts, they can add what she wrote in her note to A.J. A flawed but adequate narrative emerges. Law enforcement concludes that Marian Wallace is a suicide, nothing more.
As the weekend goes on, more information about Marian Wallace emerges. She attended Harvard on scholarship. She was a Massachusetts State Champion swimmer, and an avid creative writer. She was from Roxbury. Her mother is dead—cancer when Marian was thirteen. The maternal grandmother died a year later of the same cause. Her father is a drug addict. She spent her high school years in and out of foster care. One of her foster mothers remembers young Marian always with her head in a book. No one knows who the father of her baby is. No one even remembers her having a boyfriend. She was put on academic leave from college because she failed all her classes the previous semester—the demands of motherhood and a rigorous academic schedule having become too much to bear. She was pretty and smart, which makes her death a tragedy. She was poor and black, which means people say they saw it coming.
Sunday night, Lambiase stops by the bookstore to check on Maya and give A.J. the update. He has several younger siblings and he offers to watch Maya while A.J. tends to store business. “Do you mind?” A.J. asks. “Don’t you have somewhere to go?”
Lambiase is recently divorced. He had married his high school sweetheart, so it took him a long time to realize that she was not, in fact, a sweetheart or a very nice person at all. In arguments, she was fond of calling him stupid and fat. He is not stupid, by the way, though he is neither well read nor well traveled. He is not fat, though he is built like a bulldog—thick-muscled neck, short legs, broad, flat nose. A sturdy American bulldog, not an English one.
Lambiase does not miss his wife, though he does miss having somewhere to go after work.
He parks himself on the floor and pulls Maya onto his lap. After Maya falls asleep, Lambiase tells A.J. the things he’s learned about the mother.
“What’s strange to me,” A.J. says, “is why she was on Alice Island in the first place. It’s kind of a pain to get here, you know. My own mother’s visited me once in all the years I’ve lived here. You really believe she wasn’t coming to see someone specific?”
Lambiase shifts Maya in his lap. “I’ve been thinking about that. Maybe she didn’t have a plan of where she was going. Maybe she just took the first train and then the first bus and then the first boat and this is where she ended up.”
A.J. nods out of politeness, but he doesn’t believe in random acts. He is a reader, and what he believes in is narrative construction. If a gun appears in act one, that gun had better go off by act three.
“Maybe she wanted to die somewhere with nice scenery,” Lambiase adds. “So the lady from DCF will be coming to get this little bundle of joy on Monday. Since the mother didn’t have any family and the paternity is unknown, they’ll have to find a foster home for her.”
A.J. counts the cash in the drawer. “Kind of rough for kids in the system, no?”
“It can be,” Lambiase says. “But this young, she’ll probably do all right.”
A.J. recounts the cash in the drawer. “You said the mother had been through the foster system?”
Lambiase nods.
“Suppose she thought the kid would stand a better chance in a bookstore.”
“Who can say?”
“I’m not a religious man, Chief Lambiase. I don’t believe in fate. My wife. She believed in fate.”
At that moment, Maya wakes and holds out her arms to A.J. He closes the drawer of the cash register and takes her from Lambiase. Lambiase thinks he hears the little girl call A.J. “Daddy.”
“Ugh, I keep telling her not to call me that,” A.J. says. “But she won’t listen.”
“Kids get ideas,” Lambiase says.
“You want a glass of something?”
“Sure. Why not?”
A.J. locks the front door of the store and heads up the stairs. He sets Maya on the futon and goes out to the main room of the house.
“I can’t keep a baby,” A.J. says firmly. “I haven’t slept in two nights. She’s a terrorist! She wakes up at, like, insane times. Three forty-five in the morning seems to be when her day begins. I live alone. I’m poor. You can’t raise a baby on books alone.”
“True,” Lambiase says.
“I’m barely keeping myself together,” A.J. continues. “She’s worse than a puppy. And a man like me shouldn’t even have a puppy. She’s not potty-trained, and I have no idea how to do that kind of thing or any of the related matters either. Plus, I’ve never really liked babies. I like Maya, but . . . Conversation with her lacks to say the least. We talk about Elmo, and I can’t stand him, by the way, but other than that, it’s mainly about her. She’s totally self-centered.”
“Babies do tend to be that way,” Lambiase says. “The conversation will probably improve when she knows more words.”
“And she always wants to read the same book. And it’s, like, the crappiest board book. The Monster at the End of This Book?”
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?”
A.J. pulls Maya closer to him. He takes a deep breath. Is he really going to do this? Yes, I am. Dear God. “You say that Maya will be placed in a temporary foster home? Couldn’t I just as well be that home?”
The social worker purses her lips. “All our foster families have gone through an application process, Mr. Fikry.”
“The thing is . . . I know it’s not orthodox, but the mother left me this note.” He hands the note to Jenny. “She wanted me to have this child, you see. It was her last wish. I think it’s only right that I should keep her. I don’t want her moved into some foster home when she has a perfectly good home right here. I Googled the matter last night.”
“Google,” says Maya.
“She’s taken a fancy to that word, I don’t know why.”
“What ‘matter’?” Jenny asks.
“I’m not obligated to turn her over when it’s the mother’s wish that I should have her,” A.J. explains.
“Daddy,” says Maya as if on cue.
Jenny looks from A.J.’s eyes to Maya’s. Both sets are annoyingly determined. She sighs. She had thought the afternoon would be simple, but now it’s starting to get complex.
Jenny sighs again. It is not her first day, though she only finished her master’s in social work eighteen months ago. She is either bright-eyed or inexperienced enough to want to help them. Still, he’s a single man, who lives above a store. The paperwork is going to be ridiculous, she thinks. “Help me out here, Mr. Fikry. Tell me you have a background in education or child development or some such.”
“Um . . . I was on my way to a PhD in American literature before I quit that to open this bookstore. My specialty was Edgar Allan Poe. ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ is a decent primer on what not to do with children.”
“That’s something,” Jenny says by which she means it’s something entirely unhelpful. “You’re sure you’re up to this? It’s an enormous financial and emotional and time commitment.”
“No,” A.J. says, “I’m not sure. But I think Maya has as good a chance with me as with anyone else. I can watch her while I work, and we like each other, I think.”
“Love you,” Maya says.
“Yes, she keeps saying that,” A.J. says. “I warned her about giving love that hasn’t yet been earned, but honestly, I think it’s the influence of that insidious Elmo. He loves everyone, you know?”
“I’m familiar with Elmo,” Jenny says. She wants to cry. There is going to be so much paperwork. And that’s just for the foster placement. The adoption proper’s going to be murder, and Jenny will be the one who has to make the two-hour trip to Alice Island every time someone from DCF has to check on Maya and A.J. “Okay, you two, I have to call my boss.” As a girl, Jenny Bernstein, product of two stable and loving parents from Medford, Massachusetts, had adored orphan stories like Anne of Green Gables and A Little Princess. She has recently begun to suspect that the sinister effect of repeated reading of these stories was what led her to choose social work as a profession. In general, the profession had turned out to be less romantic than her readings had led her to believe. Yesterday, one of her former classmates discovered a foster mother who had starved a sixteen-year-old teenage boy down to forty-two pounds. All the neighbors had thought the teen was a six-year-old child. “I still want to believe in happy endings,” the classmate had said, “but it’s getting hard.” Jenny smiles at Maya. What a lucky little girl, she thinks.
THAT CHRISTMAS AND for weeks after, Alice buzzes with the news that A.J. Fikry the widower / bookstore owner has taken in an abandoned child. It is the most gossip-worthy story Alice has had in some time—probably since Tamerlane was stolen—and what is of particular interest is the character of A. J. Fikry. The town had always considered him to be snobbish and cold, and it seems inconceivable that such a man would adopt a baby just because it was abandoned in his store. The town florist tells a story about leaving a pair of sunglasses in Island Books and coming back less than one day later to find that A.J. had thrown them out. “He said his store had no room for a lost-and-found. And that’s what happens to very nice, vintage Ray-Bans!” the florist says. “Can you imagine what will happen to an actual human being?” Furthermore, for years, A.J. had been asked to participate in town life—to sponsor soccer teams, to patronize bake sales, to buy ads in the high school yearbook. The man had always declined and not always politely either. They can only conclude that A.J. has grown soft since losing Tamerlane.
The mothers of Alice fear that the baby will be neglected. What can a single man know about child rearing? They make it their cause to stop by the store as often as possible to give A.J. advice and sometimes small gifts—old baby furniture, clothes, blankets, toys. The mothers are surprised to find Maya to be a sufficiently clean, happy, and self-possessed little person. Only after they’ve left the store do they cluck about how tragic Maya’s backstory is.
For his part, A.J. does not mind the visits. The advice he mainly ignores. The gifts, he accepts (though he does liberally curate and disinfect them after the women have left). He knows about the postvisit clucking and decides not to let it annoy him. He leaves a jug of Purell on the counter next to a sign that commands please disinfect before handling the infanta. Besides, the women do actually know a few things that he doesn’t know, things about potty training (bribery works) and teething (fancy ice-cube trays) and vaccinations (you can skip the chicken pox one). It turns out that, as a source of child-rearing advice, Google is wide but not, alas, terribly deep.
While visiting the baby, many of the women even buy books and magazines. A.J. begins to stock books because he thinks the women will enjoy discussing them. For a while, the circle responds to contemporary stories about overly capable women trapped in troubled marriages; they like if she has an affair—not that they themselves have (or will admit to having had) affairs. The fun is in judging these women. Women who abandon their children are a bridge too far, although husbands who have terrible accidents are usually received warmly (extra points if he dies, and she finds love again). Maeve Binchy is popular for a while, until Margene, who in another life had been an investment banker, raises the complaint that Binchy’s work is too formulaic. “How many times can I read about a woman married too young to a bad, handsome man in a stifling Irish town?” A.J. is encouraged to expand his curatorial efforts. “If we’re going to have this book group,” Margene says, “we may as well have some variety.”
“Is this a book group?” A.J. says.