“For what?” I asked.
“For a record of these babies—birth, deaths, whatever.”
“I work. I can’t be off doing detective work.”
“Then we will,” she said. “Henry? Before you head back?”
He offered the still-wrapped-up album, first in my mother’s direction, then changed course and gave it to me. The pink blanket was stiff with dust. I unwrapped it the way I imagined one would unwrap a mummy, on alert for something awful inside. The album was thick, its cover brown leather, tooled and dyed to look antique, but not crumbling the way I expected it would be. I opened it and registered the twin shocks of the subjects themselves and the fact they’d been memorialized in something as pedestrian as Polaroids. I was expecting dignified images of the long-ago dead, as if a professional photographer in a black morning coat had been called to document what once had been. But these were cheap, yellowed, faded, almost casual.
Written in ballpoint on the bottom white space: Baby girl no. 1, born Dec. 15, ’56, 9:42 a.m. And Baby girl no. 2, 12/15/56 9:55 a.m. Taken away 12/22. They were dressed in quilted snowsuits and knitted caps, the kind of thing you might dress your live baby in for the ride home from the hospital on a December day.
I said, “They were twins! They lived a week, exactly.”
My mother said, “So pretty for newborns, too. Especially tiny ones like these.” She closed the book. “On the bright side, we could say it was very advanced of whoever took these pictures. In those days, people didn’t get to hold their babies, let alone photograph them.”
“You don’t find this suspicious?” my father asked.
“Who knows what’s normal when it comes to dead babies,” she said.
“There’s nothing normal about this! These had to be taken here”—he opened the book again—“and this one on a kitchen table. This is not a wake. It’s not a funeral home or a funeral. This is here! They could’ve been born here and never had a chance!”
I leaned in for a closer look. It was my kitchen counter, my speckled Formica. My father was right. There were no signs of ceremony or proper mourning. If we three Sherlock Holmeses were polled at that moment, at least two of us would have guessed that the next step had been burying each baby out back under my suspiciously luxuriant crabapple tree.
17
Welcome to Everton
I MAY HAVE DRIFTED off a few times during the night, but by morning it felt like I’d had no sleep at all. I’d tried watching two shopping channels and cable news. I never turned off my bedside lamp or my phone, which was shuffling through all the podcasts I’d been neglecting to listen to.
At breakfast, like an unwelcome houseguest, the photo album seemed to be taking up the whole kitchen. Draped over the back of a chair, its swaddling flannel was equally unappetizing. Why hadn’t I sent the whole creepy package home with my parents? I made coffee, toasted a waffle, and took both into the parlor so I didn’t have to dine with the evidence. I opened every shade and curtain for maximum sunlight; when I took my bath, I locked the door.
I pulled into my parking space at school almost an hour early. As ever, inadequately dressed for the cold weather, the students were rushing off to their eight o’clock classes. I found Nick already at his desk. A whole free hour, I thought, for forensic ventilation over coffee. But there was no reaction when I announced, “You won’t believe it, but yesterday, when my parents were visiting, we found photos of dead babies!”
I tried again, slightly louder. “Nick? Did you hear what I said?”
He was typing, his screen at an oblique angle, affording him more privacy than usual. “Dead babies,” he repeated. “That can’t be good.”
“?‘Not good’? How about incredibly sad if not creepy? How about didn’t sleep a wink?”
Finally, he looked up, and said rather numbly, “Me neither . . . Don’t ask.”
I said, “I’m very inclined to ask,” then spent the next few minutes silently considering what bad news he might be shielding me from. “Do you know something I don’t know about my job? Something bad?”
“It’s not about you,” he said. “It’s personal.”
Well, who doesn’t know that’s code for Mind your own business? I said nothing for a few minutes until: “You didn’t go to the doctor yesterday and find out you have a terminal illness, did you?”
His phone was ringing, first his cell, and when that stopped, the office landline. He answered neither. Nor did he answer me.
It wasn’t long before my extension was ringing. “Development, Faith Frankel,” I chirped.
“Is Nick there?” a woman asked.
“Who may I say is calling?”
“Is he there?” she persisted.
I said, “This isn’t his direct line, but I can give you that number.”
“I have that number. Believe me, I’ve tried it,” said the caller.
“Is this Brooke?”
“Good guess, Faith,” she snapped.
Where was this undeserved hostility coming from? I said, “Nick’s in a meeting and probably has his phone turned off.”
“I bet,” she said. Click.
“You may have noticed that was Brooke,” I told him.
Now my cell phone was ringing, the “Bridge over Troubled Water” ringtone I’d assigned to my mother. Before I’d even offered a greeting, she was launching into a narrative. “We’re at city hall. Outside city hall. I would’ve called you from the city clerk’s office, but they have signs saying no cell phone usage.”
“And?”
“Do you have a minute?” she asked, usually the preamble to a gossipy tidbit gleaned at the supermarket.
“Just the highlights. I’m in the middle of a couple of things.”