Little Girl Lost

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  “I wasn’t going for a weapon!” Barnes shouts. “It’s just my badge! I’m NYPD!”

  “I said, hands in the air!”

  Barnes lifts them. “My badge is in my pocket,” he says through clenched teeth. “See for yourself.”

  The guy reaches in, pulls it out, peers at it, and hands it back to Barnes. “Sorry, Detective. But you can’t be too careful.”

  He mutters that it’s okay and turns back to the elevators, jabbing the up button.

  As the elevator ascends, he checks his watch, then closes his eyes, massaging his temples with his thumb and forefinger. He’s meeting Stef in a few short hours. He should be home in bed.

  After polishing off the Jack Daniel’s, he fell onto his futon fully clothed, so weary he failed to muster the energy to turn off the lamp. But there’s a difference between sheer exhaustion and actual sleepiness on a night when the woman who claims to be having your baby is actually . . . having your baby. Somebody’s baby, anyway. Or so she says.

  It sure sounded like it, judging by the agonizing moans in the background and the fact that they were waiting for a doctor callback.

  Or so they said.

  Wondering whether it was an elaborate setup, he finally got up, turned on the coffeemaker, and did some good old-fashioned detective work—unrelated to Perry Wayland. He again called directory assistance and located an obstetrician named Wilfred Herndon, based in Bedford-Stuyvesant. He collected the numbers for every hospital in the area. Then, he started calling them, asking the main switchboards to connect him to Labor and Delivery. From there, he claimed to be a neonatal specialist and asked whether Doctor Herndon could be paged.

  “Who?” the staff asked at the first four hospitals.

  At the fifth, the voice on the other end said, “He’s on his way in, but I don’t think he’s here yet. Can you hang on while I check?”

  As soon as she put Barnes on hold, he hung up and headed for the door, not stopping to ask himself why he felt compelled to be there.

  If you still haven’t figured that out, you can be damned sure that it’s not the best idea you’ve ever had.

  The doors open on the Labor and Delivery floor. Barnes forces himself to step out. The nurses’ station is right in front of him. He makes his way toward it, past giant, framed photos of babies. Somewhere down the hall, he can hear a newborn’s thin, high-pitched staccato cries. An orderly pushes past with a disheveled, bathrobed young woman in a wheelchair, fixated on the swaddled bundle in her arms.

  Babies, babies everywhere.

  Why isn’t that getting to him? Somehow, he’s immune to the reality of what’s unfolding here—fragile new lives beginning all around him.

  Usually, it’s the opposite. He remembers back to when he was a rookie cop, on the scene at his first homicide. He’d anticipated an adverse reaction to the macabre crime, or perhaps a flood of emotion for the poor dead person and his family.

  The shooting was gang related and the victim was young, just a kid. He died a painful, grisly death. Somehow, Barnes managed to detach his emotions and focus on the job at hand. He kept squeamishness at bay despite the gaping abdominal gunshot wound and blood-spattered walls. Even the smell didn’t get to him—he’d taken a more seasoned officer’s advice and dabbed cologne under his nostrils before venturing into the building.

  “Careful,” an officer said, when Barnes mentioned that he was surprised at how well he was handling it. “It hits you when you least expect it.”

  He was right. That day, Barnes came undone when he saw the medical examiner jab a needle into the corpse’s eyeball to extract fluid for testing.

  A woman behind the desk looks up from a cup of instant noodles and flashes a pleasant smile. She’s wearing a yellow smock printed with little birds. Swans, maybe.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Yes, I’m looking for a patient, Delia Montague. Is she here?”

  She consults a clipboard.

  Those aren’t swans on her apron, he realizes. They’re storks.

  For some reason, for Barnes, those storks are the damned eyeball needle today. Dozens of happy little storks, winging a big fat bundle of nausea and emotion from his gut to his throat. He manages to stay rooted, waiting for the nurse to respond.

  Maybe he was wrong—about the doctor, the hospital, all of it. Please, please let him have been wrong. Let him get out of this place without having to—

  “Yep, she’s here. Are you . . . ?”

  Ask yourself who you are, Stockton. Or better yet, who you want to be.

  Get out of my head, Wash. I’m doing this my way.

  Oh, yeah? You mean, not at all? You going to take off now? Is that it? Without even—

  “Sir?” The nurse is waiting for him to fill in the blank.

  Is he . . . ?

  A doctor?

  A cop?

  “I’m the father.”

  Squatting on the corner of Eighth Avenue and Forty-Second Street, the Port Authority Bus Terminal is one of those places your mother warns you about. Bettina would have, if she’d ever imagined that Amelia might find herself here at this hour. In her whole life, she’s only visited the enormous building a handful of times for church outings. That was always in broad daylight, accompanied by a large group.

  Now everything is closed. It hadn’t occurred to her that she’d have to wait until morning to catch an Ithaca-bound bus.

  “Lost, sweetheart?” A toothless man who reeks of BO, long hair caked in grease, falls into step beside her as she hefts her heavy bag away from the closed Trailways ticket window. “Need someplace to go?”

  No gullible, fresh-faced fool just off the bus from the heartland, she avoids eye contact as Bettina had taught her years ago, fixating on an enormous sign for Maxell VHS tapes.

  “Child, anyone bothers you, you just ignore him.”

  “What if he doesn’t ignore me, Mama?”

  “You shout for help.”

  “What if there’s no help around?”

  “Then you be fierce.”

  The disgusting stranger dogs her. “Come on, how about a little—”

  “Get away from me!”

  He persists until another man, well dressed and groomed, steps in.

  “Get lost, dirtbag!” he orders, and the dirtbag slinks off into the shadows.

  Amelia thanks him.

  “No problem. You need a place to stay? Because you can’t spend the night in here. They’ll eat you alive. Come on, I’ll help you.”

  The words are kind, but his eyes are hard.

  Be fierce.

  “Get lost, dirtbag!” Amelia barks with far more mettle than she feels, but it does the trick. Bettina would be pleased.

  Filled with a sudden longing for her mother, and home, she remembers that Bettina is gone, and home holds little comfort or familiarity now. No going back. Only forward.

  Forward, however, is in a holding pattern.

  She’s stuck in the terminal overnight, like the pigeons darting in the rafters and the few unfortunate commuters for whom TGIF had dragged on too long. Having missed the last bus home to Jersey or Rockland, they slump on filthy benches with briefcase pillows and trench coat blankets.

  Amelia doesn’t dare make herself so comfortable—or vulnerable. She huddles in a dark corner on a bench where she can keep her back to the wall and an eye on the ticket window.

  Panhandlers jangle change in paper cups, madmen rant, and Holy Rollers preach over microphones that echo threats of Armageddon that seems to have come early to this cavernous place. It’s populated by multitudes of lost souls, toting remnants of ruined lives along dim corridors that ricochet with shrieks and moans, running footsteps, catcalls, threats, profanity, and voices arguing in every language.

  Pimps, prostitutes, and drug dealers grin and prowl like sharks, emboldened by the recent appeals court ruling that the police can no longer arrest them for loitering. Beat cops, few and far between, don’t give them a second glance as the night wears on. Nor
do they bother with Amelia, perhaps assuming she, too, is depraved, criminal, or homeless.

  She’s cold and cramped from sitting upright, feet planted on her suitcase like an ottoman. A couple of vagrants eye the bag, and she knows that if anyone tries to grab it, she will risk her life to save that little blue dress.

  Be fierce.

  She thinks about Bettina and Calvin. And about Marceline, wondering where she is, and why she left, and when—whether—she’s coming back. She wants to deny that there was a finality to her parting; wants to think that if she herself returns to the neighborhood, Marceline will be there, same as always.

  She’d always been intrigued by her, but now . . .

  The old woman is a friend. Maybe the only one she has left in the world.

  She could have helped me. She knew something.

  Chapter Twelve

  Dawn is a few hours off and high school basketball season more than a month away, but Kevin Donaldson’s alarm clock jangles at 4:45 a.m. Ever since school started Labor Day week, he’s been getting up to work out for three hours every morning, weekends included. There’s a lot riding on his senior year performance on the court—college acceptances, scholarship money, and a chance to claim the captainship.

  Coach Harding had moved him up to varsity halfway through his freshman JV season, and he’s been the star forward ever since. Thanks to him, the team made the play-offs for the first time in a decade. Thanks to him, they won the championship.

  Last season, Coach gave a big speech about all the qualities he looks for in a captain—leadership, skill, positive attitude, team player, good grades . . .

  Kevin, sitting in the bleachers, was prepared to stand, certain Coach was describing him. But then he said, “Dale Stokes.”

  Dale Stokes? Not even a senior?

  It was a slap in the face.

  “Jack Harding’s always been a fair guy. Did you do something to piss him off?” Dad asked that night.

  “Nope.”

  “Are your grades slipping?”

  “Better than ever,” Kevin assured him, not mentioning that Amy Morrison was tutoring him after school. That meant she did his assignments while he pretended to be listening to what she was saying about logarithms, chemical formulas, and herself. All boring topics, but she’s the smartest girl he knows who’s not too smart to let him cheat off her in the classroom and carry his workload outside of it.

  “Dale Stokes scored a lot of points last season,” his mother pointed out.

  “Nowhere near as many as I did. And he’s got the personality of a wet towel. And then there’s that butt-ugly mole on his cheek—”

  His mother frowned.

  “What? It’s true.”

  “Maybe the coach thinks you’re a little too full of yourself.”

  “Maybe the coach is full of sh—”

  Mom cut him off there. She doesn’t like foul language. Kevin usually doesn’t use it around her, but it was all so unfair.

  Coach can’t bypass him this season, though. Dale tore his meniscus on the baseball field last spring, and his high school sports career is over. The only decent junior player is one F paper or bong hit away from flunking out of school or winding up in jail. There’s no way Kevin won’t be named captain.

  He leaves his brother, Eddie, sleeping in the tiny bedroom they’ve shared for seventeen years now. Twin beds, though they’re not twin brothers. Most people assume they are, since they’re both seniors.

  He goes across the hall to the tiny bathroom. Old pipes groan as he turns on the water. No hope of hot at this desolate hour, unless you let it run. But you can’t, because the sink has a clog and will overflow, and Dad can’t afford to get it fixed.

  “Become a plumber,” he said when Kevin complained the other day. “Or an electrician. That’s where the money is. You can be an apprentice next year, and—”

  “I want to go to college.”

  “Like your brother. I know,” he said, as if Kevin is just blindly doing whatever Eddie does, when in fact, he’s older by five months.

  Mom and Dad tried for years to have a baby before they scraped together enough money to adopt. She once let it slip that she’d found out she was pregnant with Eddie the day after they brought newborn Kevin home.

  What would have happened if she’d found out the day before, instead? Would they still have wanted him? Probably not. They could afford one child on his father’s machinist income. They had room in this tiny ranch house, and in their hearts, for one child. They got stuck with two.

  He splashes cold water over his face, dries it with a threadbare towel still damp from last night, and looks into the mirror. He sure doesn’t look like the rest of the family. They’re stocky and fair with round, smiley faces; he’s lanky and dark, with angular features that are . . . not sulky, exactly, though that’s what his mother’s been saying for as long as he can remember.

  “Stop sulking, Kev.”

  “I’m not. Just because I don’t go around grinning like a village idiot doesn’t mean—”

  “Well, you should. You have a lot to be happy about.”

  He knows what she’s thinking whenever she says that, or when she tells him to count his blessings, or consider those less fortunate.

  All right, so he’s lucky they plucked him from his real mother’s arms in a Yonkers home for unwed teens back in the winter of 1969.

  He grabs his toothbrush from the four that dangle in the rectangular porcelain holder built into the 1950s pink-and-black tile backsplash Mom is always talking about replacing.

  “If you wait long enough, it’ll be back in style,” his father tells her.

  “That’ll be the day. I’d love a pretty blue, with Laura Ashley drapes to match.”

  “What is this, Knots Landing? You know we don’t have the money for all that.”

  Money. Everything, his whole life, his future, is always about money.

  Teeth brushed, Kevin returns to his room. He throws on the sweatshirt, running shorts, and sneakers he’d left on top of his dresser last night and fumbles for his Walkman on the desk he and Eddie share.

  “Quiet!” His brother turns over with a rustle and huff.

  “You be quiet!”

  “Hey, I’m not the one who—”

  Kevin leaves the room, closing the door behind him as loudly as he dares at this hour. It would take a full-blown slam to wake his father, but his mother is a light sleeper. Sometimes she comes out of the bedroom when she hears him stirring. Back in September when the sun came up as he was leaving, she’d just tell him to be careful. But now that it’s dark for the duration of his workout, she freaks out. Yesterday, she tried to stop him from going.

  “You could be hit by a car, running on the dark streets.”

  “I stay on the sidewalk,” he lied. “And my sneakers have DayGlo strips. You can see me from miles away.”

  “So you’re a target! Someone could jump out of the bushes and mug you.”

  “It’s Westchester, Gloria, not the South Bronx,” his father called from the bedroom. “Come back to bed. Nothing’s going to happen to him. Leave him be.”

  “I don’t like this one bit.”

  “Then get me a membership to Bally Total Fitness.”

  “With what money?” His father appeared in his boxer shorts, groggy and grizzled with beard and irritation. “We’re saving for college, remember? Why don’t you get yourself a paper route to help out a little, since you like to get up and roam the neighborhood so early?”

  Tables turned. Mom shifted gears to defend him. “He doesn’t need a paper route, Chaz. I don’t want him out there in all kinds of weather.”

  “He’s out there anyway.”

  Kevin presses Play on his Walkman, and Richie Sambora’s talkbox strains of “Livin’ on a Prayer” blast into his ears. It’s enough to drown out his parents’ voices in his head as he makes his way through the quiet house. They’re always nit-picking each other. Sometimes he wonders if he might have been better off
with . . .

  But that’s crazy. What happened between his birth parents was a hell of a lot worse than stupid bickering. He’s seen his adoption records. He’s the product of a violent rape.

  In the kitchen, he takes an egg from the fridge and cracks it into a glass. He holds his nose and gulps it down, like Stallone in Rocky. Only Sly’s mother wasn’t going to yell about all her eggs disappearing, and how is she supposed to make his brother’s favorite macaroni salad for lunch now, and doesn’t he know he’s going to get botulism or whatever disease it is that people get from drinking raw yolks?

  Kevin opens the back door. The cat is waiting. It hates him, even though he’s the one who lets it in every damned morning.

  It’ll purr and cozy up to everyone else in the house, even Dad, who hates cats and wishes Eddie had never insisted on adopting the stray. But the creature always gives Kevin a wide berth, tail twitching.

  He opens the storm door.

  “Go on in.”

  The fat tabby just stares at him.

  “No, I’m not going to feed you. You can wait. Stupid cat.”

  It scurries past him and disappears into the shadowy kitchen.

  Kevin steps out into the early-morning chill. Fog drifts in the air, dank with the scent of the river and moldering leaves. He heads down the steps and around the house to the driveway, where the Buick is parked.

  When Kevin turned sixteen, he begged his father for a learner’s permit.

  “Why? You won’t have a car.”

  “I can drive yours when you’re not using it.”

  “That’s when your mother takes it to do the shopping.”

  “Not every day. When you’re not using it and she’s not using it, I can—”

  “What about your brother?”

  “He’s not even sixteen.”

  “He will be in a few months, and I don’t want to listen to the two of you fighting over the car every day. You want a permit, get a job and earn the money to buy your own car.”

  “I can’t do that with basketball.”

  “Then you’ll have to wait till there’s no basketball.”

  “There’s always going to be basketball!”