Lullaby and Goodnight

by Staub, Wendy Corsi

  “Hell no. Who do I look like, Trump?”

  As they all laugh at Rita’s sassy response to what could have been perceived as an insult, Peyton finds herself liking Tisha even less than she did upon meeting her, and liking Rita even more.

  The midwife’s easygoing smile and quick sense of humor are a welcome addition to today’s gathering. As Nancy has pointed out more than once, and as Kate affirmed after her son’s birth, Rita has borne two children of her own. She’s been through the rigors of labor twice, and her bedside manner is proof.

  Peyton isn’t entirely sold on home delivery and childbirth, but she’s definitely anxious to hear what Rita has to say.

  Not until Allison arrives, though.

  She shifts her position, wondering if it would be rude to get up and stretch for a moment. Beside her, Julie is tapping her foot rhythmically against the leg of the coffee table, and Wanda has sighed more than once.

  “Just think,” Nancy says brightly, gazing around the room. “Next year at this time, you’ll all be mommies celebrating your first Mother’s Day!”

  “Yeah, and just think, last year at this time I was going to my prom,” is Tisha’s glum response.

  “Cripes, who invited Debbie Downer?” Wanda mutters to Peyton.

  “She’s one of Dr. Lombardo’s patients. Nancy said she needs us.”

  “Yeah, well, the last thing we need is to listen to that for the next few months. Somebody needs to set her straight and if she keeps up that ’tude of hers, it’s going to be me,” Wanda retorts under her breath, before going to answer the abrupt ring of the telephone.

  She returns a few minutes later. The group falls silent at her grim expression.

  “That was Allison’s mother. She went through Allison’s organizer and found out about today’s meeting. She wanted to know if she might have shown up here.”

  Wanda pauses, taking a deep breath and steadying her bulk against the doorjamb.

  Peyton’s nagging worry for her friend escalates into full-blown fear even before Wanda goes on, “Her mother was in a panic. She kept talking to me in Spanish, but what I think she was saying is that nobody has seen Allison since she went to bed last night. They’ve already called the police.”

  Across the river in Bayonne, Mary Nueves sits beside a cradle in the moonlight, rocking it gently with her foot, humming the Spanish lullaby her mother hummed to her forty-one years ago. She knows, because her mother told her when she gave Mary a music box that played the melody as a gift for her first pregnancy.

  Mama’s lovely voice was silenced forever almost three years ago, but the music box sits now on top of the little white chest of drawers nearby, beside a neatly folded stack of receiving blankets and Onesies that have to be put away.

  Laundry to be put away, another load to be folded, dishes to be washed . . .

  So much to do.

  But Mary can’t seem to bring herself to do anything other than rock the baby.

  She’s waited so long for her to be here. So very long. That she arrived on Mother’s Day is a meaningful gift from heaven—one last perfect gift from Mama, as far as Mary is concerned.

  A footstep creaks in the hallway.

  Mary stops humming.

  The door slips open a few inches, and her husband is silhouetted in the shaft of light that spills into the cozy little room.

  “Are you still awake?” he asks in a hushed tone. “You should get some sleep. She’ll be up for another feeding soon.”

  “I know, I can’t help it. It’s her first night in the world. I don’t want to leave her alone.”

  He laughs softly, peering over her shoulder into the cradle. “She doesn’t even know you’re here. She’s sound asleep.”

  “I know. But I just want to sit here and watch her. We’ve waited so long for this, Javier. So many months . . .”

  “So many years. I know.”

  Mary sighs with contentment and stops rocking the cradle, careful not to jar it as she stands at last. She reaches over to the dresser and lifts the music box. The brass key beneath it gleams in the moonlight as she winds it.

  The tinkling strains of a lullaby fill the room. Mary gently sets the music box back on the dresser, remembering the day she hurtled it against the wall in despair. Miraculously, it didn’t break.

  Was that after she lost that first pregnancy? Or her second? Or third?

  It’s all a terrible blur.

  And it no longer matters.

  It’s all behind them now: the countless miscarriages, the many futile attempts at conception, the dashed hopes when they accepted Mary’s infertility—and again when they realized they simply couldn’t afford to adopt . . .

  It’s all behind them, like a nightmare that vanishes the very moment you open your eyes.

  Less than eighteen hours ago, as the morning sun cast its first pink rays over New Jersey, this tiny, precious daughter was delivered to Javier and Mary Nueves.

  They named her Dawn.

  It was a fitting name, Rose said with a smile, having exchanged the delicate bundle in Mary’s arms for the prosthetic stomach she would no longer need.

  “I can’t believe she’s really here,” Javier says now, gazing down at the baby, bathed in the silver glow of the full moon.

  “Neither can I. It’s been so hard, Javier. So incredibly hard . . .”

  Years’ worth of pent-up emotion escape Mary, and she finds herself sobbing. Her husband pulls her close, crooning to her in their native tongue until the tears subside.

  “Did we do the right thing?” Mary asks, searching his eyes for the guilt she can’t quite seem to suppress.

  There is none. His conscience is clear. Perhaps hers should be, as well.

  “We saved her life, Mary. You heard what Rose said. If it wasn’t for us, she might be wrapped in a garbage bag and thrown in a Dumpster somewhere.”

  Mary shudders, gazing down at little Dawn, watching the reassuring rise and fall of her tiny chest with every feather-soft breath.

  “We all do what we have to do, Mary. There are no rules.”

  “Right,” she says quietly, recalling Rose’s words as clearly as her husband does.

  If there are no rules, then no rules can be broken.

  “Come on. It’ll be okay. Let’s go get some sleep.”

  Javier kisses the top of his wife’s head, then bends to do the same on their new daughter’s shockingly full head of glossy black hair.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  On Monday morning, Peyton arrives at the office more than an hour late, bleary-eyed beneath the obligatory layer of eye shadow and mascara.

  She slept perhaps an hour in total last night, so frantic about Allison that her own worries of the past two weeks have almost faded in comparison.

  She called Allison’s home number just before bed, praying that she’d turned up in a hospital somewhere, perhaps because she fainted on a subway in the oppressive heat. That was the most plausible and optimistic explanation she could conjure.

  A man, presumably Allison’s father, answered the phone on the first ring, as though he had been waiting beside it. He told her in broken English that there had been no news.

  When Peyton asked if there was anything she could do, he said simply, “Rezar.”

  Pray.

  Reaching her office door, Peyton spots a yellow Post-it note at eye level.

  Two words are scrawled on it in bold scarlet ink, her boss’s signature tool for written communication.

  See me.

  Peyton stifles a groan and unlocks the door, leaving the note stuck to it. Tara will have to wait until she can pull herself together. She might be here, but she’s not ready to face the day . . . and she hasn’t had a chance to prepare for the bombshell she needs to drop as soon as possible.

  She can’t wait any longer to tell her boss she’s pregnant.

  She has to leave early this evening to meet Rita, who graciously offered a private consultation when yesterday’s presentation was cut short. She w
as thinking she’d have to make up something to tell Tara about her early exit, but she can’t rely on the dental appointment excuse again. It’s been overused as it is, every time she comes back from an extended lunch hour at Dr. Lombardo’s office.

  Anyway, she can’t hide this from her colleagues much longer even if she wanted to. It’s as if her stomach popped out overnight. Today, for the first time, she’s wearing a maternity skirt whose spandex panel is concealed beneath an old spring jacket whose buttons are gaping slightly around her breasts.

  Until now, she’s gotten away with rubber-banding the buttons at her waist and looping them through the buttonholes, a trick Allison taught her.

  Allison. Where are you? What happened to you?

  A lump rises in Peyton’s throat even as her desk phone lights up and rings. Too choked up to answer, she lets it bounce into voice mail, doodling absently on a pad and thinking about her friend.

  Maybe, she tells herself, not for the first time in the past twelve hours, Allison couldn’t deal with the pressure of being pregnant and alone, and took off for a few days to pull herself together.

  She’s seemed a little tense lately, now that Peyton thinks about it. More introspective; preoccupied, almost.

  When Peyton asked if she was okay, she said she was just exhausted, fed up with her mother’s blatant disapproval, and worried about the upcoming delivery.

  “I’m so huge that I don’t know how Rita’s going to get this baby out of me,” she told Peyton morosely. “I keep hearing horror stories from people at work about big babies whose shoulders get stuck, or women who need emergency C-sections. I guess I’m just afraid that I can’t do this.”

  “You can do it,” Peyton said, squeezing her friend’s hand, riddled with unaccustomed uncertainties of her own.

  The nature of the beast, she remembers thinking.

  Now, looking back on that conversation, she wonders if she could have done something more for Allison; if she could have said something more effective, more comforting.

  “Peyton?”

  She looks up to see Tara’s secretary, Candace, standing in the doorway.

  An ambitious college graduate with a business degree and hopes of working her way into agency management someday, Candace is dressed, as always, in a Tara-style tailored business suit and pumps. Behind horn-rimmed glasses—which she confided to Peyton she wears strictly to enhance her professional appearance—her expression is serious.

  “How’s it going, Candace?”

  “Okay.” She doesn’t seem to be her usual upbeat self. Uh-oh.

  “Tara just told me to find you and tell you to come in to see her. Right now,” Candace adds somewhat apologetically, as if sensing Peyton is about to stall.

  “Okay, thanks. Tell her I’ll be right there.”

  With a reluctant sigh, she hoists herself wearily from her chair, checks to make sure her jacket has stayed buttoned, and marches off to her corporate duty.

  Thank goodness for supermarkets that deliver, Anne Marie thinks, stacking another can of the boys’ beloved beef ravioli in the rapidly filling pantry cupboard.

  Once upon a time, she actually enjoyed the grocery shopping ritual, even relished the challenge of clipping coupons and perusing the circulars for bargains. But that was in her old life. The life where every precious dollar counted.

  These days, she feels a mixture of relief and guilt whenever she tosses into the garbage the circulars that come in the weekend papers.

  It isn’t that she squanders money now that she’s moved up in the world. Not at all.

  But when the triplets came along, she realized there was no way she could negotiate supermarket aisles with three small boys in tow. So she joined the ranks of her Bedford neighbors who receive weekly grocery deliveries without batting an eye. And she hired a housekeeper.

  Not full-time, not live-in. Having somebody here day in and out would be out of the question.

  “Mommy?” Avery calls from the next room. “Is it time for lunch?”

  “In a few minutes,” she promises, thinking it’s far too early for that. She hasn’t even eaten breakfast yet. The bowl of cereal she poured an hour ago for herself is still sitting soggily on the table, abandoned when Caleb fell off the back of the couch while trying to fly like a superhero.

  Anne Marie removes the can of ravioli she just put into the cupboard, along with the one beneath it. There. Lunch.

  She knows what her Italian grandmother would say about that. Pasta from a can? Veleno!

  Poison.

  Grace DeMario made only homemade ravioli, a daylong job for which Anne Marie was frequently pressed into service.

  She actually enjoyed the chore: mixing the meat or cheese filling, rolling out sheets of pasta, pressing the dough into the antique molds Grandma had brought with her from Sicily. They were made of metal, and resembled shallow ice cube trays hinged together.

  How well Anne Marie remembers the painstaking process: put a scoop of filling into each small pasta-lined cup, lay another sheet of dough across the top, and fold the empty half of the tray over to press, crimp, and cut the ravioli all at once.

  Filled with the bittersweet nostalgia that consumes her whenever she thinks of her grandmother, Anne Marie wonders if she still has those old molds somewhere. They’re probably packed in the attic with the rest of the relics from her blue-collar Italian past. Jarrett has no interest in any of it, of course.

  She sighs, about to reach for the can opener, when the phone rings.

  Not the home phone.

  Her cell phone, tucked into the pocket of her jeans, always close at hand. The phone she programmed with different musical ring tones so that she’ll know who’s calling before she answers.

  It’s a handy feature, one that allows her to weigh the likely importance of the call in advance. She can decide whether a call is worth scrambling to answer while she’s driving. Or whether a call should be taken in privacy, where there’s absolutely no risk of being overheard.

  Yes, it’s important to know what to expect when the phone rings.

  The standard tone belongs to Jarrett, who rarely calls this number.

  The “Happy Days Are Here Again” riff is assigned to Lena, Anne Marie’s perpetually cheerful next-door neighbor.

  Karen, a southern-born friend from her mothers-of-multiples support group, laid claim to “Dixie.”

  Now the opening notes of a Brahms lullaby reach Anne Marie’s ears for the first time since she programmed in that particular ring.

  Anticipation darts through her as she scurries toward the nearby powder room to answer it in seclusion.

  Anticipation . . . and sheer, bone-chilling dread.

  “I’m sorry I was late,” Peyton immediately tells her boss, who is seated behind her desk in a corner office with a sprawling view of the East River. “I had some personal business I had to deal with, so . . .”

  She trails off, wondering if she should mention her missing friend, or just leap right into the pregnancy issue.

  Before she can decide, Tara speaks up.

  “Close the door,” she says, adding a cursory “please.”

  Peyton obliges, and takes the chair that’s silently indicated.

  “Your being late isn’t what this is about.” Tara steeples her fingers on her blotter. “But I would definitely appreciate a phone call in the future if you’re going to be late. If nothing else, so that I won’t worry that something horrible happened to you.”

  She offers a taut smile. The words are kind in the abstract, but in reality, they’re hardly genuine.

  Peyton has always recognized her boss for what she is: a shrewd, driven businesswoman who can turn the warmth on—and off—the way other people flip light switches.

  “I’ll make sure I call in from now on,” Peyton nods, swallowing the urge to vocalize her fears that something horrible might actually have happened to a good friend.

  Tara doesn’t want to hear about that, and she isn’t interested in excuses. She
’s the kind of woman who would probably stop in at the office on her way to her own mother’s funeral.

  “Alain is leaving to go back to the Paris office, Peyton, as I’m sure you know.”

  Her breath catches in her throat. “Yes, I know. Soon, isn’t it?”

  “We just finalized it. Next week.”

  She’s going to tell me that she’s promoting somebody else, Peyton realizes, trying to analyze Tara’s unyielding expression.

  Which, she realizes unexpectedly, is absolutely fine with her. She’s got enough on her plate now. More responsibility at work is the last thing she needs.

  “How do you feel about taking on more responsibility?” Tara asks, as though she’s read Peyton’s thoughts.

  In utter disbelief, she asks, “You’re promoting me?”

  “Not yet. It would be a trial run, for, say, six months. If you take the challenge and prove you have what it takes, you’ll get the title and pay increase retroactively when you come up for review in October.”

  October.

  October is precisely when she’ll be getting something far more valuable than a title and pay increase.

  “You can move into Alain’s office as soon as he leaves,” Tara goes on briskly, as though it’s a done deal. “It’s much bigger, and he has a window.”

  Peyton’s madly whirling thoughts alight on the most insipid: “Actually, my office has a window.”

  “His has a view,” is the dismissive response. “I’ll have Candace come in and help you box up your files next weekend.”

  “Tara . . .”

  “Yes?” She pauses with a hand on the telephone receiver, clearly about to set the wheels in motion without Peyton’s go-ahead.

  “Wait. Just . . . wait.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  She knows, Peyton realizes, spotting the provocative gleam in Tara’s tawny gaze. She knows that I’m pregnant and she’s baiting me.

  For a moment, she just holds her breath, aware that her professional future is teetering in the balance.

  Part of her longs to tell Tara what to do with the no-imminent-title, no-imminent-raise, more-immediate-responsibility offer. Or order, as the case may be.