Lullaby and Goodnight

by Staub, Wendy Corsi

  The weight of that remorse has grown too heavy to bear, threatening to smother all that now sustains her, including her marriage, even the joy borne of motherhood.

  “I have to tell somebody, Javier,” she desperately tells her husband, begging his understanding, his forgiveness. “I have to.”

  “But why? Who will you tell?”

  The baby cries out at the sound of her father’s harsh demands.

  “Lo siento mucho, mi tesoro.” Javier bends to kiss his daughter’s head, pressing his lips against the pink bow Mary tied around one silken tuft this morning. Pink, to match one of the beautiful dresses Javier brings home by the armload from the thrift store on the corner. Dresses for his little treasure.

  How will I live with myself if I tell and destroy him? Mary wonders in anguish.

  Yet another, perhaps even more agonizing, question persists. How will I live with myself—and my sin—if I don’t?

  Kneeling before her, resting his clasped hands on her knees as though in prayer, Javier hoarsely repeats, “Who will you tell? Father Roberto is—”

  “I know! I know what happened to him. Don’t say it, please.”

  “Well, who will you tell?”

  “I don’t know,” she wails softly. “The police?”

  “The police?” Storm clouds obliterate what was left of her husband’s attempt at compassion. “You can’t tell the police. They’ll go to the mother and—”

  “You mean the donor.”

  “I mean the thirteen-year-old perra,” he amends crudely, and Mary winces.

  This isn’t her gentle, loving Javier. This is a man blinded—no, tainted—by the delusion she herself once nurtured.

  “Javier, please don’t—”

  “No, you please don’t,” he flings back at her. “If you tell the police what happened, they’ll give our daughter back to someone who doesn’t deserve her. Is that really what you want?”

  “That isn’t going to happen. She never wanted the baby, Javier. You know that. The police will know that, too. What makes you think—”

  “She has a family, doesn’t she? Everybody has a family. What if they want the baby? They’ll take her away from us.”

  “Maybe they won’t.”

  “Maybe they will. We can’t take this chance!”

  “We have to. I have to. Can’t you see, Javier? I can’t go on like this. I can’t live with this sin. I have to leave this in God’s hands.”

  “God doesn’t want this innocent child torn from the only parents she knows!” His voice breaks, and he clings to her now, imploring, “Mary, can’t you see? You have to open your eyes and see the truth. Dawn was a gift from God.”

  No, Mary thinks dully, resting her tear-dampened cheek against the baby’s black hair, Dawn wasn’t a gift from God.

  She was a gift from a woman who had no right to play God.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The sudden ring of the telephone startles Peyton awake.

  Reaching for the receiver on the bedside table, she glances blearily at the clock and sees that it’s six-thirty. The last time she looked, having watched the minutes tick by for the duration of the night, it was five forty-five.

  That was right after she popped the two blue pills Rita handed over with sympathetic reluctance.

  “Peyton, it’s me. Are you okay?”

  “Tom?” Heart pounding, she struggles to shake off a numbing wave of grogginess. She sits up and looks warily around the shadowy room, almost expecting to see the unwelcome caller lurking in a corner.

  “I’m going to go pick up bagels and come over.”

  “No!” Tempering her panic, she manages to say, “I mean, don’t come now. Please. I didn’t sleep well all night and I need to rest.”

  “I knew you wouldn’t sleep after all that. You’ll feel safer if I’m there. I’ll just hang around and keep an eye on things while you rest.”

  “No, really. I just want to be left alone for a while. Please.”

  He hesitates. “Do you mean left alone so you can sleep this morning? Or left alone for a while . . . period?”

  She groans. “Please, Tom, I’m exhausted. I took some Tylenol PM and it’s knocking me out. I can barely speak right now.”

  “You’re not supposed to take anything like that when you’re pregnant.”

  Irked by the gentle scolding, she opens her mouth to tell him that she checked with Rita first. That will only require complicated explanations she isn’t prepared to give, and he doesn’t deserve.

  “Look, just let me sleep,” she says wearily. “I’ll talk to you later.”

  “Okay. Call me if you need me.”

  She mumbles an unintelligible reply and hangs up, collapsing against the pillow again.

  “I knew he’d call first thing.”

  She gasps at the sound of the voice and looks up to see Rita standing in the doorway.

  “Sorry . . . I didn’t mean to scare you, sugar pie.”

  “I know, I’m just jumpy. Did you sleep?”

  “Not much.” Rita runs a hand through her disheveled gray hair, her eyes barely visible beneath her unkempt fringe of bangs. “Listen, I’m going to make some coffee. The locksmith will be here in a little while. You just rest.”

  “Call me when he gets here, okay?”

  “I will.”

  Peyton closes her eyes, already drifting away on a billowing cloud of unconsciousness.

  Last night’s delightful little stunt was never part of the plan.

  Unlike the Bible, the meaningful gift all the donors receive, this was an afterthought. Peyton Somerset won’t learn anything from it, other than that she isn’t in charge of every element of her life.

  It’s an important lesson, one they could all have stood to learn. But Peyton, more than anyone else. She exudes an inner strength of character that most donors either conceal, or lack entirely. She isn’t the least bit leery of the prospect of raising a baby without a loving father to share the blessing.

  No, she thinks she can do it all, have it all. She’s brazenly claimed as her own the God-given right denied to scores of deserving couples.

  For that, she must be punished. This is no longer about the work: the methodical inverted process of take-and-give.

  No, and I’ll be the first to admit it.

  This has become a personal vendetta.

  Peyton Somerset is the epitome of the self-indulgent donor, manipulating the natural order of the universe to suit her own greedy needs.

  That’s why this time, particularly from here on in, things are going to be different.

  Of course there was a momentary lack of organization. First, the unforseen elimination of the Cordells as adoptive parents, then the Khatirs’ refusal to accept the proposal. Then there’s the cloying recollection of holding a pillow over an innocent man’s face until he ceased to breathe.

  And a priest, at that.

  But you do what has to be done for the greater good. You do whatever it takes to preserve the clandestine nature of the work, do it all without flinching, and then you move on.

  As I have.

  Everything is under control once again.

  Perhaps Peyton Somerset will be the final donor. Perhaps there will be more, but chosen, in the future as in the past, at random once again.

  Live and learn.

  In any case, the Somerset baby will come into the world to find both a mother and father waiting.

  He’s going to be so thrilled, and so surprised. I can’t wait to tell him . . .

  But I will. I’ll wait until the time is right.

  And in the meantime, there’s plenty to do. The bloody gift in Peyton’s handbag was the perfect way to knock the infuriating Ms. I’ve Got It All Under Control off balance.

  It was so satisfying that it’s tempting to do it again . . . and again . . . if only to banish the impatient boredom that always sets in during the last trimester, when everything is in place, and there’s nothing to do but wait.

  Mary ope
ns her eyes abruptly to see the sun seeping into the crevices around the perimeter of the drawn aluminum blinds. Slashes of its rays even manage to push through a few of the slats that didn’t close all the way, caging the bed beneath the window in strange bars of light.

  The angle is all wrong, Mary thinks vaguely, in the moment before it occurs to her to glance at the clock.

  No wonder. It’s late.

  Past ten, already.

  A frisson of panic takes hold, and she bolts from the bed, racing for the baby’s room.

  Dawn has never made it through the night without waking to be fed. Three o’clock, seven o’clock . . .

  She should have awakened Mary at least twice by now. Unless Javier got up with her . . .

  But he leaves for his Saturday job at the loading dock well before six. Even if he’d given her that first feeding . . .

  A frantic, sick feeling washes over Mary as she steps over the threshold into the baby’s room, where the blinds are still drawn and the night-light still shines.

  How many tragic crib death accounts did she hear about in the bereaved parents’ support group she went to for a short time after her first stillbirth? She still recalls the ravaged expressions on the faces of women who described oversleeping, then rushing to check on their babies, only to find them stiff and cold.

  Mary remembers thinking, even then, At least you had them for a little while. At least you got to hold them, feed them, feel like a mother . . .

  I was denied all of that.

  Now, as she approaches Dawn’s cradle, guilt courses through her. This loss is more terrible, even, than the crippling losses she’s already suffered. She’s held Dawn, fed her. . .

  I’m her mother. And I’ve lost her.

  She closes her eyes as she takes the last few steps, whispering a prayer, asking God for a miracle she doesn’t deserve, for strength to face what lies ahead if there can be no miracle.

  Then she leans over the cradle, where the white crocheted blanket she tucked securely around her daughter last night lies rumpled at the bottom . . .

  And she realizes the cradle is empty.

  “I can think of a hundred places I’d rather be,” Detective Sam Basir says wistfully.

  “I can think of a thousand,” Detective Jody Langella replies. Chief among them, down at Breezy Point with her firefighter husband and kids at the annual August beach party.

  “Yeah? You’re probably wishing you were down at Breezy with Jack and Mandi and Jackie Jr.”

  Okay, so her longtime partner has the uncanny ability to read her mind. Jody shrugs. “Drunken firemen, burnt hot dogs, jellyfish stings . . . who needs that?”

  “You do,” Sam tells her. “Maybe you’ll get down there in time to have a cold one and see the fireworks.”

  “I doubt it.”

  Leaving behind the blazing afternoon sunlight, they walk into the towering Co-op City building.

  Jody flashes her badge at the building manager she met last month, and learns that nobody has been picking up mail for the Cordells’ apartment.

  “What am I supposed to do? Just let it keep piling up?” the manager asks, wringing his hands.

  “You could always just open it.”

  The swarthy little man’s eyes shoot toward his receding hairline at Sam’s brazen suggestion.

  “He’s just kidding.” Jody shakes her head at her partner, wondering why he insists on riling the innocent.

  Moments later, they’re being escorted to the fourteenth-floor apartment where Linden Cordell lived with his wife Derry.

  After unlocking the door, the manager asks, “Do you need me to stay here this time? Because I have to get back—”

  “Go, go.” Jody is already in the living room, intent on looking the place over with a fresh perspective.

  Nothing has changed in the month since she was here, aside from a staler smell, more cobwebs, a thicker layer of dust. Particles are stirred to dance in the air wherever she walks, glinting like glitter in the sunlight streaming in.

  The place is stuffy; Sam swiftly opens every window.

  Glancing over a stack of CDs beside the stereo in the living room, he plucks a few off the shelf to examine them. “Check it out, Langella. I haven’t even heard of most of these bands since high school. AC-DC? Rush? Hey, I’d love to hear—”

  “Come on, we’re not here to relive our youth, Sam.”

  Obviously still convinced they’re wasting their time investigating a random murder, he tosses the CDs aside and asks, “So what is it that we’re looking for?”

  “Whatever we can find.”

  “I’d like to find something cold to drink.” He steps into the kitchen, opens the refrigerator, and makes a face, quickly closing it. “God, that reeks.”

  “What did you expect? Nobody’s cleaned it out in over a month.” Jody shakes her head and leaves him there, heading to the bedroom.

  The closet isn’t full, despite the fact that there is only one, and it contains both a man’s and a woman’s wardrobe. Jody is no fashionista despite her thirteen-year-old daughter’s efforts, but even she can tell by the labels and fabric quality that the Cordells’ clothing budget was limited.

  There are a number of empty hangers on the woman’s side. Plastic hangers, unlike the wire ones that hold all but two of the remaining garments: inexpensive summer blouses that still have tags on them. One is blue with ruffles, the other peach with a wide collar. Both are from Strawberries, marked down with final clearance prices, probably from the end of last season. Thanks to Mandi’s obsession with clothes, Jody recognizes the style as having been popular last summer.

  “What’d you find?” Sam asks from the doorway.

  “She must have packed a lot of her stuff.” Jody stares at the blouses. “But not everything. Wouldn’t you think a woman who was leaving her husband—a woman who had very little clothing in the first place—would take everything? Or at least, almost everything?”

  “Not necessarily. Maybe she wanted to travel light.”

  “But she left behind stuff that’s new. Why would she do that? Wouldn’t she want to bring the new stuff with her, at least?”

  “Maybe she had other new stuff.”

  Jody shakes her head, lost in thought.

  Something definitely isn’t adding up.

  “I still can’t believe you forgot to tell me about Wanda last night,” Peyton can’t help chiding Rita as they step out of an air-conditioned cab into a blast of humid midday heat.

  “Yeah, well, we were both a little preoccupied, remember?” Rita struggles to balance a large bouquet in one arm as the driver hands her the gift-wrapped boxes from the trunk.

  “Here, give me the roses.” Peyton reaches for them.

  “No, the vase is heavy. I’ve got it.”

  “I’m not an invalid, Rita. I can help. At least give me a couple of boxes. They’re not heavy, and it was my idea to buy all those little pink outfits, so it isn’t fair that you have to lug them all.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ve got them.” Rita shakes her head good-naturedly. “I should have known better than to take a pregnant woman to the layette department at Lord and Taylor.”

  “You’re just lucky I didn’t buy stuff for my own layette.”

  “Oh, I think that saleswoman figured you’ll be back.”

  Peyton can’t help smiling.

  Rita was right earlier when she said shopping for baby gifts would be therapeutic. It was just what Peyton needed this afternoon to sweep away the bitter aftertaste of last night’s trauma. She knows it’ll come rushing back later, when at last she’s forced to go home again, but for now, she has other things to think about.

  As they make their way across Amsterdam Avenue to the entrance of Saint Luke’s Hospital, she finds herself looking forward to seeing Wanda and her newborn baby girl, though certainly not the controlling philanderer who put them both in danger.

  She still can’t get over the shock of learning that Wanda delivered her baby girl witho
ut letting anyone know she was in labor. Anyone other than Eric, that is.

  Peyton isn’t hurt, exactly, that she didn’t get a phone call. She’s just surprised. Wanda promised to call her.

  As for Rita—well, she’s definitely hurt over the slight. Troubled, too. She wasn’t thrilled with Peyton’s suggestion that they bring the baby gifts they’d bought right over to the hospital this afternoon.

  “I don’t know if she wants to see anyone,” was Rita’s uncertain response. “Eric is probably there.”

  “Well, then we’ll just have to meet the bastard, won’t we?”

  “I’m not up for that. You go.”

  “Come with me, Rita. Come on. We owe it to Wanda. She probably needs to know we care.”

  Peyton’s little speech might have swayed Rita, but she privately has to admit to herself that her motives aren’t entirely noble. She figures holding an infant in her arms will remind her of her own priorities, and help take her mind off everything—not to mention, keep her away from home . . . and Tom.

  At least he can no longer get into her apartment. The locksmith arrived right on schedule this morning and had the new locks in place before Peyton even emerged from a welcome, much-needed slumber. By the time she woke up, Rita had paid him and sent him on his way, not to mention having made a large, healthy breakfast and cleaned the apartment.

  “What would I do without you?” Peyton asks her again now, as they walk through the doors into the hospital.

  “You’d be fine. You must have reminded me a dozen times last night and this morning that you can take care of yourself. . . remember?”

  “I can take care of myself. Absolutely. It doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate a good friend.”

  “Unlike certain other people we know.” Rita follows up with a tight-lipped shake of her head as they stop to look at the building directory.

  “Come on, don’t be mad at Wanda.”

  “I’m not as much mad as I am disappointed. How could she put herself and the innocent baby in jeopardy out of convenience for a man like that? I gave her more credit than that.”