“It sure is, isn’t it?” Mary Terror took three more long strides, the hamper in front of her. The door clicked shut at her back.
She was inside.
“You sure ’nuf must be lost!” the laundress said. “How come you to be down here?”
“I’m new. Just started a few days ago.” Mary was moving away from the woman, guiding the hamper down a long hallway. She could hear the whisper of steam and the thunk-thunk-thunk of washing machines at work. “Guess I don’t know my way around like I thought I did.”
“I hear you! ’Bout have to carry a map to get around this big ol’ place.”
“You have a good day, now,” Mary said, and she abandoned the hamper next to a group of other hampers parked near the laundry room. She picked up her pace, heading deeper into the hospital. The laundress said, “Bye-bye,” but Mary didn’t respond. She was focused on the path that would take her to the stairwell door, and she walked briskly through the corridor, steam pipes hissing above her head.
She came around a curve and found herself about twenty paces behind a female pig with a walkie-talkie, going in the same direction as she. Mary’s heart stuttered, and she stepped back out of sight for a minute or two, giving the she-pig time to clear out. Then, when the corridor was clear, Mary started toward the stairwell again. Her eyes ticked back and forth, checking doorways on either side of the corridor, her senses were on high alert, and her blood was cold. She heard voices here and there, but saw no one else. At last she came to the stairwell, and she pushed through the door and started up.
As she ascended past the first floor, she faced another challenge: two nurses coming down. She popped her smile back on, the two nurses smiled and nodded, and Mary passed them with damp palms. Then there was the door with a big two on it. Mary went through it, her gaze checking the black tape that held down the latch and cheated the alarm. She was on the maternity ward, and there was no one else in the corridor between her and the curve that led to the nurses’ station.
Mary heard a soft chimes that, she presumed, signaled one of the nurses. The crying of babies drifted through the hallway like a siren song. It was now or never. She chose Room 24, and she walked in as if she owned the hospital.
A young woman was in bed, breastfeeding her newborn. A man sat in a chair beside the bed, watching the process with true wonder. They both turned their attention to the six-foot-tall nurse who walked in, and the young mother smiled dreamily and said, “We’re doing just fine.”
The man, woman, and their son were black.
Mary stopped. She said, “I see you are. Just checking.” Then she turned and walked out. It would not do to take Lord Jack a black child. She went across the hall into Room 23, and there found a white woman in bed talking animatedly with another young couple and a middle-aged man, joyful bouquets of flowers and balloons arranged around the room. The woman’s baby wasn’t with her. “Hi,” she said to Mary. “Could I have my baby, do you think?”
“I don’t see why not. I’ll go get him.”
“You’re a big one, aren’t you?” the middle-aged man asked, and his grin flashed a silver tooth.
Mary gave him a smile, her eyes cold. She turned away, walked out of the room and to the door that had a blue bow and the number 21 on it.
She was nervous. If this one didn’t work out, she might have to scrub the mission.
She thought of Lord Jack, awaiting her at the weeping lady, and she went in.
The mother was asleep, her baby cradled against her. In a chair by the window sat an older woman with curly gray hair, doing needlepoint. “Hello,” the woman in the chair said. “How are you today?”
“I’m fine, thanks.” Mary saw the mother’s eyes start to open. The baby began to stir, too; his eyelids fluttered open for a second, and Mary saw that the child’s eyes were light blue, like Lord Jack’s. Her heart leapt; it was karma at work.
“Oh, I drifted off.” Laura blinked, trying to focus on the nurse who stood over the bed. A big woman with a nondescript face and brown hair. A yellow Smiley Face button on her uniform. Her name tag said Janette something. “What time is it?”
“Time to weigh the baby,” Mary answered. She heard tension in her voice, and she got a grip on it. “It’ll just take a minute or two.”
“Where’s Dad?” Laura asked her mother.
“He went down to get another magazine. You know him and his reading.”
“Can I weigh the baby, please?” Mary held her arms out to take him.
David was waking up. His initial response was to open his mouth and let out a high, thin cry. “I think he’s hungry again,” Laura said. “Can I feed him first?”
Couldn’t chance a real nurse coming in, Mary thought. She kept her smile on. “I won’t be very long. Just get this over with and out of the way, all right?”
Laura said, “All right,” though she yearned to feed him. “I haven’t seen you before.”
“I only work weekends,” Mary replied, her arms offered.
“Shhhhh, shhhhh, don’t cry,” Laura told her son. She kissed his forehead, smelling the peaches-and-cream aroma of his flesh. “Oh, you’re so precious,” she told him, and she reluctantly placed him in the nurse’s arms. Immediately she felt the need to grasp him back to her again. The nurse had big hands, and Laura saw that one of the woman’s fingernails had a dark red crust beneath it. She glanced again at the name tag: Leister.
“There we go,” Mary said, rocking the infant in her arms. “There we go, sweet thing.” She began moving toward the door. “I’ll bring him right back.”
“Take good care of him,” Laura said. Needs to wash her hands, she thought.
“I sure will.” Mary was almost out the door.
“Nurse?” Laura asked.
Mary stopped on the threshold, the baby still crying in her arms.
“Would you bring me some orange juice, please?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Mary turned away, walked through the door, and saw the black father from number 24 just leaving the room to go toward the nurses’ station. She put her index finger into the baby’s mouth to quiet his crying, and she went through the stairwell’s door and started down the stairs.
“She had dirty hands,” Laura said to her mother. “Did you notice that?”
“No, but that was the biggest woman I ever laid eyes on.” She watched Laura position herself against her pillows, and Laura winced at a sudden pain. “How’re you doin’?”
“Okay, I guess. Hurting a little bit.” She felt as if she’d delivered a sack of hardened concrete. Her body was full of aches and pains, the muscles of her back and thighs still prone to cramps. Her stomach had lost its bloat, but she was still sluggish and heavy with fluids. The thirty-two stitches between her thighs, where Dr. Bonnart had clipped the flesh of her vagina open to allow extra room for David’s head to slide through, was a constant irritation. “I thought the nurses had to keep their hands clean,” she said when she’d gotten herself comfortable again.
“I sent your father downstairs,” Laura’s mother said. “I think we need to talk, don’t you?”
“Talk about what?”
“You know.” She leaned forward in her chair, her gaze sharp. “About what the problem is between you and Doug.”
Of course she’d sensed it, Laura thought. Her mother’s radar was rarely wrong. “The problem.” Laura nodded. “Yes, there’s sure a problem, all right.”
“I’d like to hear it.”
Laura knew there was no way to deflect this conversation. Sooner or later, it would have to be spoken. “Doug’s been having an affair since October,” she began, and she saw her mother’s mouth open in a small gasp. Laura began to tell her the whole story, and the older woman listened intently as Laura’s son was being carried through a corridor where steam pipes hissed like awakened snakes.
Mary Terror, her index finger clasped in the baby’s mouth, strode through the corridor toward the loading dock’s door. Before she reached the laundry area, she s
topped where the hampers were parked. One of them had towels at the bottom, and she put the baby down amid them and covered him up. The infant gurgled and mewled, but Mary grasped the hamper and started pushing it ahead of her. As she passed through the laundry where the black women were working, Mary saw the laundress who’d allowed her in.
“You still lost?” the woman called over the noise of washers and steam presses.
“No, I know where I’m going now,” Mary answered. She flashed a quick smile and went on. The baby began to cry just before Mary reached the exit, but it was a soft crying and the noise of the laundry masked it. She opened the door. The wind had picked up, and silver needles of rain were falling. She pushed the hamper out onto the loading dock and scooped the infant out, still wrapped in a towel. Then she hurried down the concrete steps to her van, which she’d traded for her truck and three hundred and eighty dollars at Friendly Ernie’s Used Cars in Smyrna about two hours before. She put the crying baby onto the floorboard on the passenger side, next to her sawed-off shotgun. She started the engine, which ran rough as a cob, and made the entire van shudder. The windshield wipers shrieked as they swept back and forth across the glass.
Then Mary Terror backed away from the loading dock, turned the van around, and drove away from the hospital named after God. “Hush, now!” she told the baby. “Mary’s got you!” The infant kept crying.
He’d just have to learn who was in control.
Mary left the hospital behind, and swung up onto a freeway, where she merged into a sea of metal in the falling silver rain.
7
A Hollow Vessel
“HI.” THE NURSE HAD RED HAIR AND FRECKLED CHEEKS, AND SHE beamed a smile. Her name tag identified her as Erin Kingman. She glanced quickly at the empty perambulator beside the bed. “Where’s David?”
“Someone took him to be weighed,” Laura said. “I guess that was about fifteen minutes ago. I asked her for orange juice, but maybe she got busy.”
“Who took him?”
“A big woman. Janette was her first name. I hadn’t seen her before.”
“Uh-huh.” Erin nodded, her smile still there but the first butterfly flutters beginning in her stomach. “All right, I’ll go find her. Excuse me.” She hurried out of the room, leaving Laura and Miriam to their conversation.
“Divorce.” It had a funeral-bell sound, coming from the older woman’s mouth. “Is that what you’re saying?”
“Yes.”
“Laura, it doesn’t have to be divorce. You could go to a counselor and talk things out. Divorce is a messy, sticky thing. And David’s going to need a father. Don’t think just of yourself and not of David.”
Laura heard what was coming. She waited for it without speaking, her hands clenched under the sheet.
“Doug’s given you a good life,” her mother went on in that earnest tone of voice used by women who knew they’d traded love for comfort long ago. “He’s been a good provider, hasn’t he?”
“We bought a lot of things together, if that’s what you mean.”
“You have a history. A life together, and now a son. You have a fine house, you drive a fine car, and you’re not wanting for anything. So divorce is a drastic option, Laura. Maybe you could get a good settlement, but a thirty-six-year-old woman with a baby on her own might have a hard time—” She stopped. “You know what I’m saying, don’t you?”
“Not exactly.”
Her mother sighed, as if Laura had the brains of a wooden block. “A woman your age, with a baby, might have a hard time finding another man. That’s important to think about before you make any rash decisions.”
Laura closed her eyes. She felt dizzy and sick, and she clamped her teeth down on her tongue because she couldn’t trust what she might say to her mother.
“Now I know you think I’m wrong. You’ve thought I was wrong before. I’m looking out for your interests because I love you, Laura. What you’ve got to figure out is why Doug decided to play around, and what you can do to make up for it.”
Her eyes opened. “Make up for it?”
“That’s right. I told you a long time ago, a headstrong man like Doug needs a lot of attention. And he needs a loose rope, too. Take your father. I’ve always held him on a loose rope, and our marriage is the better for it. These are things a woman learns by experience, and no one can teach her. The looser the rope, the stronger the marriage.”
“I can’t…” Words failed her. She tried again, knocked breathless. “I can’t believe you’re saying these things! Do you mean…you want me to stay with Doug? To look the other way if he ever decides to”—she used her mother’s term—“play around again?”
“He’ll outgrow it,” the older woman said. “You have to be there for him, and he’ll know that what he has at home is priceless. Doug is a good provider and he’s going to be a good father. Those are very important things in this day and time. You need to be thinking about healing the wound between you and Doug instead of talking about divorce.”
Laura didn’t know what she was about to say. Her mouth was opening, the blood was pounding in her face, and she could feel the shout beginning to draw power from her lungs. She longed to see her mother cringe before her voice, longed to see her get up from that chair and march out of the room in a practiced sulk. Doug was a stranger to her, and so was her mother; she didn’t know either of those pretenders to her love. She was about to shout in her mother’s face, though she didn’t yet know what she was going to say.
She would never know.
Two nurses—one of them Erin Kingman and the other an older, stockier woman—entered the room. Following behind them was a man in a dark blue blazer and gray slacks, his face round and fleshy and his brown hair receding from a high globe of a forehead. He wore black horn-rimmed glasses, and his shoes squeaked as he approached Laura’s bed.
“Excuse me,” the older nurse said to Laura’s mother. Her name tag read: Kathryn Langner. “Would you go with Miss Kingman for just a few minutes, please?”
“What is it?” Laura’s mother stood up, her radar on full alert. “What’s wrong?”
“Would you come with me, please?” Erin Kingman stood at the woman’s side. “We’ll just step out into the hall, all right?”
“What’s going on? Laura, what’s this all about?”
Laura couldn’t answer. The older nurse and the man moved in to take positions on either side of the bed. A foreboding of horror swept like a cold tide through Laura’s body. Oh Jesus! she thought. It’s David! Something’s happened to David!
“My baby,” she heard herself say frantically. “Where’s my baby?”
“Would you wait in the hall, please?” The man spoke to Miriam in a flat tone that said she would, whether she liked it or not. “Miss Kingman, close the door on your way out.”
“Where’s my baby?” Laura felt her heart pounding, and there was a fresh twinge of pain between her legs. “I want to see David!”
“Out,” the man told Laura’s mother. Miss Kingman closed the door. Kathryn Langner grasped one of Laura’s hands, and the man said in a quieter, steady voice, “Mrs. Clayborne, my name is Bill Ramsey. I’m on the security staff here. Do you remember the name of the nurse who took your child from this room?”
“Janette something. It started with an L.” She couldn’t recall the last name, and her brain was sluggish with shock. “What’s wrong? She said she was going to bring my baby right back. I’d like him back now.”
“Mrs. Clayborne,” Ramsey said, “no nurse with that first name works on the maternity ward.” Behind his glasses, his eyes were as black as the frames. A pulse beat at his balding left temple. “We think the woman may have taken your child from the premises.”
Laura blinked. Her mind rejected the last three words. “What? Taken him where?”
“From the hospital,” Ramsey repeated. “Our people are checking all the exits right now. I want you to think carefully and tell me what this woman looked like.”
�
�She was a nurse. She said she worked on weekends.” The blood was roaring in Laura’s head. She heard her voice as if at the far end of a long tunnel. I’m about to faint, she thought. Dear God, I’m really about to faint. She squeezed the nurse’s hand and was met by forceful pressure.
“She wore a nurse’s uniform, is that correct?”
“Yes. A uniform. She was a nurse.”
“Her first name was Janette. Did she tell you that?”
“It was…it was…on her name tag. Next to the Smiley Face.”
“Pardon me?”
“The…Smiley Face,” Laura said. “It was yellow. A Smiley Face button.”
“What color was the woman’s hair and eyes?”
“I don’t—” Her thinking was freezing solid, but there seemed to be pulsing heat trapped in her face. “Brown hair. Shoulder-length. Her eyes were…blue, I think. No, gray. I can’t remember.”
“Anything else about her? Crooked nose? Heavy eyebrows? Freckles?”
“Tall,” Laura said. “A big woman. Tall.” Her throat was closing up, dark motes spun before her eyes, and only the pressure of the nurse’s hand kept her from passing out.
“How tall? Five nine? Five ten? Taller?”
“Taller. Six feet. Maybe more.”
Bill Ramsey reached under his coat and pulled out a walkie-talkie. He clicked it on. “Eugene, this is Ramsey. We’re looking for a woman in a nurse’s uniform, description as follows: brown shoulder-length hair, blue or gray eyes, approximately six feet tall. Hold on.” He looked at Laura again, whose face had gone chalky except for red circles around her eyes. “Heavyset, slim, or medium build?”
“Big. Heavyset.”
“Eugene? Heavyset. Got a name tag that identifies her as Janette, last name begins with an L. Copy?”
“Copy,” the voice crackled over the walkie-talkie.
“The button,” Laura reminded him. She was about to throw up, the nausea hot in her stomach. “The Smiley Face button.”
Ramsey clicked the walkie-talkie on again and gave Eugene the extra information.
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