The Girl in the Green Raincoat

by Laura Lippman

  Instead, there was Crow.

  “She’s fine,” he said quickly. “In neonatal intensive care because she’s only thirty-four weeks. But she’s almost four pounds, which is pretty good.”

  “What does she look like?”

  “My hair, your eyes, and a little rosebud of a mouth that’s wholly her own. She doesn’t look like a Fifi, though. We need a real name.”

  But Tess had always known the name she wanted. She just hadn’t allowed herself to say it out loud. “The tradition is to pick someone who’s died. Remember my friend Carl? I’d like to name her Carla.”

  Crow hesitated, and Tess thought he might object, that he might want a less sad legacy for their daughter. Carl had died under such horrible circumstances. But wasn’t all death horrible? “I’ll agree to Carla if you let me have the middle name I want: Scout.”

  Tess smiled. “Carla Scout Monaghan. It will make my mother insane!” Then she realized that she was a mother herself, and the thought of making a parent insane had suddenly lost much of its appeal.

  It turned out that Carla Scout was years away from such empathetic insight. Two days later she had a hemorrhage, apparently just for the hell of it.

  The neonatal intensive care unit was pretty much the saddest place that Tess Monaghan had ever known, and she had seen her share of sad places. All those tiny babies, all those devastated parents. Carla Scout was the biggest patient, a behemoth. “Why is she even here?” Tess overheard one mother whisper the first week. She knew from the nurses that this woman’s son had been born at twenty-six weeks, so tiny that he could fit in the palm of one’s hand. Carla Scout Monaghan was huge by comparison. Yes, looking at her, even in the Isolette, in that welter of tubes and machines, it was hard to see that anything was wrong. Tess wanted to lean over and hiss: “She had a hemorrhage. We’re waiting to see how this will affect her. Happy now?”

  Yet she knew the other mother was simply trying to find a place to offload her fear and terror. Tess couldn’t blame her. She wanted to do the same thing. Problem was, her anger and fear always circled back to her.

  She had to blame herself. No one else would. She wished Crow would throw it in her face, how he had told her that her obsession with the Epsteins was unhealthy. She recalled how Mrs. Zimmerman warned her that morbid thoughts would warp her baby. She remembered Lenhardt telling her that parenthood would be her greatest joy, and if she were unlucky, her greatest sorrow. Yes, all the fairies had come to her child’s christening. But she was the one who had cursed her.

  “If only—” she began one afternoon.

  “Stop, Tess,” Crow said, taking her hand. This time she listened. She was sitting in one of the rocking chairs placed among the Isolettes. Carla Scout had been here almost a month. Halloween, Thanksgiving, her official due date had come and gone. Tess’s stitches had dissolved, she had pumped gallons of breast milk, hoping she might one day feed her own child. But for now the baby lived in this Isolette. Back home, the leaves had fallen and Stony Run Park was so stark and bare that Tess could see through to the other side—all the way to Blythewood Road. Blythewood. Blithe Wood. A pretty name for a pretty street where two exceedingly ugly people had lived. But she had been the blithe one, thinking she controlled everything.

  Spouses can’t be compelled to testify, but there’s no law against volunteering to do so, and the Epsteins proved quite eager to trade allegations. She killed Mary Epstein. He kept two sets of books, bilked his own company, and killed Danielle when she found out. She stole her sister’s jewelry and Annette’s, too. No, he’s the one who had the jewelry all along. Tess wished there were a system in which the two of them could be locked up forever, with only each other’s company. That would be justice. Instead, Don pleaded to twenty years, while Carole was holding out for a trial in Mary Epstein’s death. It couldn’t be proved that she pushed her sister down the stairs, and even if she had sickened Annette with antibiotic-laden muffins, they weren’t the cause of her death. Frankly, Tess thought someone should go back and look at the car accident that had taken the lives of Carole’s parents. She wouldn’t put anything past the woman.

  But she had no room in her head for the Epsteins, not anymore. Everything was the baby—the sad, silent journey back and forth to Hopkins, the empty evenings, the spike of fear every time a phone rang. She let her father work on the nursery because it was clearly his way of coping, but it depressed her, watching the room take shape. The days dragged by. Some families triumphed and took their children home. New families arrived to take their place. And some families—well, some families, she just didn’t want to think about.

  “I’ve seen much sicker babies than yours get better,” the nurse told Tess. The nurses were goddesses in NICU, the ones the parents trusted. Tess asked them again and again: “Did I do this to my baby?” They always said no. She wanted to believe them.

  After the hemorrhage, the doctors had hustled Tess and Crow into a place the parents called the Room. The Room was like something out of a Stephen King novel, a perfectly bland conference room where the most horrible things happened. Unearthly sounds, inhuman sounds, emanated from the Room. The day they took Tess and Crow to the Room, the doctors were quite gentle. No, it wasn’t good that she had hemorrhaged. But it was only a two on a four-point scale. They had seen babies suffer much worse and go on to lead full and normal lives.

  “Did I do this to my baby?” Tess asked.

  The doctor said no, that her premature labor was a godsend. Her placenta had failed, something absolutely outside her control, the baby had stopped getting nourishment. An emergency C-section would have been ordered after Tess’s next ultrasound. She didn’t believe him.

  Christmas zipped by, then New Year’s, squares on a calendar. Tess’s laptop was restored to life, but she seldom turned it on.

  On the first Monday in January, she and Crow showed up at the hospital—and were taken to the Room again. She reached for Crow’s hand; it was slick with sweat.

  “I want to tell you,” their doctor said, “that I think Carla Scout is ready to go home. You’ll need oxygen and a monitor—”

  “She’s going home?” Tess asked. “Just like that?” She didn’t know it was possible to get good news in the Room. She didn’t trust it.

  “We’re pretty good at what we do here,” the doctor said. “Think of it this way. She was six weeks early. She’s going home only a few weeks after her original due date.”

  “But how—I mean, what do you know? How can you be sure? What about her vision? What about brain development? Respiratory problems?” Tess cast around, trying to remember all the other dire things she had read on the Internet. “Are you sure she’s okay?”

  “Carla Scout is stable. She has no impairment that we can detect. But no, Tess, I don’t have a crystal ball. You want me to give you some kind of guarantee that everything will be fine, forever. I can’t do that. I can’t do that for any of our patients. Oh, I’m reasonably sure that your daughter has no lingering effects from the premature delivery. However, you and Crow—you and Crow most certainly do. And you’re going to have to get over it. Welcome to parenthood.”

  They left the NICU, stunned with happiness. Tess realized that her hair was dirty and her clothes didn’t feel quite clean. When had she last bathed? Back when she was on bed rest she had promised herself that she would shower once, twice, three times a day when her confinement had passed. She had planned to exercise every day and indulge in wine again. Now she was thin, yet flabby, and couldn’t remember if she had even bothered to have a glass of champagne on New Year’s Eve five days ago. Almost certainly not. Five days ago she had nothing to toast. Now she wanted to sing, skip through the busy hive that was Hopkins Hospital. Her daughter was coming home. She was going to get a chance to screw her up in all the normal ways.

  “I guess we can get married now,” Crow said. “And finally have the baby shower that you kept vetoing.”

  “Oh, right,” Tess said. She knew they had forgotten something
. How funny to think she had once been obsessed about getting a ring from Crow. She had worried that he would skip out on her, that he wouldn’t be there if things got tough. Well, that was one worry gone. He had been a rock these past two months. She thought of the moment when Carole had stood over her and she told Crow she loved him, thinking she might never speak to him again. They were going to get married. They would fight. They would argue. They would be irritated with one another. That was how marriage worked. Except, possibly, for Mrs. Blossom. But Tess hoped she never forgot what it felt like to speak to him that night, Crow’s casual, “Love you, too.”

  “You know,” she said now, her voice taking on a teasing tone that felt rusty and strange in her mouth. There had not been much teasing as of late. “You know, I didn’t think you were going to ask me to marry you. After all, you told Lloyd he could have the family heirloom.”

  “One of the family heirlooms,” Crow said. “I held the better one back for you. You always forget—my family used to be well-to-do, Tess.”

  “Used to be,” she said. “Now you’re poor like me.”

  “Funny,” he said, “I feel pretty rich right now.”

  They went for breakfast at a beloved restaurant, the Golden West, and ate their way across the world—sopapillas, pancakes, French toast, poached eggs in green curry, limeaide, and layer cake. We’ll bring Carla Scout here, Tess thought. We’ll take her everywhere. We won’t treat her as if she’s made out of glass. She’s sturdy, like her mother.

  * * *

  The combination wedding/baby shower was over, but some guests lingered. May could not get enough of Carla Scout. Tess thought this would scare her two mommies, but Liz explained it was a hardwired instinct, this love of infants, essential to their survival. “I heard it on NPR.” Tess’s parents were in the kitchen, washing up in a silence that she now knew was companionable, the soft embers of a romance kindled by her mother’s fastidious consumption of popcorn. Crow’s mother was admiring the sweaters and caps made by Mrs. Blossom; apparently, an older woman sitting on a bench, knitting, was the greatest cover ever in surveillance. Mrs. Blossom had broken three cases of insurance fraud since January and could barely keep up with all the requests for her services, now that Valentine’s Day was near.

  But it was Whitney who outlasted all the other guests, cataloging the gifts that people had brought in defiance of Tess’s instructions.

  “Just think,” she said, “it could have been a double ceremony.”

  “You never told me,” Tess said, “how Epstein reacted when you brought him to your mother’s house and explained that you weren’t exactly who he thought you were.”

  “He was a pretty good sport,” Whitney said. “You know what? I think the pump was primed. He was terrified of Carole. It was probably only a matter of time before she killed him. Someone named Harold Lenhardt has sent you a very pretty dress. Well, not you, but Carla Scout. I can’t see you squeezing into this frock.” She held up a summery dress.

  “Carla Scout will swim in that. She’s still just at fiftieth percentile for height.” Strange, they had never planned to use both names, but it suited the baby somehow, who had lost much of her hair and developed a skeptical squint in her still-hazel eyes. Lord, how she would hate them some day, for saddling her with that unwieldy name. Much as she had once hated her parents for making her Theresa Esther. Could have been worse. She could have been Shirley.

  “And this is from me.” Whitney handed Tess a flat box. It was a baby book, a pink and white one without a shred of irony. “There’s a place for the first lock of hair, and all the developmental milestones.” Tess’s heart lurched a little. The doctor had said—no, settle down. “But the best part is this page, where you write down the story of her birthday. And who has a better one than you?”

  “Whitney—”

  “Come on, all’s well that ends well. You don’t have to put in the part about the dog urine, or the taser. But you have to give Dempsey his due. Dempsey loves Carla Scout.”

  This was true. Tess suspected the dog, now relegated to being one of the pack, was relieved that someone smaller was finally on the premises.

  “I don’t think one page could ever be enough,” Tess said. “Where do I start? With the discovery I was pregnant? The day I met Crow?”

  “You better write small, if you’re going back that far,” Whitney said. “Just don’t leave out my part. I’m the comic relief.”

  Tess picked up a pen, but instead of marring the pristine baby book, she grabbed one of the black-and-white composition books she always had close at hand.

  “Dear Carla Scout,” she began. “In the weeks that I was waiting for you, I had to stay in bed, where I spent most of my time staring out the window. One day, I saw a girl in a green raincoat . . .”

  FROM

  LAURA LIPPMAN

  Never Steal Anything Small

  In 1986, I went to visit my parents in the beach town where they live to this day. The first day of my vacation was a trifecta of summer pleasures—body-surfing, meals made from the abundant local seafood and produce, soft ice cream after supper. On Day Two, while swimming with my sister, I felt a strange sensation, as if I had kicked a crab that gave me a polite little “Hey, I’m right here” tug, a reminder that the ocean, large as it is, must be shared.

  “I think I stepped on something,” I called to my sister, and headed out of the surf to see.

  The second toe on my right foot had been almost severed. I will flash forward, as is my wont, past the bloody hour that ensued. Ultimately, a smart plastic surgeon who knew that the water posed the greatest risk to healing, patted me back together with nary a stitch and prescribed antibiotics. I spent the rest of the vacation on crutches. This incident would inspire my sister to suggest that I write a story about a young woman in a desolate place, recovering from a similar injury. The only hitch was that I was still more than a decade away from becoming a published novelist. My sister claims no memory of this, yet The Girl in the Green Raincoat was inspired by this long-ago suggestion.

  Of course, as the book makes clear, it also owes much to Rear Window and The Daughter of Time, not to mention an article I wrote in 1998, about three very different families who had bonded in the Johns Hopkins neonatal intensive care unit a decade earlier. I also had several friends who had been put on bed rest during their pregnancies, most notably Leslie Linthicum, from whom I borrowed one small detail in this piece.

  Novels are often compared to childbirth, in that novelists tend to forget any difficulty inherent in the creation once the darling child enters the world. Even while conceding that the novelist may require this selective amnesia, I still believe that writing The Girl in the Green Raincoat was one of the most joyful experiences of my writing life. It was produced during what will probably forever be my most prolific year as a fiction writer: 175,000 words, give or take, which included this novella, a novel, and another novella. The other novella, Scratch a Woman, was nominated for an Edgar® Award; the novel, Life Sentences, received some of the best reviews I have ever gotten and was nominated for the Strand Award. I mention these things not to brag, but to marvel at what a year of intense work can bring. Granted, I was very, very tired in the ensuing year, but that’s a common postpartum condition, no?

  T. S. Eliot said that immature poets imitate, mature poets steal. By that standard, The Girl in the Green Raincoat is felony larceny by an unrepentant recidivist. I stole my sister’s idea, I stole from the aforementioned Rear Window and The Daughter of Time, I stole my aunt Judy’s dog, Gabriel, to create the high-strung but loyal Dempsey. I stole from the casework of Detective Gary Childs, who did, in fact, come face-to-face with a modern-day Bluebeard. I even stole from Chekhov. Take his famous edict about a rifle on the wall, substitute “greyhound/bedpan” for rifle, and you have the framework of The Girl in the Green Raincoat.

  I also stole from The Knitting Circle, a novel written by my friend Ann Hood. The thing is, it quickly became clear to me that a serial
novella could not run by plot alone, especially when its main character was confined to a chaise longue. And although I knew it was impossible for each chapter to stand alone, I fantasized about trying to hold the attention of some weary traveler, stuck on a plane with only the New York Times Magazine to read. Could I layer smaller stories within the larger one, rewarding the reader who sampled, say, only Chapter 3? Ann’s beautiful novel showed me how I might weave individual stories into a larger tapestry.

  I don’t know if I succeeded, but The Girl in the Green Raincoat gave me multiple chances to write about love, marriage, and family. In almost every chapter someone tells Tess such a story. We find out how Mrs. Blossom met Mr. Blossom, why Tess’s father fell in love with her mother, and when young Lloyd Jupiter became enamored with his tutor. And, for the first time, I got to explore the inner psyche of Whitney Talbot. I particularly like Whitney’s meta moment at the end, when she advises Tess to write down the story of Carla Scout’s gestation, announcing: “I’m the comic relief.” When Tess cracks the spine of that black-and-white composition book, she has come full circle from the first book in the series, Baltimore Blues, in which she recorded her resolutions in a similar notebook.

  How will Tess Monaghan combine motherhood and work? That’s a question that Tess and I—hell, women everywhere—are still working out. Sometimes I think she will become more of a deskbound Nero Wolfe, with Whitney, Mrs. Blossom, and Lloyd taking their turns as Archie Goodwin. Or maybe I’ll have to skip ahead several years, to a time when Carla Scout is a little older and able to help her mother in the family business. (Encyclopedia Brown helped his police chief dad.) As I said, we’re still working it out. Anyone know a good babysitter willing to work flexible hours in a chaotic but joyful Baltimore household? I can promise you’ll never be bored.

  Laura Lippman

  Baltimore, Maryland