Joe’s eyes met hers. “Condo Crisis Control takes pride in handling any crisis. Come with me,” he said, cupping a firm hand under her elbow and urging her toward the office. Rachel, mesmerized by the way the baby felt in her arms, was agreeable to someone else’s taking charge, because she truly believed that she was incapable of rational thought at the moment. All the maternal feelings that had been buried so long had unexpectedly surfaced, and she felt overwhelmed by memories. Oddly enough, they weren’t sad memories this time but the happy ones that she sometimes tended to forget.
The manager’s office at Elysian Towers was a spare white cubicle adorned by a dusty potted palm and amateurish seascapes. Jœ, businesslike and efficient, sat down behind the vacant desk and poked around wordlessly for a moment or two before he found a phone book in the bookcase.
Rachel sank down on a chair opposite him. The baby was rooting with its mouth and making little sucking motions. She felt a wave of helplessness that she couldn’t feed it. She had always prided herself on nursing her babies, had nursed them longer than her friends thought necessary, and she had reveled in the warm moist sensation of the tiny mouth against her nipples and the gentle tugging in her abdomen as they suckled. It had been a sexual feeling almost, and Nick had pretended to be jealous of the baby, and she had teased him about it, and—
“Here it is,” said Joe, breaking into her reverie. He underlined a number in the book. “Department of Health and Social Services. They’re the government agency responsible for abandoned children. Do you want to call or shall I?”
Rachel swallowed. She wanted to go on holding the baby. “You’d better,” she said.
Joe punched out the numbers on the phone and waited while it rang on the other end. “It’s a recording,” he said in exasperation as he slammed down the phone. “It’s a sure bet nobody’s there because it’s the Christmas holiday. And this is Wednesday, which is Christmas Eve, and Thursday is Christmas Day, and a lot of state government offices are closed on Friday. Do you realize that there may be no one in their office until Monday?”
“Oh, dear,” said Rachel.
Joe stared at her for a moment. “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”
She was uncomfortable with his being able to read her so well. “Enjoying! That’s not exactly the word. It’s a beautiful baby, that’s all, and I can’t imagine who could have left it in the manger, and—well, I’m worried. But I’m somehow glad that I found it.”
“Why?” Those incisive eyes were direct and honest, and they demanded the same from her.
But she couldn’t tell him why. She never talked about it. She never mentioned Nick and Lolly and Melissa and Derek. She shrugged and looked down at the baby so that Joe Marzinski wouldn’t see the desolation in her eyes.
The baby began to squirm.
“I think we’d better change its diaper,” Rachel said. She was glad for the diversion.
“Couldn’t we stop referring to the baby as ‘it’?” Joe’s voice held a hint of teasing.
Rachel lay the baby flat in her lap and unwrapped the blanket, exposing a chubby little body. She peeked inside the diaper. “It’s a girl,” she said.
The baby, perhaps feeling the cool rush of air from the air-conditioner vent overhead, began to cry even louder, transforming herself into a tiny package of pure misery.
“Mrs. Rink’s niece visited last month and brought her baby along. Maybe she has some diapers left over,” Rachel said over the din.
“What?” It was hard to hear anything over the baby’s cries.
“I’m taking her upstairs.” And Rachel got up and walked out into the lobby, where two men in coveralls bearing logos saying Condo Crisis Control were sucking water up into large vacuum cleaners. Joe gave them a pleased thumbs-up sign, but the roar of the vacuum cleaners in addition to the baby’s wailing made it impossible to talk, and Rachel was surprised when Joe stepped into the elevator with her. As it began its upward journey, she shushed the baby, who refused to be calmed.
Rachel stared at Joe in the bright light from the fluorescent fixture overhead. “You don’t have to come with me,” she shouted.
“I want to,” he shouted back.
When they reached the eleventh floor, Joe followed her out of the elevator to the door marked 11E. Rachel fumbled in her shorts pocket for the key to Mimi’s apartment
“You better let me hold the baby,” Joe said, and Rachel, seeing the sense of this, deposited the squalling infant in his arms. Joe began to rock back and forth, an instinctive movement, but it surprised Rachel nevertheless. She hadn’t thought of Joe Marzinski with his brisk no-nonsense air as knowing what to do with a baby.
She dug the key out of her pocket and inserted it into the lock. The door swung open on Mimi’s startling yellow-and-white decor.
Joe blinked his eyes at the brightness within.
“Mimi—my grandmother—wanted something to cheer her up after my grandfather died,” Rachel explained loudly as Joe took in the overwhelming decor.
“Looks like she got it,” Joe muttered. He looked slightly stunned.
“I’d better run over to Gladys’s about the diapers,” Rachel said.
“What?”
No surprise; he couldn’t hear her. “I’D BETTER GO OVER TO GLADYS RINK’S ABOUT THE DIAPERS,” she repeated more loudly. Joe grinned and shook his head. But she thought he got the message.
As she ran down the long hallway, Rachel dreaded knocking on the formidable Gladys’s door. But the baby needed a clean diaper right away, and this was the fastest way Rachel knew to get one.
JOE MARZINSKI, surrounded by yellow walls, yellow furniture, yellow everything, gazed down at the angry red-faced baby screaming in his arms and thought with some annoyance, How did I get involved in this?
But then again, how could he not? His firm specialized in controlling condominium crises. If this wasn’t a crisis, what was? The baby was clearly abandoned. Joe, as he tried his best to calm the baby, couldn’t imagine how anyone could leave a kid right out in the open like that, manger or no manger, and on Christmas Eve to boot. A baby was to be cherished and loved, nurtured and adored. Like a woman, but more so.
Oh, he was accustomed to babies. Joe came from a large Polish Catholic family, and his five fertile sisters and their husbands kept the family well supplied. Mary Cecilia had five children, and Gracie had three, all boys. Then there was Lois with her brood of four and one on the way, which would catch her up with Mary Cecilia, much to her delight. And then there was Tonia and her twin girls, and Jenn with her four-year-old son. Jenn lagged behind the others, but she was the youngest.
His sisters and brothers-in-law, immersed as they were in the joys of child rearing, pestered him a lot for not upholding the family tradition in producing offspring. “When are you going to get married?” they kept asking. Up until recently, Joe had only smiled or deflected their inquiries with a lighthearted comment of some sort. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to get married. The trouble was that he hadn’t found the right woman.
At Thanksgiving only a few weeks ago, Jenn had bugged him again about remaining a bachelor for so long. He’d recently been out with a local schoolteacher a few times, so he’d dropped that information right into the middle of the family razzfest. What the rest of the Marzinskis still didn’t know was that Joe had already crossed the schoolteacher off his list of possibilities because she’d made it clear that she didn’t want kids.
The truth was that Joe was thirty-five and tired of looking. All the good ones, he suspected, had been picked off long ago by guys who didn’t have to spend all their time building a business. Now that Condo Crisis Control was thriving, Joe could afford to take time off. He couldn’t find anyone worth spending it with, that’s all. It was sad in a way, but what was a guy to do?
He wished this baby would stop crying. Maybe a view of the scenery would help. He wandered over to take in the wide-window view of Coquina Beach and the Intra-coastal Waterway to the west. At this time of year with all the
colored lights adorning the houses on the other side, the view was spectacular.
“Look,” he said to the baby. “See the lights? Pretty neat, huh?”
Not that she seemed to pay any attention. If anything, the crying intensified. And she was kicking so hard that the blanket fell away. His admiration of the Christmas scene across the water paled when he touched one little foot. Now here was something to admire: five little toes. He uncovered her other foot. Five more little toes. Her toenails reminded him of tiny pink seashells.
The baby was a newborn. Joe was pretty sure of that. She was a chubby baby, maybe weighing seven and a half pounds or so, and she seemed alert. Hell, she was more than alert. She was energetic. She was robust. And there was certainly nothing wrong with the kid’s lungs. Her screaming was probably audible all the way up to the penthouses on the sixteenth floor.
“Hey,” he said softly. “Do you think you could stop making such a racket?” The baby cried even louder.
“Rachel and me, we’re doing our best,” he said in a reasoning tone, forgetting for the moment that babies didn’t take to reasoning. Not knowing what else to do, he hummed the lullabye his mother had always sung to him when he was a kid. Before he knew whether this measure was likely to have any effect, the front door swung open and he swiveled around to see a harried Rachel followed by Gladys Rink carrying a box of disposable diapers.
Rachel headed straight for him, her hair bouncing around her shoulders. She was beautiful. And she was all eyes for the baby. Suddenly he wished she would look at him with that same interest.
“I’m going to change her diaper, and then…” Rachel was saying as she took the baby in her arms.
Changing diapers was something Joe knew about. “Wait,” he said, and marshaling his thoughts, making himself concentrate on the matter at hand, he went into the kitchen where he rummaged in the pantry and found what looked like an old but waterproof-vinyl patio tablecloth, which he took into the living room and spread over the couch.
What he’d done was no big deal, but Rachel smiled her thanks with eyes so big and brown that he felt as if he could sink into their velvety depths. For the first time he noticed her short tip-tilted nose and her full rosy mouth that looked for all the world as if it needed kissing.
Kissing. Now why was he thinking about that? Get a grip, Marzinski, he told himself sternly.
The door to the hallway hung ajar, and in crept Ynez Garcia, her hair still snaked around those awful pink curlers. “I happened to have some cans of infant formula sitting around. I fed it to Rubio when he was sick.” She sounded slightly apologetic.
Rachel, sitting on the couch and applying the clean diaper to the baby, whose cries had diminished somewhat, said blankly, “Mrs. Garcia—Ynez—you fed infant formula to your cat?”
“Si, poor gato, it was the only thing he’d eat before he died.”
“Well, you’re sure it’s infant formula, right?”
“Oh, certainly, I wouldn’t offer it if it could harm our little Christmas miracle. See, it mixes right out of the can half and half with water. I’ll make it up for you if you want.”
“Okay,” Rachel said. “The can opener is in the middle kitchen drawer.” She jiggled the baby while Ynez rummaged in the drawer and washed off the top of the can.
“Rachel, there is a problem,” she called over her shoulder. “The can opener broke.”
“I’ll see if I can fix it,” Joe said, but after one look at it he tossed it in the garbage can. “It’s too bent to work. Is there another one?”
“No,” Rachel said distractedly. “At least not the punch type.”
“I’ll get one from my place,” said Gladys. As she was preparing to leave, Ivan O’Toole walked in, grumpiness written all over his wispy, lined face. “I couldn’t concentrate on TV with all the noise in the hall. I heard everyone milling about.”
Gladys drew herself up to her full height, which was somewhere short of a self-important five feet. “We weren’t milling, Ivan. We are helping, which is more than you can say, I might add.”
Ivan took in the box of diapers on the couch and Ynez in the kitchen measuring formula into a pitcher. “I could do something, I guess,” he said reluctantly.
“You could sit down and be quiet,” said Gladys.
“Aw, Gladys, you underestimate me.” With that, he withdrew a cellophane-packaged pacifier from his shirt pocket and dangled it in front of the baby.
“Now where did you ever get that?” demanded Gladys.
Ivan looked proud of himself. “From the drugstore. I picked up a bunch of baby items that they donated to the condo’s hurricane-relief supply a few weeks ago, and this didn’t get included because it fell behind the couch. Maybe I better wash it off before you give it to the baby.” He hurried into the kitchen.
“I thought you were going to get us a can opener,” Rachel reminded Gladys gently.
“Humph, yes,” Gladys said before bustling out. She soon returned brandishing the required utensil. “We’re bearing gifts,” she sniffed. “Like the three wise men.”
“It’s a Christmas miracle, I tell you,” Ynez reiterated from the kitchen.
Ivan O’Toole objected strenuously to this viewpoint, and Gladys tossed in her few cents’ worth. While the others continued to take issue with each other over every possible aspect of the situation, Joe said quietly to Rachel, “What can I do?”
Rachel turned to him with a tentative but grateful smile. “If you don’t mind, you could get on the phone and call the Health and Social Services people again. Maybe you can leave a message for someone to call here. I mean, I found a baby. An abandoned baby. We really need to report it to someone, don’t you think?”
He smiled back. It was easy to smile at Rachel. “We should.” He reached for his cell phone, realized he’d left it in the company van. “Is there a phone in the kitchen?”
Rachel glanced over her shoulder at the group, which Gladys was attempting to organize into some semblance of order. “Better use the one in the master bedroom.” She gestured with her head toward a door at the far end of the room.
Happy to absent himself from the contentious crowd, which Rachel was now trying to mollify, Joe ambled into the bedroom, which was decorated in a delicate lemon shade of yellow with sheer white draperies pulled halfway across sliding glass doors leading to a balcony overlooking the ocean. The moon was rising now, unfurling ripples of light on the water.
He had to look the number up again before dialing. He tried not to wince as the tinny answering machine message at HSS grated in his ear for the second time that night. “Sorry, but we’re out of the office for the Christmas weekend. Our regular office hours are…” and the message droned on as Joe listened. At the end the voice said, “In an emergency, please leave a message,” before a beep threatened to separate his ear from his head.
“This is Joe Marzinski,” he said impatiently, wondering if anyone in the annals of human history had ever gone deaf from listening to answering machine beeps. He thought he himself might be a likely candidate.
“It’s Wednesday night, Christmas Eve, and we’ve found an abandoned baby at the Elysian Towers condominium. Please have someone call—” and at this point he had to look at the phone to find out the number “—as soon as possible. It’s very important,” he said, emphasizing his words, but the machine cut him off before he could get in the last two syllables of the last word. He slammed the phone down in anger at the unwieldiness of bureaucracies.
Reluctant to rejoin the group until he had calmed down, he glanced around the bedroom. Rachel had said that the apartment belonged to her grandmother, and on the dresser he spotted a picture of a smiling Rachel with her arms wrapped around a beaming older woman who was wearing a wide-brimmed flowery hat. That must be Mimi, he thought. But he doubted that the lacy rose-and-violet-print satin bra looped over the doorknob was Mimi’s; ditto the black ribbon-trimmed nightie folded neatly on the nightstand.
He grinned at the thought of Ra
chel wearing that nightie and was titillated by the unbidden vision of her sliding out of bed in the morning with one strap slipping down her shoulder. He caught himself up short. He had only just met Rachel Hirsch. He had no business thinking intimate thoughts about her. He noted with a not-so-dispassionate interest that there were no signs of a man around.
“Joe! Are you off the phone?”
Feeling undeniably hopeful about where all this might lead, he sauntered out of the bedroom to see Rachel holding the baby over her shoulder and gently rubbing her back. The baby was sucking vigorously on the pacifier, and Mrs. Rink and Mrs. Garcia and Mr. O’Toole were hovering with hushed reverence in the background.
“I left a message with HSS. How’s the baby doing?”
Rachel looked worried. “She’s hungry. No telling how long it’s been since she ate. And, Joe, we don’t have any baby bottles. Ynez has mixed the formula, though. The problem is that we can’t get it into the baby.”
“I’ll run to the drug store.”
“No point in it. Every place is closed at this hour. It’s Christmas Eve.”
Joe raked an impatient hand through his hair. “Can’t you use an eyedropper or something?”
Rachel patted the baby’s round little bottom. “Babies have a sucking instinct, and she wouldn’t be able to suck on an eyedropper.”
Gladys Rink cleared her throat. “Nellie Winstrom on the seventh floor collects dolls for a hobby, and she showed me a baby doll that came with a nursing bottle. It looked exactly the same as a real bottle only smaller. Want me to go see if she’s home?”
“Please,” said Rachel.
Gladys returned in a few minutes, triumphantly waving a doll’s bottle. “She said we could use it,” she said. “Until we can get the baby a real bottle, that is.” She rushed to the kitchen to fill it with formula.
Ivan stepped forward. “We can’t go on calling this child ‘the baby.’ She needs a name.”
“A name?” said Ynez. “Why, we should call her Christmas. Because she’s a Christmas miracle.”
“I was thinking of Noel,” Gladys called from the kitchen in a tone that brooked no protest.
Baby Christmas Page 2
