Nursery Crimes

by Ayelet Waldman

  When Peter and I had met in New York City, seven years before, he was working at Movie Madness, a cult video store in the East Village, and writing horror screenplays in his spare time. Actually, he’d been writing screenplays at work instead of waiting on customers. Our first conversation involved my threatening to report him to his boss and his asking me out for a beer instead. I still have no idea why I went out with him. It probably had a lot to do with his soft, sexy, gray eyes.

  At the time Peter and I met, I had been earning big bucks at a prestigious New York law firm. I married him six months after that first beer, fully expecting to support him for the rest of our lives together. Three weeks after we came home from our honeymoon (beach-hopping and rain-forest-trekking in Costa Rica), he got a call from his agent. Slasher movies were suddenly in vogue, and one of that year’s hottest producers had gotten his hands on Peter’s script for Flesh-Eaters I. He optioned it for more money than I made in a year.

  Much to my joy, Peter’s success allowed me to quit my job. The short and only answer to the question of why I had ever become a corporate lawyer in the first place was money. I graduated from Harvard Law School owing seventy-five thousand dollars. Delacroix, Swanson, & Gerard offered me a starting salary of just under ninety thousand dollars a year. After two years at the firm I had lowered my debt to a mere fifty thousand dollars, higher than my parents’ mortgage but a slightly more manageable monthly payment than when I had started out.

  During those two years I had billed six thousand hours, represented an asbestos manufacturer and a toxic-waste dumper, and helped to bust a union. My garment-workers’-union-organizing grandfather must have been spinning in his grave. I’d spent three weeks trapped in a warehouse in Jersey City, sifting through documents, and a month in a conference room in the Detroit Airport Hilton, listening to lying corporate executives. I’d done so many all-nighters that for a while Peter was certain I was cheating on him. The lunches at Lutèce and the Lincoln Town cars that drove me home each night were no compensation for the misery I felt during every one of my fourteen-hour days. By the time Peter got his big break, I was way past ready to quit.

  We used Peter’s advance to pay off my law school loans, packed the contents of our apartment into a U-Haul, hooked it to the back of my aunt Irene’s 1977 Buick, and took off for the promised land, Los Angeles. We ended up in a 1930s apartment chock-full of period details and period appliances in Hancock Park, near Melrose Avenue, and I got the job I’d always wanted, as a federal public defender. For the next couple of years Peter wrote script after script, some of which were actually made into movies. We met a lot of interesting and creative people: writers, directors, and even an occasional actor. I represented gangbangers and drug dealers and became familiar with a side of L.A. that most of our new Hollywood friends tried to pretend didn’t exist. I was the only one of our set not either writing a script, producing a movie, or trying to do one or the other. Nonetheless, I managed to hold my own at industry cocktail parties, regaling studio executives with stories about my cross-dressing bank-robber clients and how I was “protected” by the Thirty-seventh Avenue Crips.

  I loved my job, and I was really good at it. Everything was going wonderfully, and we were really happy. And then something happened that destroyed it all: We had a baby.

  Anyone who tells you that having a child doesn’t completely and irrevocably ruin your life is lying. As soon as that damp little bundle of poop and neediness lands in your life, it’s all over. Everything changes. Your relationship is destroyed. Your looks are shot. Your productivity is devastated. And you get stupid. Dense. Thick. Pregnancy and lactation make you dumb. That’s a proven, scientific fact.

  I went back to work when Ruby was four months old, and I quit ten months later. I just couldn’t stand being apart from her and Peter. I’d call in the afternoon, snatching a few minutes to pump breast milk between court appearances and visiting clients at the detention center. Peter would tell me the latest cute Ruby story. I missed her first word (“boom”) and the day she started to walk. Peter wrote at night, slept in, and took over for the nanny at eleven each morning. He and Ruby spent the day together, going to the park, playing blocks, lunching with pals from Mommy and Me. I was jealous. Completely, insanely jealous.

  I was also doing a lousy job at work. I didn’t want to be there any longer than I absolutely had to. I was relieved when clients pled guilty because that meant I wouldn’t have to put in the late nights a trial demands. I finally realized that I was giving everything short shrift—my work, my husband, and most of all, Ruby.

  So I quit. I dumped three years of Harvard Law School into the toilet and became a full-time mom. That decision blew everyone away, including me. My boss, the kind of working mother who came back to work when her kids were three months old and never looked back, thought I’d lost my mind. My mother kept me on the phone one night for two hours, crying. I was supposed to have the career she’d never been able to achieve. She felt like I had betrayed her feminist dream. My friends who hadn’t yet had kids looked at me with a kind of puzzled condescension, obviously wondering what had become of the ambition that used to consume me.

  As for myself, I couldn’t really believe what I had done. For months, when people asked me what I did, I continued to reply, “public defender.” If pressed, I would clarify by saying that I was on leave to be with my daughter. I never really came to grips with my status as a “stay-at-home mom.” I’d always had just a little bit of disdain for women who devoted themselves completely to their families. I’d always assumed that they were home because they couldn’t cut it, out in the real world. It had never occurred to me that a person would voluntarily leave a career in which she excelled in order to spend her days changing diapers and playing “This Little Piggy.”

  But that’s what I had done. The worst part of it was that I wasn’t especially proud of my skills as a mother. Ruby was turning out fine, if willful, stubborn, brilliant, and funny qualify as fine, but I wasn’t any June Cleaver. I did all the things mothers aren’t supposed to do. I yelled. I was sarcastic. I let her watch TV. I fed her candy and almost always forgot to wash the pesticides off the fruit. I never kept up with the laundry. My shortcomings as a mother bothered me enough to make me consider going back to work, but then I found myself pregnant again. That settled it. Awash in ambivalence, alternately bored and entranced, full of both joy and despair, I joined the ranks of stay-at-home moms. At least for the time being.

  By the time we arrived back home from our debacle at the preschool, we were all sufficiently recovered from our ordeal to joke about it. Peter treated us to a dead-on imitation of Bruce LeCrone. Ruby and I invented a new game that consisted of pinching each other, shrieking “I love to gwab!” and then collapsing on the floor in giggles. By that evening our family’s failure to enter the social register of the preschool set was forgotten.

  After we had bundled Ruby into bed, and Peter had read that night’s installment of Ozma of Oz, we settled down for the night. Peter went to work in his office, a converted maid’s room at the back of our apartment, and I got into bed with my evening snack of ice cream and salted almonds. The calcium needs of my pregnant body provided sufficient rationalization for my astronomical ice cream intake. A few almonds made my decadent snack a protein-rich necessity. Or at least that’s what I liked to tell myself. The increasing spread of my thighs I attributed to my body’s stockpiling fat in order to breast-feed.

  I flicked on the TV and spent the next couple of hours watching a movie about a woman with lymphoma whose anorexic daughter is sexually abused by a cross-dressing drug addict while a mudslide threatens their home (or something like that; I don’t really remember). I was in hysterical tears from start to finish. I love watching disease-of-the-week films when I’m pregnant. That extra burst of hormones makes for a delightful two-hour sobfest. After the movie was over, I was about to turn off the set when the lead-in for the eleven-o’clock local news caught my attention.

&n
bsp; “A prominent nursery school principal died tonight in an apparent hit-and-run. Angie Fong is live at the scene of the crash.”

  No way. It wasn’t Abigail Hathaway. It couldn’t be. After all, there were umpteen preschools and nursery schools in the Greater Los Angeles area. I stayed glued to the set through the commercial break.

  The perky, helmet-haired news reporter stood in front of a cordoned-off street corner. Behind her I could see a mailbox tipped over on its side and crushed. I could swear I saw a woman’s shoe lying next to it on the sidewalk. As soon as I heard Abigail Hathaway’s name, I yelled for Peter. He came rushing in to the bedroom, looking panicked.

  “What? Are you okay? Is it the baby?”

  I pointed wordlessly at the television.

  “Abigail Hathaway, the founder and director of the exclusive Heart’s Song School, was killed in an apparent hit-and-run outside of the school entrance this evening. Witnesses say a late-model European sedan, either gray or black, swerved onto the sidewalk, crushed the victim against a mailbox, and then took off at a high rate of speed. No suspect has been apprehended.”

  The news reporter turned to a man in a baseball jacket with long, stringy hair. He was standing next to a shopping cart piled high with empty cans and bottles.

  “Sir, you saw the accident?”

  “It was no accident, man,” he said. “This car comes speeding ’round the corner, goes up on the curb, bashes into her, and then takes off. I swear it was aiming right for her.”

  “And did you see the driver, sir?”

  “Nah, but I saw the car. Silver Mercedes or maybe a black Beemer. Something like that. It was aiming for her, swear to God.”

  The screen switched back to the news anchor in the newsroom.

  “Police are asking that anyone with any information about this incident please call the number on the bottom of your screen.”

  A commercial began, and I switched off the set. I had this strange, nauseated feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  “Oh, my God. I just can’t believe it. We saw her today. Today.” I felt tears rising up in my eyes. Peter sat down on the bed and pulled me to his chest. I started to cry.

  “I know, honey, I know,” he murmured, stroking my hair with his hand.

  “I don’t know why I’m crying,” I said, sobbing. “I didn’t even like her.”

  “I know, honey.”

  I stopped my tears. I had the hiccups. “I’m okay. Really. You can go back to work.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah, it’s okay. I’m going to call Stacy.” Stacy was an old friend from college, whose six-year-old son was a graduate of Heart’s Song. Peter went back to his office and I dialed the phone.

  “Hello?” Stacy’s voice sounded groggy.

  “It’s me. Sorry to wake you, but have you heard?”

  “What?”

  “Somebody killed Abigail Hathaway.”

  “What?” She perked up. “Are you serious? What happened?”

  “I was just lying here watching the news. We didn’t get in, by the way. And they come on with this story about how somebody mowed her down with their car. I couldn’t believe it. I started crying.”

  “What do you mean, you didn’t get in? She didn’t give you an application?”

  “No. Anyway, are you listening to me? The woman is dead!”

  “Jeez. Wow. It was a car accident?”

  “Yes. I mean, no. She was on the street outside of the school and some car hit her and then took off.”

  “Outside of the school?” Stacy sounded horrified. “Outside of Heart’s Song?”

  “Right on the corner. A car hit her and knocked her into a mailbox. At least I think that’s what happened. Anyway, she’s dead.”

  We talked for a while longer, speculating that the driver must have been drunk. I told Stacy about the interview and described the scene between the angry father and Ms. Hathaway.

  Suddenly something occurred to me. “Oh, my God, Stace. Maybe he killed her! Maybe he freaked after not getting into the school! Maybe he snapped!”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake, Juliet. He did not kill her. Bruce LeCrone is a studio executive. He’s the president of Parnassus Studios. And he used to work at ICA. He’s not a murderer.”

  Stacy is an agent at International Creative Artists, one of the most prestigious talent agencies in town. She knows everybody in Hollywood.

  “How do you know what he’s capable of?” I said. “You didn’t see this guy. He was furious. Insanely furious.”

  “Juliet, Bruce LeCrone’s temper is legendary. That was just par for the course with him. You should hear how he treats his assistants.”

  “I still think there was something bizarre about how angry he got. I think I’m going to call the cops and let them know what happened.”

  “I really don’t think that’s such a hot idea. If you make trouble for LeCrone, and he finds out it was you, Peter will never sell a script to Parnassus. You don’t want to go throwing wrenches into your husband’s career just because you have some wacked-out theory.”

  That stopped me in my tracks. I certainly didn’t want to ruin Peter’s chances of doing a movie with one of the biggest studios in town.

  “I’ll talk to Peter about it before I do anything.”

  “You do that.”

  “So, what were you up to tonight?” I asked.

  “Nothing! What do you mean? What are you suggesting?”

  “Jeez, Stacy. Get a grip. I wasn’t suggesting anything. I just wanted to know what you were up to.”

  “Oh. Nothing. I worked late.”

  “Poor you.”

  “Yeah, poor me.”

  We said good night and I turned off the light. Shivering, I snuggled down into my bed, tucked my body pillow under my heavy belly, and pulled the down comforter up to my chin. I couldn’t seem to get warm. It was a long while before I fell asleep.

  ABIGAIL Hathaway’s homicide happened too late at night to make that morning’s Los Angeles Times, but the morning news shows each aired the story. I watched all three networks and got three very different stories. One referred to the death as a traffic accident. Another said the police had suspects under investigation. The third reported that the police were treating the death as a hit-and-run and were looking for the driver, whom they believed might have been under the influence of drugs or alcohol. Much to my embarrassment, I found myself vaguely disappointed that it appeared to have been a random accident. Over the course of my long, sleepless night I had worked up a head of steam about Bruce LeCrone. He seemed decidedly murderous to me.

  The problem with having experience as a criminal defense lawyer is that you tend to see criminal violence everywhere, in everyone. One of Peter’s and my biggest sources of conflict is that despite the fact that he spends his days thinking up new and exciting ways for people to be killed, preferably with as much blood and pain as possible, he is an eternal optimist who always believes every human being to be basically good at heart. I’ve spent too much time with apparently normal guys (and some women, too) who’ve done heinous things and am always willing to believe someone capable of extreme violence.

  Not surprisingly, we got into an argument when I told Peter that I was suspicious of LeCrone. I had just woken him and was standing in the doorway of my closet, desperately searching for something to wear. Ruby was happily ensconced in the living room, glued to The Lion King.

  “Oh, right, Juliet,” Peter said, obviously irritated. “That’s what most studio heads worth nine bazillion dollars go around doing. Murdering preschool teachers.”

  “He’s not most studio heads! Tell me you didn’t think he was psychotic.”

  “I didn’t. Aggressive, yes. Used to getting his own way? Yes. But psychotic? No. If he’s psychotic then so are two-thirds of the executives in Hollywood.”

  I thought about that for a moment while I rummaged through a pile of trousers, looking for some maternity leggings. Stacy had said the same thing, and it did hav
e a ring of truth to it. Peter was always regaling me with stories of his dealings with various producers. One guy, in particular, was legendary. He had a phone with buttons on it marked “rice cakes”; “diet Coke”; “sushi.” If he punched a button and his assistant didn’t show up immediately with the requisite item, heads rolled. This same producer was famous for having been arrested on a flight from New York to Los Angeles for refusing to give up the in-flight phone and screaming obscenities at the flight attendant who tried to pry it away from him. He was probably single-handedly responsible for the appearance of phones on the backs of airplane seats. Bruce LeCrone was certainly no more horrifying a character than he.

  On the other hand, as far as I knew, neither the flight attendant nor any of the assistants of the ranting and raving producer had ended up dead. It was one of LeCrone’s enemies who had gotten herself mashed against a mailbox by a luxury car.

  However, giving my already stressed-out husband grounds for an anxiety attack was not on my list of appropriate activities for the day. I decided to drop it—or at least to let Peter think I had.

  “You’re right. I know you’re right. Listen, you remember I’m supposed to be having lunch with Marla?” Marla Goldfarb was the Federal Public Defender, and my old boss.

  “Was that today?”

  “Yeah. I told you yesterday. Is that a problem? Do you have a meeting this afternoon? Can you watch Ruby?”

  “Sure, no problem. I was going to take her on a comic-book-store crawl, anyway.” Peter’s idea of a good time is hitting every comic-book store in Hollywood in a single afternoon. If he doesn’t get the latest Hellboy or Eightball on the very day it’s issued, he’s completely inconsolable.