“And one night I was there with my girlfriend, and Scott was with another guy from Sears, and there weren’t enough booths, so the waitress asked if we minded sharing, and we said we didn’t, so we shared the booth, and then Scott asked me out.” Amber rattled on, her hands moving in her lap, her color rising. The cool young woman had turned simpering teenager.
“You were already pregnant?”
Color flooded her cheeks. “I wasn’t sure,” she said in a small voice. “I’ve never been that regular. Missing a period or two wasn’t that unusual for me.”
“You must have been showing a little,” I persisted.
“My weight goes up and down. I just thought I needed to cut down on the Friendly’s ice cream.”
So far, so plausible. Young love at the mall, followed by an unplanned surprise, followed by marriage and a desire to start a family in spite of the odds. Maybe a little touch of soap opera, but nothing sinister. Until Amber decided the Greenspans should pay her medical bills.
“Are you still working at Sears?”
Scott shook his head. “Got a construction job for a while,” he said. “When that shut down for the winter, I went to work at Macy’s, in the stockroom.”
I pressed him for the name of his boss, the duration of the job, his salary, the address where he and Amber were living—everything I thought the court would want to know.
Then I turned my attention to the harder question.
“You really think you could be a father to a kid who isn’t yours?”
Scott lifted his shoulders again in the loose shrug that characterized his generation. This time the shrug said, What the hell, nothing matters anyway, so why not quit your job, get another one, raise a kid? It’s all the same.
“I take it that’s an affirmative.” This conversation was making me feel like a teacher. Any minute now I’d be calling him “Mr. Wylie” in that snide tone I’d hated when I was in high school.
It was more than a little disconcerting for a card-carrying member of the generation that hadn’t trusted anyone over thirty to be on the other side of the generation gap.
“I like kids,” he said, an unexpected grin lighting his face. His teeth were perfect, a triumph of orthodontia. Scott, I realized, had been raised upper-middle class. So what was he doing working construction, meeting his future wife at the mall?
“Where did you grow up, Scott?” I asked.
“On Staten Island,” he replied.
“Where on Staten Island?”
“Near La Tourette Park.”
Amber leaned forward, an eager light in her eyes. It struck me she hadn’t known the answer herself, that she’d married a man she knew little about.
“Near where Amber was living at the group home?” I pressed. “In New Springville or Westerleigh?” I named two working-class neighborhoods.
His mouth turned down into a sulk, and for a moment I wondered if he’d take the Fifth. He gave another shrug. “No, the other side of the golf course,” he admitted. And it was an admission, the way he said it. As if he were confessing to coming from the wrong side of the tracks. Only Scott had come from the side of the park with the wide green lawns and big houses. The side where people went to Ivy League schools and earned advanced degrees. The side where you didn’t sport work boots and box-cutting tools as a fashion statement.
They walked out of the office with their arms around each other’s waist. Amber locked her fingers into Scott’s belt loop with an air of ownership and seemed to lean her hips into his as if trying to melt into a single unit.
After they left, I sat amid the now-useless paperwork and cursed softly to myself. Which was a restrained response under the circumstances; I would have felt better if I’d swept the papers off the desk in a grand gesture of renunciation.
On some level I hadn’t begun to think about consciously, I’d let Marla talk me into handling Amber’s adoption in order to make up for Rojean Glover’s dead children. I’d wanted more than anything to help save a child, help create a happy family.
I had to tell myself there was no reason Adam—correction: Jimmy—couldn’t be happy on Staten Island with Amber and Scott.
Telling myself was one thing. Telling Marla was another. I called her office; her secretary said she was in Brooklyn Supreme, Part 52. I considered leaving a message but discarded the idea as too cowardly. Marla deserved to hear this in person, and soon.
I put on my linen blazer and headed out the door, prepared to intercept Marla in court.
This time no faces floated out of the ground.
“Let me get this straight,” Marla said in a tone loud enough for the first two rows of the courtroom to hear. “I take you to meet your client on Saturday, she throws me out of the room, and on Monday she goes and gets herself married?”
I cast uneasy eyes around the courtroom. The judge was on break, but civil lawyers in the first row were finding our conversation too interesting for my taste. “Can we discuss this in the hall?” I asked, my voice an octave lower than Marla’s.
The question was a mistake. Given the mood she was in, if I’d begged to stay in the courtroom, she’d have hauled me bodily into the corridor. She stood in the aisle between the first row of seats and the railing, feet planted apart, her arms crossed over her ample breasts—mad as hell and not giving a damn who knew it.
“That little bitch,” Marla said, in an almost conversational tone, a tone that worried me even more than yelling. Marla quiet was far more deadly than Marla in full voice.
“I thought we could go see the clerk of the Surrogate’s Court together,” I said. “I’m not quite sure what happens next, what papers I have to file when.”
“Oh, is that what you thought?” Marla countered, raising an eyebrow in exquisite disdain. The briefcases in the front row liked that one; I heard a snicker or two but didn’t bother taking names. “You thought I’d help you take that baby away from my clients. You thought I’d let you get away with this piece of treachery, this—”
“Let me get away with what?” My voice rose in spite of myself. I didn’t want to have this conversation in public, but I did want to understand what Marla was driving at. “What is it I’m supposed to have done here, Marla?”
“She gets married two days before she drops the kid,” Marla said, her words etched in acid, “which is also two days after she meets you for the first time, and you’ve got the nerve to stand there and tell me you didn’t give her a crash course in matrimonial law?” Her green eyes raked me up and down. “Save it, Cass. Save it for someone who might believe it.”
She shook her head deliberately; her platinum hair moved in a well-sprayed unit. “I can’t believe I let you do this to me. All the years I’ve handled adoptions, and I’ve never been outmaneuvered like this.”
“If it makes you feel any better,” I said, “I didn’t know what she was going to do. She didn’t ask me anything about marriage; she didn’t tell me she was getting married. There was nothing said in that room you couldn’t have heard.”
She shot me a penetrating glance that held no softness. “Then why wasn’t I there to hear it?” she asked sweetly.
I shook my head. I had no idea why Amber had insisted Marla leave the room, but I could tell it didn’t matter. She was determined to believe I’d instructed Amber on the effects of a prebirth marriage on the presumption of paternity, and that was that.
“I should have known,” Marla went on. “The minute that creep in the silver car came around, I should have known. In fact, I did know. But I let that little bitch tell me she didn’t know him. Not that I believed her for a minute.”
“Marla,” I began, “I know how you feel. I’m not happy about this either.” Understatement of the year; I’d rather face ten juries bringing back verdicts in murder cases than look at another adoption. “But this can’t be the first time this has ever happened to you. Birth mothers have thirty days to change their minds, and that’s what Amber did.”
“Did she?” Marla rad
iated a steady, simmering rage that boiled to the surface like a geyser. “Did she really change her mind, or was she planning this all along? Isn’t that why she got married when she did—to strengthen her legal case? It seems to me her plan from the beginning was to string my clients along, get as much money out of them as possible, and then grab the baby. After they paid all her expenses and gave her presents and God knows what else.”
“Can’t you sue for the money?” I asked. Not a particularly strategic question, since I represented the potential defendant, but I was curious.
“Yeah, like the little bitch still has any of the money,” she replied. Her foot, shod in a black flat with little jewels on the toe, tapped impatiently on the courthouse floor. “Or if she does, she’s socked it away someplace. The prospects of getting any of it back are not large. And my clients would rather put whatever they have left into another baby, not into legal fees for a case that won’t get them anything.”
Another baby. I could hardly bear to imagine Ellie Greenspan saying good-bye to Adam, just as Amber herself had done three weeks earlier, then combing the ads in the Dreamchild newsletter for another birth mother to subsidize. The cruelty of Amber’s decision came home to me yet again.
Marla locked her green eyes with mine. “I swear, Cass,” she promised, her voice as cold as a Disney stepmother’s, “I’ll make you wish you’d never taken this case.”
Too late for that, I wanted to say but didn’t.
Marla FedExed me her papers two days later. The top document was a court order, signed not by Sylvia Feinberg, the Surrogate we were scheduled to appear before, but by Judge Julius Hargrove of the Family Court.
Family Court. Marla had called it a poor people’s court, had dismissed it as a place no self-respecting adoption lawyer would be caught dead in. And now she was serving me with an order from that very same court.
Why?
I skimmed the front page, my eyes eliding the legalese, trying to get to the heart of the matter. Finally, buried on the third page of the affidavit in support, I had it:
“I, Joshua Elliott Greenspan, am the biological father of the child known as Adam Greenspan, born Baby Boy Lundquist.”
I recalled the slight tremor in Josh’s hand as he held the birthday card Amber had sent him, the one supposedly from his yet-unborn son.
Happy Birthday, Daddy.
CHAPTER SIX
“I need your car,” I said without preamble. I’d timed my visit to Mickey’s office for the ten-minute window between clients, so I made it short and to the point.
She raised an inquiring eyebrow, but she opened her purse without comment.
“It’s about Amber,” I confessed, deciding my colleague deserved to know why her car was about to cross the Verrazano Bridge into Staten Island. “Something’s come up and I need to talk to her right away.”
Mickey handed over her car keys and said, “It’s parked on Bergen, on the other side of Court. Near the taco place.”
I nodded. Under other circumstances I’d have said something clever about the way Mickey’s car gravitated toward parking places in front of spicy food emporia, but now I just wanted to get out of her office.
She didn’t say I told you so, but the muscles around her mouth were strained from the effort of not saying it.
I had directions from my interview with Scott. I’d told them I wanted to make a home visit, to be able to report to the judge what kind of home they could make for their baby. It hadn’t occurred to me I’d be racing out to Staten Island to confront my liar of a client about the true paternity of the child she’d handed to Josh and Ellie that cold March day.
I could have called her on the phone, but I had to see her face when I told her what Josh was claiming.
I drove along Victory Boulevard to Richmond Avenue. Right on Travis, a narrow street that was overgrown with tall reeds on one side and developed into two-family houses that all wore the same drab green paint job on the other. I scanned the cross streets and pulled into a parking place just after the one I wanted. I was somewhere near the group home Amber had lived in before her marriage, but it was on the other side of the mall. I walked along the street, noting the well-kept lawns, the magnolias in full bloom, the basketball hoops on the sides of the houses.
The house Amber lived in looked like all the others. I walked up to the front door, which was guarded by an aluminum screen door with a curlicue C on the front, and rang the bell closest to me. A woman about my age opened the door and stood behind the screen. She had blond hair worn in short curls and held a fluorescent green substance in her hand.
“Yes?” she asked.
“I’m looking for Amber Lundquist,” I said. “Or Amber Wylie,” I amended. “I’m not sure which name she’s using.”
“She lives upstairs,” the woman explained, punctuating her remark with a toss of her head. “The other bell.”
“Oh. Sorry,” I replied, and pushed the second buzzer.
A child came up behind her. Five, maybe, with red shoulder-length hair and a freckled face. “Aunt Betsy, Matthew hit Jason with—”
“I’ll be right there, Erin,” the woman said, leaning down. She handed the green blob to the little girl. “Here, take this Play-Doh back to the table, honey.”
“Okay,” she said and skipped away.
“They must be quite a handful,” I remarked. I could hear the sounds of children at play—at war sounded more like it.
“Oh, they’re not mine,” the blonde replied with a laugh. “I baby-sit, and my niece comes over some afternoons to play with the other children.”
Better you than me, I thought but didn’t say. Amber appeared in the doorway just as the blonde disappeared into the grayness behind the screen door.
“Thanks, Mrs. Scanlon,” she called after her retreating back.
“Who did you say she was?” I asked Amber as I followed her up the steps to the second level of the house.
“That’s Betsy Scanlon,” Amber replied. “Doc Scanlon’s ex. She’s renting the top floor to Scott and me.”
“So the ex-wife of the doctor who delivered your baby is now your landlady,” I remarked, not bothering to mute my sarcasm. “How many other little surprises have you got in store for me, Amber?”
My client shrugged. She wore an oversized man’s dress shirt over flowered leggings; her feet were bare. “Why not? When I told Doc I needed a place for me and Scott to live with the baby, he said his ex-wife was looking for a tenant. Scott and I came right over. It’s okay,” Amber said with another shrug. “We’ll need more space when the baby gets bigger, but it’s okay for now.”
It was a typical cheap construction-box apartment, with no frills and dead white walls, bare floors made of stained pine, and white Venetian blinds on windows without drapes or curtains. There were no cardboard cartons, though; Scott and Amber must have unpacked their few belongings in record time.
The living room was a little bare of furniture, and what was here looked hastily assembled from family castoffs, yard sales, and the Goodwill, but that was to be expected for newlyweds just starting out. I noted Ellie Greenspan’s Santa Fe rug on the floor in the living room, and saw her crystal wind chime in the window.
“Are you still wearing that pendant?” I asked. No, demanded. Demanded to know how Amber could bear to use the things Ellie gave her while hurting her so deeply.
Amber’s fingers went to her throat and she touched the amber talisman with a secretive smile on her face. “Why not?” she countered. “It’s pretty. She gave it to me.”
“She gave it to you when she thought you were bringing light into her life,” I shot back. “And now you’re taking it away.”
This was not what I came to talk about. I was here to confront my client with Marla’s bombshell, to ask her once and for all who was the father of the child she’d borne, to get enough truth out of her so I could walk into court and represent her without being afraid of what I’d learn. But those insolent young blue eyes infuriated me,
made me realize how naive I’d been. How right Mickey had been to warn me against putting my faith in yet another aspect of the legal system.
I hate it when other people are right, and I’m stuck with the mess I made because I didn’t listen to them.
Amber raked me up and down with eyes as sharp as fake fingernails. “I thought you were my lawyer,” she said, cold contempt flattening her voice. “Why not let Marla take care of Ellie?”
“I don’t like being used.” I tried for the same calm, flat tone my client was using to such effect, but my rage got in the way.
Another twentysomething shrug of indifference. “I thought a lawyer was supposed to be used. To do whatever the client wants.”
“You thought wrong. If I walk away from here convinced that you shouldn’t have that baby, that’s what I’ll tell the court. You can find another lawyer.”
It was a bluff and her eyes knew it. They shone with triumph as she played her trump card. “Doesn’t the judge have to approve your withdrawal from a case?” Amber’s use of the correct legal terms told me she’d done her homework, that she had me and she knew it. Sylvia Feinberg was not going to want to bring in a new lawyer at this stage. And unless she let me go, I was stuck representing Amber even if I knew her to be a liar who had deliberately used the Greenspans.
We were still standing in the bare living room. I decided to sit, to let Amber know I was prepared to stay here until I had what I’d come for. I walked over to the couch, which was covered in faded cabbage roses against a dark blue-green, and sat down, falling into its sagging upholstery as if into a swamp.
She folded her arms and remained standing.
“Who’s the father, Amber?” I asked conversationally.
She stiffened. “I’m not sure,” she said. “I think Scott.”
“Marla served papers in which she claimed Josh was the father.”
“He could be.”
“He could be,” I repeated. I didn’t have to exaggerate my tone of disbelief. How the hell had I come to be sitting on this fourth-hand sofa listening to my client tell me she’d had sex with the man who was adopting her child?
Fresh Kills Page 7
