by James Siegel
“Fine. What about Joey ?”
“Like in Buttafuoco?”
“Like in Breidbart.”
“How about we start with Joelle ? Just so the poor kid learns her name.”
They were passing a toy store, its window stocked floor-to-ceiling with dolls, trucks, video games, stuffed animals, soccer balls, and some things he honestly couldn’t recognize.
“What do you say?” Paul said.
“Sure,” Joanna said. “Let’s go buy some toys.”
WHEN THEY ENTERED THE HOTEL LOBBY, THEY NEEDED THE doorman to help them make it into the elevator. They’d gone a little overboard— they’d been like kids in a toy store.
There seemed to be so much more to buy than when they were children. It was pretty much G.I. Joes, Barbies, and Slinkys back then. Now there were vast new categories to contemplate, numerous subcategories too. Things that talked and walked and beeped and flashed and zapped and pirouetted and sang.
All of them seemed to have Joelle’s name on them.
The doorman managed to get them into the elevator without a major mishap.
When they opened the door to their hotel room, Galina wasn’t there.
“She’s in the bathroom,” Joanna said.
Paul opened the bathroom door, stuffed giraffe in hand, but Galina wasn’t in there either.
When Paul turned around with his hands up, Joanna turned an ugly shade of white.
It wasn’t just Galina that was missing.
It was their daughter.
She was gone too.
“NO, MR. BREIDBART, I DIDN’T TALK TO YOUR NURSE.” THE concierge retained his air of helpful solicitude, but up against Paul’s full-blown panic, it seemed woefully inadequate.
“They’re not in the room,” Paul said. “Do you understand me?”
“Yes, sir. I understand.”
Paul had come down to the lobby—after checking the rooftop pool, the restaurant, the hair salon, the game room. Joanna had remained up in the room in case Galina called.
“Perhaps she went shopping,” the concierge offered.
“Did you see them leave the hotel?”
“No. I was busy with several guests.”
“Well, did anyone see them leave the hotel?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Breidbart. Why don’t we ask?”
The concierge led him over to the front desk, where he interrupted the registration clerk, who was in the middle of checking in a guest. He spoke to him in Spanish, gesturing to Paul. Paul heard him mention Galina’s name, then niña, that word again. The registration clerk looked at Paul, then back to the concierge, and shook his head.
“He didn’t see them,” the concierge said. “Come with me.”
They walked outside the hotel where the doorman who’d just helped them into the elevator was flirting with a striking woman in a midriff-baring tank top.
The doorman immediately straightened up, deserting the woman in midsentence. After the concierge had explained the problem, he looked over at Paul and slowly nodded.
“Sí,” the doorman said. Apparently, he had seen Galina and Joelle leave the hotel. “Hace una hora . . .”
An hour ago. Which would have been just after he and Joanna had left the hotel.
“Ahh, mystery solved,” the concierge said, smiling stupidly. “She is taking your baby for a walk.”
His baby had been napping.
Why would Galina take a sleeping baby for a walk?
Paul felt dizzy; the ground seemed to be tipping. The concierge was still talking to him, but Paul wasn’t processing the words. There was a steady hum in the air.
“She’s taken my baby,” Paul said.
The doorman and concierge were looking at him oddly.
“Did you hear what I said? She’s taken my baby. ”
“Yes,” the concierge finally responded. “For a walk, Mr. Breidbart.”
“I want you to call the police.”
“Policía?”
“Yes. Call them.”
“I think you are maybe too excited here . . .”
“Yes, I am excited.” The ground was tipping one way, then the other. The sun had gone cold. “My baby’s been taken. I’m excited about that. Call the police.”
“I don’t think . . .”
“Call the police.”
“You are accusing your nurse of kidnapping, Mr. Breidbart.” It was said as a statement, not a question, and it seemed to Paul that the concierge’s voice had somehow changed, gone from warm and helpful to cool and unhelpful.
“My baby was napping. The nurse told us to go get some fresh air. Then she left the hotel two minutes later and she’s not back.”
“The baby woke up perhaps.”
“Perhaps you’re right. All the same, I want you to call the police.”
“Maybe we wait a little and see if she returns, no?”
“No.”
“She has been used as a nurse many times here, Mr. Breidbart.” Yes, the concierge’s tone had definitely undergone a transformation.
Paul was accusing a Colombian woman of a crime.
A sweet-looking Colombian woman with laugh lines and patient gray eyes who was taking care of a Colombian baby. A baby that he, an American, was spiriting out of the country because there evidently weren’t enough American babies to go around.
“I don’t care how many times she’s been used. She took my baby without permission. She didn’t tell us. I need to talk to the police.”
The concierge might not have agreed with him and might not have even liked him, but he was still a concierge.
“If that’s what you want, sir,” he said stiffly.
He walked back into the lobby and up to his desk, where he lifted the phone with painful resignation and dialed out. Paul waited silently as the concierge said a few Spanish words into the receiver. He hung up the phone with undue force. The click echoed through the sterile lobby, causing several people to look up with alarmed and puzzled expressions.
THE POLICEMEN HAD THICK BLACK LEATHER BOOTS AND GUNS THAT looked like Uzis strapped to their hips.
Paul didn’t notice any black nightsticks.
The concierge spoke to them in Spanish while Paul patiently listened. In the interim between the concierge’s call and the policemen’s arrival, Paul had called Joanna again.
No news.
One of the policemen spoke decent English. Even if he hadn’t, his meaning would have been all too evident.
“Why you think your nurse stole your baby ?” he said. He didn’t look like he wanted an answer.
Paul explained as best he could. Joelle was napping, the nurse had suggested that they leave, then she’d left herself. She had neither asked permission nor left a note. They didn’t know where she was.
“He says this woman is good.” The he the policeman was referring to was the concierge, who was standing off to the side with a semiscowl on his face. In the game of good cop, bad cop, it would’ve been hard to choose who was who.
“Perhaps you didn’t understand me,” Paul said, and saw the policeman flinch. He remembered those bloodied heads sticking out of the ground, and for a moment he wondered whether he would already have been slugged on the head and hauled off to jail for making false accusations if he hadn’t been an American.
He was in the middle of explaining the rightfulness of his position, of laying out all the reasons for his full-fledged panic, of carefully explaining why his nurse wouldn’t simply have gotten up and left with their baby unless she had something bad in mind, when Galina walked into the lobby with Joelle.
EIGHT
Hours after Paul had apologized to the police, the concierge, and Galina—in that order—then apologized to Galina again, just to make sure she understood how sorry he was, he lay on the bed with Joanna and wondered aloud if paranoia wasn’t part of the strange new province of parenthood.
“We’re in a foreign country, Paul,” Joanna said, and Paul couldn’t help thinking she was right figurativ
ely as well. “We came into our room and our baby was gone. She didn’t tell us she was taking her. No. ”
In point of fact, Galina had told them that she was taking Joelle. She’d left a note tucked under the cream-colored ashtray in the bathroom—when they got back upstairs, Galina had gone in and retrieved it. Perhaps if they hadn’t been so quick to panic, they would’ve seen it. And known that Joelle had woken up from her nap just two seconds after Paul had closed the door. And that her forehead had felt just a little hot to Galina—not dangerously feverish, no, but a little hot, and that Galina wasn’t the type to take chances. And they would’ve known that among the things they hadn’t brought with them from New York was a thermometer. For which Galina had taken Joelle in search of a pharmacy. To purchase with her own money.
As it turned out, Joelle had a 101-degree temperature. Nothing to worry about with a baby, Galina reassured them, but something that had definitely needed to be checked out.
Galina forgave them, yet he noted an unmistakable glimmer of hurt in those soft gray eyes. Even anger. Something that said even saintly patience has its limits.
THE NEXT DAY PABLO TOOK THEM TO THE U.S. EMBASSY.
When they entered the outer gate, where they were forced to walk through not one, but two metal detectors, they passed a familiar face coming the opposite way.
The bird-watcher. The somnolent man who’d patiently sat for eighteen hours on the plane with them.
“Hello,” he greeted them. He was already wearing the uniform of the bush. A safari shirt with large pleated pockets, khaki knee-length shorts, and thick brown hiking boots.
“Hello,” Paul said.
“Ahh,” he said, repositioning his glasses and staring down at Joelle as if she were a new species of Colombian finch. “Yours?”
“Yes,” Joanna said. “Her name’s Joelle.”
“Well, congrats,” he said.
“Thanks,” Paul said. It was nice to run into someone from back home—even if it was someone he’d known for eighteen hours. “We need to get a little paperwork done so we can take her home. How about you?”
“How about me what?”
“The embassy?”
“Oh, if you want to go into the jungle, you have to sign a release. They don’t want your next of kin complaining they were negligent and didn’t warn you. I think what they really don’t want is anybody suing them.”
“Well, good luck,” Paul said.
“Yeah. You too.”
When they entered the spacious anteroom, they passed under a portrait of a smiling George Bush. It didn’t really sound like an embassy, though, more like a nursery at feeding time. The room was crammed with couples holding, rocking, shushing, and changing a varied array of agitated Colombian babies. If running into the ornithologist was a welcome reminder of home, this was more like an actual homecoming. All the new parents were, of course, American. Joanna and Paul managed to find two seats next to a thirty-something couple from Texas. Paul assumed that they were from Texas because the man was wearing a T-shirt that said God Bless Texas. When the man said howdy, it was more or less confirmed. His wife was holding a baby boy with a noticeable harelip. Paul immediately chided himself, ashamed that his first impression of the boy hadn’t been whether he was big or small or shy or friendly, no—he couldn’t help zeroing in on the boy’s physical imperfection.
He was kind of disappointed in himself. But as he looked around the room, he thought it was possible that he wasn’t the only one doing some comparison shopping. Every parent seemed to be mentally taking notes. Perhaps it was the nature of being handed a ready-made kid.
They were called into a fluorescent-lit room where a dour-looking Colombian woman asked them for Joelle’s birth certificate. Which didn’t, of course, say Joelle on it. Paul hadn’t really known what the birth certificate said, since it was entirely in Spanish. Among the Spanish words was apparently the baby’s name—the one given to her by her birth mother.
“Marti,” the woman said as she scribbled something down.
The biological mother was a complete unknown to them. María Consuelo had offered them information about her, which they’d promptly and politely declined. It was a kind of denial mechanism, they knew, a sophomoric one at that. It went something like this: If they didn’t know about the mother, she wouldn’t really exist. And if she didn’t really exist, it would be easier to believe that Joelle was all theirs.
The woman asked them a few questions. Her manner was polite but aloof. Paul, on the lookout for any antipathy from the natives, was unable to read anything particularly malicious in her line of questioning. Still, he was relieved when the interrogation was over.
“YOUR BABY’S COMPLETELY HEALTHY,” THE DOCTOR SAID.
Their second stop of the day.
Adopted babies needed to undergo a medical exam before they were allowed to leave the country. Pablo had driven them to a pediatrician near the hotel.
Dr. Dalliego was middle-aged, balding, and coolly efficient. He weighed, poked, and prodded Joelle with machinelike detachment as Paul and Joanna stood by with mute anxiety. Was it possible the physician would find something wrong with her? Her modest fever had disappeared this morning as quickly as it had come, but was there something that the orphanage had missed? Something that would necessitate returning her and leaving Colombia empty-handed and brokenhearted?
Occasionally, the nurse would interrupt the doctor with a telephone call, and he’d hand Joelle back to Joanna while he patiently listened to some other baby’s mother or father pour out their fears. He’d calmly utter a few words of Spanish into the receiver, nod in a kind of affirmation of his wisdom, return the phone to the nurse.
Then back to the baby at hand.
After a while Paul grew tired of looking for clues in the doctor’s expression. He decided he’d simply wait for the final verdict.
Which was apparently first-rate. Your baby’s completely healthy, Dr. Dalliego said. She’s fine.
Which was more than you could say for her father.
Paul finally allowed himself to exhale.
NINE
They were back in the hotel room.
Galina had left for the day. Joelle was asleep in her crib. Slats of amber light were slanting in through the window.
He’d remember this exact moment for a long time. Just about forever. He’d remember the way it looked—how the rays of light crisscrossed the bedspread and seemed to cleave Joanna’s naked leg in two. He’d take a photo of this moment and paste it into the album of very bad things.
Joanna was lying half in and half out of the bedsheets, staring straight up at the ceiling. She looked kind of morose.
Once upon a time Paul had resisted asking Joanna why she looked unhappy, because he always knew what the answer would be, and it always involved him. He was hoping things were different now—that the two of them were positively suffused with happiness—so he went ahead and asked.
“What’s wrong?”
“You’re going to think I’m crazy,” she said.
“No, I’m not.”
“Yes, you are. You don’t know what I’m thinking. It’s ridiculous.”
“Yes, I do. You’re thinking I’m going to think you’re crazy.”
“Besides that.”
“What, Joanna?”
“It’s nuts.”
“Okay, it’s nuts. Tell me.”
“She smells different.”
“What? Who? ”
“Joelle. She smells different.”
“Different than what?”
“Different than . . . before.”
Paul didn’t know quite how to answer that.
“So?”
“So?”
“So she smells different. I’m not—”
“Don’t you understand what I’m saying?”
“No.”
Joanna rolled onto her side and faced him. “I don’t think it’s her. ”
“What?”
“I don’t think
it’s her,” clearly enunciating each word this time so he’d know exactly what it was she was saying. Which was clearly and patently, well . . . nuts.
“Joanna—of course it’s her. We took her to the doctor today. You were with her the whole day. Are you . . . ?”
“Crazy?”
“I wasn’t going to say that,” Paul said. Of course, that’s exactly what he was going to say. “I just . . . I mean, it’s just so . . . She’s Joelle.”
“How do you know?”
“What do you mean how do I know?”
“It’s a simple question. How do you know it’s Joelle?”
“Because I’ve been with her two days. Because . . . it looks like her.”
“She’s one month old. How many other babies have you seen here that look exactly like her?”
“None.”
“Fine. Well, I have.”
“Joanna, because she smells different? Don’t you think it’s kind of . . . paranoid?”
“You mean like when we thought Galina kidnapped her?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe we weren’t being paranoid. Maybe Galina did kidnap her.”
“Do you hear what you’re saying? Do you? It’s ridiculous.”
“You didn’t think it was ridiculous yesterday.”
“Yes, I didn’t think it was ridiculous yesterday. That was before Galina came back with her. She had a fever, so Galina went to get her a thermometer. Remember?”
“Joelle didn’t have a fever when we went for a walk, did she?”
“How do we know that?”
“Because I’m her mother. I held her before we left. She was fine.”
“Babies get fevers, honey.”
Joanna sat up. She took Paul’s hands in hers—her palms felt cold and clammy.
“Look. Joelle had a beauty mark on her left leg. Right here.” She reached over and touched his leg, just below the knee. It nearly made him jump. “I saw it. I felt it. When you fell asleep the first night, I went to her crib and just . . . well, looked at her. I couldn’t believe we had her. I woke up and thought I was dreaming maybe. I had to see her again. To know she was real. You understand?”
