Great With Child

by Sonia Taitz

  Abigail was too polite to agree. Flowers and 4711 could only do so much.

  “And what about my romantic life? Who would want me now? Even he wouldn’t, and I can tell he’s like Jock, he’d want a knot in a tree!”

  “Oh, please, ma’am,” said Jay.

  “Look how he ‘ma’ams’ me—that proves it! The pity! The distancing! What do you two really know about suffering?”

  Abigail reflected on her mother’s nightmarish cancer death, then realized, with shame, that her own suffering had only been vicarious.

  “I’m an old cripple,” whispered Mrs. MacAdam, “that’s what I am . . . I haven’t any money or family. . . .” Here she began to cry, so quietly and yet so deeply and wrenchingly that Abigail felt moved to console her.

  “Your life’s not over,” she said. “Someone might be your family still. You never know who might need you, as a wife, or a sister, or a mother—”

  Where did that come from? Abigail was embarrassed.

  “As a mother?” said Mrs. MacAdam, sniffling like a child and looking up. “Do you really think so?”

  “It’s—it’s—anything is possible,” said Abigail, attempting to resume her legal distance.

  “Oh,” said Mrs. MacAdam, her voice disappointed. “Another one of your possibilities.” She paused, then added shrewdly, “and I suppose you’re not lonely at times, now, in your condition, far from home.”

  There was a laden silence then.

  “Excuse me, I have to use the facilities,” said Jay.

  “You mean you have to pee? Cora-Lee!” she shouted. “Get over here and show our man-caller where the toilet is.”

  Much more quickly than anyone expected, the maid appeared and whisked Jay off. Mrs. MacAdam addressed herself to Abigail in a surprisingly soft and human tone.

  “You’re not such a tough nut as all that, are you, lovey?”

  “Who, me? Yes, I am,” she answered, mechanically. “Tough, very tough.”

  Mrs. MacAdam whirred her chair closer to the horsehair settee.

  “And you haven’t got anyone in the world, either, have you.”

  “Well, I’ll have a child soon—and . . .” She cleared her throat and began again: “This is not really what I’m here to deal with.”

  “And you can’t trust anyone.”

  “If you say so.”

  “So you come on hard, as a defense, to keep ’em away.”

  “Professional training, my war mask,” said Abigail, surprising herself by starting to prickle behind the eyes. “Where’s the bathroom?” she said abruptly. “I assume you have another one.”

  “Cora’ll show you when she gets back from dealing with Jay. Just a second. I want to show you this picture of my daddy—” she wheeled herself over to a decorative mantel. “Wasn’t he handsome? Distinguished?” she asked, wheeling back, clutching the photo.

  Abigail nodded miserably. She needed to pee.

  “You’re a daddy’s girl, aren’t you? I always know, all that drive, need a tough husband who knows what he wants.”

  “Where’s Cora—I can’t wait—”

  “Oh, listen—” said Mrs. MacAdam, head aloft, eyebrows raised, as though she were about to reveal the secret of life.

  “What is it?”

  “Listen!”

  “I can’t hear anything. Please, where’s the bathroom?”

  “You don’t hear anything?”

  After a moment, Abigail thought she could hear the sound of weeping far away.

  “What is that?”

  “You don’t know the sound? Think harder.”

  “It does sound familiar, but it’s so faint.”

  Abigail listened. At first, there was silence, then the stray call of birds. But finally, within it, she discerned familiar sounds—cries, really—crescendoing and fading into silence.

  “Stray felines in their heat. The dumb strength of nature, huh?”

  “Yes,” said Abigail, morosely. This was a new low in her life as attorney. She was being forced to listen to a yowling feline reproduction—and she had peed in her pants.

  “Don’t worry about it, honey,” said Mrs. MacAdam, her eyes fixed on the rivulet traveling down Abigail’s legs, puddling on the floor. “I do that all the time.”

  10

  Abigail and Jay went over to visit Mrs. MacAdam’s neighbor. The maid who had seen the accident turned out to be called neither Minnie nor Mimi, but Miranda. She was a servant who “came with the house” as it was rented to various Americans each winter. Miranda was used to being alone, she explained, observing the goings on around her. She had no close relationships, save with her neighbor Cora-Lee.

  “That lady want to get killed, believe it,” she was saying.

  “Who? The pilot?” said Abigail, who kept wondering why someone with so little flight experience would take out a single engine all alone. Had she run out of gas en route to the airport at Point Salines?

  “No, I’m not talkin’ about the pilot. I’m talkin’ about the old lady, Mrs. MacAdam. Cora-Lee’s mistress. She moody.”

  “What do you mean?” MacAdam could hardly sue Abigail’s client if she wanted “to get killed.” This could be great news, better than contributory negligence, real proof of the plaintiff’s instability.

  “I saw it with my own two eyes like I’m seeing you now. I saw her driving a car along, under the plane. A real nice car, you know. The Jaguar she have all those years. Could run it fast, fast, fast.”

  “Trying to get away, probably,” said Jay. “Wouldn’t you run if you saw a plane coming down on your head?”

  “No, no. You’re not understandin’ me. The plane goin’ down, I think the pilot tryin’ to land beyond, over there by the fields, where there no folks livin’.”

  “And Mrs. M—what?” said Jay. “You’re telling us she wouldn’t let it land?”

  “That’s what it look like. And I see the pilot go up again, and the wheels don’ go up for her, and she try to go up and not hit down on Miss MacAdam, but Miss MacAdam, she drive right under, even when the plane start to go in all directions, and with the wheels stuck halfway between up and down.”

  “Hydraulics can be murder,” said Jay.

  “Could you be clearer about the causality here? I mean, maybe her driving right under the plane confused the pilot into crashing, but how could you tell what Mrs. MacAdam’s actual intent was? Maybe she was confused,” said Abigail. “The plane being so close to her land, and all. The dogs must have been barking, and she must have felt terrified, helpless.”

  “Why you care how she felt?” said Miranda abruptly. “You’re working for someone else, anyway. Your boss in New York, right?”

  “I didn’t say I cared ‘how she felt.’ I’m simply appraising the legal situation. Her state of mind is certainly relevant to that.”

  A thought occurred to Abigail. Could her client, Hutton Cranebill, countersue—hauling Mrs. MacAdam and her wheelchair into court and blaming her for causing the loss of his plane? If the crash was her fault, then so was the death of the young female pilot. Kiki’s parents would also, doubtless, get on the bandwagon. They might even claim that she was a new model with a promising career, worth millions in lost potential income. With the information Abigail was hearing, Mrs. MacAdam could be shaken down like an old sack of coins. Countersuits could be fun for defendants, a little table turn and Whoopee! We’re in the money! This scenario might really make her a star at the firm. And just in time.

  Miranda’s employers were out shopping in town. She led Abigail and Jay out to the back, and laid out a towel on the beach. The waves lapped at the shore, rhythmic and soothing. Abigail picked up handfuls of warm yellow sand, feeling it pour through her fingers.

  “Miss MacAdam kept under it, you understand. Under that little plane. She was followin’ that thing. And Cora-Lee, when it come to understanding the old lady, she no dummy, and she tell the truth, all of the truth, and she tell it to me alone. And you know what she tell me?”

&
nbsp; “This is hearsay, anyway,” said Abigail, now questioning the countersuit. What reason could MacAdam possibly have to want to kill some new girlfriend of a man she’d never met—and lose her leg in the process?

  “I don’t know what ‘here-say’ is, but here what Cora-Lee say. Cora-Lee tell me that the day before, Miss MacAdam cry she don’t want to live no more, that she want to die and be done with the pain of all of it.” Miranda sighed and stared out at the waves. “The work of it, you know.”

  “So your story is that MacAdam was basically trying to commit suicide?” Abigail interrupted.

  “Is not my ‘story’—is the truth, and Cora-Lee the one that should know it, because she know the lady for a long, long time.”

  “Hang on, though,” said Abigail. “Maybe MacAdam should have known that running under a plane would make the pilot crash, although now that I put it into words, it seems ridiculous. But even so, she might not have intended to kill Kiki, or cause damage to the plane. She wasn’t capable of any such intent, because, according to you, she was suffering from clinical depression. And when that happens to you, the world outside your misery just stops existing. It’s there, but you can’t feel it.”

  How did she know all this? She had never been depressed in her life. Maybe she got a sense of it from watching her mother making all those sandwiches and smoothing all those blankets, and for what? To be remembered by someone, she supposed. To give some person a memory of love’s sweetness.

  “Girl, you hit the nail right on its poor head.”

  There was a long pause. Up until now, Jay had been listening coolly, nodding his head from time to time. He had appeared to take the possibility of Mrs. MacAdam’s fatal—to others, that is—instability with a certain man-of-the-world quality. But now he seemed preoccupied. He scribbled into his notebook for a moment, then looked up at the darkening sky. Abigail noticed that the sun was beginning to set, the tide to rise. The waves were getting choppier and whiter. She was thinking, too: If Mrs. MacAdam wanted to kill herself, it still lent support to Abigail’s theory of incompetence. Could such a “looney tune,” as lawyers liked to term unstable people, be taken seriously in court? The desire to kill oneself was prima facie evidence of mental illness. That would benefit Cranebill and son, and that was all she would need. Pilot error was exacerbated by a suicidal on the ground. Leaving Cranebill with his deep pocket untouched would make her enough of a hero to the firm. The idea of countersuit might well be overdoing it.

  “When I came to her, after the accident?” Miranda was saying. “I wipe her head with cologne from the people living here now, and she beg me, ‘Take me away from this, Mimi. Take me home.’ ‘Where,’ I say. ‘Where your home at? You live here now twenty years.’ ‘No, Mimi, no,’ and she stroking my face so tender. ‘Let me go where I belong. Let me go there.’”

  “She’s from Maine, originally,” said Abigail, knowing as soon as she said it how flat-footed that sounded. Home could be figurative—her library, for instance.

  “She didn’t mean that, honey. She meant, ‘Let me go home where I’ll see my Jock, and he’ll see me,’ she say. ‘Let him know that even without a leg, or a heart, or a head, I’ll still know him. And he’ll know me better than he ever did.’ ‘You’ll get better, Miss MacAdam,’ I said, kind as I could. ‘No!’ she said, kinda loud. ‘I promised Jock I was coming for him, and now I’m just stuck, just stuck here. I want to go home, I want to go home,’ and on and on, and she cry like a baby.”

  “But I wonder,” said Jay, “if she was so depressed before, why was she growing all those roses and herbs? Depressed people aren’t usually so productive.”

  “Things ain’t so much black-and-white like you think, honey,” said Miranda, getting up slowly. Looking down at Abigail, she said, “You’re fighting her in a law court, I know that. You think one side is right, and the other is wrong. And he helpin’ you,” she said, looking at Jay. “They call you Big Whitey, right?”

  “Yes,” said Jay. “But you see my skin is as black as yours.”

  “Yeah, well. Ain’t anything so much black-and-white like you think. OK? And she a nice lady, remember.” She brushed the sand off her wrap skirt and walked, barefoot and dignified, back to the beautiful white oceanfront home of her employer. “I got work to do before they get back. Laundry and all.”

  Abigail and Jay watched her go.

  “Thank you!” Abigail called out. There was no answer.

  “Well, that was interesting,” she said to Jay, when Miranda had gone in. “You looked preoccupied at one point. Were you thinking of a countersuit, too?”

  “I don’t care who’s suing who,” said Jay. “I’m just looking for the detail of it. But I remembered something about the old lady. They say around here that she had a good business sense when her husband was alive—that she’s the one who got them both rich as they were.”

  “You mean she wasn’t crazy?”

  “Oh, no, no, no. Just, you know, different.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Dance to her own drummer.”

  “OK.”

  “But people are always jealous—just like she said. Lazy people without drive and ideas. You know, they wondered how she could think of a scheme and it would work out for her all the time. But it was brains and a lot of hard work, I think.”

  “Oh, come on. That old loon?”

  “They say she was getting somewhere. I wonder why that plane was there in the first place. No planes go flying that way, over the houses on the coastline. Spying, maybe, like she said? Fly real low and take some pictures?”

  “You’re wondering about that? Why would they send Kiki, of all people?”

  “So no one would think they were spying. She could even land and ask for a cup of tea, a nice blond model girl like that.”

  “You’re speculating.”

  “Not really. I found a camera nearby,” said Jay, looking straight at Abigail.

  “A camera?”

  “From the plane, battered up. A really good one, an old-fashioned Leica with telephoto.”

  “Maybe Kiki was island-hopping.”

  “Maybe. Taking pictures of Carriacou. Nice dolphins there. Or maybe she was hopping over by Mrs. MacAdam’s to see something growing on there.”

  “You mean, steal her ideas—such as they were? Who’d sink that low?”

  “Your client’s rich and greedy, right?”

  “How’d you know that?”

  “They all rich and greedy!”

  Jay laughed out loud. Abigail smiled weakly, nodding. Knowing about the camera would mean her own client was not right, and her client not being right (or provably right) could mean she’d lose the case, and losing the case would mean she would be passed over for partnership, and being passed over for partnership would mean she was not a success (or provably successful), and being a failure (as corollary) would mean she would forever be a disappointment to herself, her father, her mother, and all the striving people who had suffered, striven, and disappeared before her.

  “We ought to take a look at the pictures, you know,” Jay continued.

  “Maybe we should,” she answered vaguely. She did want to know what was in them. What the truth was. Ignorance was never the right way, was it?

  An orange sun was setting over the ocean, and the sand began to chill between Abigail’s fingers. She was sifting it again, picking up piles, letting them pour out in streams.

  “Look Jay,” she said, “it’s actually plausible, what Mrs. MacAdam says. My client, Mr. Cranebill, does in fact have something of an interest in agriculture, among other ventures. He runs a chain of pizzerias, and they use a lot of oregano. And Mrs. MacAdam did say she was going to invent some kind of herbal combination.…” She broke off into silence, realizing the implications.

  “So what you gonna do about it? Want me to check into it?”

  “No. That would hurt Cranebill. I’d get called on the carpet in about two minutes. This is not a good time for me to get a negative prof
ile.”

  “With a child coming, you mean?”

  “Yes. I’m kind of in a fix. I’m all alone to support this baby. Plus I’m up for partnership, which is all I’ve worked for—I guess all my life. So my job is to go ‘Rah-rah!’”

  “‘Rah-rah’?”

  “Yes. ‘Rah-rah.’”

  “You don’t feel stupid saying that?”

  “I don’t actually say it, Jay. I mean, unironically.”

  “Are you being ironic?”

  “No. And yes, it does feel stupid, now that you mention it. I bet you’d say it, too, though, if they paid you as well as they’re paying me.”

  “Wouldn’t. Would not ever.”

  Jay turned and started walking. Abigail followed, and he turned his head.

  “I’ll run you back to your hotel now. It’s getting dark.”

  “So don’t talk to me about cameras,” she pleaded, “not now and not even later.”

  “OK, Abigail, I hear you. Just thought you’d want to know.”

  “Oh, it is useful to know, yes. In real life, it’s often critical.”

  She stumbled on the sand, and Jackson Moss extended his hand to her.

  Abigail accepted his large, warm hand and the ride back to the safety of her hotel room.

  11

  The next morning brought a disturbing e-mail:

  Ab—

  Cranebill is going to play hardball, and so are we.

  He says “not one red nickel,” so you know that makes your job just that wee bit harder. Basically, we’ve got to cream old Mrs. M. Tell me that you’ve found something that clears Kiki the Hun. Have you checked the record of that Cessna? It wasn’t bought new, coulda been some metal fatigue, or a loose circuit, etc. Are they suing the manufacturer? So could we, now that I think of it. Hey, maybe Cranebill can make money on this! Another idea: You could say Kiki had an epileptic fit—hadn’t told anyone about it, maybe it was her first grand mal. These things happen.

  Actually, I’m just making that up, but you can use it if you want. I’d believe it!