The officer tucked the man’s head and shoved him into the back seat. Katherine could no longer see him, but she could hear him.
“What would you’ve done if you were me, Officer…?” His head emerged from the car as he struggled to read the male officer’s nametag. “Davis? Officer Davis? Do you know how many seventy-hour weeks I put in to make partner? It was all I ever wanted. I had—”
“Your little boy could have starved to death,” the female officer said. “He could have been raped. Tortured some other way. Murdered. Abandonment is a Class A misdemeanor, you know that? So, you see, Hurlbut, it doesn’t matter what you wanted. Thanks to the good citizens actually looking out for the welfare of this nation’s children, what you’ll get is the next full year of your life in prison for—”
“Up to a year, Sal,” Officer Davis said. “Most only get a month or two, tops.”
“Up to a year in prison, Hurlbut, for leaving this boy on the street. Do you—”
“Might not go to prison at all, Sal. Could be probation, but maybe house arrest with groceries delivered.”
“Well, there you have it, Hurlbut. You might or might not go to prison for subjecting your child to who knows what torment, but I tell you what you will most definitely have, and that’s a very dark tic mark on your record. Do you think you made the right choice, Hurlbut?”
Hurlbut screeched, “Choice?” And then he laughed. He laughed and he laughed. He laughed so hard and so loud Katherine smiled unconsciously. Sal silenced him with a slam of the door. Katherine remained perfectly still with her unlit cigarette until they disappeared.
Her drives continued over the next several weeks. (She had little else to do, having decided to seclude herself during the breastfeeding period.) When the most viable local spots were catalogued along with whether she noticed a law enforcement presence, she expanded her surveillance to towns ten, twenty, and thirty miles away, often spending much of every day in the car with her quiet passenger. So quiet, in fact, that Katherine habitually watched the back seat in the rearview mirror, waiting long stretches at a time for a foot or a hand to move. If after what seemed too long she saw no sign of life, Katherine would reach behind her into the car seat and tug at the baby’s sleeve until she got a kick or a gurgle.
When not analyzing covered entries and public parks—when driving on the interstate, for example, or through neighborhoods she would never even in fantasy consider—Katherine busied her mind building stories.
The first was a kidnapping, but she rejected it as flawed. Not only was she not yet wealthy enough to be an attractive ransom target, but almost anyone who desperately wanted a child could adopt. The last she had read, agencies nationwide had lowered the age requirement yet again, this time from eighteen to the individual state’s age of sexual consent, where any such gap existed, “to eliminate undue age discrimination by providing equal parenting opportunities to those deemed by the state to be legally competent to reproduce.” Agencies had also stopped requiring references and home visits. For the rare applicant who was turned away for having a violent criminal record, children—whether huddled in doorways or wandering the edges of the cannabis fields—were reliably in stock.
The next story, one she kept returning to, was the honest mistake: She had accidentally left the carrier in a store. But the ending, no matter how many times she revised the details leading to it, made her anxious. How, precisely, would a distraught mother behave the moment her husband breezed in from nowhere and, in a characteristic display of his impulsive and fleeting interest, ask, “Where’s Millie Willie?” The scope of possible reactions and imagining herself attempting to perform any one of them with conviction could haunt her for miles at a time.
More often than not she skipped past that part. Instead, she imagined the future, after Graham had accepted her explanation and they had moved on. As it was, Graham only saw the baby in the morning before work for a fast kiss and a nuzzle, if he had the time. When she needed a diaper change, a bath, or a response to her cries, he found other things to do. Were the baby not there anymore, Katherine was confident, he would recover.
Then again, he would also undoubtedly end their agreement. She did still believe it was technically fair to allow for fucking in their marriage, but more time to think had convinced her it would be hard for her to accept with any grace unless she, too, were doing it, and she had no desire to do it.
But these were, obviously, just innocent thoughts she entertained while driving around hour after hour. At home, where she and Graham and the baby lived, her imagination was less inspired. After a day out in the car, Katherine would typically put the baby on the rug in the middle of the living room and make dinner or read, thinking nothing at all.
Now and then, however, she did catch herself showing involuntary interest in the baby. Once, while standing in the doorway and watching her under her mobile, Katherine wondered about her choices—why this toy over that toy?—and about what made her coo to herself. It took a few minutes of thinking about it to realize what she was doing, and when she did, she put an immediate stop to it by calling each of the stores to find Graham and ask him when he would be home. (As it happened, he had already left, according to both store managers.)
Another time, her evening glass of wine poured and chili steam sneaking out of crock pot, she smiled at the baby’s stubborn attempts to roll over. The smile paired with unanticipated eye contact, and Katherine flew to the kitchen cabinet for her Marlboros, which she kept behind the flour. (Because Graham wanted Katherine to do nothing that could reduce the time they had together, she hid her smoking. They had agreed any behavior damaging to their health had to be done in unity or not at all, and he refused to smoke.) She brought her cigarette outside to her spot by the window, where she could occasionally look in on the baby in case she managed to find something small to put in her mouth.
Millicent did eventually find something small to put in her mouth.
It was a morning of breezes and open windows, of high, sliding clouds. Millicent played on the living room floor with a soggy stuffed cow, “A gift from Lenny,” Margaret’s card had read. Katherine planned to take her on a local drive after Graham left for work, all four windows rolled down. They would pass by some of the regular buildings and then explore a wealthy neighborhood or two.
While Graham dressed upstairs, Katherine peeled the tissue from her cranberry muffin and assured herself, as she tended to do in the moments when she felt less frantic, that parenthood could be a workable obstacle. As she sometimes did on days like this, she considered doing something else with her time, but the drives had become a necessary habit. Without them, even on a good day, the tension would be unbearable. Without them, there might not be any good days.
She was pulling a cranberry from her muffin to eat it separately when Graham skipped down the stairs, dropped on all fours, and crawled to the baby. He lifted her over his head, kissed her belly, and nuzzled her neck. “Love you love you lots and lots, little lady tater tot.”
Katherine said, “She has a checkup Friday.”
“And she’ll pass with flying colors. Won’t you, silly Millie?” He set her on the floor.
“Perhaps you could take her to this one.”
Graham looked at his watch and wrinkled his nose. “Uh…I don’t—What time?”
“What time are you available?”
“Well, I…It depends. On whether there’s a customer issue, or an inventory emergency, or… Come on, Katie. You know.” He sighed and dropped his shoulders, but corrected himself with a smile. “Why don’t you tell me when I need to be available?”
“Four.”
“Oh. Oh, no, no, no. Four?”
“What do you have at four?”
“It’s nothing. Just a thing, a meeting, but I can get out of it if I need to. If there’s no other way. I’d have to reschedule it, but—”
“Since when are there meetings at four?”
“It’s impromptu.”
“Yet, yo
u know about it three days in advance.”
“It was an impromptu idea at the time, I mean.”
“Graham, you wanted this child. You have yet to spend a full day with her.”
“With Millie? With my silly willie Millie?” Graham picked her up and rocked her with shallow bounces.
“Yes. You have yet to spend a full day with your silly willie Millie.”
“But she’s been with you. I sort of assumed you’d ask me to stay home with her when you wanted me to.”
Katherine squished the cranberry between her thumb and finger. “As her father, Graham, when you spend time with her is your decision to make. And because I am not your mother as well as hers, I refuse to tell you when you should be with your d—”
“All right. All right!” Graham laid the baby in a sunbeam and went to Katherine, arms spread wide. He wrapped them around her and held her tight. “It’s been an adjustment. I’m a dad, now. A dad!” He released her and held her arms at the elbows. “That’s…It’s a lot of responsibility.”
“Is it.”
“Sure! And I know it’s been an adjustment for you, too, having to go to all the appointments while I take care of the stores, and… But Katie, everything’ll be fine. You start pumping soon, right?” He sailed to the counter to fill his travel mug. “So you won’t even have to be there to breastfeed her regularly, anymore. You can hire a babysitter or a nanny, or something, and we can both get back to a normal life. People hire help all the time.”
“You can hire a babysitter or a nanny.”
“What’s that?”
“You, Graham. You can hire somebody. Or—and I believe I mean this sincerely—did I misunderstand our agreement?”
“No. Nope, you’re right again!” Graham screwed the cap onto his mug and winked and smiled. He stood where he was, waiting, she knew, for her to smile back. “So, okay, then,” he said. “I guess I’ll see you lovelies later.” He kissed Katherine on the cheek, bent to the floor to kiss the back of the baby’s head, and headed for the door.
Katherine said, “You may want to let the employees know today about Friday so they have time to make other plans, if they choose.”
Graham stopped with his back to her and a hand on the doorknob. “You bet!” He turned to look at her, again with a disingenuous smile, and she wondered when they had disconnected. “But careful, though,” he said. “That almost sounded like mothering.” He kissed the air and stepped out. When the door closed behind him, it was with such softness and control Katherine wondered whether he would ever come back.
She stood where Graham had left her, her unseeing eyes on the door. It took a glint of something on the floor, something quick, something bright, to awaken her. As soon as she directed her attention to where the flash had been, she saw the baby lift something to her mouth and pop it in.
Before it disappeared completely, Katherine thought she saw copper.
A penny. Millicent had eaten a penny.
Katherine dove across the room, swept Millicent up with one hand, flipped her face-down on her forearm, and held her chest while issuing a hard slap to her back. The penny dropped out and landed heads-up on the carpet.
Katherine’s eyes and face exploded in heat and sobs. She was cold, trembling, zinging, sick. She laid Millicent on the floor, then pocketed the penny and stumbled into the kitchen. Over her choking gasps she heard the baby’s own frantic shrieks.
TEN
The safest place to donate a baby, Katherine had learned from her diligent surveillance, was not an adoption agency. It was also not the new Eighth Street Children’s Shelter, a hospital, the fire station, or the police station. Each was too obvious, each had been used prolifically, and each was too closely guarded. Daycares were also unfeasible. On a curiosity visit to a nearby daycare facility, Katherine had learned that while they received no police monitoring, they had begun using live-feed interior cameras and expensive government-quality scanners with the ability to identify every professionally counterfeited form of identification from birth certificates to passports. “You’d have to be an idiot to try to leave your kid here,” the young man behind the desk had said, his unsmiling eyes accusing Katherine. For parents who opted not to officially register a child before making a daycare deposit, high-resolution exterior cameras recorded all activity within a block of the building.
The surveillance was effective, but not perfect. Children who were capable of it were sometimes made to walk from outside of a two-block perimeter, the Fact reported. The details of one story had been so disturbing Katherine was unable to put them out of her mind days later.
…“Mommy said go to the yellow door,” five-year-old Clementine Piper told police when asked how she arrived at Sunshine Days Daycare. A child psychologist supervised the hour of questioning that led police to the home address of Henrietta Piper, 20, who according to Clementine had threatened to “rip up” the family hamster if Clementine revealed her last name or where she lived.
Upon their arrival at the household with Clementine in tow, police saw Ms. Piper emerge from the home and tear apart the live hamster with her bare hands. She then hurled its bloody pieces at her daughter, police said…
Small neighborhoods with single family homes were the safest, most practical possibility. There were too many of them for law enforcement to watch.
The baby was silent in the back seat. Katherine reached back to tap her arm while turning left onto a dark Windbury street. At a snort, Katherine let her be. She watched the signs for Morncrest Drive, an unusually wide and beautified residential road she had discovered weeks before. The mature trees, privacy fences, manicured lawns, stone fountain, speed bumps, and neighborhood watch signs made it an ideal place to raise a child.
She turned onto Morncrest and switched off her lights, immediately snapping them back on when she realized how conspicuous that was. She crept past the lit houses and pretended to sing along with music. When the light of a street lamp fell on her through the windshield, she would appear to anyone watching to be casual. She remembered to smile.
Once past the fountain, a blue-ish, six-foot cube in the center of a grass island, Katherine drove a few more yards before parking at the curb. She touched the power button and watched for neighborhood watchers. When no front doors opened and no shotgun-toting silhouettes appeared on the sidewalk, she pressed the button to release the door latch. It opened with what sounded to her like a booming thuk. She waited again until she felt safe to get out.
A peek inside the rear window confirmed the baby was still asleep. Her arms were crossed over her middle and a crease divided her eyebrows. Katherine saw that she had not pulled off the note pinned to the waist of her purple pants, the top half of the message tucked snugly under the hem of a yellow t-shirt: I never knew you…
The baby opened her eyes, and Katherine ducked below the window. She backed away from the car and stood against a tree at the edge of someone’s yard.
Coarse wig fibers tickled her neck. She scratched until her skin burned. She pulled her cigarettes from her pocket and lit one, inhaling until the heat and the flavor of it gagged her. Drool spilled down her chin and inside her v-neck. She swiped her hand across her chin and scrubbed her shirt between her breasts, dried her eyes, took another deep drag, and considered the lit windows.
The original (theoretical) plan had been to leave the baby on a doorstep where people were clearly home. Whether to ring the doorbell had initially been the only sticking point. (Not to ring, she had decided. Ringing was too risky.) But now, standing here among these many fine-enough homes, Katherine was no longer sure it was within her purview to choose the baby’s home. Again she was faced with the hypocrisy of presuming to make parental decisions for a child she was choosing not to parent.
She scratched her scalp under the hot wig and noticed the glow from the fountain.
A beautiful setting, and plenty of directed spotlights. Mature tree branches formed a tangled arc over the island, which meant she would have shade du
ring the day.
But of course she would be gone by then. People would soon be leading their dogs out for walks, and someone would snatch her up long before sunrise.
Katherine scraped her cigarette on the sidewalk and tucked the butt in her pocket. She stretched with her arms high, feigning a yawn and neck twists in checks of the street and sidewalks. No one seemed to be out. She double-checked the integrity of the muddied rear license plate on her way to open the back door.
“Oh, no,” she said, reaching inside. “Do you have a poo? Do you have a little poopie-poo?” She peered over the top of the car. The street was deserted.
The “thing,” for which there was no perfectly appropriate word, took ten seconds. She counted unconsciously: One to three: Unbuckle the car seat. Four and five: remove the baby. Six to eight: Run to the fountain, place carrier in corner floodlight. Nine and ten: Return to car.
She lit a cigarette before pulling away from the curb and watched the speedometer through stinging eyes and blurred vision. Five miles per hour felt at once exceedingly fast and impossibly slow. Halfway to the end of Morncrest, she saw a man walking toward the fountain with a stroller and a black and white dog. She puckered her lips in an air kiss and winked. The man responded with a confused smile and a hesitant wave. Katherine watched him in the rearview mirror after she passed, but she was too close to the end of the road to see what he did when he reached the fountain.
Surely a man out on a walk with a child and a dog was a man who would not leave a baby alone at night.
Katherine stopped at the stop sign at the end of Morncrest. A broadly smiling couple pushing a twin stroller rounded the corner. Both parents noticed her, and their smiles impossibly widened. They fussed with their children as they passed, bending over to touch their cheeks, smooth their hair, poke their chests. In her rearview mirror, as she pulled onto the main road, Katherine saw the woman sneak a glance over her shoulder.
The Age of the Child Page 9
