Through the nursery window Claudia could see little baby Elliot in his incubator, sound asleep, an angel. Elliot Doe—that was his name now. She watched him through the shatterproof glass, absently tracing the wire design inside the glass with her fingers, her fingertips so close to the encased diamonds yet unable to touch them. He made an especially expressive exhale, his perfect bow-tie lips fluttering with it. He was every bit as beautiful as she remembered him.
It was almost noon on a Saturday, the first week in March, nearly one and a half weeks since she had found him. The day she’d brought him in, Claudia had asked if she could come back to visit. The supervisor, Nurse Galt, a gruff and serious African-American woman, had told her it might be possible, but she didn’t think so. Their “cuddlers” went through extensive background checks that the hospital only ran twice a year. Claudia had left her information with them anyway.
Elliot would have to stay in the hospital for a while longer because he’d been, the doctors guessed, about a month premature, and he needed to gain some weight. His lungs were also slightly underdeveloped. Claudia couldn’t have imagined she’d be pleased to hear he wasn’t perfect, that there might be something wrong with him, but since he wasn’t in any pain, she’d allowed herself to be happy that he was still at the hospital, having to stay longer than usual before being turned over to foster care.
Yesterday, Claudia had received the call from Nurse Galt, who had said, in her gruff manner, that since Claudia had found Elliot and possibly saved his life, they’d allow her special dispensation to come in and cuddle.
Pushing her luck, Claudia had asked if Dan could come, too. With an irritated sigh, Nurse Galt had told her she absolutely didn’t think so, but she’d check.
She’d called Claudia back two hours later to say, just this once, if they remained accompanied by a nurse, the hospital would allow it, which seemed to make her even more irritable.
“May I help you?” A nurse had come up alongside Claudia.
“Oh, I…” Claudia brought her hand down from the glass. “I’m Claudia Dubois. I found…I was the one who found baby Elliot.” She pushed her glasses up her nose, shrugged, and smiled. “I just wanted to see how he was doing, you know? They said—Nurse Galt, I mean—said it would be okay…that I could come in and see him. I called this morning and they said—He’s going to be okay, right?”
The nurse’s face softened. Apparently she knew the story. “Would you like to see for yourself?”
She guided Claudia to a small room outside the nursery and instructed her to wait there, then returned several minutes later with a blanketed bundle. “Would you like to hold him for a while?”
Claudia nodded.
“Well, wash your hands then.” The nurse pointed at the sink, then continued talking while Claudia walked over to wash her hands. “Our little babies need so much holding—sometimes it gets so crazy around here, we just can’t get to them all. It’s nice you came in.”
“Just be sure to support his head,” she said, handing Elliot over to Claudia, adjusting his blanket a little in Claudia’s arms, making sure she was leaving him in capable hands. “Go ahead, sit down. Take some time.” She took a seat across from Claudia. “We heard you’re going to try to adopt him—is that right?”
Claudia nodded again, not taking her eyes off of Elliot. “We’re trying the foster route, first. I started the paperwork a few days ago. It’s kind of a long shot and my school is—well, they’re not being terribly supportive. But when I scheduled the interview with the social worker, she was encouraging. She said since I was the one who rescued him, I had a vested interest in him. She said it might help our case.”
Claudia rubbed the downy hair that peeked from under his cap and ran the back of her hand over his cheek. The nurse watched her caresses and smiled, then checked her watch. “It’s just about his feeding time. How about I get a bottle and you can give him his lunch?” She didn’t wait for an answer before she started for the door. “He’s finally beginning to get the hang of sucking,” she said as she stepped into the next room.
Elliot felt a little thicker than he had the last time Claudia had held him, the day she found him in the bathroom. He opened his eyes and looked up at her. “Are they taking good care of you here? Are they giving you lots of tender care?” Her words got caught in her throat.
“You are so precious.” Claudia fought back tears. She should have come here sooner.
But she’d been too afraid. Afraid of how it would feel if she kept visiting him, became attached, and then had to watch him get torn away. Now, after talking to the social worker, she had some hope. A vested interest. Although the amount of paperwork and interviews and background checks she and Dan were going to have to endure seemed insurmountable. They needed to get physicals, to make a fire-escape plan, give fingerprints, and even prove their pets had been vaccinated. At least, since their feng shui goldfish had died, they didn’t have to vaccinate any fish.
Now that Claudia had set the gears in motion, Dan was starting to balk at the process, making it all seem so much more insurmountable. His just-going-along-with-your-nutty-idea attitude had given way to barely concealed surliness. Monosyllabic answers to her questions as she filled out forms. Moody silences that were out of character for him. And of course, she was sure he knew what she was really up to, suggesting the foster parenting route as a way to ease him into the adoption route.
It did seem hopeless. She couldn’t do this without Dan on board, and it would probably take all of two seconds during the interview process before the social worker would know that Dan wasn’t on board. It was ridiculous to even try. But still, now that she was finally here, holding this little baby, she knew this is what she was supposed to do. She knew that somehow, making sure Elliot was going to be fine was her responsibility.
And where was Dan anyway? He’d said he would be here twenty minutes ago. Saturday traffic could be brutal, but this might be just another of his passive-aggressive protests.
They’d run separate errands this morning. Claudia had bought groceries and stopped by the cleaner’s. Dan had gone to get the oil changed in his car. He’d said he needed to run by his office to pick up some drawings he’d forgotten and that he also wanted to stop by Genesis Art Supply on the way back if he had time. Claudia was sure he’d make the time. Dan had said it would be easier if he just met her here, but now she was getting the sinking feeling he wasn’t going to show at all.
Claudia looked down at Elliot and snuggled him a little closer, amazed at the warmth he gave off. He fell back asleep in her arms, so precious and trusting, and she had to wonder, as she looked at his face, what she’d ever been afraid of.
Mara was just getting to the good part of her book when she saw, from the corner of her eye, Henry climbing up the front steps. His key turned the front lock and Tippy hopped down off her lap in anticipation. She started reading more quickly, trying to get in as many words as she could before Henry got inside. She crammed in one more sentence while he shut the front door and walked over to her.
“Hi honey,” she said, closing her book, at the same time that Henry bent down to kiss her.
Mara tilted her cheek up for him and when he bussed it, she recoiled as if he’d scraped her face with thirty-grade sandpaper.
“Henry!” she complained, turning her face up to look at him.
Her eyes went wide.
“What?”
She stared back at him open-mouthed and pulled her legs up under herself on the chair. Mara crouched there, speechless, pointing at his face.
“Oh, this?” He rubbed the quarter inch of thick stubble that covered his chin and cheeks. “Yeah, I really need to shave. Didn’t mean to scratch ya, hon. Sorry.” He mussed her hair with his hand.
Mara sank back down in the chair with a sigh. He must not have shaved before going to the gym this morning—probably had over-slept and been in a hurry. Mara shook her head with relief. She shouldn’t let herself get spooked like that.
> “I think I am going to call Dr. Bernstein today, though,” Henry said, turning toward the kitchen. “This hair stuff is getting a little too weird.”
She could see Henry rubbing his face with his hand again as he walked away.
“I shaved once this morning already.”
The truck had its trailer wedged securely underneath the viaduct, ironically right underneath the yellow and black sign that read, 13' 10'', something, Dan imagined, the driver should have read before he tried driving underneath it. He tapped his hand on the steering wheel. Claudia was going to be pissed; he was already twenty minutes late.
The truck driver kept getting out of his cab, looking up at the viaduct and assessing his truck, then getting back in to talk on his radio. Dan watched from his car, penned in by traffic on all sides, positioned about six cars back from the scene of the accident. At one point, the man in the car directly behind the stuck truck had tried to wave it backward authoritatively, but the truck driver had just looked at him as if he were nuts. Now, the truck driver was hiding in his cab, apparently waiting for the police, or someone of authority, to arrive and untangle the mess.
Dan tried to call Claudia on her cell phone but she hadn’t picked up, and that’s when he figured she probably couldn’t have it on at the hospital. He left her a message, telling her he was stuck in traffic, but it sounded like the kind of thing he wouldn’t believe either. They both knew he didn’t want to go to the hospital to see this baby, but he had promised.
He’d been hoping Claudia’s idea that this was going to lead to something was just going to go away, but as the week had worn on, she’d only seemed more determined. He felt like the guy in the car behind the truck—tilting at windmills, trying to single-handedly unstick an impossibly stuck situation.
Two squad cars, a tow truck, and forty-five minutes later, Dan stood outside the nursery. The babies in the bassinettes all looked the same to him, with the exception of the one who was crying. Dan could hear his howls through the glass, his little red face screwed up under his blue cap. “That’s probably him,” Dan thought. He watched a nurse walk over and pick up the crying boy; she held him to her chest and patted his back. When she noticed Dan, she pointed off to his right and he went through the double doors to the nurses’ station.
The woman sitting behind the desk didn’t look up as he stood in front of her, ignoring him even after he’d cleared his throat. He was thinking there should be better security in a place like this, when the nurse he’d seen through the window came around the corner, no longer carrying the squalling boy, and asked if she could help him.
“I’m Daniel Dubois. I was supposed to meet my wife here a while ago, but—”
“About an hour ago, if I’m not mistaken.” She smiled at him. “C’mon.” She waved her hand for Dan to follow her. “I was just going to check on them. I think she was getting ready to leave pretty soon.”
They walked down a short hallway and the nurse stopped outside a room next to the nursery. She put her index finger over her lips and then silently mouthed the words, “in there,” while pointing inside. Dan could see Claudia in profile from the door; her hair was hanging down the side of her face, swaying back and forth as she rocked the baby in the glider, and she was humming Brahms’s Lullaby. Dan could see Elliot asleep in her arms, his face the picture of contentment, a little arm thrown back next to his shoulder in complete relaxation.
It might have been less of a surprise to him if he’d watched her go through an entire pregnancy, instead of just all of a sudden one day acting like someone’s mother. He stood watching silently, not wanting to interrupt this scene. He wished he could keep watching it indefinitely. She looked so relaxed, so confident—so oddly unlike Claudia. When she finally looked up and noticed him there, he could see that her face was the picture of contentment, too.
Chapter Eighteen
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Gimme that. Where’d you find this?” Gail grabbed the video out of Will’s hand.
“Andrew wants to watch a video,” Will said. “I was helping him get it—since he needs to take it easy.” Will made big eyes at her—all innocence and light.
Andrew was on the couch, his expression a mirror image of his brother’s.
“Well, I have no idea what’s on this.” Gail turned the unlabeled video over in her hand. “Why are you getting into these old video tapes? I had them in a bit of an order. What is it you wanted to see, Andrew?”
“Nokio.”
“Well, this isn’t Pinocchio. I don’t know what’s on this—old baby videos or vacation or something. Let me help you find Pinocchio.” Gail rummaged through the stack of videos forced to the back of their entertainment cabinet, having given way over time to the stack of DVDs that had replaced them. “Here it is.”
“Let me do it. I can do it.”
“Okay, here you go.” Gail gave the video to Will. “You guys got it under control now?”
“Yeah, we got it.”
The VCR ingested the videotape with a high-pitched wheeze and Will nodded at her vigorously, his shaking head saying, go away. She looked over at Andrew on the couch, his new inhaler resting on the coffee table in front of him—just in case. She frowned at it, hating it. Andrew smiled at her, too, the same go away expression on his face. Gail smiled back and left the room, heading into the kitchen with the mystery video in her hand.
She flipped it over again, as if hoping a label might appear. They had so many old VHS tapes, and the labels had fallen off a bunch of them, if they even had had them in the first place. Another project for another day: cleaning out the old videos. Probably half of them were ancient episodes of All My Children, material she didn’t want her children to see, but before she could get rid of any of them, she wanted to look through them all, catalogue them maybe, at least make sure they didn’t contain anything important.
Back when Will was first born, they used to have a VHS recorder, and she didn’t want to take the chance they’d accidentally throw away any VHS tapes of first steps or spaghetti dinners. It would take time to archive all those old tapes, figure out which ones she wanted to keep, and then she’d still have to take them in somewhere to have them converted to digital. It would take time she didn’t know where she’d find. It had been on her list of things to do for a couple of years now at least. Well, in light of everything that had happened recently, she certainly wasn’t going to wish for time to do something like that. She was still reeling from what she thought were the consequences of her last wish.
Andrew had had to stay in the hospital for two days and had been sent home with that inhaler. The doctor had said he would have to use it for as long a year, until his lungs had time to recover. Until then, no running, no sports: Andrew was to take it easy. Clearly, Gail thought, that woman had never tried to raise a five-year-old boy.
She sat down at her desk in the kitchen and booted up the computer, her fingers absently drumming the videocassette. A long, long time ago—back before the kids—she and John had used their video camera to make some home videos of their own. Gail smiled: their own private Paris Hilton–like “memoirs.” Come to think of it, where was that video? Gail stopped tapping the one under her hand. Oh man, what if? Maybe I dodged more than a racy episode of All My Children. That would have been God-awful. Terrifyingly embarrassing. Lord only knows—well, maybe Lindsay did, too—how much therapy it would require to recover from an incident like that.
John entered the kitchen, walking past her and over to the fridge. “What are you grinning at?” he asked, opening the door and leaning inside. “You look like you’re guilty of crimes.”
“Do you remember that old, old video we made? Right after college? At our first apartment on Wellington?”
John turned around and grinned at her, his hand still on the open refrigerator door. Not much else besides sex could take his mind off food. “Why yee-esss I do. Why’s that? Do you want to make another?” He gave her a mischievous grin.
Gail smirked back at him.
“I was just wondering where it is. I haven’t seen it in ages and now, with the kids getting older…Do you remember where we hid it?”
“In a safe place so we’d know where to find it?” John took out the mayonnaise and the bologna and cheese and shut the door to the fridge. “I remember hiding it.” He laughed. “I just have no idea where.”
Gail didn’t say anything. She tapped the video under her hand again.
“Why? Did you want a movie night tonight?”
“No…I…That’s not what this is about. The boys had this.” She held up the tape. “And it’s unlabeled and I don’t know, it got me thinking. I guess I got a little concerned again—thinking about, you know, what if?”
John shrugged and pulled out the loaf of Wonder Bread from the breadbox, forgoing the Brownberry Whole Wheat. “I’m sure it’s around here somewhere.”
“Mmm.”
“If you’re worried about it, we can look. It’s got to be up in our room—or buried in a box in the attic from one of the moves. We’ll find it. I’m sure we didn’t give it away.”
“Give it away?” Gail’s voice was higher than usual.
“I’m saying I don’t think we gave it away.”
“When would we have given it away?”
“I’m sure we didn’t. All the stuff we’ve donated to the Brown Elephant has been clothes or books—albums and stuff. I don’t think we ever unloaded any videos.”
Gail did not feel comforted. She felt panicked.
John spread mayonnaise on both slices of bread before slapping his sandwich together. “If it’ll make you feel better, I’ll look around for it tonight. It’s probably up in the attic.”
Gail nodded. She ran her hand over the tape on the counter. Maybe this one was it; maybe it somehow got mixed in with the others during a move. Given away? Of course not.
John stuffed nearly half of his sandwich into his mouth in one bite.
Wish Club Page 19
