What Was Mine

by Helen Klein Ross

  Loving Professional Seeks to Mother Your Baby. But none of the girls wanted to consider a single mom, which is what they themselves would have been. “They all want a home like in the sitcom Family Ties,” said a lawyer I called. “I’m sorry,” he added, but I didn’t feel apology from him, only haste in dismissing me. I called numbers in ads placed by girls themselves, seeking homes for their babies. It traumatized me, how roundly I failed auditions again and again. I wouldn’t get anywhere telling the truth, I realized. I decided to fake a spouse and ran another ad: Loving Couple Wants to Give Your Baby a Beautiful Home. I got calls this time, but soon discovered that the process of adoption involved too much paperwork, too many inspections to pull off this kind of deception.

  Did I want to foster an older child? If so, I could probably bring one home right away, someone told me. Part of me wished I was bighearted enough to take in an older child who needed mothering. But I wasn’t that generous. I wanted a baby. My heart was set on having a baby, not a child too old to be beautiful in the way that all babies are beautiful. I wished it were otherwise.

  It seemed everyone I knew was having babies. I attended shower after shower for coworkers and friends, even hosted one myself, for the art director who’d helped me place the ads in Kansas. I went all out—it was a big deal to ask people to schlepp out to New Jersey and I wanted to make the commute worth their while. Instead of napkins by the plates, I folded cloth diapers. I filled party bags for each of the guests, with jars of gourmet pickles. I spent a shocking amount on cheese to go with the theme: Tetilla, a Spanish cheese in the shape of a breast. During Baby Bingo, one of the guests en route to the bathroom mistakenly opened the door to the nursery and soon the entire party was gathered at its threshold, faces agog, silent, and I saw myself as they did: a woman stocking up for a baby I’d never have. For the first time, I realized, as they did, as Warren had tried to convince me—I wasn’t ever going to have a baby. I just wasn’t.

  Once the party was over, and I walked the celebrant to her car carrying shopping bags full of loot and the hat made of the ribbons in which they’d been wrapped, I spent the rest of the weekend in bed, mourning the baby I’d lost, the marriage I’d forsaken in futile pursuit of parenthood. The baby I might have had (I’d felt it was a boy) would be fourteen years old then and I imagined, with tenderness, the crack in his voice, new hair on his smooth face. He’d be four years older than Cheryl’s Jake and I imagined them together, Jake looking up to his older cousin, the same way Cheryl used to look up to me. Now it was like Cheryl thought I didn’t know anything anymore. Once she had babies, it was like she stopped being sisters with me, and became sisters with our mother instead. At family gatherings, they talked in corners, exchanging stories, secret language, as if they were members of a club that I couldn’t get into.

  By Monday morning, I was myself again—or rather, I acted like myself: made myself get out of bed, take a shower, put on a smart outfit, take the commuter bus to the city, and throw myself into my work. Soon I was the go-to copywriter for fast turnaround: brochures, print ads, TV spots. I practically grabbed pink pages off the top of the pile of job requisites, whereas before, like most creatives, I’d hidden when traffic people came around trying to get me to accept assignments. No job was too much for me to take on. To meet deadlines, I’d sometimes stay overnight at the office, tap, tap, tapping at my Kaypro computer. I came to be one of the copywriters in highest demand, one of the first to be called upon when the agency pitched accounts. I redirected my fervor for a baby into a passion for work, creating campaigns for clients who were like babies themselves in their constant demands, their inability to separate their own needs from that of the person gratifying them.

  And that is how I took my first trip to IKEA. The store in Elizabeth had just opened, it was only the second IKEA store in this country.

  An account man drove us out to do research—driving is never left to creatives. The parking lot was crowded, though it was midweek and I recall thinking how well the new campaign must be working. Yet, the brand manager was already seeking to replace it. He’d invited the agency I worked for to pitch the account.

  It was only May, but we were having a heat wave. We had to walk a long way from the car, in hot sun. The heels of my shoes kept sticking to the tar of the parking lot and I stopped a few times to extricate them. When a wall of glass doors opened up to admit us, a wave of happiness washed over me, which at first I attributed to air-conditioning.

  A woman in a red apron greeted us cheerfully, handing us bright yellow bags for our shopping convenience. The yellow bags were enormous, the size of trash bags—but they weren’t big enough to hold furniture. I was confused. Wasn’t IKEA a furniture store? Furnish Your Life was the tag line. Yes, there was furniture—lots of it—but there were little things to buy, too: candles, bottle openers, fridge magnets, measuring cups, clocks, all designed in practical but unexpected ways which made ordinary household items seem exotic. I followed the group into a forest of floor lamps, but soon wandered away, drawn by the room displays. I was mesmerized by dioramas of family life. A white canvas sectional around a giant TV screen showed the commercial the brand manager hated. Blond dining rooms, dark book-lined studies, eat-in kitchens with groceries on the counter—all appeared to be lived in by happy people who had just stepped away. I meandered through room after room of intentional disarray gleaming with possibility. A childlike optimism invaded me. This seemed a place where nothing bad could happen.

  I spent the next few weeks holed up in my office with my art director, working to come up with campaign ideas that would make others fall in love with the place, as I had. Our presentation got a standing ovation, but we didn’t get the account, after all. The agency of record retained it. But I found myself going back to the store. Not just once, but again and again. I went there on summer Fridays as others went to the beach. Sometimes I’d pack a sandwich from home and eat it on a wooden bench by the entry, observing the comings and goings of people who would enter empty-handed but leave with so much that red-aproned helpers had to assist them out of the store. Or, I’d stand by the Ball Room and watch children playing sound-lessly behind glass. The Ball Room was like a giant aquarium: instead of water, a sea of brightly colored foam balls in which kids were jumping, diving, mutely laughing in the swell. Basically, it was a babysitting service, a clever marketing move, as it freed parents to concentrate on filling their carts.

  Sometimes I’d go to the café, where menu items were Swedish, and linger over meatballs and lingonberry juice, transfixed by the motions of mothers around me, admiring their skill at keeping both trays and babies aloft. They moved in pairs, combining broods of small children, seating them at tables laden with food, fencing them in with large shiny carts overflowing with the fixtures of family life. I imagined their good fortune wafting to me, borne in the mingle of scents from their trays. I pictured myself in their midst, dandling a baby on my knee as I joined in their discussions, weighing in on the advantages of wood cribs versus metal, classical versus pop songs for musical mobiles, at what age to take a binky away.

  The press has it all wrong. It was not premeditated.

  4

  lucy

  The agency had summer hours: every other Friday off.

  August 10, 1990, was an off Friday for me. I convinced myself, as I sometimes did before pointing the car toward IKEA, that I needed to buy something there. The heat was unbearable, air conditioners were taxing operational systems all over the East Coast, and there were rumors that the strain would cause a blackout. I needed candles and IKEA sold them—perhaps sells them still—in handy boxes of many for a bargain price.

  There I was, innocently trawling the aisles, empty yellow bag slung over my shoulder. (I always took a bag from a greeter when I came in, so as to look shopperly.) I was trying to remember where candles were, when I came upon a baby sitting alone in a cart. Not sitting, exactly. The baby was too young to sit. She was slumped in a plastic infant carrier which wa
s the same yellow as the bags. The carrier was attached to the seat of the shopping cart, as was common in the days before car seats became portable. The baby was in a fallen-over position that looked extremely uncomfortable. Her eyes were open and wide and blue. She was staring at me and my skin prickled all over. Her face looked exactly like the one on the cover of a picture book I’d loved as a child: Baby’s First Christmas. Whenever I thought of having a baby, hers was the baby’s face I’d imagined. She was a girl, I knew. Her sunsuit was pink. She looked at me wonderingly, as if trying to work out where she’d seen me before. When she smiled a gummy grin, I felt a sea swell under my breastbone.

  No one else was around. The baby was alone in the long, empty aisle. Her eyes were bright with expectation. A wisp of blond stood at the top of her head. It was as if the cart was a spaceship that had landed, bringing her to me.

  “How old is she?” asked a passing shopper who was pregnant and pushing a cart full of wicker. She gazed at the baby with admiration and I welled with an inexplicable pride.

  “Two months,” I said, without thinking, beaming idiotically, as if the baby were mine.

  “Two months? She’s enormous!” and I guessed that I had grossly miscalculated.

  Now the baby was listing further in the seat, held by straps, but not very tightly. There was a chance she could fall. I saw that the woman expected me to prop her up.

  I can honestly say that my only intention in reaching into the cart was to right the baby. But as soon as my palms pressed against her doughy arms, I felt a force so strong I can still feel the bind in my chest. Her skin was cold. She had goose bumps. She was dressed for heat, not for air-conditioning, wearing a lacy bib, but no shirt. The folds of her neck were slick with drool, making her susceptible to drafts. She could catch pneumonia!

  As I straightened her in the seat, she gazed at me with what looked to be gratitude. I inhaled a sweet scent from the down on her scalp and a flow of something warm started through me.

  The pregnant woman leaned on her cart and pushed away.

  How could someone leave a baby alone in a shopping cart? Anyone might come along and take her, someone who might do her harm. I couldn’t just leave her there.

  I decided to take her to the front of the store, to one of the cashiers. As soon as the cart began to move, the baby brightened and looked around, pumping her bare feet as if to help propel us on the little journey we’d embarked on together. The cart glided easily, almost of its own accord, down one aisle and up another, toward the bank of cash registers at the front of the store.

  Then, it was moving away from the registers, toward the exit sign, four vivid red letters lurid in their suggestiveness to me. I told myself: I was only taking her outside for a minute, to get her out of the cold. She could catch a chill. A deathly chill. The air outside would warm her up.

  And then, we were within inches of the exit doors, when alarms went off, and I do what I always do when I panic—I froze. A tumult sounded, electronic bells were banging and bonging, and the baby began to cry as a woman in uniform hurried toward us. I felt a sudden distance from my own body, as if I were watching myself on a movie screen, wondering how the picture would turn out.

  The woman smelled like jasmine, which, oddly, was the name on the badge over her breast: Jasmine, Security. But her eyes weren’t accusing, they were apologetic.

  “Guess your baby forgot to pay for this,” she said, smiling as she leaned into the cart and wriggled a rubber duck from inside the baby’s sunsuit. She squeaked the toy, which made the baby stop crying, and waved us into the bright, waiting world.

  My ears were throbbing with the sound of my own heart as I unstrapped the baby. I lifted her cautiously out of the cart. She was heavier than I thought she would be. Talcum, a scent I hadn’t inhaled in years, came to me as I pressed her soft weight to my chest. Rubbing her back in circles to keep her calm, a motion resurrected from years of babysitting, I dropped my chin on her back (a possessive gesture I noticed often in mothers) and walked quickly—but not too quickly—through outer doors which opened automatically to release us. Us! Oh, the enormity implied by that diminutive word, how exhilarated I was by its sudden insinuation into my consciousness.

  The heat of the unconditioned air was a shocking contrast to the cool inside the store and this moving from the comfort of one place to the shock of another brought to mind the process of birth, which I’d often imagined—though not in this way.

  5

  jasmine

  I even apologized to her. God forgive me. It never crossed my mind she was a kidnapper. It was my first job as security. It was a sophisticated system, state of the art they’d invested in because they were afraid of high shrinkage—retail for shoplifting—because of the area. I was told the system was sensitive. They were still getting the kinks out. I was supposed to check bags of anybody who set off the alarm, but the lady didn’t have any bags. I saw the duck in the baby’s clothes. It had a sticker. Stickers were always falling off one thing and onto another, and sure enough, the duck was marked SHOWR CRTN. I sent them on their way.

  The security cam hadn’t worked that day. Some electronic had failed. We didn’t know it until the next day when the FBI requested tapes. There was no footage to identify her and I couldn’t remember anything about her except she was white. If only I’d detained her for a minute, things could have been different, is what I kept telling myself for years.

  6

  marilyn

  How many times have I relived that terrible day, the day of the “event,” as Tom, my ex, called it almost as soon as it happened, distancing himself from it, or trying to, as if it had impaled some other family, some far-flung unlucky family you read about in the news.

  Luck had always been with us before. We both had good jobs, or what I thought was good in those days, when career and financial success were still paramount. Tom was a lawyer on Wall Street and I’d just been promoted to sales manager at AT&T, a top-ten company for working mothers. We’d recently renovated a colonial in Cranford, in a good school district. The mortgage was already half paid down.

  Of course, luckiest of all, we had a new baby. A wondrous, perfect baby girl, Natalie. Tom thought she was named for his mother, but secretly, I’d named her after the secretary to my first boss, a girl whose carriage and delicate facial structure I found so beguiling that my breath stopped each time I had to approach my boss’s desk.

  That morning, I overslept the alarm. I was tempted to leave out this detail later, in the recountings I made to the police and the press. I thought it made me sound lazy and was afraid this detail—a lackadaisical mother!—might prejudice people against me and reduce the urgency of the search. But I didn’t hold back even this morsel of memory, in case it was an important piece to the puzzle. I was already beginning to apprehend the connectedness of the universe.

  At 7:58 a.m. the phone rang, pulling me out of a dream. I remember the time because I was shocked to see the numbers on the Dream Machine clock switching over, dropping from 7:57 to an impossible 7:58, with a soft click, well past the time I’d usually be getting Natalie up and changed and fed and ready for Charu to dress her in whatever outfit I’d laid out on the bathinette.

  What was the dream, a policewoman wanted to know, but how could I remember? I didn’t put much stock in dreams in those days and didn’t see what dreams had to do with the nightmare of the reality that had descended upon us.

  Still groggy from sleep, I reached for the phone, knocking over a wineglass that was on the nightstand. I never could get that red stain out of the carpet, though I scrubbed it with every product imaginable. When we put the house on the market a year later, I pulled the bed over, to hide it.

  I couldn’t tell who had called, at first. The snooze alarm was going off and the buzzer was so loud I couldn’t hear whoever was on the other end of the line. At first, I thought it must be Tom calling from the office, but he’d still be on the 7:49, his car phone out of his reach, embedded in the dashbo
ard of his new car parked at the lot. The only way he’d be able to call from a train would have been from a cell phone which he didn’t have, practically no one had one in those days, no one but me. The company had given it to me the month before. AT&T had just started a policy of letting new mothers work off premise. My last month on maternity leave, an IT guy had come out to the house to set me up with a company computer, fax machine, even a cellular phone, a new compact model the company was coming out with and touting because it weighed less than a pound. I could test-drive it for R&D, he said.

  I thought maybe the caller was Tom’s mother. She sometimes called at odd hours and maybe they were putting off their drive up from Virginia. They were due to drive up that weekend, to meet the baby. It was already Friday! They’d be there the next day and there was still lots to do to get the house ready for them. I’d wanted to give them the master bedroom, but Tom felt that wasn’t necessary, they could stay in the room we both used as an office. That room was fine, but its bathroom needed a few things: a shower curtain, a bath mat, a hanging shelf for toiletries. I planned to run out after a meeting, to go shopping at Conran’s, which was a few blocks away from the AT&T office on Forty-Eighth where I worked.

  When I heard Charu’s voice, my heart sank. If Charu was calling, it meant that she wouldn’t be coming at 8:30 like she usually did. Without a babysitter, I was in trouble—or so I thought, then still unaware of what real trouble was. Without a babysitter, I couldn’t go into the office, I wouldn’t be able to deliver the report I was due to present at the meeting that afternoon. My boss had chosen me to present it in his stead and I’d been up until 2 a.m. the night before, rearranging slides and rehearsing words I had memorized, words meant to sound spontaneous, but which I didn’t dare trust to spontaneity, because the thought of public speaking sent shivers down the back of my legs. Little did I know that my preparation that night was readying me to speak on television, for the first time.