What Was Mine

by Helen Klein Ross

  By six o’clock, I couldn’t resist tuning in to the news any longer. I settled with the baby in the den, in Warren’s big leather recliner—now I was glad his girlfriend hadn’t wanted it. My heart pounded as I pressed the remote to turn on the set. I turned so the baby couldn’t see the screen from her place in my lap. I didn’t want her to see her mother.

  As the picture came on, I worried. Were they on the lookout for me?

  There was the first President Bush guessing the week-old war in Iraq would be over in a few days. Then, news from the Central Park jogger trial. Then, what I’d been bracing myself for: a reporter stood outside IKEA, holding a microphone: A search is on for missing infant Natalie Featherstone abducted today . . .

  Her name was Natalie. She didn’t look like a Natalie. She was four months old. Four months and six days.

  They had no lead on who’d taken her! Relief ballooned in my brain.

  The screen filled with the glistening, tear-streaked face of her mother. Marilyn. She was a striking woman, beautiful even in her distress. Her hair was long and blond and fell in gentle waves in front of her face as she leaned toward the camera, which made her seem so close I drew back, afraid for a moment she could actually see us. I was fearful for myself and sorry for her. Very sorry. Her baby had been taken. I had taken her baby, who was on my lap, sucking peacefully on a bottle. I was glad she didn’t seem to recognize Marilyn’s voice. What can a four-month-old baby know of her mother? What can she remember? A fragrance? A gesture? The feel of her hands?

  “I turned away from the shopping cart for only a second,” Marilyn was saying. But this was a lie! She was a liar! She’d left the baby for much longer than that. She’d abandoned a small, helpless baby in a shopping cart in the middle of a store in a bad area. What if someone had come along besides me? Someone who meant to harm her, lock her up, raise her in a basement? There are so many crazy people out there, I thought, protectively stroking the baby’s arm.

  The camera pulled back to reveal Marilyn’s husband, pink-faced and square-jawed, in expensive-looking jacket and tie.

  The distraught parents . . .

  He held up a photo of himself and his wife holding the baby. The camera went in for a close-up. It was a photo not of the baby, but of their car! A red BMW took up most of the picture. The camera pulled back and I could see, in the splay of their legs against the green lawn, they’d gotten everything they’d wanted so far in life.

  The infant in the picture looked nothing like the baby I held in my lap and I realized they hadn’t bothered to take recent photos. The camera was on them again and she put her hand to her throat as if checking for the persistence of vocal cords there. She leaned her cheek against his shoulder and he put his arm around her in a comforting hug. They still had each other. My longing for a baby was at least the equal of theirs.

  The FBI has launched a tristate search for the kidnapper . . .

  Kidnapper. Until then, that word hadn’t occurred to me.

  Suddenly everything in me started to rise. I managed to get the baby safely to her crib in the next room before kneeling on the floor and retching into the plastic wastebasket decorated with characters from Pinocchio. I knelt for a long while, cushioning my knees on the rug, while everything in me, everything I’d ever consumed, it seemed, came up into the basket and now the room reeked with the smell of my vomit.

  I took the basket to the bathroom and emptied it and washed it and brought it back to the baby’s room. The baby was crying and I picked her up and took her to the rocker and rocked her to sleep.

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  marilyn

  I didn’t want to go to sleep that night, or nights for weeks after. I didn’t want to lie down in the dark knowing I’d wake to a house without Natalie. I’d pace the house, walking in figure eights, needing to go somewhere, to feel as if I were doing something. The doctor gave me meds to knock me out, but I didn’t want to take them at first. I’d never taken anything stronger than aspirin. What if Natalie turned up in the night and I was unconscious and couldn’t go to her right away?

  After about a week, I gave in. Tom warned me I couldn’t function anymore without sleep. But sleep wasn’t restful. It was full of nightmares. Nightmares about Natalie in which she was screaming, reaching for me and I couldn’t help her, her hands were always just out of my grasp. Or, I dreamed that I’d find her, she’d been in her swing all along, and my body would flood with gratitude and relief and I’d pick her up but she’d slip out of my grasp and fall through a hole in the floorboards and I’d be wakened by a strange sound and Tom taking me in his arms, telling me the strange sound was coming from me.

  Even worse than the nights were the mornings, climbing out of a deep well of sleep, slowly encountering the light, hearing the waking song of my baby, getting ready to get out of bed and tend to her, when I’d have to remember all over again—she was gone.

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  lucy

  I returned her again and again, in my mind. All that night, and throughout the next day, I saw scenes in which I was handing the baby back to her mother. I imagined walking boldly through the doors of IKEA, saying that someone had given her to me, or that I had found her somewhere, in a playground, crying, left alone on the grass, in need of a diaper change. But what playground? And what had I, a childless woman, been doing in a playground? And where had I been when the baby was taken? I had no alibi. I knew from TV, I needed an alibi.

  I couldn’t keep her, much as I wanted to, much as I felt an inexplicable connection between us. But how would I give her back? I imagined returning her, under cloak of night, to her doorstep. I knew where the parents lived. It was all over the news. I imagined swaddling her in soft blankets, leaving her in a basket on their welcome mat, ringing the doorbell and hurrying away. But how could I hurry away fast enough to not be seen by vigilant neighbors or police who I assumed were watching the house? After a sleepless night, I woke with a plan.

  That morning, holding her on my lap as she took a bottle, I told her how much I loved her, how sorry I was we couldn’t stay together. Baby, I said, (I called her Baby) I’ll never, ever forget you. I gave her little terry-clothed arm a squeeze, and at this, she pulled her mouth away from the bottle and gazed at me, as if taking in what I was telling her.

  I washed and ironed the sunsuit and bib she’d worn to IKEA, dressed her in it, and brought out a sweater my sister had knitted for the baby I was never able to have. I wanted to leave the baby with something to show that the person who’d taken her was a kind person who had cared for her well.

  I drove a few towns away, to a Babies To Go. How reluctantly I unstrapped the crisscrossings for the last time, picked her up, and settled her on my shoulder. Once in the store, I followed signs for cribs, which were in the rear. I dithered for some time deciding which one would be best to leave her in, glad to be spared the attention of salespeople huddled in a far corner over boxes of takeout.

  I chose an old-fashioned rocking cradle, plump with white pillows and bolstered in frilled fabric dotted with bumblebees. White ribbon weaved prettily through its wooden slats. Slowly, I lifted her from my shoulder, resting her head on the ruffled pillow, prodded the cradle into gentle motion, rocking her gently until she was asleep. I kissed my fingertip and touched it to her soft forehead, then stood and hurried toward the front of the store, tears gathering so that I could barely see my way to the pay phone by the front door. I put in a quarter and listened to several mechanized messages thanking me for calling IKEA.

  I’d meant to say where the baby was, then hang up. But before a human answered, I was distracted by a cry from the back of the store. That cry changed my mind. The sound of her sadness pulled at my core. I couldn’t bear for her to be abandoned again. I replaced the receiver and hurried back to rescue her from the cradle.

  “Mommy’s here,” I crooned. It was the first time I’d ever called myself that. The word flooded me, filling crevices I didn’t know I had. I held the baby tight, reveling in the pleasure of
her small, warm body against me, a pleasure I’d resigned myself to never feeling again. I swayed with her back and forth, murmuring “there, there” and other small mantras that mothers do, until she quieted, head on my shoulder.

  I knew what I was doing was wrong according to law. But what I was doing felt right, according to the laws of nature.

  I carried her to the aisle of car seats. It took a few minutes to divert the attention of a salesclerk from his carton of Chinese food, to help me pick out the best one.

  Driving home with my baby in the seat behind me, I kept checking the rearview mirror to make sure she was safe, begging the universe to give Marilyn more babies, knowing that none could replace the one in my care.

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  lucy

  I had to give her another name, of course. She’d been Natalie for four months. She’d no doubt come to recognize the sound (na-talee) and associate it, according to Dr. Spock, with fulfillment of needs or pleasure. I didn’t want to wrest that accomplishment from her. I didn’t want to damage her development. And yet, I needed to call her something else. A name different but not too distant from the one she was used to. I didn’t want her to feel as if her identity had been robbed. I didn’t want to subject her to psychological vertigo.

  After we came home from Babies To Go, I sat on the floor in her room, pulling baby-name books from the shelf. I had plenty of baby-name books. Warren and I had perused them at leisure in the heady days of what we thought was impending parenthood. None of the names we’d chosen seemed right to me now.

  The baby lay beside me on the braided rug, playing with paper which she was crinkling and putting into her mouth. She liked sucking on paper. It was clean paper. Engraved Tiffany stationery, fresh from the box. I imagined the baby would have her own engraved stationery someday. What name would be on it?

  Her new name couldn’t begin with an A, E, or O. I’d avoid initials that could turn into acronyms. In grade school, I’d had a friend, Zena Thomson, whose middle name was Isabelle and for years she had been taunted with “Zit.”

  Bella. Chloe. Haley. Mia.

  Besides an actress whose work I admired, Mia was also the name of a friend’s older sister, a girl who was pretty, poised, sophisticated—all the things I hadn’t been as a girl.

  The name in the mouth produced a sound similar to Natalie: Mee-a.

  “Mia,” I tried, and the baby looked up.

  Years later, after a playdate with a friend whose sitter spoke Spanish, Mia told me that her name in that language meant “mine.”

  “Did you name me that or was that my born name?” she wanted to know.

  “Your born name,” I said. “It’s beautiful. I didn’t want to change it.”

  “My first mommy named me that because she didn’t want to give me away, right?”

  “Right,” I said, lifting her, pressing her against me, swallowing the lump in my throat, until she demanded her freedom and wriggled away.

  The day after I named her was a Monday, and at 9 a.m., I called Sandra, the creative manager at work. I told her I was in Kansas. She knew about my quest for a child—everyone at work knew about it at that point. I said I was picking up a four-month-old baby from a high school student who’d changed her mind about raising her. Such deception is unimaginable now, when caller ID would display the area code of the landline I was calling from, but then it was possible. Sandra was a single mother herself. She told me to take as much time as I needed.

  In the first days with Mia, I wouldn’t let her out of my sight. I’d take her into each room with me, strap her into a high chair while I worked in the kitchen mixing formula, heating it, mashing banana, which Dr. Spock suggested should be the first fruit. I’d stand there working the fork, pressing tines into the soft white pulp, crossing and recrossing patterns until the banana was mushy enough for a baby to eat, thinking how lucky I was not to be at the ad agency, hashing and rehashing client copy instead. I even set her up in a bouncy chair in the bathroom so I could keep an eye on her while I was taking a shower. I carried a monitor around the house while she slept, listening for the reassuring sound of her breath. I’d sometimes keep watch, hovering over her crib rail, gazing at her as she fell asleep, marveling at the rise and fall of her little square back, the glisten of sweat on her dimpled arms, the daintiness of her baby snores.

  You’d think a four-month-old taken from her mother would put up a fuss. But I recall her in those first days with me being less upset than she seemed to be puzzled. Perhaps I am deluding myself. Perhaps I have blocked out a wailing resistance. But I don’t think so.

  Picture it, my friend had said, and it will come true. I was filled with gratitude for my good fortune—and remorse for the way it had come to me.

  I’d sometimes call my sister “from Kansas,” putting questions to her, but most things having to do with taking care of a baby—how to burp them, carry them, get them to sleep—couldn’t be explained over the phone. Cheryl kept offering to fly down to help and I had a devil of a time talking her out of the trip.

  Every few days, I’d call in to the office, reporting progress. “She rolled over today for the first time!” I’d say, failing to mention that the bed she’d rolled over in had been mine in New Jersey. Or “Another delay,” I’d lie. “The birth father needs to cosign and they can’t find him.”

  I got a message from the art director who’d helped me place the ad saying how happy she was for me, but that deadlines were urgent and she was pairing up with another writer. I didn’t care.

  I lived those first weeks of motherhood in dread of the doorbell. The few times it rang, I felt every hair on my body upend. I feared that something would break in my case and that the authorities—or even the wronged mother herself—would show up at my door to take her back. The few times the bell rang, I never answered it. Instead, I’d peep through a gap in the drapes. The bell ringers wore benign-looking uniforms in post office blue or UPS brown. But what if they were disguised to gain access? What if I was a suspect being spied upon? They’d leave packages on my doorstep but I’d wait until after I put Mia down for the night before creeping out to retrieve them. The packages were baby gifts. Baby clothes from my sister, a Sony video camera from friends at work. (The agency I worked for had the Sony account.) Once a flyer fell from the door when I opened it: Missing Infant, it read beneath a photo of Baby Natalie. I crumpled the paper and threw it away, glad that the photo looked nothing like her.

  I didn’t answer the phone. I rarely went out, waiting for dark before backing the car out of the driveway, so no one could see that I had a car seat, to buy groceries in distant towns.

  What worried me most during those weeks was that she would get sick with something. I’d have to bring her to emergency and the jig would be up. I guessed there were alerts to airports and hospitals for a baby fitting her description. Each time I changed her diaper, I did a complete body check, scouting for redness or rashes or lumps. I kept careful notes on her feeding and poop schedules, as one book advised—although later, I realized that advice had been for nursing mothers, to inform them if their babies were getting enough nourishment.

  Mia usually slept through the night, but one 3 a.m. she was crying inconsolably, though her diaper was dry and she didn’t have a fever. Remembering the little lump I’d felt in her gum, I guessed she was teething. In despair, not knowing how else to soothe her, I sat on the rocker with her in my lap and undid the top of my nightgown. I thought maybe milk would come, maybe I could calm her with it. Weren’t there stories of wet nurses and women in bomb shelters nursing babies whose mothers had died? These thoughts were crazy, but I didn’t care—I was desperate to give Mia whatever she wanted.

  The sight of my breast did calm her immediately and I guessed that she’d been breastfed before, though she’d been weaned by the time she came to me—I knew by the odiferousness of that first diaper. She stared at what was being offered, with a glance at my face as if asking permission, then moved her face forward and seized my ni
pple between her gums. It hurt like hell, as if my nipple was being crushed between stones. I winced and pulled back and she resumed her crying, screaming louder this time, as if I had tricked her, which I suppose I had.

  I wished that those first weeks could have gone on forever, our tiny world of eating, sleeping, rocking, reading.

  It was as if Mia thought she was on a great adventure. She seemed to take pleasure in exploring new sights, new surfaces, new smells, new sounds. She didn’t take naps, though the books said she should. She hadn’t read those books. She slept through the night, though. I was grateful for that. I’d begin each day with a feeling of excitement, as I used to feel as a child on Christmas morning. I’d never been a light sleeper, but now I was out of bed at the first sound of her “talking” to herself in her crib in the morning, my heart somersaulting, hurrying to the nursery to take in the gratifying sight and scent of her, realizing anew—I was somebody’s mother!

  I’d sing her little songs and talk to her as I attended her toilette. Then, I’d settle her in a jump chair, I’d go to the front door, and after checking from the window to make sure no neighbors were about, I’d duck out and grab the paper from the front porch. I’d sit at the table feeding Mia and turning the pages slowly, cautiously, scanning headlines for news of what had happened, closing the paper, grateful for yet another twenty-four hours with her.

  Generally, people in advertising consider PR to be a lesser profession, but my own estimation of the field rose considerably when I saw that after a few days of media attention the story was made to sink out of sight. IKEA was opening a new store in Los Angeles. They didn’t want bad publicity.