“You’ve been feeding that dragon ever since, haven’t you?”
I chuckled. Nice analogy. Feeding the dragon? But what about our daughter? I knew what he was going to say. But what kind—
“You started taking a perfectly healthy baby from doctor to doctor. And that’s not normal.”
Normal? What kind of mother would I be, Jack, if I didn’t try to help my child? What kind of mother would I be?
“There’s something wrong with her. She cries too much. Don’t you get that?” My accusation seemed to trigger additional resentment on his part and, as always, Mia’s excessive crying was just a figment of my imagination.
“There’s nothing wrong with her, nothing. The fact that you can’t handle a baby doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with her. You’ve been taking Mia from doctor to doctor and they all tell you the same thing. A colic, she’ll grow out of it. You can’t continue to insist on all these tests that make no sense. I’ve been allowing you to do this for the longest time but I need you to stop this madness.”
Jack stared at me for a long time. Then he took a step back. His voice was calm but his neck was covered in blotches.
“I don’t know what to do but I can’t allow you to go on like this.”
Jack’s mind was not prepared to wrap itself around such an unwelcome emotion as this: he didn’t know what do. Jack was too rational to accept chaos. He had been trying to put me back together but now he realized he was finally out of options.
His decision to get married because I was pregnant had backfired on him. Not only was I not keeping up my end of the bargain, but at the same time I kept him from fulfilling his. There was work to be done, lots of work. An infinite workload of case files, preparing witnesses, and interviews. And even though he was exhausted, I knew that the pressures of his job felt perversely comfortable to him compared to what awaited him at home every night. I threw my head back and burst into an overly animated gesture of joy.
“This whole marriage was a mistake. Come on, Jack, this is your way out.” You shattered into a couple of pieces, Jack put you back together again. Even four, six, or ten, with enough glue he could make you right. When I shattered, the pieces were too many to count. It wasn’t even a matter of how many, but how much. Like sand. Uncountable. And when Jack felt backed into a corner, he reacted.
He walked toward me as if to grab me. “Just listen to yourself . . . you’re irrational. You follow me to work, you come to my office, embarrass me? I don’t know what’s going on, but you need help.”
I just stared at him as I watched him pause just long enough to shake his head. Then his voice turned to ice.
“I find you here, in my closet, while Mia is screaming her head off. Does that strike you as rational?”
Mia stirred, her little hands reaching for something invisible, sounds of distress escaping her lips. Jack’s eyes were darting left and right. When he finally spoke, his voice was down to a whisper.
“I no longer trust you with my daughter. This stops tonight.” He kept switching Mia from one arm to the other while she was growing visibly upset. Tears started to well up in her eyes and short of a bottle nothing was going to calm her down. “Estelle, this can’t go on any longer. Why can’t you just—”
“Just what? Be normal? Is that what you want me to be? Normal?”
He stood there, didn’t say a word. His face was empty, I had hit the nail on the head. A normal woman is all he wanted. And I was everything but. Cha-ching, you lose, Jack.
“You need to get help,” he said. “I’m taking off tomorrow and we’ll go see somebody. You need professional help.”
I stood there, waiting until he left the closet, cautious not to turn my back on him. I went to the kitchen and, while the bottle warmed in the microwave, I slid the gun in the back of the junk drawer.
I fed Mia, put her in her crib, and went into the study, where Jack was perched over a case file. He looked as if nothing had happened at all. When he saw me, his demeanor changed. He seemed agitated. I sat in a chair in front of his desk and crossed my legs. I managed a smile and hoped my face didn’t seem too contorted. I wanted to appease him, to seem as sane as possible.
“There’s something we need to talk about,” Jack said.
I took in a deep breath, then I exhaled. “This is when you’re going to tell me about your girlfriend, the one from your office?”
“There’s no girlfriend. I . . . I wanted to tell you when the moment was right, but hell, no moment is right lately.” He paused for a second, “The woman at my office was Victoria Littlefield.”
The name sounded familiar but I couldn’t quite place it.
“She’s from the DA’s office and we were discussing a position.” He got up, stepped closer, and lowered his voice to a whisper. “Until you barged in like a maniac, that is. I can’t even blame her that she didn’t offer me the job once she found out I have a lunatic for a wife. This job is all I ever wanted. Ten years from now I could be DA. But that doesn’t matter anymore now, does it?”
His eyes communicated what he didn’t say out loud. That the way I acted earlier was the wrecking ball that tore a gaping hole into the walls of our already-fragile marriage. And his career.
“You’ve no idea what I’ve been going through,” he said. “Sometimes I drive an hour out of my way just to get gas. That hour in the car, by myself, is the closest I’ve come to normalcy in months.”
I held back the tears. He was a trapped man. A man trapped by a woman who didn’t measure up.
“I know you do more, you have more responsibility with the baby, but I get up in the middle of the night and feed her, and I still go to work the next day. And it’s not like I’m just shuffling paperwork. I can’t come home every time you call. I’ve been working my entire career for this DA job and you . . .” He paused, deflated. “It stops tonight. Tomorrow you’re going to see a doctor.”
—
When I arrived at the clinic, Jack was waiting by the door, looking impeccable in his suit, dark gray, Hugo Boss—his favorite, stylish and simple, he wore it, as usual, with a white shirt and a gray tie. I was late and Jack looked irritated. I could tell by the way he raised an eyebrow as I walked up. When he spotted me, his forehead wrinkled, furrows so deep I hadn’t noticed before. I felt guilty. After all, Jack’s time was precious.
“Sorry I’m late.” I raised my face but all he did was lightly brush his lips across my cheek.
Jack was all business during our appointment. His lint-free suit, his starched shirt, all signs that he’d made a success of his life. He told the doctor how I was obsessing over “minute details” and how I didn’t want to “accept colic as a diagnosis” and how he’d been able to “hold things together” all by himself.
I watched him steal a glance at me while he spoke, probably wondering how we arrived at this implausible moment when all he’d ever done was “provide and support.” All he ever did was be there for me, and here I was, frazzled and sunken in.
Dr. Wells took one look at me, got out his prescription pad, and scribbled on it. “If nothing’s happening, we’ll just adjust the dosage.” Then he told me to come back after a month so I could tell him all about the improvement. “Once the baby sleeps through the night, life will be different. Some new mothers need adjusting. Give it some time.”
I realized he wasn’t a psychiatrist or therapist, just a family practitioner. Because specialists cost co-pays, and “Dr. Wells is capable of prescribing an antidepressant.”
You poor sap, a bit of time and a good night’s sleep is what I need?
“Right,” I said, smiled, and cradled my purse. It was heavy. Inside was Jack’s gun, vibrating joyously.
—
On our way home, in the car, Jack seemed appeased. In his world you solved a problem by coming up with a remedy and the fact that the bottle of pills in my purse was goin
g to make everything okay was just the way he knew the world to be. An orange bottle with three refills and his life was back to normal.
“Tell me you’re going to be okay.” His voice was soft, fragile almost. “Please take the medication and just get on with it.”
“It?”
“Life, get on with life. Take the baby out, meet other moms in parks, I don’t know, whatever moms do.”
I was tired of him selling me his logic like a snake oil salesman offering a cure for ulcers. It was laughable. Mingle with other moms and a pill a day will take my sorrows away.
“It’s not complicated if you really think about it.” He put his arm around me at a light, pulling me toward him. “You overanalyze everything, that’s what your problem is. It’s not about being perfect. It’s about changing a diaper, warming up a bottle.”
His embrace felt staged. I looked out the car window, focusing on a tree almost as tall as the building behind it. I wondered if the roots of a tree were really as deep as a tree was high. It seemed impossible almost, a terrifying and secret part of the city, invisible to its inhabitants.
The pills gave me strange dreams. I hardly slept and I was so tired I could care less about anything but pretending to be okay. When I told Jack I wanted to stop the medication, he frowned.
“But I can’t sleep and my hair’s falling out,” I complained.
He glanced at my hairline. Are you sure? his eyes seemed to say as if he watched me attempting to fit a round shape in a square hole.
“Those are not side effects according to this,” Jack said and flipped over the medication flyer. “Dry mouth, skin rash, nausea, vomiting, and shallow breathing. Hair loss is not one of them. Maybe you should take some vitamins.”
“What about numb hands and feet?”
“Go to a gym, one that has child care. Maybe you’re not moving enough.”
What about the fact that I’m just acting like I’m okay, I wanted to ask. What about being a con? Is that a side effect?
And I had to promise Jack I’d continue the medication. Thirty days later I wanted to believe that I was better, but fear was still everywhere—in my head, my throat, my chest. It wrapped itself around my heart, my stomach. I feared something terrible was about to happen, the most terrible thing you can imagine. Jack’s promise to cut back at work never materialized, and when a week later, he actually did come home early from work, he was cheery. With the slightest curve at the corner of his mouth he handed me a box of Chinese takeout.
“Your favorite,” he said.
“You’ve been doing a lot better,” he said. “Don’t you think so?” he asked but didn’t wait for my response. He spoke of money and credit, and that the financial problems with the property weren’t going away. He couldn’t be in that amount of debt and having a foreclosure hanging over his head wasn’t going to get him that DA job. And that he’d come up with a plan.
“A plan,” I said. “What kind of plan?”
“We’ve run out of options and I made a decision,” he said. His words flew by, hardly reached me. “Here’s the deal,” he said. “The economy is in shambles, huge salaries for associates at big law firms are no longer, but there’s money to be made in foreign exchange deals, equity, and debt. There’s a company in Chicago,” he said.
“We’re moving?” I asked.
“Kind of,” he said. “The brownstone, the property with the huge mortgage, that’s part of my plan. Renters won’t put up with the noise of the construction. With the money I make in Chicago we can pay the mortgage, finish the renovations, and in a year at the most we’ll be able to either sell it or rent it.”
He looked at me with his eyes blazing as if he’d just solved all our problems. He was smart, I knew that, I loved that about him, but he was also shrewd. Driven. He was hardwired to get what he wanted, and whatever Jack wanted, Jack was going to get.
“I can’t believe I didn’t think of this sooner,” he said. “Legal staffing is the new thing now; it cuts down on expensive billable hours. Outsourcing saves money with legal support work expenses. We’ll be out of this financial hole in no time,” he said.
“I’ve accepted a job. Walter Ashcroft, a legal staffing firm in Chicago,” he said. “And I’ll be moving to Chicago. I’ve arranged for you to stay in the brownstone in Brooklyn.”
—
Jack wasn’t a bad man. I was neither seeing him with rose-colored glasses nor was I overly critical. He used to be gentle with me and he had good intentions. He had hope, no, more than hope, faith even. He decided moving me into the brownstone in Brooklyn was the solution, a brownstone that was, even according to his own words, in shambles. Birds of a feather, I thought. Shambles.
I needed him to be there in case I wasn’t getting better, but I didn’t know how to ask for that, and so two months later I was in my car on the way to North Dandry while Jack was at the airport waiting for his flight to Chicago.
“I can’t say I like it but I don’t see any other way right now,” he said when I called him from the car on my way to North Dandry. “The project manager is living in the upper apartment while he’s supervising the construction on the other two units. His name is Lieberman. If you need anything and I’m not available, call him. You won’t have to lift a finger. The movers will unload and unpack. It’ll be the easiest move you’ve ever made.”
“I don’t need anyone to check up on me, Jack.”
“I’m just saying if you need anything, call him. I’ll be gone for three weeks, four tops, after that I’ll come home for a weekend. I told you that last week, remember?”
Was he trying to tell me that I was senile?
“I’ll fly home as often as possible, I promise, depending on the workload. Plus I want to be there when Mia crawls for the first time.”
“I’ll record it so you don’t miss it,” I said and was amazed at how rational and normal I sounded. The night before we had watched Mia, six months old then, prop herself up with her hands. She was able to roll from her back to her stomach and vice versa but my fears of SIDS were as strong as ever. She still wasn’t sleeping through the night and preferred the bottle to solid food.
I heard muffled voices and the sound of Jack switching his cell from one ear to the other, then a metal detector alerting and a voice telling someone to step aside. I imagined Jack, his arms raised, the handheld metal detector following the contours of his body.
“I’m at the gate. Take your meds, okay?”
“Sure.” I knew Jack had been counting the pills and only stopped after I had phoned in the refills.
I swerved to the right and hit the curb. It took me only a few seconds and the car was back under control.
“Bye. I’ll call you, okay?”
I didn’t answer, hung up the phone, and threw it on the passenger seat. I may have sounded all right to Jack but I felt like a lunatic. If I looked in the rearview mirror and saw a foil beanie on my head, I wouldn’t be surprised.
I spotted the NORTH DANDRY sign and pulled up to the curb. I killed the engine and looked at the brownstone. As I turned around, I realized Mia’s contorted body was hanging over the side of the seat, her head turned at an odd angle. She had fallen asleep. And I had failed to buckle her seat belt.
NEW DETAILS RELEASED: MOTHER OF ABDUCTED INFANT WAS FOUND UPSTATE ONE WEEK AFTER THE DISAPPEARANCE
Brooklyn, NY—Police have released new details in the abduction of 7-month-old Mia Connor. According to an unnamed source, the mother, Estelle Paradise, was found in a ravine near Dover, NY, about three hours from NYC. She was found days after the actual disappearance of the infant. Estelle Paradise had critical injuries to her head and her torso and was treated for hypothermia and other serious accident-related injuries.
A man walking his dogs made the discovery. “They just took off,” he said about the two chocolate Labradors, “like hounds from hell. There was no
holding them back. Usually I whistle and they come, but they ran down the ravine. I thought I’d lost them, then I heard the barking.”
The ravine locals refer to as “Echo Ravine” makes an 80-foot drop to the riverbed below. Officials said it took six hours to remove the injured mother from the ravine due to the steepness of the embankment. The Dover Fire Department assisted with the rescue.
The mother was first taken to a Dover hospital and later transported to a hospital in New York City. The mother’s condition has been upgraded from serious to fair. No official source has commented on her exact injuries.
No further information regarding the abduction of Mia Connor has been released.
CHAPTER 9
“Detectives.” Dr. Baker nods at them on his way out. “Thirty minutes tops. If her vitals make somersaults, I’ll put my foot down.”
The detectives wait until Dr. Baker has left the room.
“My name is Detective Wilczek. I’ll be heading the investigation. You remember Detective Daniel?” He points at the middle-aged rotund man. “We appreciate you talking to us, Mrs. Paradise,” he says and pulls out a notebook. Wilczek is in his forties, buzz cut, thin, and wiry. His nails are bitten to the quick.
Dr. Baker has removed the morphine pump and I try to ignore the pain behind my left eye.
“I’d like to go over everything again, if you don’t mind. I understand you must be getting tired of repeating the same thing over and over, but I prefer to hear it from you.”
My routine, Jack’s job in Chicago, the days leading up to her disappearance, the morning I found her crib empty. While Wilczek takes notes, he never interrupts me. When he doesn’t take notes, he twists the narrow wedding band on his left hand with his thumb.
“Tell me about the locks. Why did you have those locks installed?”
I found a window left open, a door ajar, and crooked blinds. Nothing major, yet worrisome, and I couldn’t convince myself that it was “just the wind.” Because reason was like a ghost, one minute there and gone the next. Vanished. It was as if reason were able to dissolve into the very air itself. I wondered if someone had rigged the house with secret entrances and passageways like some creepy old mansion. I even occasionally found my eyes scanning the walls and floors for telltale signs of intruders, but of course there were none.
Remember Mia Page 7