The Cradle Robbers

by Ayelet Waldman

  The next morning I begged my kids’ teachers to let them stay in their respective after-school programs. I got off fairly lightly; in return for the pleasure of unloading Isaac for the afternoon—at a cost of ten bucks an hour, I might add—I merely had to agree to be responsible for six Thursdays’ worth of classroom snacks. Organic fruit and vegetables only, no peanuts, no partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, and at least two different sources of protein. The mind reels.

  Ruby’s teacher decided that what I owed her was classroom laundry service. I was going to be fluffing and folding painting smocks and dress-up clothes for a month in return for an extra two hours parked outside the Arguello family manse.

  The afternoon before, I’d called in an order of flowers to be delivered to Gabriel’s mother, with specific instructions that the florist not leave them with the maid, but rather make sure that the mistress of the house herself received the bouquet. I wasn’t bribing Mrs. Arguello; I hadn’t in fact even included a card, and I’d sent a dozen Gerbera daisies, about as cheap an arrangement as you can get delivered to Pacific Heights. All I was doing was making sure that I’d find Suzette Arguello at home, and short of hiring another private investigator to do a stakeout before I went up to do my stakeout, sending a personal delivery was the best way to do that.

  In retrospect, perhaps I was overly optimistic in imagining that it would be easy to do a stakeout with a four-month-old. I figured she’d nurse, sleep, maybe poop a little. It never occurred to me that she’d choose that moment to cut her first tooth. Because I was a third-time mother, and had thus adopted the Boy Scout motto as my own, I had a Raffi tape, a rattle, one of those soft books and, miraculously, a bottle of baby Tylenol in my diaper bag. Still, Sadie would neither sit quietly in her car seat nor nurse. She fussed, she cried, she whined, she insisted on being bounced in my lap. It was challenging, to say the least, to keep one eye on the rearview mirror and the other on the drooling baby while at the same time trying to be unobtrusive. I failed.

  “Excuse me.” The woman who tapped on my window with her ivory-handled cane was very tall and very old. She was also about the width of a pencil.

  “Excuse me, miss,” she said again, this time walloping the glass.

  I rolled the window down quickly. I’d declined the insurance on the rental car and I wasn’t eager to pay out-of-pocket if the old woman shattered the glass. Neither was I especially thrilled at the prospect of picking shards out of Sadie’s hair.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  “May I be of some assistance, miss?”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  She harrumphed for a moment and whacked her cane against the ground a few times. She was dressed for a morning’s constitutional walk, in a gray tracksuit and bright white sneakers. “You’ve been sitting here for quite some time,” she said finally.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “One hour and seventeen minutes.”

  “Has it been that long?”

  “It most certainly has. What, may I ask, are you doing here?”

  I sighed. It happens not infrequently that a nosy neighbor inquires about our business when we’re doing a surveillance. Al is particularly good at scaring them off. He generally barks something about an investigation and they hightail it, afraid of getting caught in the crossfire. I doubted anyone would mistake me for a cop with Sadie in the car, and, moreover, this woman did not look like someone who would be frightened away, even if she thought I was with the police. On the contrary, she was more likely to call the mayor and instruct him to have me move my investigation to a neighborhood with lower property values.

  “I’m waiting for a friend,” I said.

  “In your car?” She sniffed and peered through the window, looking suspiciously around the interior. “This is your car, isn’t it?”

  Just then Sadie sneezed, giving me an idea. “Excuse me,” I said, “Have you been vaccinated for the Rombolola virus?”

  “What?”

  “It’s just that the baby got her Rombolola vaccination yesterday, and I’m supposed to keep her away from anyone with a compromised immune system. Anyone with an immune-deficiency syndrome, or anyone who hasn’t had a Rombolola vaccination. Especially anyone over the age of . . . er . . . seventy or so. She’s just shedding virus like crazy. And what with the chance of paralysis and rashy pustules, you can’t be too careful.”

  Sadie sneezed again, and my nosy interloper leapt about three feet away from the car, trailing her cane behind her. She was nimble on her feet for her age, that’s for sure.

  “You can’t loiter on this street!” she called to me as she backed quickly away from the car.

  I held Sadie’s hand up in a little wave and watched the woman sprint up the block, using her cane as a pivot to hurl herself around the corner. Then I glanced back in my rearview mirror, just in time to see the garage door of Gabriel’s mother’s house glide open. Instead of a large European car slipping out, however, the vehicle that made its exit was a bright red Bugaboo stroller. And who should be pushing this most stylish of infant perambulators? None other than Suzette Arguello herself. Accompanying her was a young blonde woman carrying a lime-green, Chinese silk diaper bag. They paused for a moment and appeared to struggle with the stroller’s harness. It was their incompetence that allowed me to catch them, as it took me a moment or two to wrestle Sadie out of the car and into the Baby Bjorn, grab my purse and my own diaper bag, and race down the block.

  I reached them just as they were about to disappear around the corner. I was in time to hear Suzette say, “I’m going to keep Noah with me this morning, Moira. I won’t need you until lunch.”

  The newly liberated Moira handed Suzette the diaper bag and went off down the hill.

  I said, “Hello, Suzette. I see you’ve found your grandson after all.”

  Twenty-one

  SUZETTE Arguello and I ended up in a tea shop on Union Street, sipping green tea while the babies snoozed quietly in our laps. After her face had resumed something of its normal color, and I had reassured myself that the woman wasn’t about to drop dead of a heart attack over the handlebars of her $750 stroller, Suzette had agreed to accompany me for a reviving beverage. At that point, I think, she realized there was no way to keep her secret any longer, and the only thing left to do was effect some kind of damage control.

  I let her take a few trembling sips before I began. My first question was very simple. “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why did you steal your grandchild? Why didn’t you just ask Sandra to let you keep him while she was in prison?”

  She dabbed delicately with a napkin at her upper lip. She was remarkably good at managing with one arm, while the baby slept in the crook of the other. “You did not know my son’s girlfriend very well.” This was not a question; there was no doubt in her voice.

  “No.”

  “She refused to give Noah to me. I offered to care for him from the very beginning, even though Gabriel and Sandra both knew my position on their addiction and its consequences.”

  “Your position?”

  “I have always insisted that Gabriel would have to deal with the consequences of his addiction on his own. We are willing to help him maintain sobriety, but we are not willing to clean up the messes he makes with his drug use. But I made an exception in the case of the baby. I even approached Sandra myself.”

  “While she was in jail?”

  Suzette nodded. I noticed that while she spoke she rocked the baby very gently, almost imperceptibly, keeping him comforted and asleep. “I wrote her a number of times. I even arranged for a visit. She refused to put me on her visiting list, but my husband sits on the state parole commission. One of his colleagues pulled some strings for me. I came to the prison fully expecting to visit with her, but she would not see me. They tried to bring her down, but she refused. In the end, not even the threat of solitary confinement convinced her to see me.”

  “Did they put her in the SHU, into solitary?�
�

  She shrugged. “I imagine they did.”

  Sandra chose to spend time in segregation rather than see her boyfriend’s mother? Why did she hate Suzette Arguello so much?

  Noah yawned and stirred. Suzette bent over, pulled out a baby bottle from her elegant silk diaper bag, and slipped it deftly between the baby’s lips. He began pulling on the bottle, immediately calmed down.

  “But why did you go through this elaborate ruse? Why not just petition the court? Your son is a drug addict, your daughter-in-law was in jail. She had no other close relatives. I’m sure you would have been awarded custody of Noah anyway. And temporary custody would have turned into a permanent adoption within six months. According to the law, Sandra had only six months to reclaim her baby before her parental rights would have been terminated.”

  Suzette looked almost confused, as if what I said was so foolish she could not even comprehend it. “We could never have done that.”

  “Why not?”

  “A court petition would have resulted in a termination hearing. Gabriel would have testified against me. The media would have gotten wind of it, and it would have been horrifying. A complete circus,” She shuddered. “The very idea is ridiculous.”

  I put my nearly untouched cup of tea back down in its saucer. “Wait a minute. Are you telling me you cooked up an elaborate plot to steal your grandchild so that you wouldn’t be embarrassed in the newspapers?”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “No, I obviously don’t.”

  It took her a moment to answer. In the meantime, she spread a cloth diaper on her shoulder. It was trimmed with blue plaid and embroidered with the initials N.F.A. It took me a moment to figure out the monogram. She must have changed the baby’s name from Noah Anthony Lorgeree to Noah Francisco Arguello, after his grandfather. She lifted the baby onto her shoulder and began patting his back.

  Finally I said, “Help me understand. Explain it to me.”

  “I can’t,” she said. “I can’t explain to someone who has not experienced what it’s like to live in the public eye. An Arguello family custody trial would have been front-page news in the San Francisco Chronicle, and all over the country. We would have become the butt of late-night comedians. Analysts would have picked the case apart on Court TV. My brother-in-law is the lieutenant governor. He will be governor one day, and perhaps president. I could not risk embarrassing him.”

  “And you don’t think this will embarrass him? You don’t think that you bribing a couple of junkies, and God only knows who else at the Department of Social Services, might embarrass him?”

  Noah burped suddenly and his grandmother cooed proudly. “There’s a good little man,” she said. She deposited him back in his stroller. “There is no need for this to become public.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  I said, grimly, “Sandra Lorgeree is dead. She was murdered in prison.”

  “I had nothing to do with that.” She was looking into my eyes, and once again I wished I were one of those people with the magical ability to tell when someone is lying just from the steadiness of their gaze. Hers didn’t twitch or shift, but still I had no idea if she was telling the truth.

  “Maybe that’s a matter for the police to determine,” I said. “Once they have all the facts before them.”

  Suzette suddenly grabbed my free hand, the one that was not holding Sadie. “Please,” she said. “Please, I’m begging you. I didn’t hurt Sandra. I know how this looks to you. I know. But all I wanted was to save my grandchild. I didn’t hurt her. I have no idea how she died. Please, believe me.”

  I looked down at our interlocked hands.

  “Please, Ms. Applebaum,” she said. “Do you know what would have happened to Noah if I hadn’t stepped in? If he had gone to foster care? Gabriel identifies as Mexican American. The baby would be considered biracial. Do you know what the chances of a biracial boy being adopted are? They are terrible. Truly terrible. Noah would have been shuttled from one foster home to another. I was a member of the board of supervisors, I know just how dreadful our foster care system is, how dangerous it is for children.”

  “His mother wanted him. She wanted him to go to her family.”

  “What family? She had no family! She wanted to punish this beautiful boy because she hates me. Well, I wouldn’t let her do that. I couldn’t.” She spun the stroller around so that the round-faced baby faced me. His head was cocked to one side, and a small smile played across his sleeping face. He was too young for the smile to be anything but gas, but it was charming, nonetheless. “Could you have allowed this precious child’s mother to make a decision that would ruin his life?”

  As I stared into the stroller, the baby shifted to his side and stretched, his back arching, his round behind poking out, and his tiny hands balling into fists on either side of his head. He pursed his lips, frowned, and then smiled again, his face spinning through expressions like the pictures in a slot machine. He burped and his grandmother leaned forward, delicately blotting away the tiny froth of milk that bubbled on his lips. She stroked his cheek with the back of her impeccably manicured index finger, her touch feather-light against his velvet skin.

  What would I have done in her place? I would have risked any amount of shame and embarrassment to fight for this child, newspapers and political careers be damned. But what was I going to do now? That was the real question. What was I going to do, knowing what I knew, when Noah’s mother was dead and none of her relatives were in any shape to care for him? The only person who wanted this baby was sitting across the table from me.

  I had found Noah, and I had come no closer to finding Sandra’s murderer. If anything, I felt further away from knowing what had happened in the exercise yard of Dartmore Prison than I was a few hours before.

  “What will you do?” Suzette asked as I got to my feet and gathered my baby and my things.

  “I have no idea.”

  “That’s not good enough.”

  “You’re telling me?”

  Twenty-two

  SADIE and I made it home in plenty of time to pick up her brother and sister from their schools. We could even have stopped at the market and bought something to make for dinner, but I needed to get back to my husband—I needed to see him and hold him. I needed my family around me.

  The four of us—Ruby, Isaac, Sadie, and I—walked through the door and were greeted by a complex and delicious smorgasbord of aromas. I hadn’t realized how much the Parent Lack of Appreciation Breakfast had motivated Peter.

  “What’s going on here?” I said as we rushed into the kitchen. “Did you cook?” Peter used to cook all the time, before Sadie came along and made takeout an omnipresent feature of our lives.

  “Not only did I cook,” he said, “but I made everybody’s favorite food.”

  “You made four-cheese lasagna?” Ruby said.

  “I did.”

  “And you made hot dogs and sauerkraut?” Isaac shouted, jumping up and down.

  “I did.”

  “And you made clams casino?” I said, flinging my arms around his neck and landing a kiss on his bristly cheek.

  “Clams casino isn’t your favorite food,” Peter said. “Barbecued oysters is your favorite food!”

  I took a step back, and before I could stop myself, my face fell. “No, barbecued oysters is your favorite food. My favorite food is clams casino.”

  He was wrapped in a long, food-spattered apron, and he was wearing a Kansas City Monarchs baseball cap backward on his head. He looked very sweet, and very disappointed.

  “I blew it,” he said.

  I did my best to recover. “No you didn’t. This is great. I love lasagna and hot dogs and oysters.”

  “But they’re not your favorite. I was going for everybody’s favorite.”

  “You did two out of three. That’s not so bad.”

  He looked balefully at his children. “Yeah, but to be perfectly honest, I was kind of looking to impress you tonig
ht. Lasagna and hot dogs aren’t going to help me get lucky. I was thinking I had it in the bag with the barbecued oysters.”

  I leaned over and kissed him again on his sauce-covered cheek. “Tell you what. You change this poopy diaper, and I’ll see what I can do about tonight.”

  * * *

  After a dinner that was almost as nauseating as its parts are delicious (let’s just say that these were three great things that didn’t go so great together), Peter gave the kids their baths and put the two older ones to bed while I tried to deal with the mountain of sauce-encrusted pots and pans. Not for the first time, I wished I could just turn a fire hose on the kitchen after Peter had finished with it. It never ceases to amaze me how that man can lay waste to a room. He’s an amazing cook, but he never uses one pan when seven can do the job.

  After I was done, and after I’d nursed Sadie to sleep, I was seriously regretting my earlier promise. Peter bounced into the bedroom and shucked his pants.

  “That’s a nice look for you,” I said. He was still wearing his food-covered apron, and his long, pale legs stuck out underneath. He actually looked kind of cute from the rear, like an actor in a porn movie designed to appeal to the gourmand who can’t decide whether he wants to spend the evening dining in or out.

  Peter tore off the apron along with the rest of his clothes and leapt on the bed.

  “Aren’t you going to get undressed?” he said.

  I winced. “I’m so tired, honey. I don’t honestly think I would enjoy myself.”

  He sighed. Then he said, “So fake it.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t mean fake it. I just mean, you know—pretend to enjoy yourself. Just pretend you want to be here. I honestly don’t care anymore. I need you. I don’t care how tired you are. You don’t have to do anything. You can just lie there, if you want. You can be the sex lox, for all I care. I just want to make love to you tonight, for Christ’s sake.”

  “The sex lox?”

  I stared at him for a minute, and then, despite myself, I started to laugh. “The sex lox,” I sputtered.