Nursery Crimes

by Ayelet Waldman

  “And?” Peter asked, obviously worried.

  “And I think this birth’s not going to be exactly what you had in mind,” she said.

  “No kidding,” I answered.

  “You know, Juliet, Peter, they never go exactly as we plan. Every birth is a surprise to me. Some more than others.” She sat down next to me on the bed and took my good hand in hers. “I know how much you wanted a VBAC, but I’m afraid that’s not the best idea right now.”

  “Why not?” I asked, close to tears. “I’m fine. I don’t feel anything. My leg is fine. The baby’s fine. Isn’t he?”

  “You’ve lost some blood, Juliet. Not a lot, but enough to make you weaker. Isaac’s doing okay, but he’s not as strong as we would like. You know I wouldn’t be saying this if I didn’t think it was for the best, but I think it’s time to get Isaac out of you and into this world.”

  Peter and I looked at each other.

  “Your call, sweetie,” he said, and kissed me softly on the forehead.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s do the surgery.”

  Nineteen

  ONCE I’d agreed to the C-section, things went very quickly. I was shaved, swabbed with Betadine, and wheeled into the operating room in just a few minutes. Isaac Applebaum Wyeth made his entry into the world not long afterward. He was a little guy—only five pounds, four ounces—but considering that he was a full four weeks premature, the doctors were pretty happy about his size. They didn’t even make him stay in the neonatal nursery that first night. They kept him for a few hours, but then let him come to my room. I don’t remember much about the next couple of days. I was more tired than I’d ever been in my life, and when I wasn’t nursing the baby, I was sound asleep. Luckily, Isaac was a quiet baby at first—he pretty much slept and ate for those first few days. He was probably stoned on all the various painkillers he was taking in through my breast milk, but I was just happy to be getting rest.

  At some point, after the surgery, Detective Carswell came by, carrying, strangely enough, a blue, stuffed alligator. He stood awkwardly in the doorway and said, to Peter, “This is for you. I mean, for the baby. Is she strong enough to talk?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “They pumped me full of morphine and I’m feeling absolutely splendid. Itchy, but splendid.” I scratched my arm. One of morphine’s more unpleasant side effects is that it makes you feel like you’ve been attacked by hordes of mosquitoes. The pain relief was worth it, however.

  “Can you tell me what happened?” he asked.

  I told him the story of how Audrey had shot me.

  “You know, when police officers are in their last trimester of pregnancy, we pull them off the street. We don’t send them out to get themselves shot,” Carswell said.

  “Lucky pregnant police officers,” I said, gingerly shifting my thigh.

  Carswell snapped his notebook shut. “You are one difficult lady,” he said.

  “No kidding,” Peter interrupted.

  “I may be difficult, but if it weren’t for me you’d still be looking for the driver who left the scene of an accident,” I said.

  “I’m sure we would have ultimately come to the correct conclusions,” Carswell said, not sounding sure at all.

  He paused.

  “Thank you,” he said, and leaned over to pat me on the foot. He missed, and stroked the bed instead, but hey, it’s the thought that counts.

  After he left, Peter asked me, “I wonder if they’ll find Audrey.”

  “They will. They almost always do,” I said, and shut my eyes.

  I was right. Audrey was arrested after using her mother’s credit card to fill up her tank at a gas station in Oakland. I considered getting in touch with her after her arrest, but something held me back. I don’t know, maybe it was that she had lied to me, manipulated me, and shot me. But I asked a friend, a very good criminal defense lawyer, to call her, and Audrey ended up hiring him. Luckily for her, she wasn’t tried as an adult, and was instead allowed to plead guilty in juvenile court. She was sentenced to spend the years until her twenty-fifth birthday in the custody of the California Youth Authority.

  Daniel Mooney was released from jail and promptly brought an unsuccessful malicious-prosecution suit against the city of Los Angeles. I wasn’t surprised to hear that he also ended up in protracted litigation with the trustees of Abigail Hathaway’s estate. Seems he felt that since Audrey was barred by California law from benefiting from murdering her mother by inheriting her millions, all the money should go to him.

  Strangely enough, while I never spoke to or saw him again, I did end up hearing from Nina Tiger. She E-mailed me more or less to say no hard feelings and to ask to hear my “side of the drama.” She was writing a memoir about the Hathaway murder titled, quite grotesquely, I thought, From the Loins of a Closed Mind. I politely declined to participate. I’ve never seen the book in bookstores and am grateful that the publishing gods were wise enough to keep that particular family saga out of print. So far.

  Peter and I weren’t so lucky with Bruce LeCrone. Not long after the events surrounding the Hathaway murder, the studio executive ended up losing his job at Parnassus in the most Hollywood of fashions. He was phased out of his executive position, set up in a luxurious office suite on the studio’s lot, and given a multimillion-dollar production deal. I like to think that his calling a pregnant woman a disgusting cow in front of two-thirds of the Hollywood establishment and the television cameras of Entertainment Tonight had something to do with it, but I doubt it. More likely it was the box office routs of Parnassus’ last few pictures that did him in. Before he left the studio he did manage, however, to tank a project of Peter’s that came across his desk. It didn’t end up being that big a deal, however. Paramount optioned Ninja Zombies and it sat around in development for a while, earning Peter a nice chunk of change and the revilement of every parent watchdog group that got hold of the script.

  On my second day in the hospital, Peter brought Ruby to visit me. Her eyes grew wide as she walked in and saw me lying in bed. At first she seemed scared to come near me, but, Ruby being Ruby, she soon got over her shyness and within a few minutes was curled up next to me in bed, describing all the things she’d done with Stacy and her kids over the past few days.

  I’d had the nurses take Isaac to the nursery so I could be with Ruby alone for a bit, but they soon brought him back for a feed. Ruby watched in uncharacteristic silence as the baby nursed. Finally, she turned to me and announced, derisively, “That baby is too little. He can’t play anything.”

  Peter and I laughed. “That’s true, Sweet Petunia,” I said. “But you know what?”

  “What?”

  “He’ll grow pretty soon, and I bet his most favorite thing to do will be to play games with his wonderful big sister.”

  “You mean me?”

  “I mean you.”

  She looked at Isaac suspiciously.

  “Okay, big sister,” Peter interrupted. “Time to go home and let Mommy sleep.”

  “Okay,” she said, and skipped over to plant a kiss on my cheek. “Bye-bye, Mommy.”

  “Bye, honey. I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  Peter bent down over the bed and softly kissed me on the lips.

  “I’m proud of you, honey.”

  “For almost getting myself killed?” I asked.

  “For figuring out that Audrey did it, for not getting yourself killed, and for giving birth to a wonderful baby boy.”

  My eyes welled up with postpartum tears, and I kissed him back.

  After they left, I lay thinking about Ruby for a while. It seemed to me that my ambivalence about being home with her had so overwhelmed me that I couldn’t simply relax and enjoy her. I had left work to be with my child and ended up resenting her for it. Surely she already sensed this; how long would it be before she ended up mirroring it? While I was pretty sure that Ruby would never do anything like the awful thing that Audrey had done, I realized that I had, like Ebenezer Scr
ooge, been given a glimpse of Christmas future, and an opportunity to change things before it was too late. Isaac gave a squawk and I leaned over his bassinet, thinking that I was going to have to figure out some way to be a good mother without losing myself in the process. But first I was going to have to figure out a way to talk one of the nurses into changing that stinky diaper.

  Turn the page for an excerpt

  from the next Mommy-Track mystery

  The Big Nap

  Available in hardcover

  from Berkley Prime Crime

  One

  I probably wasn’t the first woman who had ever opened the door to the Fed Ex man, wearing nothing from the waist up except for a bra. Odds are I was not even the first to do it in a nursing bra. But I’m willing to bet that no woman in a nursing bra had ever before greeted our apple-cheeked Fed Ex man with her flaps unsnapped and gaping wide-open. You could see that in his face.

  I thought about being embarrassed, but decided that since I’d been too tired to notice that I wasn’t dressed, I was definitely too tired to care. “You have to air-dry them,” I explained. “Or they can crack.”

  “That has to hurt,” he said.

  I signed for the package, which turned out to be yet another sterling silver rattle from Tiffany (that made seven), closed the door, and dragged myself up the stairs to the second floor, duplex apartment where I lived with my husband, Peter, my three-year-old daughter, Ruby, and the mutant vampire to whom I’d given birth four months before.

  “Yes, yes, yes. I know,” I sang in a mock cheerful voice as I scooped my screaming baby out of his bassinet. “Finished your six-minute nap, have you? That’s all the sleep you’ll be needing this week, isn’t it? Hmm?”

  Isaac eyed my conveniently exposed nipple and increased the pitch of his wail. I settled my considerable bulk into the aggressively ugly glider rocker that had taken pride of place in our living room and lifted him to my breast. He began suckling as though he’d just gotten home from vacation in Biafra. It had been all of half an hour since he’d eaten. I leaned back in the chair, ran my tongue over my unbrushed teeth, and looked up at the clock on the mantelpiece. Noon. And I’d been awake for eight hours. Actually, it’s hardly fair to say that I woke up at 4:00 A.M. That was just when I’d finally abandoned the pretense that night was a time when we, like the rest of the world, slept. Isaac Applebaum Wyeth never slept. Never. Like really never. It was my firm belief that in the four months since his birth the kid hadn’t closed his eyes for longer than twenty minutes at a stretch. Okay, that’s not fair. There was that one time when he slept for three hours straight. But since I was at the doctor’s office having a wound check (bullet and Caesarean, but that’s another story altogether) at the time of this miracle, I had only Isaac’s father’s word that it had actually occurred. And I had my doubts.

  Sitting there, nursing Isaac, I entertained myself by imagining what I would be doing if I were still a federal public defender and not a bedraggled stay-at-home-mom. First of all, by this hour of the day I’d have already finished three or four bail hearings. I might be on the way to the Metropolitan Detention Center, hoping my smack-addict clients were straight enough to have a conversation about their plea agreements. Or, I might be in trial, striding around the courtroom, tearing into a quivering FBI agent and exposing his testimony for the web of lies that it was. All right, all right. Maybe not. Maybe I’d be watching my client self-destruct on the stand while he explained that the reason he was covered in red paint and holding the sack of the bank’s money complete with the exploding dye pack was because his friend borrowed his clothes and car and did the robbery and then mysteriously gave him the bag. And no, he doesn’t remember his friend’s name.

  But I wasn’t a public defender anymore. I wasn’t even a lawyer. I was just an overtired, underdressed mother. I’d quit the job I’d loved so much when Ruby was a baby. This decision shocked the hell out of everyone who knew me. It certainly hadn’t been part of the plan I’d set out for myself when I walked down the aisle at Harvard Law School with the big diploma emblazoned with the words Juliet Applebaum, Juris Doctorat. I’d left Cambridge brimming over with ambition and student loans and began my career as a corporate lawyer, a job I hated but with a salary I really needed.

  Then, one day, I got into an argument with the clerk in my local video store that changed my life. Never, when I started dating the slightly geeky, gray-eyed slacker who gave me such a hard time when I rented Pretty Woman, did I imagine that he’d pay off my student loans with the proceeds of a movie called Flesh Eaters and move me out to Los Angeles.

  My husband Peter’s success had given me the freedom I needed to have the career I really wanted, as a criminal defense lawyer. Our decision to start a family had derailed me completely. I know lots of women manage to be full-time mothers and productive members of the work force at the same time, but, much to my surprise, I wasn’t one of them. When I tried to do both I succeeded only in being incompetent at work and short-tempered at home. At some point I realized that it would be better for my daughter to have me around, and if I was bored out of my skull, so be it.

  Isaac must have gotten sick of listening to me yawn, because he popped off my breast, let loose a massive belch, and graced me with a huge smile. He was, like his sister before him, bald but for a fringe of hair around the sides of his lumpy skull. He had a little hooked nose and a perennially worried expression that made him look, for all the world, like a beleaguered Jewish accountant and inspired his father to christen him with the nickname Murray Kleinfeld, CPA.

  I kissed him a few times under his chins and hoisted myself up out of the chair.

  “Ready to face the day?” I wasn’t sure who I was asking—my four-month-old son or myself.

  Only a mother of an infant knows that it is in fact possible to take a shower, wash your hair, and shave your legs, all within a single verse of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.” The trick is finishing the E-I E-I O’s with your toothbrush in your mouth.

  Balancing Isaac on my hip, I gazed at my reflection critically. Washed and artfully ruffled, my cropped red hair looked pretty good, as long as you weren’t looking too intently at the roots. My face had lost some of that pregnancy bloat, although sometimes it did seem as though Isaac and I were competing to see who could accumulate the most chins. My eyes still shone bright green and I decided to do my best to emphasize the only feature not affected by my rather astonishing weight gain. I applied a little mascara. All in all, if I was careful not to glance below my neck, I wasn’t too hideous.

  “Isn’t your mama gorgeous?” I asked the baby. He gave me a Bronx cheer.

  I rubbed some lipstick off my teeth.

  “Let’s get dressed.”

  A mere half-hour later, a record for the newly enlarged Wyeth-Applebaum household, Isaac and I were in the car on our way to pick up Ruby at preschool. He was, as usual, screaming, and I was, as usual, singing hysterically along with the Raffi tape that played on a continuous loop in my Volvo station wagon.

  One really has to wonder how children make it to the age of ten without being pitched headfirst out a car window.

  Two

  ON the way home, my children thoughtfully contrived to keep me from falling asleep at the wheel—not an easy task given that I’d been averaging more or less eleven minutes of sleep a night—by regaling me, at top volume with (in one ear) a long, involved story about Sneakers the rat and how he had escaped from his cage, and (in the other) the usual hysterical weeping.

  As we pulled into our driveway, Ruby said, “Mama, can we go to the park? Please oh please oh please oh please.”

  It was only because I was momentarily distracted by thoughts of the proper diagnosis of sleep-deprivation psychosis that I forgot that I’d been looking forward to turning on Sesame Street and enjoying an hour or so of TV-induced stupor (mine rather than theirs).

  “Okay, honey,” I said. Oh well, there was always the possibility that Isaac would fall asleep on the way there.
I bundled the two of them into their double stroller and set off for a walk to the playground.

  Our neighborhood, Hancock Park, is one of the oldest in Los Angeles, dating all the way back to the 1920s. It’s full of big old houses, most of them stuccoed Spanish-style numbers with the occasional elaborate English Tudor thrown in for variety. The broad tree-lined avenues arc in gentle, carefully planned curves. While the addresses might have hinted at a certain long-ago grandeur, the neighborhood’s proximity to downtown L.A. and a number of less savory neighborhoods has, in the last couple of decades, made it a haunt of car thieves and even the odd mugger or two. That’s kept the housing prices lower than in some tonier areas. It’s also kept out the movie-industry riffraff for the most part. We lived in one of the many duplexes sprinkled throughout the neighborhood.

  On our walk to the park, I was taking up quite a bit of sidewalk space—all of it to be exact. Without realizing it, I’d caused something of a traffic jam behind me, which I noticed only when a polite little voice said, “Excuse me, may we pass?”

  I turned around to see a gaggle of boys, ranging in age from about six to ten, gliding on Rollerblades behind me. They looked like your basic boys, kneepads covered in mud, shirttails flying, except that their shirts were white button-downs and they wore black trousers. They also wore yarmulkes and sported long, curling sidelocks. Hasidic Jewish Rollerbladers.

  Los Angeles, like New York, has a large and vibrant Hasidic community. These are the most observant Jews; they follow the rules of Judaism to the absolute letter. They wear traditional clothing, the men in dark suits with their heads covered at all times. The women dress modestly, in long dresses with sleeves past their elbows, and their hair concealed by wigs and hats. The Hasidim follow a rebbe, a spiritual leader. There are different sects that, if you are more familiar with them than I, can sometimes be told apart by their distinctiveness of dress; some groups of men wear knickers or fur hats, some women wear only dark tights and eschew light-colored stockings of any kind.