Olivia brought the baby up to her face and inhaled deeply, smelling her strangely familiar scent, like the smell of her own body, yet sharper and more pungent.
The baby began pushing her head against Olivia’s chest, and she took one of her breasts in her hand and guided the nipple to the baby’s mouth. At first the tiny girl didn’t seem to know what to do. She kept her mouth closed and rubbed blindly against the nipple. Then, suddenly, she opened her mouth impossibly wide and Olivia slipped the nipple inside. The baby gulped once and began to suck, voraciously, as though she’d been waiting for this moment for every minute of the nine months she’d been hidden inside her mother’s body. Olivia felt a current run from her nipple down through the center of her body and into her womb.
Elaine stroked the baby’s head and smoothed Olivia’s hair away from her eyes. “What do you want to call her, honey?” she asked. “What’s her name?”
“Luna,” Olivia said. “Her name is Luna.”
“Luna Goodman?” Elaine asked, doubtfully.
Olivia nodded, laughing, and after a moment her mother joined in. Olivia picked up the baby’s hand and kissed her soft palm.
***
Olivia slept deeply, propped in the hospital bed. Elaine rocked in the glider, holding Luna and crooning to her. The room was dim—the shades were drawn and the lights were off. Elaine had spent the night on the pullout armchair, waking when Luna woke and helping Olivia get the baby on her breast. Now, mother and daughter were quiet, and only grandmother was awake. Elaine traced a finger along the baby’s downy cheek. Her skin was softer than anything Elaine had ever felt, softer than silk, softer than fur, as smooth as water.
Luna’s pursed lips made sucking motions as she slept, as though she were dreaming of nursing. She frowned, and Elaine slipped a pinky into her mouth. The baby sucked hard on it, harder than Elaine had imagined such a tiny mouth would be capable of, and settled again. Elaine stared into the baby’s face, looking there for signs of her own self, of her genes and family history. Luna’s dark hair was clearly her father’s, and her nose had the faintest arch that looked as if it might grow into her father’s hook. Elaine remembered how proud her own grandmother had been of Elaine’s “shiksa nose,” insisting that its pert bluntness was a testament to the family’s successful assimilation, although Elaine’s father had always said it was more likely the legacy of a Polish pogrom. Olivia’s, like her mother’s, lacked the defined curve of caricature. The irony of Luna inheriting a Jewish nose from a Catholic father made Elaine smile.
Carefully, so as not to wake the baby, she unwrapped the end of the tightly swaddled blankets. She took one tiny foot in her hand and played her fingers lightly along the pearl-like toes. Olivia’s own foot stuck out from under the covers of the hospital bed, long and thin with the sparkly blue toenails that she had asked Elaine to paint a few days before. The polish on the big toe was slightly chipped. Now, for some reason, Elaine was startled at the sight of that large, adult foot. It seemed like only moments ago she’d been able to fit baby Olivia’s entire foot in her mouth. Moments, days, weeks, years; along the way, that baby had turned into a woman, and Elaine couldn’t help but wonder if she had paid the slightest attention to the time as it passed. She could remember almost nothing about Olivia’s infancy and early childhood. Brief flashes of memory were all that remained, and Elaine had little confidence even in those; they all seemed to coincide with the photographs she had snapped.
Elaine was startled from her reverie by a soft knock at the door. She raised her eyes and met Izaya’s as he peeped in. She nodded, and he entered, laden with a ridiculously large bouquet of spring flowers in a cut-glass vase, a stuffed moose that must have been three feet long under one arm, and a dozen Mylar balloons tied to his wrist. Elaine burst out laughing when she saw him, and Olivia woke to the sound.
“Oh, no,” he said. “Did I wake you up?”
“No, no. It’s okay. What did you bring?” Olivia asked, her voice languid.
“Um, a moose.”
Elaine laughed again. She gently laid the still-sleeping baby in her bassinet and held out her hands to Izaya.
He gave her the flowers and the stuffed animal and then untied the balloons. They floated up to the ceiling. Half of them had dancing blue bears and read, “It’s a boy.” The other half had the same picture in pink and announced the arrival of a girl.
“Arthur called and told me you were in labor. I didn’t know if it was a girl or a boy.”
“This is Luna,” Elaine said, picking up the baby and handing her to Izaya. Izaya looked startled at his burden, but then his face softened. He rocked back and forth on his heels, holding the baby in his arms.
“She’s as beautiful as her mother,” he said, and then blushed. Luna woke with a soft cry and Izaya quickly handed her over to Olivia. Olivia settled the baby in the crook of her arm and pulled down the shoulder of her hospital gown. Elaine watched Izaya’s face as the baby nuzzled her mother’s full breast, rooting around until she found the long pink nipple, and then gulping greedily. Olivia smiled serenely down at Luna. Her hair was full and wild and caught the light shining though the slats in the window shades with a glint of gold brightness. Her cheeks were flushed, as was the full, round breast pressed up against the baby’s face. She was beautiful. Izaya stared and then, suddenly seeming to realize that perhaps he shouldn’t be looking, glanced quickly away.
Elaine pulled the rocking chair up to the edge of the bed. “Why don’t you sit down,” she said. Then she walked to the other side of the room and busied herself arranging the flowers and gathering the balloons into a bright bouquet in a corner. She listened to the low hum of Olivia’s voice describing her labor to Izaya, in perhaps more detail than Elaine thought was strictly necessary.
Elaine ached to see the almost timid longing she recognized in Izaya’s face. She wondered, again, about the extent of his feelings for Olivia. His eagerness, his tenderness, gave him away. Elaine smiled ruefully to herself at the thought that Olivia might finally have found a man of whom even her mother could be proud. She couldn’t decide, however, if she was really seeing something that was there, or if it were only her own desperate hope for a future for her daughter that led her to imagine a connection that did not exist. Lawyers were not allowed to fall in love with their clients, and if Izaya had, by some accident of chemistry or fate, then surely he would never act on it. Olivia was going to jail. What was the point of this impossible newborn love?
Elaine leaned heavily on the windowsill, closing her eyes against the tears that threatened to begin again. She, a woman who never cried, who had remained dry-eyed at the birth of her own child, in the courtroom where her marriage was dissolved, at her father’s graveside, had wept so often and so freely since Olivia’s conviction that sometimes she wondered whether the tears would ever stop flowing. She felt like a faucet whose washer had given way with a final groan, allowing a constant stream of water to come pouring through the tap. She didn’t like anything about her tears. She didn’t like the hot prickling in her eyes. She didn’t like the red ache in her nose after her eyes finally dried up. She didn’t like the pitying glances of those who saw her crying. She brushed angrily at her face and got up.
“I’m going to go get some breakfast,” she said.
Luna had fallen off the breast and lay in the crook of Olivia’s arm. Olivia leaned back on her pillows, her breast still exposed, the pink nipple spilling a clear stream down onto the sheet.
“Honey,” Elaine said. “You’re leaking.”
***
“She really is beautiful,” Izaya said, after Elaine had left the room. He was staring not at the baby, but at Olivia. She moved to cover her breast. She paused for a moment, her hand resting lightly across her nipple. She looked directly into his eyes, and her mouth softened, almost into a smile. He blushed, and she tugged her nightgown into place.
Olivia made a nest
of blankets for the sleeping baby next to her body. She lay Luna down.
“She’s so tiny,” Izaya said.
“I don’t know, she felt pretty big to me when I was trying to get her out,” she said, and he laughed. “I don’t think I ever really said thank you.”
“Thank you? For what?”
“For everything. For the trial.”
“How can you thank me? I screwed it up! We lost.”
“We didn’t lose. I got acquitted of everything but the phone count.”
Izaya leaned back in his chair and rubbed his hands roughly across his face.
“You’re going to jail,” he said. “That means I lost.”
“Well, then, thanks for the moose.”
He smiled thinly. Conscious of the faint absurdity of having to comfort her lawyer for her own misfortune, Olivia said, “Four years isn’t so long. I mean, it’s a lot less than ten, isn’t it?”
Izaya sighed. “Man, I’m such a dick. I should be the one telling you that.”
She shrugged. “It’s okay. We can tell each other.” She closed her eyes. The birth had drained her of all her energy and strength, and then the baby had woken up every ninety minutes or so during the night, nursing desperately, occasionally bursting into tears of helpless rage at the mere trickle of colostrum that was all Olivia’s breasts were producing. Olivia knew that her milk would come in eventually, but she still felt a kind of distressed inadequacy at this, the first of many ways she would disappoint her little girl. She could not even allow her mind to contemplate the horrible betrayal of abandonment that was to come.
“You’re tired,” Izaya said, rising.
She nodded. “I am. But thanks for coming. And for everything. Really.”
He nodded and then grabbed at the string of one of the pink balloons. “I’m going to take this one, okay?” he said. He left the room, the balloon bobbing in his wake.
She picked up the baby and unwrapped her from the swaddling blankets. She pulled her hospital gown aside and held Luna’s nearly naked body to her own bared breasts and belly, and she took comfort in the warmth that spread between them.
***
Olivia and Luna were easiest with each other at night; Olivia felt none of the anxiety that sometimes overtook her during the long days of caring for the baby. When Luna cried, Olivia would nurse her without really waking, fitting a nipple between her daughter’s mewling lips in a kind of somnambulant haze. The baby slept nestled in bed against Olivia, not in the ivory wicker bassinet that Olivia had found waiting in her room when she came home from the hospital. In the mornings, before she came downstairs, she would muss the lace bedding in the bassinet so that Elaine would think the baby had passed the night there, rather than in her mother’s arms. Olivia did this in part because she was sure Elaine wouldn’t approve of the baby sharing Olivia’s bed, that she would argue that Olivia might crush the tiny girl, that it was important for Luna to learn to sleep alone, in her own bed. Olivia had no energy for the argument, which she knew with a kind of weary self-foreknowledge would devolve into a lecture by her of the sleeping patterns of indigenous people the world over. But there was another reason for the charade—Olivia didn’t want to hurt her mother’s feelings. Elaine had been so proud of the gift she had presented to her new granddaughter, one that was so unlike her in its fundamental frivolousness. An opulent bed for a child who would sleep in it for no more than a couple of months was so extravagant, so indulgent, that it was something Olivia had a hard time even believing her mother had purchased.
The first days home from the hospital were the worst. Olivia’s milk came in almost as soon as she walked in the door of the house. Her breasts swelled to the size of bowling balls and were just as hard and unyielding. Luna, who had been so hungry, seemed horrified at the transformation of the objects she’d so clearly come to view as her own. She had screamed for hours, refusing to nurse, unable to be comforted, and her tears were soon matched by her mother’s. Olivia found herself more grateful to her own mother than she had ever been before. Elaine had appeared with a head of cabbage, four icepacks, and a page of instructions she had downloaded off the Web. For some reason that neither of them could figure out, stuffing Olivia’s bra with raw cabbage leaves relieved the engorgement, and Luna was soon nursing peacefully again.
Arthur, to no one’s surprise, absented himself from this and all the other everyday dramas associated with the baby’s arrival. When Elaine had come home from the hospital the night after Luna’s birth, he’d happily informed her of his decision to begin training for an Iron Man competition. She’d greeted his invitation to join him with a dull shake of her head. He spent his days at work and his evenings training for the two-and-a-half mile swim, the one hundred-twelve–mile bike ride, and the twenty-six–mile marathon.
When Luna was a week old, Elaine went back to work. Olivia had at first been panicked at the thought of being entirely alone with the baby, but she soon found their isolation pleasurable, even blissful. She would drag the baby’s three-hour cycles of sleep and nursing out until the mid-morning. Then she would fill Elaine’s deep tub with warm water and a squirt of lavender soap. The two would float in a fragrant steamy haze for a while, until Olivia grew hungry enough to begin the day. At first she’d simply heat up whatever was left over from the previous night’s dinner, but soon she began bundling Luna up in her Baby Björn, the infant carrier she had found at the resale store down the block from the pharmacy, and walking over to the lunch counter, where Ralph would serve her a pile of scrambled eggs, toast, and potatoes large enough to feed her twice or even three times over.
In the afternoons, she’d keep the baby attached to her chest and do her best to prepare for her sentencing hearing. Periodically, Izaya would call or email, making sure she was gathering letters to be submitted to the court on her behalf. Elaine and Arthur each wrote a letter, as did Ralph and one of Olivia’s high school teachers—her favorite, with whom she had stayed in touch. A couple of the families for whom she’d been the baby-sitter of legend also wrote, although there were others who greeted her request with something akin to horror.
On Izaya’s instructions, Olivia drafted a statement to the judge, which Izaya then edited heavily and returned to her. They emailed the statement back and forth for a while, pulling out and putting back various lines and sections until it satisfied both of them.
Izaya sent her a copy of the brief he wrote to the judge, asking for a downward departure from the applicable sentencing guideline range. His request was audacious, to say the least. The fact that Olivia had been convicted only of the telephone count meant that her sentence was capped at four years. However, the judge was still obliged to use the sentencing guidelines and make his calculations based on the fifty-five grams of methamphetamine at issue in the trial. When Olivia had expressed confusion at how she could possibly be sentenced for a crime of which she’d been found not guilty, Izaya had shrugged his shoulders in disgust.
“It’s unbelievable; I know,” he said. “But the Supreme Court has said it’s the law. You get sentenced even for conduct of which you’ve been acquitted. Basically, it means that all the government has to do is get a conviction for one small count. Then you go to jail as if they’d won on every count.”
“But that’s not fair!” Olivia had howled into the telephone, waking the baby lying in her arms.
“Tell me about it,” Izaya said, over the resultant sound of Luna’s wails. “You’re lucky. The phone count statute limits your sentence to four years. I’ve had clients end up serving ten, or even twenty, for crimes for which they’d been acquitted, all because they got convicted of some minor, lesser included offense.”
In the absence of the statutory maximum for the telephone count, the sentence required by the guidelines in Olivia’s case was sixty-three to seventy-eight months. Izaya was not content, however, to accept the four-year sentence prescribed by the statute. I
zaya’s brief asked the judge to make use of the safety valve to bring her sentence down to forty-one to fifty-one months, and to depart even lower. The sentence he requested was home detention—the ankle bracelet of Elaine’s fantasies.
“Will he do it?” Olivia had asked.
“I don’t know,” Izaya had replied. “I’ve never asked for anything like this. We’ll have to wait and see.”
The morning of her sentencing, Olivia woke early and forewent her usual lazy bath. She fed Luna, then hooked herself up to the breast pump Elaine had rented for her. She sat at the kitchen table, sleepily rocking to the rhythm of the suction whooshing through the tubes of the pump. She had begun pumping breast milk as soon as she had gotten home from the hospital. Over the past five weeks, she had filled her mother’s freezer with three hundred ounces of pale yellow milk packed in tiny Ziploc bags. Her nipples were cracked and sore from all the pumping, and the smell of the lanolin she used to relieve the ache made her nauseous. But she wanted Luna to have breast milk as her only nourishment for as long as possible, and she was determined to leave enough for at least a month, in case Izaya’s hopes went unrealized and she had to go to prison.
The sound of Elaine’s voice caught Olivia’s attention.
“I just can’t get used to seeing you hooked up to that machine. Are you sure it doesn’t hurt?”
“It’s not too bad. Well, once when I had the power amped up all the way it sucked my nipple in about three inches. That was awful. But normally it’s pretty bearable.”
“Ralph will be here in a few minutes. Do you want to get dressed?”
Ralph had become Luna’s greatest fan. It was all Olivia and Elaine could do to keep the man from dribbling spoonfuls of Rocky Road into the baby’s mouth. He had been only too happy to watch her on the day of Olivia’s sentencing hearing and had even decided to close the soda fountain for the day. It would be the first time in thirty years that milk shakes wouldn’t be available on a Tuesday on College Avenue.
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