A cold wind blew. Nina walked. The city had a smell the wind couldn’t quite blow away, as though something had plugged the entire sewage system, and somewhere below things were approaching a critical mass. Nina passed by the usual sights without really noticing: a woman with a stack of videocassettes under her arm, a man lying in a fast-food doorway, wrapped in a Hefty bag. Two eyes looked out at her from his emaciated face; for a moment Nina thought he was about to say something, but he did not.
Nina walked. She walked herself into fatigue and beyond. Then, finally, when she had walked her mind quiet and turned for home, “Salut Demeure” began to play in it.
Her feet took over then and walked her to the hospital instead. Sometimes they stroll back into the hospital, leave the baby and stroll out. Yes. Of course. Reality lights up, if only for a moment, and they try to undo what has been done. Nina walked faster and faster. She was running by the time she got there.
Random details impressed themselves on Nina’s brain: the hiss of the sliding doors; the too-bright lobby; crushed coffee cups and a blob of pink gum on the stairs. Then she was on the fourth floor, outside the nursery window.
There had been a population explosion since her last visit. Almost every bassinet was filled, including the one at the far end of the first row, where a blue-wrapped bundle now lay. A blue-wrapped bundle with a blond tuft of hair sticking out of the blanket.
The next thing she knew, Nina was inside the nursery, standing over the bassinet. There was a blond baby boy in it, but he wasn’t hers. One glance at his features brought back the nearly lost image of her own son’s face. But doubt stirred in her mind anyway; was there just a remote chance she could be wrong? Very gently, Nina began unwrapping a corner of the blue blanket, to see the identification bracelet on the baby’s wrist. She was careful not to disturb the baby, so she had still not seen the bracelet when strong arms seized her from behind.
“Help! Help!” someone cried, right by her ear.
Nina struggled, twisted, saw she was being held by a tall nurse, not Verna Rountree, but a nurse she hadn’t seen before.
“Help!” the nurse shouted. Babies began to cry. People came running. “I caught her red-handed, I caught her red-handed,” the nurse told them, gradually lowering her voice. “She was just about to snatch another one.”
They surrounded Nina. They knocked her to the floor, perhaps not deliberately. They stared down at her, yelling and questioning; the babies cried. Nina lay on her back, unhurt but unable to make a sound. Then one face came closer, separating itself from the crowd. It was the head nurse.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” she said.
The head nurse took Nina down to the lobby and called a taxi. “I can walk,” Nina told her.
“You’ve done enough walking. But you’d better think about getting some therapy.”
“Therapy?”
“To get you through this.”
“I don’t need therapy. I need my baby back.” Nina was angry, but she couldn’t find the strength to raise her voice.
The head nurse looked at her closely. “Are you planning to sue?”
“Sue?”
“The hospital. The administration’s worried about it.”
“It hadn’t occurred to me.”
“No? They say you’re some kind of wheel downtown.”
A taxi pulled up. The head nurse walked Nina to it and opened the door for her. “Anyway, I hope you do.”
“Why?”
“They deserve it.”
“For what happened to me?”
“No,” the head nurse replied. “In general.”
The door closed. The taxi pulled away. The driver was listening to a late-night call-in show on the radio. A woman said: “I hate all the holidays, but Thanksgiving is the worst. It’s the pits.”
“You’re the pits, lady,” said the host, cutting her off. “You depress me. Hello, line two? Hoboken? Hoboken, you’re on the air. What’s on your mind? Hoboken?”
Nina spent the rest of the night lying in bed with her eyes open. At first light she rose, walked past the closed door of the nursery and pulled the Lifecycle out of the hall closet. She sat on it and began pedaling. Almost immediately she felt weak and tired, and her mind, rather than shutting down, focused sharply on the baby. Nina got off the bike after only a few minutes.
She called Detective Delgado’s office. “Delgado’s not in,” a man told her.
“When can I reach her?”
The man called to someone nearby: “When’s Delgado back?” Then he said to Nina: “She’s out of town all week.”
“All week?”
“Annual vacation.”
“But—”
“Got to put you on hold for a second.”
Click. Nina was cut off instead, like the depressing woman who hated Thanksgiving. A sob rose in her throat. She clamped it back down. “Stop it,” she said aloud. Use your brain, your fucking business brain. Someone must be handling Detective Delgado’s caseload. Nina reached for the phone. It rang just as she touched it.
“Yes?” said Nina, answering it.
“Hello.” It was a woman, with a quiet voice, even hesitant; not Detective Delgado, not the head nurse: no one she knew. “Is this Nina Kitchener?”
“Yes.”
“I hope I haven’t called too early.”
“You haven’t.”
Silence. Fragments of another conversation buzzed softly on the line; Nina wondered if it was a long-distance call.
The thought might have carried down the wire, because the woman said: “I’m calling from Boston. My name is Laura Bain. The NBC station here showed that interview with you.”
Silence.
Nina, thinking of her encounter in the alley by the pizzeria, and the girl and the man who had traded a baby for ten thousand dollars and were still on the loose, pressed the RECORD button on her answering machine. But if the woman had some scam in mind, she seemed in no hurry to begin.
It was Nina who broke the silence. “And?” she said.
“I feel very badly for you. And I’m really sorry for bothering you at a time like this. I know what you’re going through.”
“Do you?” Nina replied, unable to keep the bitterness out of her tone; she felt a pang of guilt about it—even over the phone and in her condition she could sense how much stronger than the other woman she was.
“Unfortunately I do,” Laura Bain said in a voice that sank away to almost nothing. “My baby was kidnapped five months ago.”
“Oh God.”
Silence. More conversations whispered in the wire; someone laughed in one of them. Nina sensed the answer, but she asked anyway: “Have you got him back yet?”
“Her,” said Laura Bain. And: “No.”
“I’m sorry.”
Nina heard Laura Bain take a deep breath. “The reason I’m calling is that while I was watching you on TV I had a thought and it just won’t go away. I—I’ve got to ask you something.”
“What?”
“Did you use a sperm bank?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Was it the Cambridge Reproductive Research Center?”
“No. The Human Fertility Institute. Here in New York. Why?”
“I used a sperm bank too. The Cambridge one.”
Nina waited for the woman to continue. When she didn’t, Nina said, “I have no idea what you’re getting at. Why did you even think of asking if I’d gone to a sperm bank? I never discussed that with the news people.”
“Because you remind me of me,” Laura Bain said. “I think we should meet.”
19
Long ago at Camp Wapameo, reading in her bunk by flashlight while the other girls slept and the counselors sat around the fire on the beach, swatting mosquitos and trying to tune in rock ’n’ roll from anywhere on a cheap transistor, Nina had come upon a story about a drunken man whose hat falls into a mysterious ring and disappears. Reaching for it, the man stumbles into the ring and falls forward in time. Ther
e he meets another man, a little older than himself, whom he finds troubling. Not long after, he steps into another ring, meets a man older and more troubling than the first. And into another ring, and so on. Eventually it hits him that all the men he encounters are himself, at later stages of life. Nina remembered the story the moment she spotted the woman she took to be Laura Bain.
The woman, standing just beyond the security station for the Pan Am shuttle gates at Logan Airport, wore a finely tailored tweed coat and was biting her lower lip. She looked about forty-five years old. Her face was thinner and paler than Nina’s; her hair was almost the same shade of brown, except she had a lot of white in it, and Nina still had none. Her dark, deep-set eyes were alert, even intense, as she scanned the line of arriving passengers. They lit on Nina and recognized her immediately; for a moment Nina thought something uncanny was going on. Then she recalled that the woman had seen her on TV. But she was still thinking of the time machine story when the woman stepped forward.
“Hello, Nina,” she said in the same quiet, flattened tone Nina had heard on the phone, a tone that didn’t match the nervous energy in the movements of her face and body. “I’m Laura Bain.” The women faced each other. They might have shaken hands, might even have embraced, but their timing was off and in the end they did nothing. “Hungry?” Laura said.
“Not really.”
“Me either.” A smile crossed Laura Bain’s face, so quickly it barely existed, like some wondrously short-lived species on “Nova.” “I’m never hungry anymore,” Laura said. “And I used to be such a pig.”
“But it’s not a weight-loss method you’d recommend.”
Laura laughed, a harsh and surprisingly loud laugh. She gave Nina’s hand a little squeeze: Laura’s skin felt hot, as though she were fighting a disease.
Laura unlocked her car, a Jaguar with a cellular phone inside, and drove toward the city. Nina waited for Laura to begin. Laura bit her lip and said nothing, until the phone buzzed and she picked it up. “Hello.” She listened for a few moments. Then, still in the same flat voice, but without indecisiveness, she said: “It’s too early. Tell him to hold on till I’m back from Accra.” She hung up and entered the tunnel under Boston Harbor. Her hands gripped the wheel tightly, as if it might try to do something on its own at any moment.
“What do you do, Laura?”
“For a living? I’m a commodity investment analyst.” She handed Nina a card. “Strictly cocoa, actually. But I’m thinking of taking on coffee as well. More work. Less time to think about Clea.”
“Clea?”
“The—my baby. My daughter. What’s your baby’s name?”
Nina began to regret her trip to Boston. “He doesn’t have one,” she answered. Unless, she thought, the woman with the leathery skin had given him one. She’d had plenty of time by now.
“Oh,” said Laura. They climbed out of the tunnel into hard, cold sunlight. Nina saw that Laura was crying. She looked away, but not before Laura noticed. “That wasn’t true about the coffee,” she said. “How can I take on coffee? I can barely handle the cocoa anymore.”
Nina tried to think of something to say but couldn’t. She didn’t want to spend the afternoon locked in a Jules Feiffer dance to self-pity with this woman. As if volleying that thought back at her, Laura stuck a cassette into the player. Laura’s sound system was first-rate, to Nina’s ear perfectly reproducing the lifelessness of the New Age instrumental she had chosen. The music made the minutes spent in stop-and-go traffic long and gloomy.
Laura parked in front of the Beacon Hill Bistro. “Don’t mind me,” she said, no longer crying, her voice even brightening a little. “I have two states of mind—basket-case and robot. I’m safely back in robot now.”
The waiter knew Laura. He led her and Nina to a quiet table in the back corner. “We’ve got a lovely fresh salmon today, served en brochette with a raspberry basil sauce and a little goat cheese salad on the side.”
“That sounds nice,” Laura said. But when it came she didn’t touch it. She did drink all but one glass of a bottle of Bourgogne Aligoté. Nina had the rest.
“Well,” said Laura, rubbing her hands together as though kindling something positive. “Down to business.”
“I’m not sure what our business is, exactly,” Nina said.
Laura stopped rubbing her hands. She laid them on the mauve tablecloth. The nails, polished and manicured, were bitten to the quick. “Maybe it is silly,” Laura said. “Calling you. Sperm bank. Kidnapping. Ergo—what?” And maybe had the waiter not been passing at that moment she wouldn’t have ordered another bottle. But he was and she did. Then she caught Nina looking at her and lost herself in thought.
“But—” she was beginning when the waiter returned. He drew the cork. “Just pour,” she told him. He raised his eyebrows the way David Niven might have if he’d ever accepted a waiter role. “I’m sure it’s fine,” Laura told him. He poured and went away. “But,” Laura said, “it’s been five months of doing less and less and finally almost nothing. To get Clea back. I call Detective This or Detective That once a week, as though it were any other item on my schedule. What else can I do? I’ve tried everything.” The robot broke down and tears came silently again. “I don’t even walk the streets anymore looking for her.” She dabbed her cheeks with a thick mauve napkin. “And then I saw you. And I just thought—okay, here’s a chance to do something.”
Nina didn’t want to bring on the tears again, but she did want to understand what Laura Bain had in mind. “Like what, though?”
Laura’s voice, which had risen slightly, fell again. “I don’t know.” She stared into her wineglass.
Nina soon found herself staring into hers too, as though performing some ritual. She made herself look up. “What made you go to a sperm bank in the first place?”
Laura raised her head, slowly, like someone emerging from a trance. “Biological clock, et cetera. And I haven’t had a serious man in my life since I was twenty-eight.”
“How old are you now?”
“Thirty-five.” Laura saw a reaction in Nina’s face and misinterpreted it. “A little older than you, I guess.”
Laura paused, perhaps for Nina to give her age. But Nina, shocked that she was five years older than Laura, was thinking of the time machine, and how fast it could move when something happened like what had happened to Laura and to her. She had stepped into the ring; in the next five months was it going to line her face and whiten her hair and flatten her voice and leave her with wary eyes like Laura Bain’s? Would that defeated face soon be her own? Nina pushed the thought away and tried to pursue whatever half-formed idea Laura had in mind: “It wasn’t someone in a volunteer’s uniform, was it?”
“What?”
“Who took your baby, I mean.”
“Oh, no. My—Clea—wasn’t taken from the hospital. We’d already been home for two days. It was after lunch on a Saturday. The last Saturday in June. The nanny was arriving from Ireland on Monday and I was going back full time the following week. It was a nice warm day and I took Clea out in the backyard in her carriage. I’ve got a house in Dedham—bought for Clea, really. I sat in a chaise longue, fooling with some figures. Clea went to sleep.” Laura’s eyes were drawn back to the wineglass, almost as if she were reading her story in the calm surface of the liquid. She sighed. “Then I guess I fell asleep too. I don’t know why. I never need more than six hours. But I was still very tired from the birth, and Clea hadn’t been sleeping much at night. I just—fell asleep.” She dabbed with the mauve napkin again, then continued. “A barking dog woke me up. It was late in the afternoon by then—I’d slept for hours. I went over to the carriage, thinking Clea had slept too—I remember feeling happy because I was beginning to worry she might be a colicky baby or even sick or something—and I pulled back the insect screen and Clea was gone.” She continued staring into the glass. Nina waited for more. But there was no more. Laura’s head bobbed up suddenly and she said: “That’s it.”
> “That’s it?”
“Nothing’s happened since. Nothing good. The police came. They took fingerprints on the carriage. They questioned the neighbors. They questioned a woman who once snatched a baby at the Dedham Mall. They told me to offer a reward, which I did. They told me to hang on. I hung on. Then I saw you on TV. And there was no mention of a husband or father or anything, and I just thought—sperm bank.”
“And you were right. But where does that take us?”
“I don’t know. Let’s say we were divorced, or in the middle of a bad separation or something and our children disappeared like this. Where would the police go first?”
“To the father.”
“Right.”
“But there is no father, Laura. There’s just frozen sperm.”
“I know. But it’s something we have in common. And maybe there’s more.”
“Even if there is, where would it lead?”
“I’m not sure. But I can’t go on like this.” Laura’s eyes were being drawn to her glass again.
“All right, all right,” Nina said, trying to make her voice gentle. “Let’s try. But all I can see are differences. Your baby was taken from home, mine from the hospital. The police are pretty sure I saw the kidnapper; you saw nobody.” Nina described the woman with the leathery skin and the volunteer badge. Laura had never seen her.
“But that doesn’t mean she wasn’t the one,” she said. “In fact, I’m going to pass that description on to the police. Tell me more.”
Nina sensed Laura’s stubbornness. Perhaps they did have something in common, after all. She told her story, starting with the message that there was a telephone call and ending with the Cabbage Patch Kid. As she spoke, what little light that had begun to shine in Laura’s eyes faded; the woman was stubborn, but hope was almost gone. When Nina finished there was a long silence.
The waiter came to clear the table. Most of the customers had already gone. The restaurant grew quiet and a little eerie, like a theater after the play. Laura went to the bathroom. Nina checked her watch, wondering if she could catch the next shuttle. Laura returned and insisted on paying the bill. While signing the credit card slip, she said: “You didn’t have a phone in your room?”
Pressure Drop Page 15