Hope House

by Tracy L Carbone

  After a few cursory glances to ensure they weren’t followed, Kurt led her up a flight of inside stairs to the second floor apartment. Four color-coded keys opened a succession of deadbolts. “You got this place as tight as Fort Knox,” she said. He grunted in reply.

  The place was pretty standard on the inside. White walls that weren’t really white anymore. Dark hardwood floors that had seen better days. There was a gray couch. Also non-descript.

  The apartment consisted of a large living room with a kitchenette area Kurt must use as his home office. A tangle of cords was duct taped to the tabletop and she imagined he plugged a laptop into them. As paranoid as Kurt was and with the confidential information he had on his clients, there was no way he’d leave the computer plugged in on the table. A white throw rug sat under the cable, to keep the floor from getting scratched. A big coffee stain marred the fabric with an ugly brown starburst.

  Kurt shut the door behind him. She heard the click-click of all the locks being engaged.

  “So this is my place. There’s a bathroom over there and my bedroom is through that door. You can take my room.”

  “For how long?”

  “Until we figure out what’s going on.” He gestured for her to sit with him on the couch. “Want a Coke?”

  “Do you have bottled water?”

  “I’m a Coke and take out food kinda of guy. My staples are soda, smoked almonds and beer. Anything else is take-out.”

  “I’m all set for now. Just tell me what you found out.”

  “After I called you late last night and you told me what Tommy said I did some further checking about the age of the fetus. To verify it either way, you know?”

  “You got access to my medical records?” So much for all the damn HIPAA laws. Nothing was really safe.

  “I did gain access, and yes, nothing’s safe from an accomplished hacker. Gloria, records say your fetus was sixteen weeks when you had a miscarriage. The records state, well, I didn’t actually see the records but I talked to someone at the hospital. Actually talked her into looking up the records for me, and she said it was a normal early term miscarriage.”

  “According to the records.”

  He nodded. “According to the records, yes.”

  “But records have been known to be falsified.”

  “True.”

  “Well those records are not mine, Kurt. Sixteen weeks? How could they say that?” She felt her blood pressure rise. “Are you sure you had the right record? Maybe they looked up the wrong—”

  “I didn’t. Believe me. It was your name on the file. I just don’t understand why Tommy and the medical records both say the same age.”

  Gloria felt the room spinning around her. Now even Kurt didn’t believe her.

  “Oh my god! I know why the records say that!”

  “You do?” Kurt leaned forward. He wanted to believe her and that was something.

  “When they were wheeling me down the hall for my surgery, to take the baby out, they thought I was asleep and I heard them talking.”

  “The doctors?”

  “No, Tommy and my doctor. My doctor said something about after twenty weeks it would have to be reported as a stillbirth. They didn’t want me to go through a funeral and have to get a death certificate for the baby.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “My doctor told Tommy not to worry about it. That he’d lie on the records and say it was earlier than twenty weeks, and he’d say it was a spontaneous abortion. A miscarriage.”

  Kurt leaned back on the couch, seeming to absorb it all. “The logic makes sense if they didn’t want to have to show a body, if they wanted to steal it. But Gloria, there isn’t any proof.”

  “Yes there is. I have proof.” She smiled when she remembered. “I have a copy of the ultrasound picture at sixteen weeks. I’m sure the date on it will be six weeks before they took her away from me. I know I still have the photo. It’s all I have left of her and I never got rid of it.”

  “Damn, that’s good! Okay, well that explains that. They lied about the age.”

  Gloria took a deep breath and sighed. All the shattered segments of her life since entering that hospital so many years ago, each jagged piece was falling into place.

  2.

  Kurt Malone’s apartment, Miami, afternoon

  “But the ages still don’t match up. Alison is too young.”

  “If they lied about the age of the fetus there’s no reason to think they’d be honest about the age of the child they adopted out. About Alison.”

  “It’s a big difference though. The Ganders would have figured it out if they got a six or eight month old or whatever instead of a baby that was only a couple of weeks.”

  “Alison Gander is mine.” Gloria folded her arms and curled her slender body into the corner of his couch. He wanted to hug her, console her, but after almost losing control yesterday he didn’t want to be that close to her. Well, he wanted to be, but it wasn’t a good idea.

  Not that he didn’t want to sleep with Gloria. Hell, he’d be crazy not to. Not only was she sexy but he liked her. Still, it wasn’t fair to get involved with someone like Gloria. Someone who had a lot going for her, a good job and a nice life back home. All he could offer her was, at the most, a few weeks of affection and love making and then he’d have to leave her before she started asking about his past. For her own good, Kurt had to keep his distance from her.

  “Let’s assume she is, okay? Like I said before I wouldn’t put it past the Puglisis if they found a way to do it. I still don’t know why they’d go through all that for one baby though.” She shrugged and he continued. “Maybe this will help.”

  “What?”

  “When I called the hospital I pretended to be your husband. I explained we were trying to have another baby and asked them to tell me how far along the baby was when you’d lost it. They were happy to tell me what was on record.”

  “I see.”

  “Then I hung up and started wondering about the doctor. You said you didn’t know him except as your physician so I called back and figured I’d talk to him.”

  “He’s still there?”

  “No. Coincidentally, he left shortly after your miscarriage. I got lucky that one of the nurses dated Tad Boucher a long time ago and still felt jilted when he left her so abruptly. She was happy to talk.”

  Gloria unfolded her arms and slid forward on the couch again. Kurt could smell her light perfume and got a little distracted but he pulled himself together. “What did she say? Where is he?”

  “He left the hospital in New York to go to Israel for a few months then to Haiti.”

  “Israel and Haiti?”

  “Boucher told the nurse he was going to Israel for some specialized training. After that he went to Haiti, where she assumes he still is, to work at a charity mission of some sort.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Doesn’t sit right. A staff Ob/Gyn at a major New York City hospital ups and leaves to spend his life in Haiti. Not only that, but there’s no paper trail of his career after he left New York and nothing at all tied to his social security number once he left.”

  “Sounds like he needs a skip-tracer on his trail. Unless . . . you think he’s dead?”

  Kurt shook his head. He’d helped a lot of people start new lives and the pattern was the same. “Maybe he knows what he did was wrong and wanted to run away.”

  “So you believe me after all?”

  He caught her smile and the damsel in distress glint in her eye, and his heart sputtered. It always skipped around when he got too excited. He coughed a few times to get it back in line. “I never said I didn’t believe you. I just have a hard time with the facts at hand. I’m happy to let you prove me wrong.”

  “So Tad Boucher is in Haiti at a charity mission. Doing good to make up for what he did to me?”

  “Maybe, maybe not. The place he went all those years ago is called Maison D’Espoir. I couldn’t find a trail of him after New
York but I did get something of interest from earlier in his life.”

  Kurt stood and got himself a Coke. He needed something to cool himself down. Despite his resolve to never sleep with a client, he was unsure how much longer he could resist Gloria. Morally it was the wrong thing to do but he felt himself wavering.

  He sat down and handed her a can of Coke, which she opened and drank. He popped his open too, took a few gulps and held the can against his forehead.

  “What?”

  “Tad Boucher went to UMASS too, just like Mick Puglisi. Probably not a coincidence Mick and Tad went to the same school as you and Tommy Carpenter.”

  “I don’t remember a Tad Boucher though. He didn’t look familiar to me when he was my doctor.”

  “He was older and it’s a big school but I’m sure he remembered you.”

  She raised her eyebrow at him. “So what are you telling me? It’s some kind of conspiracy?” Sarcasm at its best.

  He looked up at her, the soda can cooling him enough to keep his hormones in check. “I admit it sounded far-fetched when you first told me about it, but there are too many pieces connecting together to believe this is all mere coincidence. Fact is, often in life what appears this coincidental is not all coincidental.”

  “So what do we do?” She stood and paced. “What’s our next step?”

  “We get a hold of Alison’s adoption record. See who’s listed as the biological mother. If it’s not you, then we talk to that lead—ah, person.”

  “But how can we get the record? Hell, Kurt, I couldn’t even get into the office for face time much less see the files.”

  He laughed. So innocent. “We can see anything we want if we’re careful. I’ve got a plan. It’s not entirely legal or safe, but if it works you may just be taking your daughter home after six years of dreaming about her.”

  “What about Tommy?”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s her father. He hasn’t believed me all along but if I prove it, I know he’ll be relieved. I don’t think he ever got over the fact I lost her. That we lost her.”

  Kurt thought Gloria was giving the guy a lot more credit than he deserved. The way Kurt saw it, the loser abandoned Gloria when she needed him most, then started a whole new family and forgot all about her. He didn’t deserve any stake in Alison Gander.

  But Kurt agreed that if she was his long lost kid and Kurt found her for Tommy and Gloria, it would be a nice feather in Kurt’s cap and probably a big ass bonus from Tommy Carpenter. Even more motivation to be aggressive about bringing down the Puglisis and uncovering the truth about Alison Gander. He wanted to tell Gloria that her ex had hired him to prove to her she was entirely wrong and completely misguided, but he decided this wasn’t the time. He couldn’t bring himself to enlighten her that her PI was taking her money and Tommy’s in true double-agent fashion. His last conversation with Carpenter had ended with the man shouting for him to get Gloria on a plane pointed toward Boston. But instead of saying anything on that score Kurt erupted with, “Okay, here’s the plan.”

  Gloria moved closer to him on the couch. “I’ll do whatever I have to. Safe or not. Legal or not. Go ahead. I’m all ears.”

  3.

  Maison D’Espoir, Haiti, evening

  Martine looked at the locked metal door to the room where the eggs were kept and gritted her teeth. The thought of that room in the hospital made her sick. It was the cause of so much pain and sadness for the girls here. All the babies born at Maison D’Espoir began life from within that room. Dr. Tad had told her the babies waited there in big machines, in freezers shaped like barrels. She asked him if they were like those baby frogs that looked like fish, swimming around free in the barrel until he scooped them out with a net and put them into the girls.

  He had laughed and corrected her. “No, Martine, not like tadpoles. Embryos are tiny, too small for someone to see without a microscope. I couldn’t just scoop them up.”

  He had explained to her then, or tried to, that before the embryos were brought here—embryos meant tiny babies before they even looked human yet—that they were eggs. In a laboratory somewhere far away, several years ago, the eggs were mixed with men’s sperm in a little cup. Once mixed enough and turned into embryos, they were shipped where they waited behind that locked door, thousands of them, to be planted like seeds in the fertile young girls.

  Martine did not entirely believe what Dr. Tad said. Mixing eggs and sperm in a laboratory did not make any sense. They would scramble. Maybe you had to do it just hard enough. If you mixed them just a little too hard, but not enough to scramble, maybe that was how you got twins. Dr. Tad said it was not how you got twins but she wondered about this a lot. What to believe, what not to believe.

  Whenever she walked by the door to the locked room, she still pictured the embryos as tadpoles, trying to swim their way out of the big barrels in the secret place behind the stout metal door.

  Dr. Tad had said it was a wonderful thing. A miracle. The beautiful blond babies that were born from this special science made families so happy, he assured her. It used to make Martine feel proud and useful to carry a baby and give it to a family to make them happy. But now it made her sick.

  Boni had birthed a baby the real way and was not happy, not allowed the joy that the American families got from having a child in their arms. It was not fair. Martine leaned against the cool door. So many times over the last few years she had wanted to take an axe and smash through that door and let all the embryos out of the barrel. Let them be free.

  When Martine left Maison for good, she was going to do just that. As soon as her passport came through, she was going to go in there and carry all the whole barrels out even if they were very heavy. She would roll them down the hill out back and to the river. And then she would break open the tops and dump them into the current—to set them free. Maybe they would turn into baby frogs since they did not even look like humans yet. And they would swim with the current. And someday they would be grown up frogs, happy to sit on rocks and eat flies.

  The thought made her smile.

  But then her thoughts went back to Boni. She had to find her. It was only a few days ago she had birthed her baby. She might have fallen down somewhere in the woods, maybe even bled to death!

  Yesterday she and Dr. Tad had gone to Port au Prince and put an emergency rush on Martine’s passport. She thought she would find Boni on the way walking with her baby. But they did not spot her. Martine had made Dr. Tad drive to Boni’s village but no one there, not even her family, had seen her. Dr. Tad gave Boni’s father some money so then he was happy. He smiled with brown teeth and greedy eyes and snatched the bills from Dr. Tad’s hands. He did not seem to care so much that his daughter and grandson were missing in the dense jungle.

  The entire drive back was marked by silence as Martine had watched the roads hoping to catch sight of her friend and her little baby boy.

  But they didn’t see Boni at all.

  By the next day Martine was worried about Boni. She had to go look for her again, through the jungle brush where cars could not drive. That would be the route Boni would travel.

  If Martine told Dr. Tad, he would not let her go. He would say she was not allowed off Maison D’Espoir lands. He would say it was not safe.

  So she did not tell him. Instead she wrote a note on a piece of Maison D’Espoir stationery and tucked it into the front door of his cottage. Then she sneaked down the hill in the back and through the opening in the gate.

  4.

  Miami Hospital, Miami, same evening

  “Are you sure he’s all right to go home?” Mick asked.

  The petite gray-haired nurse with a big forehead fake-smiled at him, stressing her impatience. “Mr. Puglisi, he’s fine. He’s awake and responsive, he’s eating Jell-O . . . It’s time to take him home.” She had big teeth too, Mick thought. Big horse teeth. He didn’t like her tone and he didn’t like her. Why was it that this bitch always seemed to be supervising this shif
t when Luke had surgery?

  Mick didn’t want his little boy to spend the night in the hospital but it made him nervous to bring him home so quickly after surgery. What if something were to happen? What if his incisions became infected?

  “Daddy,” Luke said, his eyes still a little droopy, “I go home with you. I want to see Auntie Angie.”

  “All right, Luke. Let’s get you home then.” He scooped his son up and placed him in the wheelchair.

  Making racecar sounds, the boy asked, “Can you push Luke fast?”

  Mick looked to the nurse for an answer. “I don’t advise it,” she warned. “If you bang his toes, you’re going to cause him a lot of pain and could undo all the good the surgeon just did.”

  Spoilsport. Mick returned her fake smile and slowly pushed Luke down the hall.

  “Want to go get a new animal at the gift shop?” Mick asked as they rolled into the elevator.

  “Thanks, Daddy. Wuv you,”

  “Love you too, buddy.” Mick smiled as he pressed the button. His son gave him such joy. He knew the families he sold his kids to received this same gift every day. Money was great, but having a kid blew that out of the water. Not that he ran the adoption operations solely to be a nice guy. Mick admitted his deepest motivation was profit and receiving the praise his own father gave him for running such a lucrative enterprise. But it was nice to know that his actions brought the added benefit of bringing joy to families.

  Mick pondered this as he walked. Perhaps someday he’d get nominated for some kind of humanitarian award.

  The bell chimed and Mick and Luke rolled to the gift shop. He was feeling so happy that he decided to buy his son two stuffed animals in the shop. He leaned down and kissed Luke’s little blond head. What a great little kid.

  His phone buzzed as they entered the store. He frowned when he looked at the number. Tommy-freaking-Carpenter again.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi Mick. You got a minute?”

  “Just a minute. I’m taking care of something right now.” He pulled a big panda from the top shelf and handed it to Luke to inspect. The boy hugged it hard then handed it back. Luke was particular about his stuffed animals. They had to be very soft and have just the right smell. No hard buttons. No cold parts. That’s what he called them. Cold parts. It meant plastic face pieces or hands.