The Replacement Child

by Christine Barber

  Maxine Baca was kneeling in front of Daniel’s shrine, just starting on the second Sorrowful Mystery of the rosary. The Scourging at the Pillar. In her mind, she recited what she’d been taught in grade school: Jesus is bound to a pillar and cruelly scourged until his whole body is covered with deep wounds. Maxine’s eyes were closed and she held her blue-beaded rosary tightly. She imagined herself at the pillar, being scourged. She thought of a leather whip. Then a stick like the one her mother had used. She bowed and crossed herself as she said, “Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”

  She finished the tenth Hail Mary and then the Glory Be to the Father before opening her eyes. She shifted on her knees in front of Daniel’s shrine and stared at his graduation picture before closing her eyes again and starting the next Mystery. The Crowning with Thorns. She said the Our Father while she imagined a Roman solider in front of her, pushing the crown of thorns down on her head. She imagined the blood running down her face. She started the Hail Marys again.

  She finished her last Hail Mary and immediately started on the Carrying of the Cross. She didn’t like this mystery. She imagined herself carrying the heavy cross down a dusty street. When the Roman soldiers told Simon of Cyrene to take the cross from her, she pushed him out of the way and continued up the hill. She recited the tenth Hail Mary in a rush, excited to get to the last Sorrowful Mystery, the one she liked the best. The Crucifixion.

  She closed her eyes tighter and straightened her back as she knelt. She said the Our Father and thought of herself being nailed to the cross. She imagined the hand of the Roman solider touching hers as he positioned the nail and pounded it in. Sometimes when she had the visions, she would feel a sharp pain in her hands and feet. On those days, she was closest to God. Today she felt only a dull ache. She started on the first Hail Mary and imagined herself being nailed to the cross over and over. By the time she reached the last Hail Mary she was sweating. Next she was supposed to say the First Glorious Mystery, but instead Maxine said a Glory Be to the Father and a last Our Father.

  She tried to stand up but had to put her hand out on her bed to pull herself up. She smoothed the bed as she stood up stiffly. It was the bed that had been in Daniel’s nursery. The one she had nursed him in when he was a baby. She had slept in Daniel’s room until he was almost eight. Ron had stayed in Ernesto’s room in a crib until he was three. Ernesto had never complained about it. But one day, when she came back from the store, Ernesto had moved her bed back into their bedroom and pulled Ron’s crib into Daniel’s room. She had had insomnia since then, but hadn’t moved the beds back until Melissa was born.

  Maxine stood up the rest of the way and kissed the feet on the crucifix on the wall above her, crossing herself.

  Veronica Cordova stood in the doorway of Maxine’s bedroom, her hands folded in prayer. Maxine didn’t know how long her friend had been standing there.

  “I prayed a rosary for Melissa this morning, too,” Veronica said. “Maybe we can pray one together for her later.”

  Maxine just nodded and walked past Veronica, who had been with Maxine since she’d fainted earlier that morning. The two women went into the kitchen. Veronica busied herself making coffee. Maxine stared at the cold toast and coffee, still on the table, that Detective Montoya had made her.

  Her box of newspaper clippings was also on the table. She sat down and pulled it over, stopping to read a few highlighted words.

  “I hope you don’t mind, but I called the funeral home,” Veronica was saying. “I hope that was all right. I thought you’d want to use the same one that we had for Daniel and Ernesto.”

  Maxine looked up at Veronica, who had finished making the coffee and was starting to clear off the table. They had met when Veronica and her husband had built a house three doors down. That had been so long ago. Almost forty years. That’s how long Veronica had been coming over to her house every morning for coffee. They would talk about planting their gardens and share news about the neighbors. Ron and Manny had played on her kitchen floor together since they were babies.

  Ron had called a little while ago, asking her how she was doing and wondering if he should come home. She had told him that she would be fine with Veronica.

  She pulled another clipping out of the box and smoothed it on the table. This one was about a new study that promised a cure for drug addiction. She found a pen in the box and used it to underline the words vaccine and dopamine. The last line of the article was a quote from a scientist: “We are five to ten years away from a cure.” Maxine started to underline the quote, but the pen poked through the paper, ripping into the words. She stopped, surprised, then pushed the pen harder, digging into the table and scribbling furiously.

  At eleven thirty A.M., Lucy and Gerald were in the Piñon fire station writing their run reports. Two other EMTs had shown up to the accident within minutes. They had helped load the man into the ambulance and taken him to St. Vincent Hospital. Gerald told Lucy to sit in the front passenger seat of the ambulance—like a misbehaving child—while he and an EMT worked on the man in back. She felt completely ineffectual, sitting there staring out the window as the real medics helped the patient. She heard them moving in the back, talking to each other in low tones as equipment beeped and whirred. The EMT driving the ambulance never even looked her way. She knew what they thought of her, and they were right. She was not cut out for this.

  The patient ended up having a closed-head injury, a broken leg, and possibly a ruptured spleen. Gerald had to explain to her in slow words what the injuries meant. Lucy was going to call the hospital later. She hoped he would live. His name was Earl Rivera, which they found out after his wife passed by the accident on her way to work. Lucy had first heard her screams over the buzzing extrication saw. Lucy had looked around crazily, afraid for a second that the saw was cutting into the patient. Then she saw a woman standing with a sheriff’s deputy. The woman was doubled over and shrieking. The deputy patting the woman’s back looked very scared and very young.

  Lucy walked over to the woman without thinking and led her away from the scene. Lucy had her sit down on a running board of the fire truck, while she told a firefighter to go get Mrs. Rivera some water. Then she started asking questions about anything that might stop the woman from screaming. She found out that Mrs. Rivera worked for the state accounting office and that she and her husband had been married for twenty-one years. They had three children. The oldest, a girl named Joyce, was graduating from the University of New Mexico with a degree in engineering in May. Mrs. Rivera showed Lucy a picture of the family. Joyce looked a lot like her mother. Lucy helped Mrs. Rivera call her sister, who came to take her to the hospital.

  Now, sitting in the Piñon fire station, Lucy was trying to figure out how to tell Gerald that she was quitting. She couldn’t do this work. She wondered how anyone could.

  When Lucy was seven, she’d run barefoot along a creek and gotten a piece of rusted metal stuck in the bottom of her foot. Her mother had frantically called an ambulance. The paramedic who had taken care of her was smiling and soothing; he’d told Lucy that she had beautiful eyes. She was enthralled. He was her savior.

  Earl Rivera might think she was his savior. The thought almost made her laugh.

  She watched Gerald as he scribbled on his report. He hadn’t said anything since leaving the hospital.

  Gerald looked up, catching her staring at him. He must have seen something in her face.

  “How are you doing?” he asked, putting his pen down.

  “Do you want the truth or a lie?”

  He smiled. “The truth this time.”

  “I never want to see something like that again.”

  He sighed and finished off the last of the coffee in his chipped brown mug. “Did I ever tell you why I stopped being a full-time paramedic and became a volunteer?” Without waiting for her to answer, he said, “One night when I was working for the city, my partner and I got called out on a sick call. That’s as much as the 911
dispatcher told us. As far as we knew, this guy had the flu. It turns out the guy felt sick because he had been shot twice. So there we were, without any police around, trying to save this guy, and the shooter shows back up. He fires off two more rounds and kills our patient.”

  Gerald went to get another cup of coffee, leaving Lucy waiting at the table. She watched him add cream and sugar. He stirred the cup a few times before saying, “I quit over that. I started my own construction business instead. It took five years for my wife to convince me to join up with the county as a volunteer paramedic. I still get cold feet every time I go to a sick call.”

  “I don’t get the point,” she said.

  “The point is, you don’t pick this profession, it picks you. I had no choice but to come back.”

  “You make it sound like a calling from God.”

  “It is.”

  “Well, I’m calling God back and telling him I don’t want it.”

  She jumped as Gerald’s pager sounded again, spilling some of the coffee in her mug.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Wednesday Afternoon

  Of course it was a sick call.

  Gerald rolled his eyes as he swallowed the last of his coffee and tied his boots on. He told Lucy to look up the address they were going to in the map book as they got into the ambulance.

  She picked up the map book and flipped through the pages. “How do you work this thing?” she asked.

  Gerald laughed. She hadn’t meant it as a joke. “There’s an index in the back. Just find the street there,” he said.

  Soon she was getting carsick as they sped down the tiny streets and flew over potholes.

  “Goddammit! Gerald, would you please not go over every single bump,” she said, trying to make herself act normal. And normally she would have yelled at a man she barely knew. “Take the next left,” she said, checking the map.

  She looked over at him. He was tapping his finger in time with the radio, some Eagles’ song. A few minutes ago, she’d been quitting; now, she was running another call. How had that happened?

  They pulled up to the house as Gerald picked up the radio and said, “Santa Fe, Piñon Medic One on scene.” He got out of the ambulance and pulled on his latex gloves.

  Lucy didn’t move from the passenger seat. “You know, I think I’m just going to stay here,” she said.

  “I need you inside.”

  She took a deep breath and got out of the ambulance.

  In front of a newish, adobe-colored stucco house with perfect landscaping was a woman, probably in her early seventies, dressed in red stretch pants, a long lime-green T-shirt, and a white baseball cap.

  “Are you the one who called 911?” Gerald asked.

  The woman nodded. “It’s my friend. She didn’t show up at my house this morning. We were supposed to go to Hobby Lobby.”

  Gerald and Lucy reached the front door. It was locked. Gerald called out, “It’s the fire department,” several times. The old woman reached into her pocket, pulled out a set of keys, and thrust them into Lucy’s hand. “Here, take these fucking things. I lost my glasses so I can’t open the door myself. That’s why I called you.”

  Lucy found the right key on the set and unlocked the door and pushed it open. All three of them were in the foyer before a faint smell hit them. It was like a staleness in the air. Lucy glanced at Gerald. She guessed what the odor was, even though she had never smelled it before. She wanted to go back to the ambulance. Hell, she wanted to go home. Be anyplace but here.

  “Ma’am, could you do us a huge favor and stay just outside the front door here. It would really help. Thanks,” Gerald said.

  The woman put her hands on her hips, looked Gerald up and down, and said, “Like hell I will.”

  “Ma’am, we really need you to stay here.”

  The old woman snorted as she stomped outside. Gerald started in and Lucy had no choice but to follow. The house was decorated in early grandma—pictures of smiling children and grandchildren hung on the walls. On coffee tables were lopsided vases and candy bowls made by small hands. They wandered through the dark house, which was stifling. The heat must have been set at eighty.

  Gerald occasionally called out, “Ma’am? Ma’am, it’s the paramedics,” but they didn’t get an answer. Lucy tried not to think about the reason for that.

  They found her splayed over an easy chair, her head on the floor and her legs sticking up over the back of the chair. She had been dead for a while. Her skin was mottled and her eyes were rolled back. Lucy barely heard Gerald talking in the background.

  “I wonder what killed her,” Gerald said to himself. “We’ll have to get a medical history. Maybe an MI. Stroke. Anything. Weird positioning of the body. I guess she fell that way.” He walked over to the woman to feel for a pulse. Lucy wondered why, since the woman was so very obviously dead.

  Lucy stood in the entrance to the living room. She had seen dead bodies when she was a cops reporter, but those had been covered with sheets. The most she had seen was the top of a head or the bottom of a foot. It was nothing like this. Lucy moved forward a few steps, involuntarily craning her neck to get a better look.

  The woman’s body was discolored, with the blood pooling in weird places because of how she had fallen over the chair. There was no dignity in this kind of death. No peace. One minute you’re alive, and the next, strangers are in your home, staring at your varicose veins and stretch marks.

  Gerald kneeled next to the body, peering at some long bruises on the woman’s neck.

  “Come take a look at this,” he said to Lucy. Just then, a police scanner on an end table went off.

  Acold wind hit Gil when he stepped out of his car downtown near City Hall. He had called Judy Maes to say that he was stopping by her office.

  He found her standing over some blueprints. Her black suit didn’t have a crease in it. He had been surprised to reach her at work the day after her best friend had been found dead. As he got closer, he noticed how tired she looked. She wore lipstick but most of her eye makeup had been wiped off, giving her dark circles. She took him to a break room near her office and closed the door.

  “When was the last time you talked to Melissa?” Gil asked after he offered his condolences.

  “The day before she died. We talked about stupid stuff—my car problems. My Jeep is always in the garage. My lack of a boyfriend. I don’t think we even talked about her at all. God, doesn’t that seem selfish of me?” Judy Maes put her hand up to her face and rubbed her eyes before she went on. “We talked for only a minute or two.”

  “How did she seem?”

  “Normal.”

  “Had anything out of the ordinary happened in the last few weeks? Anything that seemed a little odd that Melissa told you about?”

  “Nothing. She seemed fine. But it was always hard to figure out Melissa. She could have been completely freaked out and never shown it.”

  “What do you mean? What was Melissa like?” Gil asked.

  “Studious. Nice. Dependable,” she said. “The guys always loved her because she was such a mystery. They thought no girl that beautiful could be so straitlaced. They wanted to find her bad-girl side.”

  “What kind of people did she hang around?”

  “That’s the mystery thing—she seemed drawn to wild people but she was never wild herself. Like a moth to a flame. There wasn’t a single weekend in college that I wasn’t drunk, and Melissa was right there with me, but never had anything to drink herself. She would just be with us. Just kinda watching. And when we went home, she’d be the designated driver. She was always the one holding my hair back as I threw up in the toilet. Always taking care of us.”

  “Why do you think she never joined in?” he asked.

  “We talked about that once. Melissa wasn’t a stupid girl. She knew she was uptight. She said she thought maybe it was because of her brother, the one who died. She felt she was the replacement child—the one who wouldn’t screw up. The one who did everything right.�
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  The one who shouldn’t die young, Gil thought. “And did she do everything right?”

  “Too much so, sometimes. She once saw some friends cheating on a test and turned them all in. And these people were pretty good friends of hers. She was weird that way—she watched us drink ourselves stupid every night and said nothing about it, but as soon as someone did something she considered morally wrong, she would have no mercy.”

  “So she had no problems at all? Gambling? Debts?”

  “Melissa? Never in a million.” Judy shook her head. “I heard the newspaper did some story about her doing drugs. But no way. Her only real problem was dating guys who were jerks. She’s dated some real losers. It was the same kinda thing—she would never be a bad girl herself but dated bad guys.”

  “Was anybody ever violent?”

  “This one guy, she only dated him for a week or so a couple of years ago, but I can’t remember his name. God, what was that asshole’s name? Anyway, he slapped her for some stupid reason and that was that.”

  “Did she ever see the guy again?”

  “You mean recently? Not that I know of. If she did, she didn’t mention it.”

  “What about the new boyfriend—Jonathan Hammond?”

  “I think they were having a little trouble … not that she ever said anything. With Melissa you had to watch the way she said things. Like last week I asked how things were going between them and she said, ‘As well as might be expected.’ In Melissa-speak, that meant something was wrong. But she wouldn’t tell me any more. My guess is that she was going to break it off.”

  “What do you think of her boyfriend?”

  He could tell that she didn’t like the question. She answered it carefully. “I think he was a step up from her usual loser.”