The Drifter

by Christine Lennon

  She flipped through the pages, items she’d found on LexisNexis, the arcane legal research platform she used, pre–search engine, at work. There was a copy of his autobiography, cowritten with one of those bizarre women who befriend and fall in love with death row murderers. Through this research and reading, she thought she’d find something to soothe her, but it also left her feeling raw and cold, like she did on the sidewalk screaming at Caroline. Betsy was certain that she wouldn’t notice any new details on the aging newsprint that night, but the pain was starting to dull and she needed to stoke it to keep Ginny alive.

  Betsy closed the folder, drained the last of her drink, and fumbled around under the desk for Gavin’s slippers, which she knew would be there. She stood up, went through the front door, and walked down the hall to the service closet. She opened the trash chute and placed the folder inside. She paused for a moment to consider what she was doing, acknowledge that she was drunk and angry and eager to “let go,” even just metaphorically. She wanted to will herself to be done with the whole mess, with Caroline, with this psychotic killer, with the haunting memories of Ginny. And then she let go. Betsy closed the door of the chute and its hinge made a metallic squeal as it slammed shut. She paused for a moment to listen to the folder rattle and thump as it fell rapidly down to the trash heap six stories below.

  PART 4

  CHAPTER 20

  EXPECTING

  October 26, 2006

  Betsy opened her eyes and stared at the flat, white expanse of her bedroom ceiling. The daily purgatory between sleeping and waking was always the hardest part of her day. It was when the certainties of her life weren’t so certain. Time wound back and scrambled, and her dreams were still vivid. Inevitably, the images from those nightly visits to her past would blur and fade, and an odd nostalgia would settle in. Reality loomed.

  Soon, very soon, this morning struggle to join the land of the living would be interrupted by the cries of the child that was growing inside her, the seven-pound wake-up call that was due to arrive in five weeks. Throughout her pregnancy, she had imagined what kind of cry her baby would have. Would it be high-pitched and nasal, a little raspy, like the sound effect on a television show? Or would it be throaty and low, shouted between jagged gasps? Almost immediately, she’d push the thought away. What kind of mother thought about what her child’s cry would sound like? This was supposed to be one of the happiest times of her life. She should be joyful. Blissful. Betsy suspected this pressure to be the beatific expectant mother was all bullshit, a kind of cultural brainwashing designed to mute the fear of childbirth and the uncertainty of early parenthood. If anything, she was shocked when she felt moments of sustained pleasure, verging on joy. Betsy had experienced plenty of joy—the thrill of the first ultrasound image, the rush of adrenaline when she felt her daughter’s first movements, like a wriggle of a fish, her squeal of delight when Jessica came into the office with the first itty-bitty onesie—though it hadn’t been as simple as all that.

  She propped herself up on her elbow, grabbed Gavin’s pillow, and shoved it behind her back to help support her girth. Gavin emerged from the bathroom in the hall, showered but unshaven, buttoning his favorite striped shirt. He sat on the edge of the bed opposite her to put on his socks. She stared at the back of his still-wet head and spotted a small cluster of gray near the crown.

  “You can tell your mom that those Celtic names are out. Too many extra N’s and consonants pretending to be vowels. And Reagan?” Betsy asked, rearranging herself on their bed and adjusting the pillow behind her back. She reached over to the nightstand and took the list of six baby names that Gavin had scrawled on the back of a Vietnamese takeout menu. He opened the window and let in a sudden gust of brisk air, letting the sound of distant honking horns drift into their room. “You can’t be serious. Is this just 1980s nostalgia or are you actually turning into a Reaganite on me after all these years?”

  “First, uh, how about ‘Good morning,’” he said, walking around to her side of the bed to place his hand on top of her undulating middle. Betsy studied his face. At thirty-seven, he was still as boyish and lanky as he had been when she first met him at twenty, like a kid who’d never fully grown into his limbs, with a slight paunch around the middle. “Second, I like to think of our daughter as an Independent. I guess it just sounded right. I’m feeling an even number of syllables. Reagan Davis. Iambic pentameter and shit.”

  “Um, iambic pentameter is a ten-syllable line in a poem, dumb ass. My question for you is this: Does Nancy Davis Reagan ring a bell?” she asked. “Or are you just going to say ‘No’?”

  She’d decided to let Gavin take a shot at choosing the baby’s first name. They’d waited so long to decide to have a child, she figured, so he’d had plenty of time to think it over. As soon as the ultrasound technician waved her wand in the right spot and told them they were having a girl, Betsy decided she would present Gavin with the challenge.

  “G, will you help me come up with some names for the bump?” she called out from the shower one morning, months before. He looked at her blankly, as though he’d never suspected their child would need a name, or had thought that she would present it upon arrival with a business card, or maybe they’d find it tattooed in looping script on her left inner biceps. Betsy worried that this represented a larger blind spot Gavin had for parenting, and that this was only the first of many times he would drag his feet when she asked him to help.

  They’d been together over fifteen years now, more or less, hot and cold. When they first headed north on the interstate from Florida in his ancient Honda Accord, they couldn’t have known that all of these years later they’d be buying organic cotton crib sheets and researching lactation consultants. Could they have imagined, as they wore out Dinosaur Jr.’s Green Mind in the tape deck after the CD player broke, and plowed through bag after bag of original flavor Corn Nuts on their drive up the coast, Gavin laughing as Betsy gripped her seat as they skidded across snow-slick asphalt for the first time, that one day they’d be approved by the condo board of a doorman building on 18th Street and 7th Avenue and granted the privilege of paying off a mortgage in $5000 monthly chunks?

  For years, the question hung between them: Kids or no kids? Could they raise even a single child in the most exhausting and expensive place imaginable? If yes, when? Finally, Betsy’s gynecologist showed her “the chart,” the one with the steadily plummeting red line that tracks the average woman’s reproductive decline, peaking at twenty, sliding steadily southward until it screeches to a halt and takes an acrobatic cliff dive at thirty-five. They’d reached yet another “now or never” milestone in their relationship, which was what was typically required to get either of them to take any meaningful action, and plunged headlong into now. Any doubts she had about their future, their past, and the sad, strange ties that bound them together were tossed in the trash with a half-full blister pack of Ortho-Cept. After eight months of trying and one round of Clomid, she was pregnant.

  “I LIKE REMI,” she said, calling out to Gavin, who’d left the room to make coffee and find the newspaper. Remi was short, no possible infantilizing nickname. “What do you think of Remi Virginia?” She knew the instant they found out the baby was a girl that she wanted her daughter’s first name to be gender neutral, so no one would make knee-jerk assumptions about her when they read it, and that her middle name would be Virginia.

  She stayed perfectly still under the covers, waiting to feel a flutter of movement beneath her skin and muscle walls. No movement, no spark of recognition from within. Then, a few moments later, she felt a sensation of pulling from her back and then encircling her abdomen. Betsy held her breath and then exhaled. For the past two days, she’d been having contractions that everyone assured her were harmless Braxton Hicks. But something about the waves of tightness across her belly gave her pause.

  Early on, she’d had a scare. Eight weeks into her pregnancy, she’d hemorrhaged in the bathroom at work and she had been terrified that she
’d lose the baby ever since. Betsy called Jessica on her cell phone from the stall, panicked. Jess called a car service, ushered her discreetly out of the loading dock in the back of the building, and rushed her to Dr. Kerr’s office. She’d clutched Jess’s hand until the doctor found a heartbeat. After seventy-two hours of bed rest, she was back to normal, back at work, but determined to be more “relaxed.” She had been diligent, and a little tentative, ever since. Gavin thought she was ridiculous whenever she placed headphones across her abdomen to play classical music from her iPod to the incumbent of her uterus, but whenever he stayed late at work, she’d take the headphones out of the top drawer of her nightstand, recline on the couch, and listen to Yo-Yo Ma with her unborn child. It wasn’t just for the baby, she told herself. It was for her; the muffled hum of Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 would lull her right to sleep.

  Now Betsy rolled onto her side, pushed herself out of bed, and slid her feet into flattened shearling slippers. Her belly slackened again. Her heartbeat regulated. Remi Virginia would be her name. She struggled to keep her mind from wandering, resisting the pull of the warm sheets and the serene blankness of the white ceiling.

  “Hey,” she said, shuffling through the kitchen. Gavin was standing in the hall, still in his socks, shirt untucked, so engrossed in the paper that he hadn’t heard the question.

  “So, what do you think?” Betsy asked. He looked up, clearly startled, folded the newspaper, and placed it in his bag, which hung from a hook near the door. He was pale, his eyes looked bloodshot.

  “So, what? Sorry. I spaced for a second. Do you want decaf?”

  “Sure. What’s going on in the Times?”

  “Oh nothing, you know, same shit.” He shoved the paper into his work bag and brushed a stray hair from her eyes. “The Thursday Styles wants me to wear a pocket square.”

  “Alright. But only if it’s purple,” Betsy said. “So . . . what do you think of the name? Remi Virginia?”

  “Hmm,” he said. “I like it, but . . .”

  “But what?”

  “Well I know how much you like monograms.”

  “And?”

  “And her initials would be R.V.D. R.V.? V.D? One part motor home, one part genital herpes.”

  “Jesus, Gavin.” She rolled her eyes. “You could ruin anything.”

  He went back into the kitchen to start the coffee. Betsy opened the refrigerator and eyed a selection of plain yogurt, a bowl of hard-boiled eggs, and some dense and grainy brown bread. Given her “advanced maternal age,” her gynecologist had suggested a low-glycemic diet, which Betsy had followed to the letter and continued, as much as she could, through her pregnancy for fear of gestational diabetes and ninety-five extra pounds. There were days, and this was one of them, when she wanted nothing more than a salt bagel with chive cream cheese.

  “Hey, Gav, do you want to grab a bite with me after my appointment?” Betsy had an ultrasound scheduled at ten. “Just looking at the font on that Greek yogurt is making me queasy.”

  “Sure, that’s a great idea,” Gavin said as he watched the coffee drip into the pot. “In fact, I have an even better one. Why don’t you take the whole day off?”

  “Wait—what? Are you serious?”

  “I have to run into work this morning for a minute to take care of a few things, and then I’ll be free for the rest of the day.” Gavin had vaulted up the ranks in television news to become the executive producer of a cable talk show that aired live at 9:00 p.m. He was rarely home before 11:00 p.m., and they were just delusional enough to think that their reverse schedules would prove to be an advantage once the baby arrived. “I can hook up with you at the doctor’s office, then we can have lunch and check out that overpriced Japanese baby store in SoHo that you like before I head back to the office.”

  “OK, now you’re freaking me out.”

  “What? What’s the matter? You haven’t taken a day off since the summer. You could use the break.”

  He was right. She was tired, and it was getting harder by the day to cram her feet into heels.

  “Um . . . alright,” she said, smiling, still with some suspicion. Betsy ate an egg, just to curb the hunger pangs, which came on intensely and often. She showered, slipped into black leggings, which resembled a deflated balloon animal when she pulled them out of the drawer, and a stretchy, heather gray dress that Jessica had passed along in a bag of maternity clothes that were chicer than anything Betsy owned pre-pregnancy. She plopped down on the edge of the bed, already winded from the morning’s effort, and slipped on a pair of Converse, grateful for a day that would not require decent shoes. She scraped her shoulder-length, dark blonde hair, which was longer and thicker in her third trimester than it had ever been in her life, into a bun, grabbed a scarf and her handbag, and made her way down to the lobby. She walked the handful of blocks to Murray’s, hurrying past her favorite newsstand, and started salivating as her bagel was plastered with cream cheese. She had sworn them off for years once she left Gainesville. Betsy recognized the irony of giving up bagels upon arrival in New York. Still, every time she passed a bagel bakery and the scent of caraway seeds and burned garlic singed her nostrils, she thought of her boss Tom and his vampiric 2:00 a.m to 10:00 a.m. schedule. Betsy never thought that she’d remember those painfully early mornings with any fondness. To her surprise, she often did.

  Betsy barely made it onto a stool at the counter before she devoured her bagel, licked her finger to pick up stray salt crystals to devour those, too, and walked to the corner to catch the M20 uptown.

  She hoisted herself up on to the bus, slid her MetroCard into the slot, and waddled toward the back. She pushed a discarded New York Post off of a blue seat and lowered herself down slowly. Betsy loved riding the bus. To Gavin, it was torture, a shuttle to ferry the elderly and nannies with their tiny charges, only for the very young or the very old who were in no particular rush to get anywhere, up and down the congested streets. When Betsy had the time, she stayed aboveground. She liked to see what was happening around her, the bikes weaving in and out of traffic, the NYPD gathered in suspicious clusters on the sidewalk for reasons unknown, the ambiguous steam that rose up from manholes on chilly fall mornings like this one. Taking the bus was a habit she picked up when she’d first moved to the city, when she felt an urgent need to learn about her surroundings, memorize intersections, master the landmarks that helped her get her bearings, and keep an eye on the people around her. She felt more in control of her life on the bus. She could jump out the back door at any point, if the occasion called for it.

  Betsy was always planning her escape.

  Once they hit Central Park, Betsy decided to walk. The office was only a block or two away, and she wanted to see if any of the autumn colors remained on the lingering leaves. Years before, she and Gavin used to take the train up to Cold Spring and marvel at the view along the Hudson. Growing up in the oppressive Florida climate had given them both a deep appreciation for the change of seasons. Fall had become Betsy’s favorite time of year.

  “It looks like a puzzle,” she’d say every time she saw the intermittent patches of golden ash and bright red maple leaves along the riverbank. As a kid, she never understood the appeal of autumn, the cool dampness of the air and crunch of decaying leaves on the ground, the last dramatic, spectacular show of nature before the deathly grays of winter. Cold weather made her mother anxious. When her mom learned of Betsy’s baby’s December due date, Kathy was perturbed, claimed she didn’t want to be subjected to the crush of holiday crowds, but Betsy knew it was the cold that frightened her.

  The cramped but tidy waiting room at Dr. Kerr’s office was empty, except for a woman dressed in a pink nurse’s smock rocking a weeks-old infant. She cooed at the baby, reassuring him that his mother would be out shortly. There was a low table piled high with parenting and pregnancy magazines, beaming infant faces looking up at her from their covers, locking on to her gaze. Betsy scanned the stacks for something that wouldn’t terrify her, with all of
their caustic warnings about runny cheese and caffeine. The sets of massive, searching baby eyes and the crying of the fussy boy—short bursts of volume followed by a snorting inhale—made her tense. On the seat next to her, someone had left behind most of The New York Times. And though germy abandoned newspapers also occupied a slot on her list of phobic worries, Gavin had made off with theirs that morning and missing a day of the news would further stoke her anxiety. The headlines were predictable: Bush continued to bungle the situation in North Korea, seventy dead in a Baghdad car bombing.

  Then, on page four, Betsy saw it. She drew in a sharp breath and suddenly understood why Gavin had urged Betsy to take a well-earned mental health day.

  SERIAL KILLER CONVICTED OF MURDERING FIVE IN FLORIDA IS EXECUTED

  Her eyes darted across the first paragraph.

  GAINESVILLE, Fla., Oct. 25—The man convicted of murdering five college students here in 1990 was executed on Wednesday by lethal injection. Scott Charles McRae, 42, was pronounced dead at 6:13 p.m. at Florida State Prison. Witnesses said he stared toward them and began to sing just before the drugs were administered . . .

  Betsy stopped reading. She suppressed the urge to vomit. Everything inside of her churned like a fire. And there was his picture, gazing out past her shoulder. His forehead was furrowed and his right hand covered his open mouth. From his still-warm grave, traveling across state lines and decades, she got one last, long look. Betsy could feel her throat tighten. Her heart flipped suddenly and softly in her chest like a hooked fish. She jerked when the phone in her bag vibrated.

  “I’m in a cab, sorry, I got a little sidetracked,” said Gavin. Betsy couldn’t speak. She breathed heavily into the phone, wincing with the tightening cramp that was now radiating down her left side.