The bed in the box neatly made and turned down, Lisa picked up Edgar and settled him against her shoulder in a practiced motion. “Are you going to be okay?” she asked.
“We’ll be all right,” Anna said. “Thanks.”
For a moment Lisa stayed, her face open and kind in case Anna had a last-minute breakdown. “Good night, then,” she said finally. “If you need anything, come and bang on me and Freddy’s door. We’re right across the living room at the end of the hall. The East Wing.” She gave Anna an encouraging smile and left, closing the door softly behind her.
The bathroom door opened a crack.
“Is it safe to come out?” Paul asked.
Anna had forgotten Paul was trapped in the bathroom with nothing but a towel to wear in mixed company. Many men might have made an entrance regardless, but Paul was not one of them.
“It’s safe.”
Leaving the towel to dry on a hook on the back of the door, he came and sat next to her on the bed, smelling of soap, his hair falling damp on his forehead and neck.
“Whatcha got there?” he said conversationally.
“It seems to be a small toothless, featherless, furless, clawless creature of some kind,” Anna said, looking down at Helena asleep in her arms. “I believe it to be a human larva.”
Paul took the baby and laid it across his knees. “Do you think we should peel it before we eat it?” he asked as he unfolded the blanket Lisa had wrapped around the little girl like a tortilla around a bit of chicken.
“Too small,” Anna said.
“Shall we throw it back?” Helena was dressed in a yellow onesie with a green frog appliqué on the shoulder. Paul lifted her up, his hands the size of her torso and so dark from the sun, her golden skin glowed in contrast. Helena opened her eyes.
“Hello, little citizen,” Anna said, awestruck by the rush of gratitude she felt.
“We won’t throw you back yet,” Paul said. “We’ll fatten you up for when things get lean in the winter.”
He cradled the baby to his chest as naturally as Lisa had and Anna was dumbstruck by the absolute perfection of man and child. For the first time in months she could believe that good overcame evil, at least on alternate days.
“Time everybody was in bed,” Paul said, and laid Helena in the cardboard box on her stomach. Tucking the yellow blankets around the yellow-clad baby, he said, “I suppose Health and Human Services will be by to take her sometime tomorrow.”
Reality slammed into Anna with the force of a punch thrown in anger, and the ghosts of the hurt, the murdered, the molested, the raped, the lost children handed from home to home, flapped and screamed inside her skull, harpies chasing her back toward the yawning pit.
No. Not even on alternate days.
TWENTY-THREE
A
nna had mentally rolled her eyes when Lisa told her the story of Freddy sleeping under the crib for a week. Now it wasn’t so droll. Crib death. Another thing not to think about. There were too many things in Anna’s brain that she didn’t want to think about, that to think about brought her closer to the edge of the abyss. Not thinking was exhausting her. Trying to sleep with her fingertips resting on Helena’s back to make sure she was still breathing was exhausting her. Paul, as always, slept the sleep of the innocent.
Eventually she must have slept because whimpering dragged her from its murky depths. The clock on the bed stand, plastic molded into the shape of a football helmet, said three twenty-seven. For a groggy second she was confused and terrified, then she remembered the formula Lisa had left for Helena. The baby wasn’t dying. She was hungry. This is a good thing, Anna told herself, and threw back the covers.
The pajamas she had brought were pink with little yellow ducks on them. Not an outfit she’d ever intended to wear in public. She pulled them on to make herself decent and lifted Helena from her cardboard box.
The baby was so warm and, for the first time since Anna had ripped her from her mother’s womb, so alive. She wriggled and waved tiny fists and made angry little sounds. Anna reveled in this show of spirit and strength as she carried Helena from the bedroom to the kitchen. As good as her word, Lisa had prepared the formula. Helena clutched to her shoulder, Anna retrieved the bottle and put it in the warming pan and turned up the heat.
From an ancient race memory or an old movie, Anna remembered women testing the temperature of the baby’s milk on the inside of their wrists. With Helena in her arms this wasn’t feasible. Anna put the nipple to her lips and squeezed.
“No wonder babies cry,” she whispered as she transferred the nipple to Helena’s mouth. “This stuff is vile.”
Helena evidently thought so as well. She was having none of it. She shook her head to escape the intrusion of plastic and cried. Anna sat in a chair and settled the baby more firmly in the crook of her left arm.
“Got to eat,” she told the baby. “Keep your strength up for what’s to come.”
Helena looked at her, eyes wide, and Anna knew the baby saw her, understood, and she laughed out loud. When Helena accepted the nipple and began to suck, a marvelous sense of triumph poured into Anna, and for a moment she wasn’t tired or sore or scared. Dragged into living in the moment as babies do, there was nothing she didn’t have to think about.
When half the bottle was gone, Helena refused to drink any more.
This was the first time Anna had ever fed a baby. Had the survival and continuance of the human race been left up to her, overpopulation would not have been an issue. Helena was looking at her with expectation, or so it seemed to Anna.
“What do you want, little girl?” Anna asked helplessly.
Helena’s face was screwing up as her disappointment in Anna grew.
“More milk? A kitten? Two kittens?”
Burping. Babies needed to be burped. Everybody knew that. Relieved at having an action to take, Anna put Helena to her shoulder the way she’d seen it done and patted her back gently. Soon the baby quieted and spewed a warm substance down the collar of Anna’s ducky pajamas.
“What a good girl,” Anna said, and: “Ish.” The baby’s face relaxed and then grew beatific. An unpleasant odor let Anna know it wasn’t her child-care skills that had brought on the moment of pure joy.
“We’ve got to teach you to use a litter box,” Anna said.
Lisa had said the changing room was down the hall near the master bedroom. Anna had never changed a baby’s diaper. As she carried Helena down the hall following the spill of light from the kitchen, she envisioned stabbing the baby with huge safety pins, great squares of inexpertly folded white cloth falling off the child.
Anna switched the light on in the laundry room. Lisa had laid a soft mat over the top of the washer and dryer, creating a changing table. On a shelf above were boxes of disposable diapers. Nobody had folded a cloth diaper in over thirty years, she realized. She should have known this. She’d carried enough soiled disposable diapers out from the shorter loop trails off the roads in the parks where she’d worked. Rotten parents would shove the things under logs or in bushes rather than pack out their child’s mess.
“You have been saved by modern technology,” Anna whispered as she laid Helena on her back on the de facto changing table and began unsnapping the yellow onesie. “I am untrustworthy with stabbing weapons.” To Anna’s eye, Helena smiled and she wondered if it was anthropomorphism if human traits were attributed to neo-humans. All needful things had been left ready to hand, for which Anna was grateful. Helena was clean and a new diaper with nifty Velcro closures was laid out and ready when the bubble of her and Helena’s nocturnal aloneness was broken by a voice, sharp and close and scorching with intense emotion. “Crucified on broken branches.”
Anna gasped. Hands spread, knees bent ready to fight or grab Helena and run or scream, Anna spun around to face the intruder.
Nobody was there.
It crossed her mind that she had, indeed, gone over the edge, but she didn’t dwell on it. Of the many things in her head of late, strange voices were not among them. And this voice wasn’t altogether strange. It sounded like Freddy Martinez amped up about a thousand volts. This was the voice of a man who could have stood on a canyon’s rim and shot the fish in his own personal barrel and deemed himself justified in doing so. Nice stories about sleeping under cribs and kissing his wife and giving Anna and Paul and Helena shelter suddenly didn’t outweigh the fact that it had been Freddy whom she had found in the place of the shooter who had murdered two young women while the rest of them watched.
Barefoot, in pink pajamas, a naked baby behind her, Anna knew the unique sense of helplessness that many women lived with all the days of their lives. She hated it.
A murmur. Lisa.
The laundry room and the master bedroom shared a wall, which obviously hadn’t been soundproofed.
“In the dream it was all happening again,” Freddy said, his voice less fraught but still clearly audible. “The water taking her, her trying to grab on to anything, and I just stand on the bank and do nothing. Can’t do anything. Man,” he said so low Anna could barely hear. Then a sob, the kind that men turn into an aborted bark rather than give in to tears.
Anna was eavesdropping on the late-night bedroom conversation of a married couple who had been kind enough to take her and her husband and Helena in out of the cold and she hadn’t a shred of guilt or any intention of stopping.
Murmuring again—Lisa—and Anna stepped across the narrow utility room to shamelessly press her ear against the wall. Ranger Martinez might or might not be the shooter who’d killed Carmen and Lori, but he was connected to the woman in the strainer in a way that woke him in the wee hours with nightmares and honed his voice sharp as a razor.
“The hell it wasn’t!” was shouted so loudly Anna jumped, her butt hitting the washing machine with a thump.
Silence echoed from beyond the plywood separating her from Freddy and Lisa Martinez. Then came the sound of a drawer opening, followed by the unmistakable metallic swallow of a round being chambered.
Anna flicked out the light of the laundry room, grabbed up a naked Helena and moved soundlessly toward the faint light spilling down the hallway. When she reached the kitchen she turned that light out as well.
The door to the master bedroom opened and stealthy footsteps crept down the hall. Baby in arms, Anna didn’t know what to do. If she ran to Paul she would be leading an armed and mentally disturbed man to his bed, yet she couldn’t leave him. Backing into a corner formed by two kitchen counters, she put her hand over Helena’s mouth and waited. The steps reached the doorway to the kitchen and stopped. In the city there would have been ambient light from streetlights or next-door neighbors. Here, with the moon long since set, there was nothing but perfect night, the stars too faint to penetrate curtains and shading eaves.
Darkness was her friend. Anna sank into a crouch, making herself as small as she could, and hoped Freddy would pass through without seeing them. Moving as quietly as a hunting cat, he was through the kitchen before she’d known he’d left the hall. She could see the dark outline of his shoulders against the big windows in the living room.
She was preparing to breathe again when Helena, displeased with the hand over her mouth, made a small cranky noise.
The light came on with blinding suddenness and Freddy Martinez, wearing nothing but old sweats and unlaced sneakers without socks, was pointing his Glock at her head.
TWENTY-FOUR
I
want him fired. Tonight.”
Judith was pacing in a room that was barely four paces wide. Watching her stalking like a beast in a cage was getting to Darden. At three-thirty in the morning thinking was difficult at best. Trying to do it with a wild woman wearing a hole in the carpet was proving impossible.
“Why don’t you sit down, Judith?” he said reasonably. “Let me get you a Coke or something. There’s a machine at the bottom of the steps outside.”
“I don’t want a Goddamn Coke,” she hissed, but she sat, her narrow behind barely perched on the edge of Darden’s bed. He sat in a straight-backed wooden chair, one of two, one more uncomfortable than the other that flanked a small rectangular table, the kind they used to cram into kitchens before breakfast nooks became the fashion.
“Now tell me why you want Kevin fired,” he said.
Judith sprang up again and began the pacing. She hadn’t changed since the party and still wore the tailored blue linen trousers and white silk blouse, but they no longer maintained their pristine lines. Matter of fact, Darden thought, it looked like she’d slept in them. Or rolled in the hay in them. Her manicured fingers had run through her manicured hair so many times the latter was standing in blond spikes like sheaves in a wheat field. “Frankly, Darden, it’s none of your damn business why I want him fired. It’s your business to fire him.”
She might as well have slapped him in the face. The sting of her words burned through his tough old hide till he could feel the faint acid burn in his tear ducts where tears had once resided before he’d replaced them with ash. Darden pulled himself straighter in his chair and tried to suck in his gut. Tonight it wasn’t his friend; it was a sign of how little respect he or anyone else had for the man who used to be Secret Agent White.
Before he could think of a rational way to fall on his sword, Judith stopped pacing and threw herself to her knees on the carpet in front of him, her narrow hands on his knees, her head in his lap. “I didn’t mean that, Darden. I am so sorry. Please don’t hate me. God, I doubt I could stand it if you hated me.”
He stroked her short hair. When she was little it had been a sweet gentle brown and as soft as a puppy’s belly. It probably still was when she didn’t fill it with goop and spray and dye and whatever else women did to make themselves look younger and more appealing. At her age he doubted it would be that same soft brown but a nice color, maybe a little gray but not much. Her mother hadn’t had a single gray hair at sixty. He knew; he’d seen her in her coffin. Ambition had run her heart out. Ambition and speed and cigarettes.