We hadn’t seen each other in twelve years, but there she stood.
Amanda.
And her baby.
S
he couldn’t run. Not with a baby strapped to her chest. Not with a stroller and a diaper bag to retrieve. Even if she had track-star speed and Angie and I had blown ACLs, she’d still have to get in the car, turn over the engine, and strap the baby in all at once.
“Hey, Amanda.”
She watched me come. She didn’t wear that hunted look worn by a lot of people who don’t want to be found. Her gaze was level and open. The baby sucked her thumb into her mouth, having decided, I guess, that it was better than nothing, and Amanda used her other hand to stroke the top of the baby’s head where thin wisps of light brown hair formed swirls.
“Hi, Patrick. Hi, Angie.”
Twelve years.
“How you doing?” We reached the fence between her and us.
“Oh, you know.”
I nodded at the baby. “Pretty girl.”
Amanda gave the baby a tender glance. “She is, right?”
Amanda was pretty herself, but not in the way of models or beauty pageant contestants—her face had too much character, her eyes too much knowledge. Her slightly crooked nose was in perfect symmetry with her slightly crooked mouth. She wore her long brown hair down and heat-straightened so that it framed her small face and made her seem even smaller than she was.
The baby squirmed a bit and groaned, but then she went back to sucking Amanda’s thumb.
“How old is she?” Angie asked.
“Almost four weeks. This is the first time she’s been outside for any real amount of time. She liked it up until she started screaming.”
“Yeah, they do a lot of screaming at that age.”
“You have one?” She kept her eyes on the baby, fed her a bit more of her thumb.
“A daughter, yeah. She’s four.”
“What’s her name?”
“Gabriella. Yours?”
The baby closed her eyes—from Armageddon to serenity in under two minutes. “Claire.”
“Nice,” I said.
“Yeah?” She gave me a smile that was wide and shy at the same time, which made it twice as charming. “You like it?”
“I do. It’s not trendy.”
“I hate that, right? Kids named Perceval or Colleton.”
“Or remember the Irish phase?” Angie asked.
A nod and a laugh. “All the kids named Deveraux and Fiona.”
“I know a couple, lived up off the Ave.?” I said. “Named their kid Bono.”
A great laugh, sharp enough to jostle the baby. “No, they didn’t.”
“No, they didn’t,” I admitted. “I keed.”
We were quiet for a moment, the smiles gradually dying on our faces. The mothers and the jogger paid us no attention, but I noticed a man standing in the park halfway between the playground and the road. His head was down and he walked in a slow circle, trying really hard, it appeared, not to look our way.
“That would be the daddy?” I said.
She looked over her shoulder, then back at me. “That would.”
Angie squinted. “Seems a bit old for you.”
“I was never interested in boys.”
“Ah,” I said. “What do you tell people—he’s your father?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes uncle. Sometimes older brother.” She shrugged. “Most times people assume what suits them and I don’t have to say anything.”
“He’s not missed back in the city?” Angie said.
“He had some vacation time coming.” She waved at him, and he stuffed his hands in the pockets of his jacket and began trudging across the field toward us.
“What’ll you do when vacation time runs out?”
Another shrug. “Fall off that bridge when we come to it.”
“And this is what you want—to build a life up here in the Berkshires?”
She looked around. “It’s as good a place as any and better than most.”
“So you remember some of this place,” I said, “from when you were four?”
Those clear eyes pulsed. “I remember all of it.”
That would include the wailing, the crying, the arrest of two people who’d loved her deeply, the social worker who’d had to wrench Amanda from the arms of those people. Me standing there, the cause of it, watching.
All of it.
Her boyfriend reached us and handed her the pacifier.
“Thanks,” she said.
“No problem.” He turned to me. “Patrick. Angie.”
“How you doing, Dre?”
• • •
They lived just a mile from the dog park on the main road in a house we’d passed at least a dozen times that morning. It was a Craftsman Foursquare, the stucco painted a dark tan that contrasted nicely with the off-white trim and the copper-colored stone porch supports. It was set back off the road a few yards, a wide sidewalk bordering the houses along that stretch of road in such a way that it felt more small-town than country. Across the street was a strip of common grass and then a small access road and a white-steepled church with a brook running behind it.
“It’s so quiet here,” Amanda said as we exited our cars and met on the sidewalk, “that sometimes the gurgling of the brook keeps you up at night.”
“Yikes,” I said.
“Not a nature enthusiast, I take it,” Dre said.
“I like nature,” I said. “I just don’t like to touch it.”
Amanda lifted Claire out of her car seat and said, “Would you mind?” and handed her to me. She came back out with the diaper bag and Dre pulled the stroller out of the back of their Subaru and we headed up the walk to the house.
“I can take her,” Amanda said.
“I got her for a sec,” I said. “If that’s okay.”
“Sure.”
I’d forgotten how small a newborn was. She weighed, at most, eight and a half pounds. When the sun broke between two clouds and hit us, she scrunched up her face until it looked like a head of cabbage, her tight fists covering her eyes. Then her fists fell away and her face unscrunched and her eyes opened. They were the color of good scotch and they looked up at me with startled wonder. They didn’t just ask, Who are you? They asked,
What
are you? What is this? Where am I?
I remembered Gabby having that look. Everything was unknown and unnamed. There was no “normal,” no frame of reference. No language, no self-awareness. Even the concept of a concept was unknown.
The startled wonder turned to confusion as we crossed the threshold into the house and the light changed again and her face darkened with it. She had a gorgeous face. Heart-shaped, chubby-cheeked, those butter-toffee eyes, her mouth a rosebud. She looked like she’d grow into a stunner. Spin heads, halt hearts.
But as she began to fuss and Amanda took her from my arms, it also occurred to me that however she looked, she didn’t look anything like Amanda or Dre.
• • •
“So, Dre,” I said when we were all sitting in the living room by a hearth of smooth gray stone.
“So, Patrick.” He wore dark brown jeans, a pearl henley beneath a navy blue pullover with an upturned collar, and a dark gray fedora on his head. He fit in up in the Berkshires about as well as a fire. He pulled a pewter flask from the inside pocket of his jacket and took a small sip. Amanda watched him return the flask to his pocket with something that resembled disapproval. She sat on the other end of the couch and rocked the baby softly in her arms.
I said, “I’m just trying to imagine how you’ll go back to work for the Department of, uh, Children and Families when your family unit here is a bit, how do you say, fucking illegal.”
“Please don’t swear in front of the baby,” Amanda said.
“She’s three weeks old,” Dre said.
“I still don’t want anyone swearing in front of her. Did you swear in front of your baby, Patrick?”
“When she was a baby, yeah. Not now.”
“How’d Angie feel about it?”
I looked over at my wife and we exchanged a small smile. “It annoyed her actually. A bit.”
“It annoyed her greatly,” Angie said.
Amanda gave us a pulse of her eyes that said: Exactly.
“Fair enough,” I said. “I apologize. Won’t happen again.”
“Thank you.”
“So, Dre.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “You’re asking how I plan to go back to work at DCF when I’m shacked up with a teenager.”
“Something like that, yeah.”
He leaned forward and clasped his hands together. “Who says anyone has to know?”
I gave that a big smile. “Let me give you a picture of what the inside of my head looks like right now, Dre. I’ve got a four-year-old daughter. I’m imagining her in twelve years, shacked up, as you say, with a scumbag DCF worker twice her age who has the moral compass of a reality TV producer and hits the flask before noon.”
“It’s past noon,” he said.
“But that’s not your yardstick, is it, Dre?”
Before he could answer, Amanda said, “The bottle should be warm by now. It’s in the bowl in the sink.”
Dre got off the couch and went into the kitchen.
Amanda said, “Moral outrage isn’t going to play well here, Patrick. I think we’re all a little past that right now.”
“We’re above morality, are we, Amanda? At the ripe old age of sixteen?”
“I didn’t say I was above morality. I said I was above expressions of moral outrage that are a bit self-serving given the histories of the people in this room. In other words, if you think you get some sort of second chance to save my honor twelve years after you handed me back to a mother you knew was incompetent, you don’t. You want absolution, find a priest. One with a clear conscience of his own, if there are any of those left.”
Angie gave me a look that said: You walked into that one.
Dre returned with the bottle of formula and Amanda gave him a sweet, weary smile as she took it from him and slipped the nipple into Claire’s mouth. Claire immediately started sucking, and Amanda gave her cheek a soft caress. I wondered who were the adults and who the children in the room.
“So when’d you find out you were pregnant?” Angie said.
“May,” Amanda said as Dre took his seat on the couch, closer to her and the baby now.
“Three months along,” Angie said.
“Uh-huh.”
I said to Dre, “Must have been a shock for you.”
“Just a bit,” he said.
I turned my eyes to Amanda. “Thank God you’ve got a neglectful mother, right?”
“I don’t follow.”
“It must have been a lot of help hiding the pregnancy,” I said.
“It’s done all the time.”
“Oh, I know,” I said. “I knew
two
girls who pulled it off in high school. One was overweight in the first place, so, you know, but the other, she just bought larger-size clothes and kept eating junk food in front of everyone and nobody picked up on it. She gave birth in a bathroom stall during fifth period, junior year. School janitor walked in on it, ran back out screaming, fainted in the hallway. True story.” I leaned forward. “So, I know it’s done all the time.”
“Okay, then.”
“But, Amanda, you don’t have an extra pound on you.”
“I work out.” She looked over at Angie. “How much did you gain?”
“Enough,” Angie said.
“She loves Pilates,” Dre said.
I nodded as if that made perfect sense. “And you don’t want me swearing around the baby, but you feed her formula?”
“Sure. What’s wrong with formula?”
“For a lot of women? Nothing. But you? You’re a tiger. I can see it in your eyes—someone looks at that kid wrong, you’d slash their throat.”
She nodded without hesitation.
“You’re not the type of woman gives a baby formula when she knows how much healthier breast milk is.”
She rolled her eyes. “Maybe—”
“And that baby—no offense?—looks nothing like you. Or him.”
Dre came off the couch. “Time to go, dude.”
“No.” I shook my head. “It’s not. Sit down.” I looked at him. “Dude.”
Amanda said, “Claire is mine.”
“We don’t doubt that,” Angie said. “But she didn’t start that way, did she?”
“Sit down, Dre.” Amanda shifted the baby against her chest and adjusted the bottle. She looked at Angie and then me. “What do you think is going on here?”
Dre took his seat. He took another hit off his flask, got another contemptuous flick of the eyes from Amanda.
“Well, you’ve got a bunch of lunatic Russians on your tail for a reason,” Angie said.
“Ah,” Amanda said, “you’ve met them?”
Angie shook her head and pointed at me.
“I met two of them,” I said.
“Let me guess—Yefim and Pavel.”
I nodded and noted the muscles tightening in Dre’s face. Amanda, on the other hand, looked as calm as ever.
“And you know who they work for.”
“Kirill Borzakov.”
“The Borscht Butcher,” Amanda said, caressing Claire’s face again. “That’s one of his nicknames.”
“How
old
are you?” I said.