Here She Lies (9 page)

Julie had a glass of wine. Lexy nursed on my lap. Outside it was a bright spring late afternoon in a world filled with caterpillar infestations and marketing infil-trations and police interrogations, but inside, in
here
, we relaxed in a moment of unexpected ease. She had brought me to the perfect place to get my “sensitive” mind off
stuff.

Over a plate of pistachio biscotti and dime-sized chocolate cookies, we decided things. I would buy a short-term membership at the local gym to help shed stress and a few leftover maternity pounds, and Julie would babysit, getting Lexy used to being without me in the house. We figured that with planning we could manage the transition to my two-night absence next week, when I went to New York for the job orientation, so as to cause everyone the least inconvenience and distress. Leaving your baby, for however brief a time, felt like arranging a trip to the moon; there was no end to the potential complications. We would have to find a local pediatrician, but Julie assured me there were plenty.

“I guess we should start getting her in the habit of taking bottles from you,” I said. “I brought my pump and all the bottle gear.”

“I thought you hated pumping.”

She was right: I did. During our phone calls between Lexington and Great Barrington, I had fre-quently moaned about the discomforts of pumping breast milk while at work in the prison so that Lexy could drink the real thing at day care.

“It’s just that I want her to stick with breast milk for a while longer,” I said. “It’s so much better for her and she’s still so young.”

“What about supplementing with formula? Wouldn’t that free you up a bit?”

Dreaded formula
, full of artificial additives. Julie, not being a mother herself, couldn’t have realized what she was asking of me, how every bit of mommy-baby attachment I relinquished would be a loss. And yet maybe she had a point. Lexy had been fed on mama’s milk (pure gold) for nearly half a year. Was it time for more flexibility? It would be a matter of training my milk ducts not to produce milk every day at a certain time. The idea of formula saddened me a little, but things were changing now. I had to be strong.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s do it, but gradually.”

“And maybe we should start her on solid food, too.

She seems kind of hungry.”

Hungry?
I resented that a little. “Maybe it would be easier if I just took her with me.”

“Right. And bring her to the orientation at the hospital? Not exactly professional.”

“You could come with me to New York, Jules. It could be fun.”

“I have some work things coming up—nothing I can’t do with Lexy around, but I have to be here. Anyway, we’d be pretty cramped in Dad’s old apartment, don’t you think? Just leave Lexy at home with me—”

“But you have so much work—”

“Not
that
much. Don’t worry! I
want
to take care of her. It’ll be
fine
.”

So it was settled. I mean really settled: I was going, alone; and Lexy would gradually be weaned to bottles and solids. I thought it seemed like a lot to ask of my baby all at once, especially after being separated from her daddy and her home, but Julie seemed so confident.

On the way home, passing through Great Barring-ton, we caught the local cell phone store before it closed at seven. Julie bought herself a new phone—

slender and pink—and signed me on to her service, getting me a lesser phone that was still a considerable upgrade from what I was used to. After, she pulled the car up to Brooks Pharmacy so I could run in and buy four new plastic bottles, silicone nipples and a can of formula. Then, as the sun set along a spectrum of vi-brant, dying color, and the green mountains grew dark and shadowy around us, we headed back to the house.

The days passed in a modest kind of peacefulness, a respite from upheavals and traumatic events. The street out front washed clean with two more rains. Thomas Soiffer seemed to vanish like a puff of smoke, and with it the murder investigation, news of which appeared in the papers with less and less frequency. We went on with our lives; what else could we do?

Julie and I fell into routines. I would sit alone in the Yellow Room at appointed times, pumping milk from my breasts and freezing it in plastic bags, every few days omitting a pumping, retraining and literally downsizing my breasts (though they still managed to reach near-explosive proportions if I didn’t get to the pump on time). Lexy was started first on a mix of breast milk and formula once a day, then one full bottle of formula a day, then two. Julie worked at odd hours, making and taking phone calls, hammering information out of and into her computer, but as always she directed her energies with admirable focus and seemed to have plenty of time to spend with Lexy.

Which was good: our plan, for my baby’s comfort and happiness when I was away in New York, seemed to be working. Lexy was adjusting beautifully to the bottle-breast trade-off between look-alike mommies.

Sometimes, when Julie fed and napped Lexy, I skedaddled, haunting the house and grounds with my camera, capturing the final traces of Zara Moklas’s evaporation and documenting my family’s daily life.

Sometimes I went to the gym, where I grunted and groaned myself in the direction of something close to my previous and Julie’s current form. Sometimes I ran errands. I was getting to know the town, shopping for groceries at Price Chopper, gathering fresh fruits and vegetables at Taft Farms and joining the local fashion aficionados to troll the designer racks at Gatsby’s—

where, on Thursday, I broke down and bought matching tie-dyed hoodie sweatshirts, silkscreened on the front with a seated Buddha, for we three Milliken females. It was an indulgence, but we deserved it; our little tribe had come a long way together through a strange week.

That evening, as the day waned through shades of lilac, burgundy and brown into a black country night outside, we all wore our matching psychedelic sweatshirts and danced to Tina Turner belting out a ballad about love-and-what’s-it-got-to-do-with-anything. A pot of rosemary beef stew simmering on the stove filled the kitchen with its rich fragrance. We were happy. After dinner I nursed Lexy in a rocking chair Julie had moved from the loft into the Yellow Room.

Put my baby to bed, put myself to bed, and slept …

Until my sleep-self was pulled unwillingly and in total confusion out of a deep well. That was how my dream-mind transformed itself from sleep to abrupt, panicky wakefulness. I was in a well attached to a rope that pulled me up up up up up and I did not
want
to go up, I wanted to stay asleep. But it was out of my control.

Gradually as I awoke I became aware of a tremen-dous, awful, deafening sound. The alarm system: it had been triggered.

Someone was in the house.

Lexy was screaming, though her screams had little impact against the shriek of the alarm. I had never heard anything like it. The sound was large and overwhelming and so shocking that I couldn’t think of what to do.

I picked Lexy up and tried to mute her hearing by pressing her head between my chest and one hand.

Holding her, I darted into the hallway; then, terrified, I went back into our room and locked the door. The panic and hysteria of the moment made it impossible to
think
. To know what to
do
. I threw open window after window, looking for a way out.
Where was the
maroon car?
Either it was too dark out to see it or it was gone. Chilly air streamed into the room. The fourth window opened onto an abutment that Julie had earlier explained was original to the barn, tacked-on grain storage or something like that. I couldn’t remember. Looking down at the lower section of tar roof I could hardly see its edges in the country darkness.

How would I know where to step? How could I take a
baby
out there?

But I had to.
Someone was in the house.

I swung one leg out the window, straddling half in and half out, and was about to lift my other leg over—

holding on to Lexy for dear life—when the alarm went off as suddenly as it had blasted on.

The abrupt silence froze me.
What did it mean?

Outside my door, footsteps grew louder. I raised my other leg to swing it out the window so I’d be sitting, ready to jump down.

My doorknob jiggled.

I inched myself forward,
ready
. I felt turned on in a way I never had before, not in a
good
way but like a machine. I didn’t like it, being animated for pure action. And yet the urge to survive was irresistible.

“Annie?” It was Julie’s voice. “Open up. It’s okay.” Movement, fear, urgency gelled. Coolness spread over my skin. The phone started ringing, just as Julie had said it would; if it was a false alarm you gave your password and the alarm company called off the police.

Was that what this was:
a false alarm
?

Coming back inside, I felt sick at what I had almost done. If I had made the small leap down, I might have dropped Lexy. Anything could have gone wrong.

I opened the door and there was Julie in black-and-white cow-print pajamas, ear pressed to phone, telling someone the password: “Peanut Butter Jealous.” (A stuffed monkey we’d both loved and claimed and fought over as young girls;
she
had funnily mala-propped the name.) I bounced Lexy, calming her, while Julie recited information about herself and her house to prove that she was who she said she was.

After the call she looked at me apologetically. “Sorry, A. I turned it off from the control pad in my bedroom.

It flashed something about a battery in one of the kitchen windows.”

“A battery?” Impossible! The epic battle I had just waged against fright could
not
have been caused by a
battery
—faulty, expired, whatever.

I followed her downstairs into the dark kitchen. She flicked on the light and the room glowed, quiet and still, just as we had left it after dinner. The door and windows were closed. Nothing looked out of place.

Julie inspected the window nearest the door and pronounced, “There’s no sensor magnet. It must have fallen off and triggered the alarm.”

“Why would that happen?”

“Beats me. I watched while they installed the system. The magnet’s about an inch long, stuck on with glue. It makes contact with the battery.” Just then a face appeared outside the window: a man. We both screamed and Lexy began to wail again.

The man looked frustrated, pressing something flat against the glass: his open wallet. He was showing us his police identification. I noticed his short brown hair, but he had a beard and no double chin—this was not the man I’d seen earlier in the maroon car.

“Call Detective Lazare,” I told Julie. “Find out if it’s a different guy.”

She called—it
was
a different guy; the shift had changed at midnight. So we let him in. He introduced himself as Mack and went directly to the window to inspect it himself, reaching the same conclusion: the magnet was gone.

“Do me a favor, ladies, and sit tight while I have a look around.” Mack reached under his fleece sweater and pulled out a gun. I
hated
guns, for everything they represented. I’d had to endure mandatory target practice at the prison, and just seeing one now brought back the bitter smell of singed metal and the sound of a bullet piercing the air, smashing into a distant card-board figure. But I said nothing. What if someone
had
slipped into the house and Mack confronted him? I was
glad
Mack had the gun.

Julie and I sat at the table while I nursed Lexy, which was the only way to calm her at this point since she was so agitated. Finally she fell asleep in my arms.

After a while Mack reappeared to reassure us. “Everything looks okay,” he said. “No one’s here except us chickens.” We thanked him but didn’t laugh; we were exhausted, on edge. “You might want to look around, though. See if anything’s missing.”

Julie got up and took a quick glance around the kitchen. The TV she kept on the counter was still there, as were our purses, hanging off the same hook right by the front door. In the adjacent dining room I heard her opening drawers before calling out, “Silver’s all here.” Mack and I stayed together in the kitchen, he standing by the door with his hands in his pants pockets, trying not to eye the high-end appliances, and I at the table, holding sleeping Lexy. Julie moved through the house, inspecting for the obvious things a thief might take: electronics, jewelry, hidden cash. Everything was there.

When my arms began to lose circulation I went upstairs and put Lexy in her crib. I closed and locked the windows, checked the closets and under the bed, then carried the listening end of the monitor with me back to the kitchen. I set it on a counter, raised the volume to high, put water on to boil for tea and then reached into my purse for one of the packets of artificial sweet-ener I’d borrowed from a diner in town.

I found one easily in the mess of stuff at the bottom of my purse.
Too
easily. My wallet—the bulkiest item I carried and inevitably the obstacle in my searches for lipstick, pens, tissues, cell phone, keys—was not there.

But how could that be possible? I dumped the contents of my purse onto the counter and saw that it was true: no wallet.

“Oh, jeez,” Julie said, watching me. “But nothing was taken from the house. Why would anyone break in here and steal just your wallet? Annie, maybe you lost it again.”

I was a little famous for that, having mislaid my wallet three times in the past two years, leaving it behind at stores, on my dresser, in my desk at work. Each time it became less a catastrophe and more a tired farce.

“Check
your
purse,” I told Julie.

She did. Everything of hers, including her wallet, was accounted for.

“I lost my wallet once,” Mack offered. “Badge and everything, gone.” He cringed at the memory of whatever he had suffered as a result.