Lullaby and Goodnight (32 page)

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Authors: Wendy Corsi Staub

BOOK: Lullaby and Goodnight
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But that was when she was talking to herself in the mirror.
Now that it’s real, now that she’s facing the woman who has what is rightfully hers, she finds herself faltering.
She finds herself focusing on a small tear in the screen as she mumbles, “I was wondering if I can speak to you about . . .”
About your so-called daughter.
Say it,
she commands herself.
Speak up and say it.
But the moment has passed, and she can hear footsteps pounding down the stairs. Coltish, running footsteps that belong not to an adult, but to an impetuous child.
“Mommy?”
That word . . . in that voice . . .
And there she is, a golden girl with a long waist and bare bronzed limbs, sun-streaked hair, an innocent smile; there she is, as though she stepped out of the past, out of a grave, alive once more.
Oh my God. Oh my God.
Anne Marie’s hand flies out to keep her steady, resting on the door frame so abruptly that the woman beyond the screen takes a startled step backward. Her hand is raised in front of the girl, an age-old, instinctive maternal shield from danger.
She thinks I’m the danger,
Anne Marie realizes incredulously.
This woman, who stole the most precious thing in the world from me, is looking at me like she thinks I’m here to destroy her
.
Ask her where the child came from. Ask her for proof that she belongs to her.
Trembling, Anne Marie turns her attention from wary adult to curious child, and finds herself gazing into a pair of unusually shaded blue-green eyes.
That’s when reality hits her.
It isn’t her.
The girl looks like her, sounds like her, moves like her . . .
But the eyes are different, in shade and in shape.
And the lips. The lips are wider, and . . .
And she has braces.
Heather never wore braces. She needed them, the dentist concluded after a series of X-rays, but they were well beyond financial reach.
So Heather was forced to live with a gap in her smile, and the X-rays were dumped into a file folder, not to be seen again until they would be used to identify sparse, dismembered remains found in a landfill.
But Anne Marie never knew until that morning in June, when her cell phone rang with the Brahms lullaby tone she’d assigned to Mason Hertz. He was the private detective she’d hired with Jarrett’s money.
That morning, while her children played in the next room and the sun streamed in the windows of her beautiful Bedford mansion, he broke the news that should have been broken to her years ago.
The authorities must have tried to locate her way back then with their somber news, Mason Hertz informed her. But by then, Anne Marie DeMario had disappeared from Staten Island, where she had lived her whole life. She had fled north, to the Hudson Valley, without leaving a trace. The person she once was had ceased to exist, replaced by a shell of a human being who lived every day wishing she were dead.
Then Jarrett came along and gave her the opportunity to reinvent herself as Anne Marie Egerton. Neither he, nor anybody she met after she left the city, ever knew she had been a teenaged single mother.
A mother who was too overwhelmed by the sheer financial responsibility of providing for her child to realize that somebody might steal her away.
Heather. Oh, Heather.
Heather’s eyes were brown, not aquamarine, with a wide-set, distinctive roundness, like her great-grandmother’s.
“She has my chestnut eyes,” Grace DeMario would say proudly. “And a mind of her own, that one, just like me.”
A mind of her own, yes, and it led her down a rocky path and well beyond Anne Marie’s grasp.
I did everything I could to keep her out of trouble, and safe with me,
she tells herself adamantly, jabbing the base of her palm into eyes that are suddenly tear-blinded.
“Mommy, what’s wrong with that lady?”
That lady.
That’s all I am to her.
All at once, Anne Marie isn’t here to accuse, to condemn, to reclaim. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
Maybe all she needs now is to know how the path wound its way here, to this comfortably lived-in house in suburban Long Island.
She clears her throat, looks up at the woman, begins to speak.
But she’s cut off by an abrupt “You’re her, aren’t you? You called me that day, asking crazy questions . . .”
She trails off and glances at the girl, who is hanging on every word.
“Kelly, go get Daddy. Hurry,” she commands urgently, her eyes boring into Anne Marie.
Kelly. Not Heather.
The girl takes off running toward the back of the house, calling, “Daddy! Daddy, come quick!”
“Please,” Anne Marie manages to say. “Please just tell me how you got her. I know she isn’t yours.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Look, I saw her birth certificate, but it isn’t real. How did you get it? How did you get
her?
”
The woman takes a step back, shaking her head in angry denial, but she’s frightened.
Anne Marie can smell her fear, can feel it breaking out like beads of sweat on a condemned inmate’s brow.
Yet she summons her self-control with a blatant inhale-exhale to steady herself, and she glares at Anne Marie. “Listen, I don’t know who you are, or why you’re here, but—”
“I’ll tell you who I am,” Anne Marie says, in the instant before she hears a masculine voice calling, approaching from somewhere inside. “And I’ll tell you who your daughter is.”
“What are you talking ab—”
“She’s my dead daughter’s baby—she’s my grandchild!” Anne Marie flings at her before turning and fleeing for the car at the curb.
“Gil? It’s me, Peyton,” she calls in response to the voice on the intercom. “Can I come up?”
There’s no verbal reply, merely an abrupt buzz and a sharp click as the lock on the security door is released.
He only lives on the third floor but she waits for the elevator, balancing a hand on top of her belly.
Too much stress today, she tells herself, cringing as she feels yet another sharp twinge down low in her pelvis, well beneath the spot where she’s grown used to the baby’s kicks and squirms.
She promised Rita she would go straight home and lie down when they said good-bye outside Wanda’s apartment building. It was the only reason Rita agreed to let her go on her own; otherwise, she said, she was going to insist on staying at Peyton’s again tonight.
“Go, Rita,” Peyton insisted. “You miss J.D., snoring and all. Go home to him. I’ll be fine.”
And she really believed she would be.
But when she found herself in a cab, heading downtown to face God only knows what, she decided to make a pit stop at Gil’s.
Not because she’s anxious to rehash her perceived slight, or his failing marriage, or his being fired.
More because she dreads going home.
What if Tom shows up at her door?
What if he breaks in?
Do you actually think Tom is going to hurt you?
She steps into the small elevator and presses the button marked 3.
Maybe she does.
Maybe she doesn’t.
Maybe she isn’t sure what she’s supposed to be thinking, feeling, doing.
The only thing she knows without a doubt is that with the new alarm system and dead bolts, and the bars on the windows, she should feel safe.
The elevator arrives on the third floor with a jarring bump that is echoed by another strange twinge in Peyton’s pelvic region.
If she were further along in the pregnancy, she might think it could be labor. But of course, she still has ten weeks to go. It’s too early for labor.
From here, she can see that the door to Gil’s apartment is ajar. She walks toward it, wishing she had just gone home after all. What she needs, despite the solid six hours of sleep she got thanks to the Tylenol PM, is more rest.
For all she knows, the disgusting, bloody mess in her bag was some kind of sophomoric prank played by somebody at work who wants to get her riled up.
But what about the Bible?
Maybe that’s unrelated.
Yeah, right. And maybe this thirty pounds Peyton has gained is unrelated to the fact that she’s pregnant.
But she’s weary of riding this dizzying carousel of possibilities. She’s no longer as frightened as she is fed up.
She’ll say a quick hello to Gil, mend the fences if she can, and be on her way.
“Gil?” she calls, pushing the door open.
He’s sitting on the couch, surrounded by newspapers, magazines, empty snack bags, plastic laundry baskets containing heaps of clothes that are either clean and need to be folded or dirty and need to be washed.
Dirty, most likely. Nothing in this place looks or smells clean.
“Hi,” he says, blinking up at her like somebody who’s just been awakened—except that, judging by the smoldering cigarette in his hand, he wasn’t sleeping.
At least, she hopes he wasn’t.
“I didn’t know you smoked.” She closes the door behind her reluctantly, making a face at the toxic air.
“Yeah.”
“Do you mind if I open a window?”
The old Gil would have opened it for her, putting out the cigarette and apologizing along the way, calling her Runt in that affectionate tone he uses with her.
This one merely says, “Go ahead.”
Peyton crosses the room, sidestepping domestic debris along the way.
“I’m surprised to see you,” Gil comments, after she tugs the window open and resists the urge to remove the screen and stick her whole head out into the fresh air.
She can’t help retorting, “Yeah, well, I’m surprised to see you
this way.
”
He shrugs.
“What’s going on with you, Gil?”
“You really want to know?”
“No, actually, I already know. Unless some new personal crisis has struck in the last few weeks?”
He stares at her for a long moment. Then he says, “You never used to be cruel.”
“I’m sorry.” She shakes her head, filled with remorse. “I didn’t mean to be cruel. I’m just frustrated, seeing you this way.”
And frustrated, seeing myself this way. I hate being afraid, and exhausted, and uncertain.
“So why did you come over?”
“Because I was worried about you, and you never called me back.”
“I thought you were the one who never called back.”
She clenches her jaw—then doubles over at an unexpected cramp.
Gil is on his feet and beside her in an instant. “What happened ?”
“Ow . . .” The tightening sensation has passed.
“Come on, Runt, sit down.” He’s the old Gil again, hurriedly stubbing out the noxious cigarette, helping her to the couch, patting her shoulder, again asking what happened.
“I don’t know. I think I’m okay now,” she tells him, but alarm bells are sounding loud and clear in her mind.
“Do you need some water or something?” he asks, hovering.
“No,” she says slowly, her thoughts careening once again. “But I think I need the telephone.”
 
Hours have gone by with no sign of Javier or the baby.
Hours in which Mary has gone from frantic tears to silent anguish to stoic resolution.
Now she sits beside the empty cradle silently bargaining with God to give her back her family . . . including the child who isn’t rightfully hers.

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