Nineteen Minutes (5 page)

Happiness was relative, according to her husband. Although most people laughed when Lacy told them her husband’s job involved putting a price on joy, it was simply what economists did-find value for the intangibles in life. Lewis’s colleagues at Sterling College had presented papers on the relative push an education could provide, or universal health care, or job satisfaction. Lewis’s discipline was no less important, if unorthodox. It made him a popular guest on NPR, on Larry King, at corporate seminars-somehow, number crunching seemed sexier when you began talking about the dollar amount a belly laugh was worth, or a dumb blonde joke, for that matter. Regular sex, for example, was equivalent (happinesswise) to getting a $50,000 raise. However, getting a $50,000 raise wouldn’t be nearly as exciting if everyone else was getting a $50,000 raise, too. By the same token, what made you happy once might not make you happy now. Five years ago, Lacy would have given anything for a dozen roses brought home by her husband; now, if he offered her the chance to take a ten-minute nap, she would fall to the ground in paroxysms of delight.

Statistics aside, Lewis would go down in history as being the economist who’d conceived a mathematical formula for happiness: R/E, or, Reality divided by Expectations. There were two ways to be happy: improve your reality, or lower your expectations. Once, at a neighborhood dinner party, Lacy had asked him what happened if you had no expectations. You couldn’t divide by zero. Did that mean if you just let yourself roll with all of life’s punches, you could never be happy? In the car later that night, Lewis had accused her of trying to make him look bad.

Lacy didn’t like to let herself consider whether Lewis and their family were truly happy. You’d think the man who designed the formula would have happiness figured out, but somehow, it didn’t work that way. Sometimes she’d recall that old adage-the shoemaker’s sons go barefoot-and she’d wonder, What about the children of the man who knows the value of happiness? These days, when Lewis was late at the office, working on another publication deadline, and Lacy was so exhausted she could fall asleep standing up in the hospital elevator, she tried to convince herself it was simply a phase they were stuck in: a baby boot camp that would surely transform one day into contentment and satisfaction and togetherness and all the other parameters Lewis plotted on his computer programs. After all, she had a husband who loved her and two healthy boys and a fulfilling career. Wasn’t getting what you wanted all along the very definition of being happy?

She realized that-miracle of miracles-Peter had fallen asleep on her shoulder, the sweet peach of his cheek pressed against her bare skin. Tiptoeing up the stairs, she gently settled him into his crib and then glanced across the room at the bed where Joey lay. The moon fawned over him like a disciple. She wondered what Peter would be like when he was Joey’s age. She wondered if you could get that lucky twice.

Alex Cormier was younger than Lacy had thought. Twenty-four, but she carried herself with enough confidence to make people think she was a decade older. “So,” Lacy said, introducing herself. “How did that pressing matter turn out?”

Alex blinked at her, then remembered: the birthing pavilion tour she had slipped away from a week ago. “It was plea bargained.”

“You’re a lawyer, then?” Lacy said, glancing up from her notes.

“A public defender.” Alex’s chin came up a notch, as if she was ready for Lacy to make a deprecating comment about her affiliation with the bad guys.

“That must be awfully demanding work,” Lacy said. “Does your office know you’re pregnant?”

Alex shook her head. “It’s not an issue,” she said flatly. “I won’t be taking a maternity leave.”

“You might change your mind as-”

“I’m not keeping this baby,” Alex announced.

Lacy sat back in her chair. “All right.” It was not her place to judge a mother for the decision to give up a child. “We can talk about different options, then,” Lacy said. At eleven weeks, Alex could still terminate the pregnancy if she wished.

“I was going to have an abortion,” Alex said, as if she’d read Lacy’s mind. “But I missed my appointment.” She glanced up. “Twice.”

Lacy knew you could be solidly pro-choice but unwilling or unable to make that decision for yourself-that’s exactly where the choice part kicked in. “Well, then,” she said, “I can give you information about adoption, if you haven’t already contacted any agencies yourself.” She reached into a drawer and pulled out folders-adoption agencies affiliated with a variety of religions, attorneys who specialized in private adoptions. Alex took the pamphlets and held them like a hand of playing cards. “For now, though, we can just focus on you and how you’re doing.”

“I’m great,” Alex answered smoothly. “I’m not sick, I’m not tired.” She looked at her watch. “I am, however, going to be late for an appointment.”

Lacy could tell that Alex was a coper-someone who was used to being in control in all facets of her life. “It’s okay to slow down when you’re pregnant. Your body might need that.”

“I know how to take care of myself.”

“What about letting someone else do it once in a while?”

A shadow of irritation crossed over Alex’s face. “Look, I don’t need a therapy session. Honestly. I appreciate the concern, but-”

“Does your partner support your decision to give the baby up?” Lacy asked.

Alex turned her face away for a moment. Before Lacy could find the right words to draw her back, however, Alex did it herself. “There is no partner,” she said coolly.

The last time Alex’s body had taken over, had done what her mind told her not to do, she had conceived this baby. It had started innocently enough-Logan Rourke, her trial advocacy professor, calling her into his office to tell her that she commanded the courtroom with competence; Logan saying that no juror would be able to take his eyes off her-and that neither could he. Alex had thought Logan was Clarence Darrow and F. Lee Bailey and God rolled up into one. Prestige and power could make a man so attractive it took one’s breath away; it turned Logan into what she’d been looking for her whole life.

She believed him when he told her he hadn’t seen a student with as quick a mind as Alex in his ten years of teaching. She believed him when he told her that his marriage was over in all but name. And she believed him the night he drove her home from the campus, framed her face between his hands, and told her she was the reason he got up in the morning.

Law was a study of detail and fact, not emotion. Alex’s cardinal mistake had been forgetting this when she became involved with Logan. She found herself postponing plans, waiting for his call, which sometimes came and sometimes didn’t. She pretended that she did not see him flirting with the first-year law students who looked at him the way she used to. And when she got pregnant, she convinced herself that they were meant to spend the rest of their lives together.

Logan had told her to get rid of it. She’d scheduled an abortion, only to forget to write the date and time on her calendar. She rescheduled, but realized too late that her appointment conflicted with a final exam. After that, she’d gone to Logan. It’s a sign, she’d said.

Maybe, he told her, but it doesn’t mean what you’re thinking. Be reasonable, Logan had said. A single mother will never make it as a trial attorney. She’d have to choose between her career and this baby.

What he really meant was that she’d have to choose between having the baby and having him.

The woman looked familiar from behind, in that way that people sometimes do when you see them out of context: your grocery clerk standing in line at the bank, your postman sitting across the aisle of the movie theater. Alex stared for another second, and then realized it was the infant throwing her off. She strode across the hallway of the courthouse toward the town clerk, where Lacy Houghton stood paying a parking ticket.

“Need a lawyer?” Alex asked.

Lacy looked up, the baby carrier balanced in the crook of her arm. It took a moment to place the face-she hadn’t seen Alex since her initial visit nearly a month ago. “Oh, hello!” she said, smiling.

“What brings you to my neck of the woods?”

“Oh, I’m posting bail for my ex…” Lacy waited for Alex’s eyes to widen, and then laughed. “Just kidding. I got a parking ticket.”

Alex found herself staring down at the face of Lacy’s son. He wore a blue cap that tied underneath his chin, and his cheeks spilled over the edges of the fleece. He had a runny nose, and when he noticed Alex looking at him, he offered her a cavernous smile.

“Would you like to grab a cup of coffee?” Lacy said.

She slapped ten dollars down on top of her parking ticket and fed it through the open mouth of the payment window, then hefted the baby bucket a little higher into the crook of her arm and walked out of the court building to a Dunkin’ Donuts across the street. Lacy stopped to give a ten-dollar bill to a bum sitting outside the courthouse, and Alex rolled her eyes-she’d actually seen this particular fellow heading over to the closest bar yesterday when she left work.

In the coffee shop, Alex watched Lacy effortlessly unpeel layers of clothing from her baby and lift him out of his seat onto her lap. As she talked, she draped a blanket over her shoulder and started to nurse Peter. “Is it hard?” Alex blurted out.

“Nursing?”

“Not just that,” Alex said. “Everything.”

“It’s definitely an acquired skill.” Lacy lifted the baby onto her shoulder. His booted feet kicked against her chest, as if he was already trying to put distance between them. “Compared to your day job, motherhood is probably a piece of cake.”

It made Alex think, immediately, of Logan Rourke, who had laughed at her when she said she was taking a job with the public defender’s office. You won’t last a week, he’d told her. You’re too soft for that.

She sometimes wondered if she was a good public defender because of skill or because she had been so determined to show Logan that he was wrong. In any case, Alex had cultivated a persona on the job, one that was there to give offenders an equal voice in the legal system, without letting clients get under her skin.

She’d already made that mistake with Logan.

“Did you get a chance to contact any of the adoption agencies?” Lacy asked.

Alex had not even taken the pamphlets she’d been given. For all she knew, they were still sitting on the counter of the examination room.

“I put in a few calls,” Alex lied. She had it on her To Do list at work. It was just that something else always got in the way.

“Can I ask you a personal question?” Lacy said, and Alex nodded slowly-she did not like personal questions. “What made you decide to give the baby up?”

Had she ever really made that decision? Or had it been made for her?

“This isn’t a good time,” Alex said.

Lacy laughed. “I don’t know if it’s ever a good time to have a baby. Your life certainly gets turned upside down.”

Alex stared at her. “I like my life right side up.”

Lacy fussed with her baby’s shirt for a moment. “In a way, what you and I do isn’t really all that different.”

“The recidivism rate is probably about the same,” Alex said.

“No…I meant that we both see people when they’re at their most raw. That’s what I love about midwifery. You see how strong someone is, in the face of a really painful situation.” She glanced up at Alex. “Isn’t it amazing how, when you strip away everything, people are so much alike?”

Alex thought of the defendants that had paraded through her professional life. They all blurred together in her mind. But was that because, as Lacy said, we were all similar? Or was it because Alex had become an expert at not looking too closely?

She watched Lacy settle the baby on her knee. His hands smacked the table, and he made little gurgling noises. Suddenly Lacy stood up, thrusting the baby toward Alex so that she had to hold him or risk having him tumble onto the floor. “Here, hang on to Peter. I just have to run into the bathroom.”

Alex panicked. Wait, she thought. I don’t know what I’m doing. The baby’s legs kicked, like a cartoon character who’d run off a cliff.

Awkwardly, Alex sat him down on her lap. He was heavier than she would have imagined, and his skin felt like damp velvet. “Peter,” she said formally. “I’m Alex.”

The baby reached for her coffee cup, and she lurched forward to push it out of reach. Peter’s face pinched tight as a lime, and he started to cry.

The screams were shattering, decibel-rich, cataclysmic. “Stop,” Alex begged, as people around her started to stare. She stood up, patting Peter’s back the way Lacy had, wishing he would run out of steam or contract laryngitis or just simply have mercy on her utter inexperience. Alex-who always had the perfect witty comeback, who could be thrown into a hellish legal situation and land on her feet every time without even breaking a sweat-found herself completely at a loss.

She sat down and held Peter beneath his armpits. By now, he’d turned tomato-red, his skin so angry and dark that his soft fuzz of hair glowed like platinum. “Listen,” she said. “I may not be what you want right now, but I’m all you’ve got.”

On a final hiccup, the baby quieted. He stared into Alex’s eyes, as if he was trying to place her.

Relieved, Alex settled him into the sling of her arm and sat a little taller. She glanced down at the top of the baby’s head, at the translucent pulse beneath his fontanelle.

When she relaxed her grip on the baby, he relaxed, too. Was it that easy?

Alex traced her finger over the soft spot on Peter’s head. She knew the biology behind it: the plates of the skull shifted enough to make giving birth easier; they fused together by the time the baby was a toddler. It was a vulnerability we were all born with, one that literally grew into an adult’s hardheadedness.

“Sorry,” Lacy said, breezing back to the table. “Thanks for that.”

Alex thrust the baby out toward her as if she were being burned.

The patient had been transferred from a thirty-hour home birth. A firm believer in natural medicine, she’d had limited prenatal care, no amnio, no sonograms, and yet newborns had a way of getting what they wanted and needed when it came time to arrive in the world. Lacy laid her hands on the woman’s trembling belly like a faith healer. Six pounds, she thought, bottom up here, head down here. A doctor poked his head through the door. “How’s it going in here?”