Remember Mia (8 page)

“D
etectives.” Dr. Baker nods at them on his way out. “Thirty minutes tops. If her vitals make somersaults, I’ll put my foot down.”

The detectives wait until Dr. Baker has left the room.

“My name is Detective Wilczek. I’ll be heading the investigation. You remember Detective Daniel?” He points at the middle-aged rotund man. “We appreciate you talking to us, Mrs. Paradise,” he says and pulls out a notebook. Wilczek is in his forties, buzz cut, thin, and wiry. His nails are bitten to the quick.

Dr. Baker has removed the morphine pump and I try to ignore the pain behind my left eye.

“I’d like to go over everything again, if you don’t mind. I understand you must be getting tired of repeating the same thing over and over, but I prefer to hear it from you.”

My routine, Jack’s job in Chicago, the days leading up to her disappearance, the morning I found her crib empty. While Wilczek takes notes, he never interrupts me. When he doesn’t take
notes, he twists the narrow wedding band on his left hand with his thumb.

“Tell me about the locks. Why did you have those locks installed?”

I found a window left open, a door ajar, and crooked blinds. Nothing major, yet worrisome, and I couldn’t convince myself that it was “just the wind.” Because reason was like a ghost, one minute there and gone the next. Vanished. It was as if reason were able to dissolve into the very air itself. I wondered if someone had rigged the house with secret entrances and passageways like some creepy old mansion. I even occasionally found my eyes scanning the walls and floors for telltale signs of intruders, but of course there were none.

“I wanted to be safe.”

“Did you feel threatened in any way? Did anyone make a threat toward you?”

“No, nothing like that. I was basically living there by myself most of the time; it was just a precaution.”

“Nothing odd happened in the days before your daughter disappeared?”

Once, there was an imprint in my bed, the sheets crumpled, as if a supernatural visitor had taken the liberty of resting there in my absence. Then one day I came home and the mirror seemed off-kilter. Was I imagining it, is my view of the world skewed somehow? My first thought was
There’s someone here
. But the house was empty. So I dismissed it.

“Not that I remember,” I say.

“Who had access to the apartment?”

I think about it for a while. “Jack. The movers. The man who installed the locks.” Suddenly my pulse quickens. “The man who installed the locks . . . he was odd, he looked at me the entire time.”

“We dusted the entire apartment for prints. The ones on the door are from the gentleman who installed the locks. We checked out his alibi and he’s been eliminated. He takes care of his elderly
parents. There are prints from your husband, mainly on the furniture. Some other prints on furniture checked out as the movers.” Wilczek’s voice turns composed, almost kind. “Were there any strange phone calls? Anyone watching you? Anything out of the ordinary? Even something insignificant might be a very important fact.”

The coffee table had been moved, haphazardly pushed aside. There were visible dents in the rug, as if my mother’s spirit, annoyed by my lack of furniture placement, had come to properly rearrange my table. I dismissed it as if I was accepting a warped and disturbed home.

“Nothing out of the ordinary,” I say.

And then: “Tell me again why you didn’t call 9-1-1?”

“I had the phone in my hand, dialing the number, and then I saw that her bottles were gone. Her clothes, everything. I didn’t understand what had happened.”

“So you did what?”

“I looked for her, everywhere. In my car. In alleys, around the neighborhood, everywhere. I asked a homeless woman on the corner if she’d seen anything. I even looked in Dumpsters.” I catch myself but it’s too late. The word
Dumpster
echoes in my mind. It just didn’t sound right.
I looked for my daughter in Dumpsters.
Why did I even say that? Why would I even entertain the possibility of my daughter thrown away among trash and garbage?

“You went up and down the street you say. Did you ask for help?” Wilczek’s voice remains calm.

I shake my head.

“How about the workers in the house?”

“It was a Sunday, everybody was gone.”

“How about your neighbor?” He checks his notes. “Lieberman, the other person living in the building, right? Did you ask him for help?”

“He visits his sister on the weekends. He leaves on Friday
afternoons. I called him a few times but I couldn’t even leave a message.”

“What did you think happened to your daughter?”

I fold over my blanket like an accordion, its waffle-weave pattern a shadowlike illusion that seems crooked, and I’m looking for order among chaos.

Focus on his question.

“I didn’t have any idea.”

“Did you call your husband?”

“No.” I lower my head and wonder where I’d be right now if I had called Jack right away. Jack would have called the police, he would have rushed home, and he would have known what to do because Jack always knows what to do. Not calling him was just another one of my blunders. “He had just left and started his new job. I knew it would be hard for him to call every day and he was due to come home in a week or two for a few days.”

Wilczek leans forward, adjusting his tie. “Why didn’t you ask him for help? He’s a lawyer, he’s got resources and connections other parents of abducted children only dream of.”

“I . . . no . . . I was confused. I thought many things.”

“Did he call you at all after he’d left New York?”

“Yes, we talked. Not at length, no, just how are you, how’s the baby, everything okay, how’s the house coming along, that sort of thing.”

“Tell us why you bleached your entire house.”

I bleached my house? Oh yeah, that.
I remember the bleach. I was on the brink of something that felt like horror. Yes,
horror
is the right word. I had to occupy myself. I felt soothed by the acid burning in my nose and eyes, the struggle to breathe as if someone had his hands around my lungs, the wheezing and coughing I welcomed. When I returned to North Dandry, after I had left the precinct, a stench hit me, a fusion of coffee grounds and dead air behind windows that had gone unopened for days, maybe even
weeks. And then I saw the filth; the grimy drain and the moldy ring around the faucet. I went to work among buckets, rags, and steel wool. When one toothbrush wore down, I got another from the bathroom drawer. I dipped the bristles in bleach and scoured the grout between the floor tiles, ran ice cubes through the disposal. I cleaned room after room, removing objects from shelves, mopping, wiping, scouring. As my hands started to burn and my cuticles all but dissolved, I realized that this mission was designed to make something right, something that I wasn’t sure I had wronged to begin with. I cleaned with bleach, yes I did. Detective Wilczek wants to know why, and who could blame him, I know what he’s insinuating.

The detective waits for an answer but I have no logical explanation for him and so I remain silent. I look out the window as if to find the answer in the distance.

“I need you to explain why you left the precinct without reporting the disappearance. Picking up the phone and then not reporting her missing after you realize her things have disappeared is one thing. But then you decide you need to talk to the police after all. You walk to the station but you don’t ask for help. You must understand that this doesn’t make sense. There’s no intruder, no break-in. Just a missing baby and a mother who can’t remember anything.”

“Dr. Baker told you I have amnesia, right?”

“Mrs. Paradise”—Wilczek scoots his chair closer, his eyes appear soft—“children don’t just disappear out of locked apartments. They don’t disappear without a trace. Are you telling me that someone walked through walls and made away with a closet full of clothes and a dozen baby bottles? Boxes of diapers? And all that while you were sleeping?”

I have to agree with him. It sounds like a melodramatic soap opera.

“You missed a doctor’s appointment,” Wilczek continues. “Some
sort of scheduled vaccination. You’ve been to all previous appointments, but not that one. Why didn’t you go?”

“I forgot.” I didn’t go to her scheduled vaccination appointment? I would never just miss a vaccination, there must have been a reason. Something irks me but I can’t put my finger on it.

“The day care said you never returned with her shot records.”

“The day care needed the complete shot records to enroll her, and since I missed the vaccination appointment, there was no reason to go back. And it wasn’t child care, really, just a couple of hours here and there.”

“Did you reschedule the appointment?”

“I was going to but then she . . .” I pinch my lips shut. I need to be alone, I need to think this through, everything’s unclear, too vague to put in words.

“She what?”

“She disappeared.”

Wilczek lowers his head and studies his notebook.

“Tell me about the homeless woman.”

“There was a homeless woman on the corner, I’d seen her before, and I thought if she’d been there all night, she might have . . .” It dawns on me that if he knows about her, he’s undoubtedly spoken to her. “You talked to her? What did she tell you?”

I watch his eyes fly over the notes in his little book. “I don’t want to go by what other people tell me when I can hear it from you.”

“She was confused. She had a dog with her. That’s all I remember.”

“Tell me about the car seat,” Wilczek says.

I hear a beeping sound behind me, speeding up. Then it hits me: I left a car seat on the curb and I gave the homeless woman my suitcase. I shake my head in disbelief. My heart is beating in my throat. How stupid and how random. Why did I do that?

“I don’t know what to tell you.” I try to sound calm but I can feel the tears gathering behind my eyes. My heart is beating fast
and my head is shaking from side to side. Anxiety tremors, according to Dr. Baker. “As far as I understand it, the way it was explained to me, I have amnesia. The accident caused me to forget what happened the days before. My memory only goes so far.”

“So there’s something you’re not telling me?”

“That’s what I’m trying to explain to you. I don’t know what I’m not telling you. I can’t possibly know what I don’t know.” The comment makes me smile. I catch myself but it’s too late.

“Time’s up.” Dr. Baker pokes his head in the room and shuts down the interview. When the door closes behind him, Wilczek gets up to leave.

“Did you find any blood?” The words escape before I can rein them back in.
Careful. Be more careful.

“Blood? What kind of blood?” Detective Wilczek’s facial expression is blank.

Are there different kinds of blood? Blood is blood.
Don’t say that out loud.

“I’m just wondering if there was
any
blood.”

“We’re waiting on forensics,” he says. “But like I said, all that bleach . . . Call me if you can think of anything else. We’ll talk again soon.”

I nod and close my eyes.

Minutes later, I stand up, unsteady at first, then I get the hang of it. I slide my feet more than lift them off the ground, which makes walking easier. I reach for the doorknob. I can’t resist the urge and peek out the door down the hallway and wonder what would happen if I just started walking. My guard leans forward ever so slightly when he detects movement.

A baby’s wails travel down the hallways, straight through the open door, aiming directly into my auditory cortex, hitting it like an arrow pierces a bull’s-eye.

I slam the door shut. I lean against it as if I’m attempting to
keep the acoustic waves at bay. I run my fingers through my hair, upward, and hold my head, gently at first, then I pull my hair as hard as I can. My scalp starts to pulsate but the pain drowns out the baby’s wails. If I could cut off my other ear to deafen the cries, I would.

Mia is gone and I’m the suspect.

And as I sit on the floor in my hospital room, I see myself not so much for what I am, but for what I’m not.

I’m not a tearful mother whose eyes are red and swollen, begging the kidnapper to return her child. Dr. Baker called it “blunted affect,” a lack of emotional reactivity, a sign of trauma, maybe even brain injury. I wish he was here right now to watch what this crying baby is doing to me. I’m not a pleading mother. Instead I say things that I find suspicious myself, I smile when I have no reason for happiness. I ask questions when clearly I don’t remember. I can only imagine what the detectives are thinking right about now.

I’ve seen distraught mothers on TV, mothers who clutch their kid’s beloved stuffed animal, mothers who promise they’ll never stop looking. The fathers behind them, arms wrapped around them, families gathered in support of them, wiping tears, trying to hold in their emotions. I’ve seen mothers on front pages, eyes glazed over, the Valium doing its job of delaying the anguish for at least a few hours. The agony in the parents’ eyes is painful for the onlookers, even translates through television sets—it is unrestrained, unedited, and raw.

And then there are the monsters. Monsters lying about the disappearance of their children, tearful pleas to phantom carjackers, Munchausen syndrome lunatics running into emergency rooms, cradling dead or near-dead babies. Newborns stuffed in trash receptacles after being born in Walmart bathrooms. With their umbilical cords still attached.

Jack’s words
We can still fix this
echo in my mind. Did I do
something that needs fixing? I remember the scissors and sharp objects near her. And how the cord of the lamp by her crib made me nervous. I never carried her in my arms walking down steep stairwells, always had her safely tucked away in a car seat. Sharp edges and blunt corners, heights atop stairs seemed tempting.

I have a suspicion. I won’t tell anyone, but I whisper it to myself.

I
met the property manager in front of the brownstone on North Dandry. Jack had hired Yolanda Drake of Hudson Bay Property to oversee the renovations of the brownstone. She started talking the moment I got out of the car.

“Sometimes properties are . . .” Yolanda paused and searched her mind for the right word. “Cursed,” she finally said and lifted her index finger.

“Cursed? Isn’t that a bit over the top?” I narrowed my eyes in disbelief and gently straightened Mia’s head, as not to wake her. I couldn’t believe that I had forgotten to strap her in.

“No, ‘cursed’
is
the right word. The contractor ran out of money, the subcontractors quit, workers stole materials from the jobsite, and no one got the appropriate permits. You name it, it went wrong with 517. I’ve never had a property that had so many problems. The contractors have been ordered to fulfill the contracts but they have to be supervised. No one is very happy at this moment, especially your husband.”

I tried to look enthusiastic about the gossip she was so willingly sharing with me and nodded in agreement.

“The property should have sold or rented months ago and everybody is getting impatient. Brilliant idea to have someone on site at all times to make sure everything goes smoothly. David Lieberman’s quite proficient and he keeps the workers in line. Lieberman reports to me, I report to your husband.”

Suddenly a sound startled me. It started off as a murmur, then turned into a loud crash, making me flinch. A cloud of dust emerged from a huge green metal container connected to a bright yellow construction chute in front of 517. Within seconds we were covered in a cloud of construction dust.

“Is there a provisional date of completion?” That’s what Jack had called it. A provisional date of completion, meaning the moment when renters wouldn’t be bothered by the noise. I wondered how Jack thought my living there in the meantime would be a good idea, even remotely.

“We’re playing it by ear. Contractors are never on time.”

“My husband told me it was a matter of a couple of months.”

Yolanda Drake shifted her considerable weight from one foot to the other and raised her eyebrows. “Anything is possible, I guess,” she said and handed me the key. “It’s all yours,” she added and wiped her hand on her pencil skirt.

My eyes followed her until she disappeared around the corner. The key to 517 felt warm to the touch. I glanced back at the car. Mia was peacefully asleep in the car seat, calmed by the humming engine from the ride over here.

I switched on the baby monitors and left one on the passenger seat and tucked the second one safely away in my purse. I cracked all windows half an inch and turned off the engine. The temperature was a comfortable sixty degrees, the sky overcast. The tinted windows hardly allowed any visibility into the car’s interior.

Apartment A1 was located on the first floor. I calculated I could get to the car in less than thirty seconds if Mia started to cry. I was reluctant to wake her, knowing it would result in another crying fit, making me think how hard it must be on her to respond to life with such violent protest. Every nap was hope on my part, hope that she’d wake up and be calmer, more content.

I walked up the steps to the front door. It opened before I could fully insert the key. In front of me stood a man in steel-toed boots covered in wood shavings like coconut flakes on a cake. He stood on the threshold, the rim of the yellow hard hat shielding his eyes. He lifted his head and his eyes skimmed over me. He continued down the steps and turned to the left. I watched him as he walked away, down the sidewalk and up the block. His stride was wide, his torso upright.

I entered the building. I stood still just long enough to take in the scent of fresh paint and a faint odor of disinfectant. A1 in cursive gold letters on the door straight ahead. To the left was a large opening taped shut with heavy-duty tarp to keep the dust and debris out.

A hair-raising shriek made me reach for the baby monitor. The green display sat idle, a faint sound of white noise in the background. Then a whining sound turned into a throaty grind. I shut the monitor off, then back on. Nothing but white noise. When I inserted the key into the lock and pushed open the door, I realized the sound was coming from behind the tarp: carpenters sawing wood, framing walls, or working on the hardwood floors.

The two-thousand-square-foot apartment’s floors were solid cherrywood, native to upstate New York. The distance from the front to the back was an impressive forty feet. The hallway led through two parlor doors into the living room, which took up the entire back of the building. There were two rooms on the left; the kitchen and the dining room, eventually leading into the parlor. There were three rooms on the right; the first one the bathroom, the other two bedrooms.

My footsteps echoed through the rooms and the light flooding through the windows was harsh and uncomfortable. The walls were bleak, painted in an abrasive white. I inspected the doors and windows. A double-cylinder dead bolt on the front door, a type of auxiliary lock that required a key to project or retract the dead bolt from either side. There was also a mortise lock, usually found in older buildings, making any attempt to break in practically impossible.

Suddenly the monitor unleashed violent static and then went silent again. I manually switched over to the second channel. Again, nothing but white noise. I switched back to the initial channel and heard a man’s voice. Before I reached the car, baby monitor in hand, the monitor changed to a gentle buzz, then to a protest, and finally an eruption. Mia’s stuttering gasps interrupted by attempts to fill her lungs with air.

I dug into my purse for the car key, and when I looked up, the man with the steel-toed boots, whom I’d seen earlier, stared at me. His eyes went from the car—echoing with screams—back to me, to the monitor in my hand. My cell phone rang and the moving company confirmed the address. When I turned back around, he had gone.

—

A week later, I stood by the window, parted the curtain with my hands, and looked out into the fall night. It was almost dark and the streets were deserted except for a few people taking their dogs for a last pit stop before they’d curl up on couches or on kitchen floors. Leaves tumbled about like discarded paper, following their destinies into storm drains, iron window grates, and curbside puddles.

I pulled the curtain, layered it midway where the panels met, and shut out the dark. Night falling on New York City was not my favorite time of day. The outside noises—the traffic, the hurried voices, and the screaming children in the school courtyard
across the street—never completely stopped but slowed down like a clock that needed winding.

Later, I jerked up from a half-sleep state, a buzz echoing in my head. I listened but it was quiet. I shut my eyes again. Three more buzzes sounded and I realized it must be the doorbell. I peeked through the hole but all I could make out was a shadowy outline of a man.

“Yes?” I said through the closed door.

“Mrs. Paradise?”

“Yes?”

“David Lieberman.”

At first, the name meant nothing to me, and then I remembered Jack and the property manager mentioning the name of the upstairs tenant who was overseeing the renovations. I had a feeling he wasn’t going to go away unless I talked to him.

“Just a minute,” I said, ignoring Mia wailing in her crib. I opened the door, chain still engaged, and looked at him through a crack in the door.

“How’s the pressure?” Lieberman checked his hands and proceeded to clean the fingernails of one hand with the nails of the other.

“What?” I wanted to tell him to leave me alone but he’d probably tell Jack, and Jack would call and scold me for being rude. After all, according to Jack, Lieberman was here to help.

“The pressure. The water pressure.”

“I’m sorry?”

“The water pressure.” He emphasized every syllable, as if I was either incapable of understanding English or partially deaf.

“What about it?”

He cocked his head. “Someone’s crying in there,” he said.

“What can I do for you?” I said, ignoring his comment.

“If you pick her up, she’ll stop crying. I’ve been listening to her all day.” He gave me a stare. “Not that the walls are particularly thin in this building, but noise travels.”

“What about the water pressure?” I tried to keep my face expressionless.

“Have you taken a shower lately?” he asked and looked me up and down through the crack in the door: my greasy hair, my wrinkled shirt, and the pants I’d been wearing for a week. “There’s a problem with the plumbing, they are working on the pipes.”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“She isn’t going to stop crying until you pick her up.” His neck craned to see what was going on behind me.

I started to think that my expressionless face might be a mistake. “Let me call you after I check, okay?” I closed the door and on my way to the nursery, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I looked emaciated, my cheeks sunken and my eyes black holes surrounded by dark circles. I couldn’t even remember the last time I had taken a shower.

A couple of hours later the buzzer went off again. This time I opened the door and stood in the doorway. I had all but forgotten about the plumbing and the water pressure.

“The pressure seems fine,” I lied, “but I can’t tell a difference, to be honest with you.”

“Would you mind if I checked?”

I didn’t say anything.

“I met your husband a couple of times.” He hesitated ever so slightly, then added, “He asked me to check on you.”

“I don’t need to be checked on.”

“Maybe that came out wrong. He wants me to help you if you have any issues. Plumbing, electric, whatever you need, just tell me. I’m either next door or upstairs. Except on the weekends, I’m never here on the weekends. I visit my sister upstate. But during the week, Monday morning until Friday afternoon, I’m all yours.” He smiled at me, then cocked his head. “You didn’t call me and I realized you didn’t have my number.” He stepped closer and handed me a piece of paper. I got a whiff of sawdust and oil.

“I’m not sure what my husband told you, but the moving company gave me a list of plumbers and electricians.”

Lieberman nodded. “Do you have any idea how long it takes to get a plumber to show up? You have more important things to worry about,” he said and raised his eyebrows.

Mia was fussing in the background. “Right,” I said and grabbed the door.

“I’m around nail guns and saws all day. It can get pretty loud and the ringing in the ears sometimes takes hours to go away,” he said and tapped his right ear with his hand. He smiled without showing teeth and took his New York Yankees hat off. “I go home at the end of the day and then I hear the baby cry through the ceiling. That’s all I’m saying. Must be hard, all by yourself.”

He looked even younger with his hat off.

“I’ll check the pressure again and I’ll call you. Promise.”

“Okay then. If I don’t hear from you, I’ll just come back,” he said and laughed.

I offered him a smile that was friendly without being encouraging. Before I shut the door, I heard the tarp move and for a second the construction noise increased. Then the tarp closed and all was quiet again.

—

A couple of blocks from North Dandry, a Child’s Play offered child care services by the hour.

“Here’s a copy of our policies. The by-the-hour group drop-off times are flexible. The other groups adhere to a curriculum and you have to talk to the individual caregiver regarding the drop-off times.” A middle-aged woman in ice cream cone–littered scrubs handed me a stack of papers from behind the counter.

We toured the facility. Behind a two-way glass wall two staffers in pink scrubs sat in padded gliders, each one rocking a baby in her arms.

“Her immunization record must be up to date,” she said and pushed her glasses back to the bridge of her nose. “There’s a list of shot records required by law in your paperwork. Take it to the pediatrician and have them look it over. It’s pretty standard.”

We passed the window of the toddler room, where about two dozen children, in groups of three or four, were lying on the floor curling their bodies into the shape of each letter of the alphabet.

A woman in purple scrubs joined us. After she introduced herself as the director, she glanced down at Mia thrashing her arms and legs. “Anything out of the ordinary we need to know?” she asked while Mia was catching her breath between two wails.

“She’s just a bit fussy today,” I said and struggled to pop the pacifier back in Mia’s mouth.

“Don’t forget her shot record—we can’t enroll her unless the paperwork is complete,” the lady in purple reminded me. I signed the required paperwork and handed her a check for the application fee.

After I left the day care, I thought about things that seemed to be out of place lately: a formula bottle I thought I had left on the counter was now in the fridge, baby clothes I had left draped over the crib ended up in the hamper, windows left ajar, and dirty diapers I’d left around the house wound up in the trash. It was probably my imagination; it wasn’t as if Jack was catching a flight from Chicago to New York, secretly checking in on me, moving things around. “Mommy brain” they call it, I kept telling myself, assuming that the part of my brain that used to be involved in planning and foresight was taken over by the baby’s schedule. It was probably the unfamiliar surroundings but I didn’t need another worry.

Mia was asleep in her stroller when I entered a hardware store just a couple of blocks from North Dandry. The sales clerk at Taylor Hardware, Security & Lock wore an apron with the name
LARRY
stitched in cursive across the pocket, almost illegible in all capital letters, and a slightly more complicated name would have
been impossible to decipher. Larry climbed ladders and pulled boxes from the very top shelves while I listened patiently to his explanations, taking mental note of possible lock choices, all the while looking into Larry’s watery eyes stuck behind his enormous glasses.