Moonlight Mile (21 page)
T
here was only one pediatrician in a fifteen-mile radius of Becket, a Dr. Chimilewski, two towns over in Huntington. When Amanda pulled up in front of the office at ten the next morning, I stayed where I was and let her go inside and keep her appointment. I sat in Dre’s car and replayed the conversation I’d had with Yefim on my way out of Dodgeville. He’d called me minutes after I left the train station and nothing we’d discussed made any sense yet.
When Amanda came out twenty minutes later, I was waiting with a cardboard cup of coffee that I offered to her. “I guessed cream, no sugar.”
“I can’t drink coffee,” she said. “It aggravates my ulcer. But thanks for the thought.”
She clicked the remote on her car to unlock the doors and came around me with the baby in the car seat. I opened the door for her.
“You can’t have an ulcer. You’re sixteen years old.”
She snapped the car seat into its base in the backseat. “Tell that to my ulcer. I’ve had it since I was thirteen.”
I stepped back as she closed the door on Claire.
“She okay?”
She looked through the window at the baby. “Yeah. She’s just got that rash. No cause. They said it’ll go away, just like Angie said. They said babies get rashes.”
“Hard, though, right? All these things that could be real health scares turn out to be absolutely nothing, but you never know so you got to get it checked out.”
She gave me a small and weary smile. “I keep thinking they’re going to throw me out next time.”
“They don’t throw you out for being too careful about your child.”
“No, but they tell jokes about you, I’m sure.”
“Let ’em tell jokes.”
She walked around to the driver’s side, looked over the roof at me. “You can follow or just meet me back at the house. I’m not running anywhere.”
“I’ve noticed.”
I turned to walk toward Dre’s Saab.
“Where’s Dre?”
I turned back to her, met her eyes. “He didn’t make it.”
“He . . .” She cocked her head slightly. “The Russians?”
I said nothing. I held her gaze. I looked for something in her eyes that would tell me, one way or another, which side she was playing in this. Or was it all sides?
“Patrick?” she said.
“I’ll see you back at the house.”
• • •
In the kitchen, she made green tea for herself and brought the cup and small pot out to the dining room with her. Claire sat in her car seat in the center of the dining-room table. She’d fallen into a deep sleep in the car and Amanda told me she’d learned no good came from pulling her out of the car seat and moving her to the bassinet once they were inside. It was just as easy and just as safe to leave her where she slept.
“Angie get back all right?”
“Yeah. She arrived in Savannah at midnight. Got to her mother’s by half-past.”
“She doesn’t strike me as someone from the South.”
“She’s not. Her mother remarried in her sixties. Her husband lived in Savannah. He passed about ten years ago. By then, her mother was in love with the place.”
She placed her teapot on a coaster and sat at the table. “So what happened at the train station?”
I sat across from her. “First tell me how we ended up at the train station.”
“What? I got a call and they said the meeting site was changed.”
“Who called you?”
“It could have been Pavel, could have been this other one they call Spartak. Actually, now that I think of it, it did sound more like him. He’s got a higher voice than the others. But then what do I know for sure?” She shrugged. “They all sound pretty much the same.”
“And Spartak or whoever said . . .”
“He said something like, ‘We no like Comcast Center. Tell them meet at Dodgeville Station, half hour.’ ”
“But why call you?”
She sipped her tea. “I don’t know. Maybe Yefim lost your—”
I shook my head. “Yefim never made that call.”
“He had Spartak make it.”
“No, he didn’t. Yefim was waiting at the Comcast Center when Dre got himself vaporized by an Acela.”
The teacup froze halfway to her mouth. “You want to repeat that one?”
“Dre got hit by a train going so fast that it liquefied him. There’s probably a forensics team out there right now, bagging up the Dre scraps. But they’re little scraps, I assure you.”
“Why would he step in front of a . . . ?”
“Because he was chasing this.” I placed the Belarus Cross on the table.
It sat between us for about twenty seconds before either of us spoke.
“Chasing it?” Amanda said. “That makes no sense. He had it with him when he left the house, didn’t he?”
“And I assume he handed it over to someone, and then that someone threw it back over the tracks.”
“So you think . . . ?” She closed her eyes tight and shook her head. “I don’t even know what you think.”
“I don’t either. Here’s what I know—Dre crossed the tracks into the woods and then someone threw this cross out of the woods and over the tracks. Dre came running out after it and ran into a really fast train. Yefim, meanwhile, claims he was never at the train station and that he never changed the original meeting place. Whether he’s lying or not, and there’s a fifty-fifty chance either way, that’s his claim. We don’t have Sophie, they don’t have the Belarus Cross, and it’s Christmas Eve. Friday. Dre was the last chance Yefim had of scoring another baby to give to Kirill and Violeta. So now Yefim wants the original deal back in place—that cross”—I looked down the table—“and that baby for Sophie’s life, my life, the life of my family, and your life.”
She fingered the cross a couple of times, pushing it up the table a few inches.
“What do the inscriptions mean, do you know? I can’t read Russian.”
“Even if you could,” I said, “they’re not in Russian. That’s Latin.”
“Fair enough. You know any Latin?”
“I took four years of it in high school but all I retained is about enough to read a building foundation.”
“So, no idea?”
I held it in my hand. “A little. The one up top reads
Jesus, Son of God, defeats
.”
She frowned.
I shrugged and racked my brain a bit. “No, wait. Not
defeats
.
Crushes.
No. Wait.
Conquers.
That’s it.
Jesus, Son of God, conquers.
”
“What about the bottom one?”
“Something about a skull and paradise.”
“That’s the best you can do?”
“I took my last Latin class ten years before you were born, kid. My best ain’t bad.”
She poured herself more tea. She held the cup in both hands and blew on it. She took a tentative sip and then placed the cup back down on the table. She sat back in her chair, her eyes on me, as calm as ever, this serious child, this marvel of self-possession.
“It doesn’t look like much, does it?”
“It’s the history that gives it its worth. Or maybe just someone deciding it’s worth something, like gold.”
“I never understood that mentality,” she said.
“Me, either.”
“I can tell you, though, that Kirill’s already lost too much face over this to let any of us live. Certainly not me.”
“You been reading the papers lately?”
She looked over the teacup at me and shook her head.
“Kirill’s hitting his own product too much. Or he’s just having a full-on mental breakdown. He might wrap one of his cars around a pole at a hundred miles an hour before he ever gets around to you.”
“So, I’ll just wait for that day.” She grimaced at me. “And even if, let’s say, everything goes according to this fairy-tale scenario that Yefim—Yefim, yes?—outlined for you?”
“Yefim, yeah.”
“So, okay. We live, Sophie lives, your family lives. What about her?” She pointed down the table where Claire sat, strapped in her car seat, wearing a tiny pink knit hoodie and matching pink sweatpants, her eyes closed to slits. “They take her into their home, Kirill and Violeta, and pretty soon she’s not just the
idea
of a baby. She’s an actual baby. She cries at inconvenient times, she screams, she howls when her diaper’s wet, and she shrieks—I mean, like an electrified banshee—when you change her top because she hates having anything covering her face and you can’t remove a top without covering her face, at least not the ones I have on hand. So they take her, these psychotic children in middle-aged bodies, and let’s say they get past all the inconveniences and total lack of sleep that go with having a baby in the house, twenty-four-seven. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. You don’t think Kirill, who’s now lost massive face, power, and respect because he got his own black-market baby stolen from him and he couldn’t get her back—you’re telling me he’s not going to resent that child? Kirill, who, as you said, is having some sort of psychotic meltdown lately? He’s not going to come home some night, amped up on Polish vodka and Mexican cocaine, and bludgeon that baby when she has the temerity to cry because she’s hungry?” Amanda threw back her entire cup of tea like it was a shot of whiskey. “Do you really think I’m giving my baby back to
them
?”
“It’s not your baby.”
“That social security card you saw yesterday? That wasn’t mine. That was hers. I already have one with the same last name. She’s mine.”
“You kidnapped her.”
“And you kidnapped me.”
She’d never raised her voice, but the walls seemed to shake just the same. Her lips trembled, her eyes grew red, tremors raced through her hands. Outside of highly controlled fury, I’d never seen her show emotion.
I shook my head.
“Yes, you did, Patrick. Yes, you did.” She sucked wet air through her nostrils and looked up at the ceiling for a moment. “Who were you to say where my home was? Dorchester was just where I was born. I was Helene’s spawn, but I was Jack and Tricia Doyle’s child. You know what I remember about that time when I was so-called
kidnapped
? For seven perfect months, I didn’t feel nervous or anxious. I didn’t have nightmares. I wasn’t sick, because when you leave a house where your mother never cleans and there’s roaches and roach bacteria everywhere and rotten food fermenting in the sink—when you leave a place like that, you tend to feel better. I ate three times a day. I played with Tricia and our dog. After dinner, every night, they dressed me for bed and then brought me to a chair by the fireplace—seven o’clock on the dot—and they read to me.” She looked down at the table for a moment, nodding to herself in such a way I doubted she knew she was doing it. She looked up. “And then you came. Two weeks after you returned me to Dorchester, and a DSS caseworker had cleared Helene to raise me, you know what happened at seven o’clock?”
I said nothing.
“Helene had spent the day drinking because she got stood up on a date the night before. She put me to bed at five o’clock because she was too far in the bag to deal with me anymore. And then at seven o’clock—on the dot—she came into my bedroom to apologize for being such a bad mother, feeling all sorry for herself and confusing that with empathy for another human being. And while she was apologizing, she puked all over me.”
Amanda reached out and pulled the small teapot to her. She poured the rest of it into her cup. She didn’t have to blow on it as much this time.
“I’m—”
“Don’t dare say you’re sorry, Patrick. Spare me that, please.”
A long, dead minute passed.
“You ever see them anymore?” I asked eventually. “The Doyles?”
“They’re prohibited from having any contact with me. It’s a provision of their probation.”
“But you know where they are.”
She looked at me for a moment, then nodded. “Tricia did one year in jail and got another fifteen probation. Jack got out two years ago, after ten years in prison for reading me bedtime stories and giving me proper nutrition. They’re still together. You believe that? She waited for him.” She looked at me with shiny, defiant eyes. “They live in North Carolina now, just outside Chapel Hill.” She pulled her hair from its ponytail and shook it violently until it hung straight down beside her face again. From back in its shroud, her eyes found me again. “Why’d you do it?”
“Bring you home?”
“Bring me back.”
“It was a case of situational ethics versus societal ones, I guess. I took society’s side.”
“Lucky me.”
“I don’t know that I’d do any differently now,” I said. “You want me to feel guilty and I do, but that doesn’t mean I was wrong. If you keep Claire, trust me, you’ll do things that make her hate you, but you’ll do them because you’ll believe it’s for her own good. Every time you say no to her, for example. And sometimes you’ll feel bad about it. But that’s an emotional response, not a rational one. Rationally, I know damn well I don’t want to live in a world where people can just pluck a child out of a family they deem bad and raise a stolen child as they see fit.”