Seven Minutes to Noon (9 page)

“Let’s hope she did.”

Sylvie smiled a little sadly, as if she knew she had misspoken and was grateful for the forgiveness implicit in Alice’s answer.

“How are our babies doing today?”

“Kicking like mad.”

Sylvie blew two kisses to Alice’s flourishing tummy. Maggie was crazy to doubt her, Alice decided; the girl was pure charm.

Alice reached down for Ethan’s dinosaur pajamas and put them on the counter.

“Need a bag for these?”

“I’ll just put them here.” Sylvie folded the pajamas neatly into her canvas purse with its long shoulder strap and large blocks of color. She had been in Brooklyn four years and had mastered the look of the New Local woman — understated clothes, easy hair, a casual bag slung across her middle.

“Are you going over to Garden Hill today?” Alice asked. “I’ve been playing phone tag with that broker you recommended. I can’t remember who owes who a call, I’ve been so distracted. But she must know what’s going on.”

“Oh yes, if it’s happening, Pam will surely know about it. But no, today I’m not working there. I’m taking a walk and running some errands. It’s such a lovely morning.”

Alice glanced at the window. The sun was out in full force. “Enjoy it,” she said, just as Maggie appeared on the sidewalk out front and charged through the door. She was breathless, her forehead speckled with drops of sweat.

“Did you hear?” Maggie asked.

“Hear what?” Alice leaned over the cool stone of the counter.

“Over at the canal,” Maggie said. “They found a body.”

“Come on,” Maggie said. “We’ll call Martin later and explain.” She set the brown paper bag on the counter. “Sylvie, can you watch the shop?”

“Yes, of course.”

Alice and Maggie left the store. Maggie started to run, then slowed down so Alice could keep up.

“It could be nothing.” Alice’s head had begun to throb.

“It can’t be nothing,” Maggie said, “but it may not be her.”

By Degraw Street Alice’s lungs were burning. They turned the corner and from two blocks away could see the chaos. There were four blue-and-white police cars, two dark sedans, a dented white van with its side door gaping and an ambulance, lights revolving in eerie silence.

Alice and Maggie had both slowed to a trot by the time they crossed Bond Street, where the blunt end of Degraw quickly turned derelict. Bands of hastily strung yellow police tape separated a cluster of onlookers from the area surrounding the bank of the canal. People were gathered on the sidewalk by a strip of dried earth that strangely boasted a plaque announcing a Parks Department urban renewal project; another good intention unfulfilled. Police and plainclothes detectives swarmed the garbage-strewn landing overlooking the end of the canal. Men and women wearing tight plastic gloves were collecting things into paper bags. Evidence. Alice remembered
reading once in the newspaper that evidence was collected in paper bags, not plastic, to avoid the damaging effects of moisture.

Alice and Maggie stood with the onlookers, attention fixed on the low metal fence at the crest of the canal’s muddy bank. The fence was covered in graffiti and malformed as if someone had rammed a truck into it.

Frannie stood in a deep bend in the fence. Hands jammed into her pockets, she seemed to be watching something below. Her face, tilted toward the canal, showed a case-hardened weariness that jolted Alice. Frannie’s forehead was clenched tight, eyes skewered on some new, ugly truth.

Maggie squeezed next to Alice in the crowd. Together they struggled to look where Frannie was looking. In the distance, Alice saw nothing but a blur of refuse: a shopping cart tipped out of the muddy water, a kid’s bike wheel covered in algae, a deflated pink condom hanging off a craggy branch jutting from the bank. Staked into the ground just next to Frannie was a yellow traffic sign in the shape of a diamond.
END,
it said, with awful simplicity. Someone had felt the twisted need to add to that sentiment in black marker:
boned a bitch here.
Alice wanted to cry.

“What’s happening?” Alice asked a police officer who was just then coming toward them.

“Crime scene,” was all he said before turning his back on the gaggle of curious citizens.

“Wait! Officer!” Maggie shouted.

Frannie turned around and saw them, then twisted back to face the canal. Alice now noticed Detective Giometti down on the muddy bank with his brown work boots toed into the water. His hands were planted on his hips and he too was staring at something.

“What’s happening down there?” Maggie called to the officer, who glanced back to answer.

“Divers.”

There was no shade and the sun grew hotter over them, as hot as deep summer.

Divers.
Alice felt her stomach rumble, an onslaught of nausea threatening to force itself up.

Finally, in the distance, the water eddied and the back of a dark dry suit emerged. About five feet farther out, a second diver’s head surfaced. Facing each other, the swimmers appeared to be synchronizing their efforts toward the bank of the canal. Alice watched them move slowly against the weight of the water, goggles fogged over, breathing apparatus strapped to their backs. Then, with a surge against gravity, she appeared.

Lauren was bloated and her skin was mottled gray and blue. Her eyes were open, filmed with algae. Her long brown hair had been chopped off. Her face looked plastic, masklike, strangely serene. A riotously colorful tent of a maternity sundress clung to her stalklike body. Her belly appeared to have reversed itself; instead of pregnant, her middle looked scooped out, emptied.

The divers dragged Lauren onto the craggy incline that served as shore. When they shifted her body to keep her from buckling into the canal, Alice saw the back of her head. It was crushed. Two officers hustled over and covered her with a bright yellow plastic tarp.

Alice collapsed forward at the waist, falling to her knees. The palms of her hands caught the concrete and she held herself up on shaky arms. The sour smell of her own vomit hit her in waves. Weeping, Maggie knelt beside Alice, holding her hair out of her face.

Finally Alice collected herself, drawing a breath of the fetid air. She knew Maggie had to be thinking the same thing.

Alice summoned her voice and said it first: “Where is the baby?”

The effort to dredge the canal and find the baby became furious in the hours to follow. Dental records confirmed the body to be Lauren’s. The media latched on to the possibility that Lauren’s baby —
it
— might have been spontaneously borne of the underwater phenomenon known as
coffin birth.

It.
Ivy was not an
it.

Last spring, Alice had bought two tiny dresses, one with a matching bonnet. They were Ivy’s dresses and Alice would hold them for her, for when she was found. Lauren’s death was confirmed, but Ivy could still be out there somewhere, alive.

The canal was an enclosed water system with a grate at the ocean end. Nothing as big as a full-term baby could possibly get through. If the baby was there, they would find her.

Alice learned many things that awful Monday, three days after Lauren disappeared. The day her wrecked body was found. She learned about the steep incline of grief. She learned how to stay alive in a state of half consciousness, barely breathing. And she learned that loss, violent loss, was merciless. Merciless and hungry, devouring hope and future and love in a single gulp.

Simon had heard the news around the neighborhood and hurried over to the canal to bring Alice and Maggie to his house. Mike was summoned home from his workshop. The store was closed. All the children were put
under Sylvie’s care at Maggie’s apartment while the adults gathered at Simon’s and prepared themselves to visit Tim and Austin, whose teacher had personally brought him home.

The men silently bolstered the women as they walked numbly through the neighborhood to Lauren and Tim’s building. Alice felt deeply, wrongly contradicted by Lauren’s death, herself obliterated, floating through an everyday world she had no right to inhabit as if things were normal. Through her numb heart she felt exploding droplets of poison anger. She wished she could fly backward through time to just that morning, when she was firm in her refusal to believe the worst. She wished she could turn to Mike and tell him,
You were right. There was no reason to worry.
If anyone tried to make her accept this new truth, she would shut her eyes. Tell them
no.
She would
not
embrace this thing she had seen for herself. There would have to be two worlds, two truths. Before and after. The problem was right now.

Alice had no idea what time it was when they got to Tim’s. There was daylight. Warm summery air. He met them at the door himself, pale and automatic. Let them in without speaking. He exhaled, as if he had been holding his breath waiting for them, and allowed each friend to hug him in turn.

Gina — Austin and Peter’s teacher — was sitting on Lauren’s favorite antique wingback chair. The purple one in which she used to read. Austin was sprawled on the floor playing with his blocks, building them higher and higher with Gina’s gentle encouragement. Her long ponytail hung lazily across her shoulder in a way that inexplicably broke Alice’s heart. Gina was being so tender with Austin. Austin with his thick sandy brown hair looked more like Lauren than Tim. Alice wanted to run to him but wasn’t sure how much he understood. She didn’t want to frighten him. Instead she offered him a faint smile.

“No!” he shouted and smashed his tower. He must have seen something else in her face, in all their faces.
He was only five but he had to feel the disproportion of everything that was happening around him. He jumped up and ran out of the living room, refusing to look at the grown-ups who had gathered before him like ghosts to ruin his perfect sleep.

Tim’s haggard face contracted, squeezed like a fist. Draining him. Completing his desolation. “I have to tell him,” he said in a voice broken into gravel.

“I’ll go,” Alice offered.

“Yes,” Maggie said. “Let us.”

“No.” Tim breathed deeply, as if trying impossibly to pump air into waxen lungs. “I have to do this.”

Tim followed Austin down the hall and a door clicked shut behind them.

Gina sighed and stood up. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

Simon thanked Gina for bringing Austin home and, gallant as always, showed her out. When he came back into the living room, Alice suddenly remembered that Mike, Simon and Tim had Yankees tickets for a game that night. She saw the three empty seats, midway up the stands. Heard the roar of a crowd that would gather without them. Saw a hard white ball swallowed by a candy-blue sky, disappearing into a rapturous silence.

All the windows of Tim’s apartment were shut and no one bothered to open one, a detail that occurred to Alice as a kind of out-of-body observation. She was vaguely aware of the possibility of walking over and opening one of the windows. Instead she sat pressed against Maggie on the couch Lauren had recently reupholstered in raw eggshell silk.

Mike positioned himself behind the purple chair, running his hand back and forth across the nubby fabric. Simon walked over to one of the windows, posting himself there as if on lookout.

Above Alice, the glass pendants of Lauren’s antique chandelier threw brilliant slivers of sunlight across the room. The sudden rain of refracted light galloped over them, dizzying Alice. Lauren was everywhere all at once, ricocheting off the walls and ceiling and floor. Talking
up her love for Austin. Asking favors. Planning projects. Detailing hopes for Ivy.

Lauren. Echoing. Resonating. Everywhere.

Alice pressed her hands against her ears and shut her eyes. She couldn’t take it in. But the cacophony of Lauren didn’t stop.

“What should we do?” Mike said, glancing toward the hall down which Tim and Austin had fled.

“Leave them alone a little while, I think,” Simon answered.

When the doorbell rang, Simon and Mike both jumped to the intercom. Moments later, Frannie and Giometti appeared in Lauren’s living room. They strode in with the perfect mixture of sympathy and confidence; it was as if, having often visited scenes of such crises, they were buffered from the raw shock. All of a sudden Alice saw the detectives, these people, in a new light. The way they stoically walked in, joined the friends,
handled the situation.
Alice felt suddenly reduced, childlike; irrationally reassured.

“We’ll need to talk,” Giometti said in a tone that was both sad and determined. He glanced around the living room, those soft eyes beaming regret from his toughened face. “Where’s Tim? He’ll need to hear this too.”

“Right,” Simon said. “I’ll go.” He went down the hall, returning a few minutes later behind Tim, who carried a limp Austin over his shoulder. Tim settled himself and Austin uneasily in the purple chair, stroking the small back as sobs alternated with deep, reflexive breaths. Simon stood behind them, his fingers playing lightly in Austin’s hair. Giometti helped Mike bring extra chairs from the dining table.

Frannie sat next to Alice on the couch, bringing with her a faint scent of rosemary.

“We’re sorry,” Frannie said softly to Tim. “We know this is a terrible, terrible thing for you. For all of you. We were hoping to find her—”

Alive,
Alice thought, and began to cry. She could still feel Lauren’s warmth on the bench beside her. Hear the
precise way she formed her words. As Frannie spoke, everyone surrendered to tears. Maggie, Mike, Simon, even Frannie, all of them. Tim’s green eyes were roiling oceans of sorrow.

“You were her family,” Frannie continued. “We honor the love you feel for her.”

Then Giometti carefully said, “We have some information to share with you. We’ve found that it can help the family to know the facts.”

He waited a moment for the rest of them to still their emotion. Alice understood now that this was his role in the partnership: he was the left side of the brain, always sober and pragmatic, to Frannie’s intuitive, emotive right side. They were perfectly tuned to each other. Choreographed, almost.