What Was Mine (10 page)

I know Mia's not walking is my fault. I knew this is true, because I was afraid of her getting hurt. I was afraid to let Mia learn to walk in the apartment because the floors didn't have carpet. Some floors were marble, some floors wood, each hard in its own way. Lucy didn't want carpet, she thought floors were beautiful and didn't want to cover them up. This is another example of American thinking.

I worried that Mia would fall down and hit her head on the hard floors. I carried her everywhere—from kitchen to bedroom to living room to watch Monkey King on television. Finally, one day, my arms feel so tired, I almost drop her. Now I know I need to teach her to walk. The only place of soft floor was a round rug in Mia's room, a rug near her crib, so that if baby falls out, she won't land on hard floor. I make Mia practice her walking there.

At first, Mia doesn't want to walk. I know why. She thinks: Why do I need to walk? Mia sits like little Buddha, everything is brought to her or she is brought to everything. I talk, talk, talk to her, over and over, telling her she needs to learn how to walk. I tell her she is a big girl now, she has to stand straight and walk like a grown-up lady. But many days, she only sits, holding up her arms, crying “Ayi! Ayi!,” waiting for me to pick her up. I try to trick her, leaving the room to see if she'll do this thing by herself. But she doesn't. She crawls to me in the doorway, lifts herself to standing by holding on to my leg, crying for me to pick her up in my arms.

One day, we are in the park, playing in the sandbox. Another Chinese lady is there with the baby she takes care of. This baby is younger than Mia, but already walking. The baby is a boy and he pushes himself up and walks across the sand to take Mia's shovel out of her hand and bring it back to the place he is playing. Mia doesn't cry, she looks only surprised. Then she, too, pushes herself up and takes a few steps by herself across the sand to take back her shovel. When I see this, I clap and shout. I am so happy. I tell the other babysitter and she claps, too, even though now her baby is crying. Our clapping and shouting make Mia walk again and again.

On this day, I did not tell Lucy that Mia first walked in the sandbox. I keep this secret because I am a babysitter who is also a mother. I know a mother wants to be there to see her baby's first steps. She doesn't want babysitter to see this before her. So when Lucy comes home, I wait for her to find us. We are sitting on the rug in Mia's room, playing a game. When Lucy comes in, I pull Mia to her feet and start clapping like it is part of our game. Suddenly Mia takes a step toward Lucy and another, before she falls down.

“She's walking!” Lucy says, throwing down her big bag and running to Mia. She picks her up and I smile and look surprised like I have never seen this before. Lucy looks at me and tears come to her eyes and I wonder if she knows that these are not Mia's first steps, but is glad for my silence.

I
was always holding my breath, steeling myself for retribution. When would it come? I had no idea. But I suspected that some kind of payback from fate was in store.

When Mia was three, I got her into the Florence School across town. Florence was—still is—all girls. I wanted an all-girls school for her. I'd gone to one and liked learning in the company of those of my sex. When I did school tours, I noticed boys got the attention, making noise on their mats.

I needed a birth certificate and adoption papers to enroll her, of course. Faking them was easier than I thought it would be. I'd read in the paper about a town hall that had burned down in Kansas. All the records in it had been lost. A paste-up man in the bullpen created a birth certificate for me. I told him it was a joke for a client. I chose April 26 for her birthday, a safe few weeks after her real one, which I knew, of course, from the news.

I
bought a Polaroid camera because for the first few years, I was afraid to take real pictures of her. I worried that an attentive film developer might see something to arouse his suspicion. This was before digital. Film had to be developed in photo shops, long strands of film had to be uncurled from tin canisters and developed in baths,
then printed, requiring attentive eyes on each frame. Until Mia was in kindergarten, I took only pictures that could develop themselves. I have two of them with me. I keep them safe inside one of her gloves in the drawer of a table, in the dark so the images won't fade. One is of Mia getting her first haircut. Here she is, aged two, shrouded in a smart, silky black robe embroidered with the name of a Madison Avenue salon, head bent under the hands of a stylist, her eyes wide, gazing warily at the scissors poised at a curly strand on her forehead. Here's another of her a couple of years later, dressed as Alice in Wonderland for Halloween. She wears a white smocked apron over a pale blue dress and patent-leather Mary Janes bought from a fancy shoe store near Florence. You couldn't button the strap of the Mary Janes with your fingers, you had to use an old-fashioned buttonhook that came with the shoes. Later I learned from Mia that Wendy hated those shoes, that the laborious process of using that buttonhook was the only thing that caused her to lose her patience. Wendy never complained to me about it, though.

I'd get Mia ready for school after I got ready for work. I'd roll down the tops of her regulation anklets as I dressed her, smoothing the lace, trying to block thoughts of what would come to be, what would happen to Mia, if the world was just. I'd shut my mind's eye against horrifying images such as Mia's lace-covered ankles being severed from her legs, occasioned by some brutal accident in which she fell under a bus that proceeded to run over her—this had happened, years before, to a girl at the school whose name was engraved on a plaque in the school library. The girl's parents had another daughter, in Mia's class. They were good people, not deserving of such a thing, far less deserving of it than I was, I knew.

I worried that something might break in the FBI case, that police would come to our building and take her away. For years I braced myself as I came home to the lobby, gauging the doorman's face for a look that told me the police had been there.

I didn't stop worrying until Mia was five, after something that happened on a class trip.

I'd volunteered to be a chaperone on her kindergarten's visit to a downtown pie factory. This was when Chelsea still had lots of factories, before the factories became glassed-in showcases for art. Many mothers of girls in the class were stay-at-home moms and I was glad for opportunities to prove to them and to Mia that although I had a job that took me many hours of the day away from her, I was as attentive to my daughter as they were to theirs.

We were a group of about twenty: fifteen five-year-olds, two teachers, and a few mothers besides me. Mia was glad I had volunteered, being young enough to still want me around. I'd been assigned responsibility for a group of three: Mia and two of her little friends. I remember how happy she was that day, which made me happy, too. Watching her cavort at the bus stop with others in their pleated gray uniforms and red-checked aprons that made them look like miniature milkmaids.

After a tour of the factory, during which the girls frequently giggled at the sight of themselves in obligatory hairnets, we emerged into the street, where there was a retail outlet for pies. The line was long, and as I stood at the end of it, holding Mia's hand, a police car drew up to the curb outside the pie-store window. My throat closed and my heart started up like a punching fist, and as the officers took their place in line behind me, I worried that it was beating so hard it would set into telltale motion the gold pin on my silk blouse.

There was no reason to assume that the appearance of the police in the store was in any way connected to me. Yet my mind raged with the possibility that this was so, that their presence meant that authorities were still in pursuit of a long-grown-cold trail of an abduction. I could almost feel their breath on the back of my neck.

I let Mia's hand slip out of my own and turned to the officers. With a bright smile, I offered to let them go ahead of us in line. The
officers were young, in their midtwenties. One was a woman and I wondered if she was a mother, with a mother's sixth sense. She smiled at me, then down at the little brood of my charges. I was glad that her gaze did not linger on Mia.

“No'm,” said her partner, touching the beak of his cap. “We can wait.” Was this meant ironically? By “wait,” did he mean he could wait me out, to make the mistake that would connect me with the crime I'd committed, to which I'd not yet been linked?

There was no logical reason for this kind of thinking, but it sprang from a fear that grabbed my innards and squeezed, coiling around them like snakes.

I turned back to face the counter. We were far back in line, the last of our group, having been waylaid by a trip to the restroom.

I felt the officers' gaze bore into the back of my head. They were standing close behind me, close enough, it seemed, for thoughts to jump from my brain into theirs, thoughts I concentrated on keeping contained within the bones of my skull, a ridiculous exercise, I realized, even as I was doing it, but I felt compelled to focus on doing it anyway.

What if they—the woman—was reading my mind? What if she intuited the connection between Mia and me? Mia's baby face had once been on a milk carton, before the practice of picturing missing kids on milk cartons had been discontinued. That photo had borne little resemblance to how Mia looked then, even less to how she looked now, but what if the policewoman had poured from that carton, had remembered the face, was trained in tactics of police artists who age faces, elongating the cheeks, adding hair, giving the nose structure, the lips, the eyes?

The sweet fragrance wafting from pies made me suddenly sick, and without a word, I grabbed the hands of the two girls who weren't mine, thinking that my action would prove to the cops behind me that one of these was my child. I'll never forget the look of betrayal
on Mia's face as she realized I was leaving the store with other children, not her. She followed us out, as I knew she would. “For air,” I explained to my charges, sitting us all on a bench outside the store, until after the police left, passing us on the sidewalk without a glance, their attention focused on forkfuls of pie.

It was then I knew—I'd get away with it.

I
n the days after the kidnapping, I felt so shot through with guilt, sometimes I could barely pull myself out of bed.

How could I have walked away from my baby? Tom never asked me that in so many words, but I knew he wondered it. I wondered it, too. The weight of what I had done sometimes pressed on my chest, making me feel pinned in place, unable to move.

Other times, I couldn't stop moving. I was manic. My grief felt like terror. I cleaned and cleaned. I cleaned everything in that house: walls of the nursery, baths, kitchen, scrubbing until I'd used up every bottle of cleaning product we had in the cabinet. All day long, I'd scour surfaces until falling into bed chapped-handed, bone-tired. I rubbed and rubbed at the wine I'd spilled by the side of the bed, but that spot never came out. I washed Natalie's floor on my hands and knees. I ripped down her white curtains and bleached them, not wearing gloves. I meant to punish the hands that had lost her. I washed her walls, her crib sheets, her changing table, anything that was hers and I hoped would be hers again. As I was scrubbing, making things perfect for when she came back, I'd torture myself, replaying that day again and again, making it come out every way but the way that it had:
I don't take the baby shopping, I stay home and work. I don't answer the phone in the store, I never hear it, buried deep in my bag. I answer the phone, but the call is dropped and I hurry to
finish shopping and take Natalie home, where I return the call, oblivious to the tragedy I am averting by doing this.

I resented the way Tom began to avoid the situation, his attempts to seal off pain, to deny the horror that was undeniable.

Soon we began to inhabit opposite ends of a day: he claimed early mornings, I claimed the nights. Our orbits rarely intersected. But one night, finally climbing into bed, I saw that the other half of the bed was empty. I went to find him, maybe he was sick. I passed Natalie's room and saw him there, in the moonlight, on his knees on the carpet. He gripped the crib slats, his forehead resting against the bars. I couldn't hear anything, but could tell by the shaking of his back, he was sobbing. I never saw Tom cry before. I had done this: brought my husband to his knees. I went to bed and never mentioned it to him.

Days seemed to go by in slow motion and hyperspeed at the same time. Mostly, I felt like nothing connected me to the ground. I spent hours each day trying to imagine where Natalie was. I wondered why something so terrible had happened to Tom and me. But really, it was my fault. Tom never came out and said this. But I know he thought it. I thought it, too. His parents certainly did. They came that first weekend. Neither of them ever met my eyes, not once.

Every time I saw Tom, I saw Natalie's face. Her forehead. The shape of her eyes, her chin. I stopped wanting to look at him. He wasn't her. He couldn't bring her back. Nobody could.

One day, I heard the song from Natalie's swing. I was in the laundry room. I assumed Tom had started it going, for some reason. Anger surged in me as I hurried down the hall to her bedroom, but when I saw the swing, it was perfectly still. I didn't know how its music had come, but later I realized that it had been Natalie, reassuring me she was still in the world.

As Tom and I became more and more isolated from each other, we became isolated from others, too. Neighbors had flooded into the
house to help initially, but after a few months, they preferred to avoid us. Once, at the grocery store, a friend from book club turned her cart around when she saw me, hurrying off in the other direction. I didn't blame her. No one knew what to say. I'd stopped going to book club. I'd stopped going anywhere, stopped even going out of the house unless I had to. I began to resent people whose children hadn't vanished.