Where is the Baby? (10 page)

‘God bless, Tally,' the warden said as she withdrew her hand, ‘and good luck. Let me hear from you.'

‘I will. Thank you.' Tally turned slowly to look at the door. She could see sunlight and moved toward it, then stopped and looked back.

‘Go on now,' the woman said quietly. ‘Don't look back.'

Tally put the flat of her free hand against the door and pushed. Near-blinded by the sunlight, she stepped over the threshold. The door closed heavily behind her with another click, and she stood shielding her eyes with her hand.

Warren Berman was standing next to a gleaming black Mercedes, waiting for her. As she stepped outside, he came toward her with a smile and a hello, automatically reaching to take hold of the small cardboard box she carried.

Leading the way to the car, he held open the passenger door and waited until she was inside before closing it. Then he stowed the box behind the driver's seat and slid behind the wheel.

‘How are you?' he asked.

‘Older,' she said. ‘Do you happen to have a spare pair of sunglasses, Warren?'

‘As a matter of fact, I do.' Reaching past her, he opened the glove compartment and pulled out a pair of aviator-style Ray-Bans. ‘There you go.'

She thanked him and put them on, at once eased, and turned to look at the structure that had contained her for the past fifteen years.
I'm outside
, she thought.
Out
.
Free
. After five thousand three hundred and seventy-two days. She had on clothes that were, surprisingly, too large, and in the back of the car she had a small carton containing the few items of any significance to her: a thin eight-by-ten-inch envelope of photographs, some photocopied articles from various journals, and the diary she'd kept during her first two years of incarceration before the pointlessness of the exercise had struck her and she'd stopped.

‘There's a not-bad-looking diner about ten miles up the road,' Warren said. ‘How does that sound?'

‘Fine,' she answered quietly as he put the car into drive. ‘You look very well, Warren,' she said, studying his profile.

He glanced over with a smile. ‘So do you, Tally.'

She didn't respond to this but looked for a time at her hands, at her just-returned wedding ring and wristwatch – items that felt more substantial than she remembered. Then she turned to look out the window at the scrubby, featureless land flying past. She wanted to get as far from Nevada as possible, to be somewhere with trees and seasons and snow. And that, for the moment, was all she knew. Simply being outside the walls was a shock to her system, as if the top layer of her flesh had been sheared away. She felt shaky inside and hollow, as if a good shove would cause her to collapse in a heap of disconnected bones.

The car flew noiselessly along the highway – a sleek steel capsule with a console that she thought would have looked appropriate on a space ship. So many panels and controls: mobile luxury. There had been a time when a car like this would have seemed perfectly ordinary; a time when life had been so filled with promise that nothing had seemed impossible. And then, everything changed irrevocably. The suddenness of those past events still shocked her; the way the world could tilt without warning and send things sideways. The details would probably always sit in her head, like exposed wiring, capable of shocking her. Nothing else would, though. All these years later, she'd been disabused of the old notion of women as the gentler of the species, of the belief in family as an indissoluble unit, and of personal safety as something ordained. She had, in fact, lost her faith in pretty much everything. Thirty-seven years old and she felt at least twice that, like someone edging toward the end of her life, not someone moving back out into what was, purportedly, the middle.

The middle of nowhere. That's where they were. And in the middle of this nowhere was an unlikely oasis, complete with neon sign (D-I-N-E-R, ALWAYS OPEN) and half-a-dozen cars, including a state police cruiser, in the parking lot.

‘I saw this place on my way to get you and thought it looked decent enough,' Warren said. ‘But if you'd rather go somewhere else . . .'

‘No, this is fine,' she said, looking for the door handle, briefly wondering if the door would actually open. It did. And heat gushed into the car's cool interior with the heft of a gigantic hand that wanted to hold her in place on the leather seat. She fought past it and climbed out of the car to stand looking down at her feet, at the black leather high-heeled pumps she'd worn at her sentencing. Long-accustomed to sneakers, the shoes struck her as ridiculous. She'd once been someone who actually paid hundreds of dollars for footwear that made her feet feel as if they were being crushed.

Mental note: buy some sane shoes.

Another mental note: buy some clothes that fit and dump the Chanel suit.

Everyone looked up when they walked through the door. The two state troopers at the counter stared at her as Warren took her arm and led her to a booth at the far end.

As she sat down she could still feel the troopers' eyes, and wondered if they knew she'd just been released. The out-of-date clothes were probably a giveaway. But it didn't matter. She'd served the full sentence. She was free. She did not have to return after this outing, did not have to report to a parole officer. Free of all obligations.

Warren had brought his attaché case in with him and laid it with care on the seat beside him, saying, ‘I'm actually hungry. I drove up last night and' – he looked at his wristwatch – ‘my flight home is in a couple of hours. I was hoping you wouldn't mind dropping me at the airport.'

Frowning, she tried to make sense of what he was saying.

‘The car's yours,' he explained, ‘but for a technicality. I've got a folder of documents that need to be signed.'

‘Mine? Did they imagine I'd want a car like that, Warren?'

‘I guess they did. Your mother's instructions were explicit. I was to deliver the car to you here, along with . . .' He stopped and reached for the menu. ‘I really have to eat. My blood sugar's plummeting. The last thing I need is a hypoglycemic attack. I won't be able to get on the plane and I've got meetings all day tomorrow.'

‘Of course,' she said, and out of curiosity reached for the other menu, thinking this was alarmingly typical, familiar in a hateful, well-remembered way. The family lawyer sent to deal with the malfeasant child. ‘I don't have a valid driver's license,' she said, thinking about the car outside, now hers.

‘Yes, you do,' he told her. ‘You've got a temporary that's good for sixty days. Plenty of time for you to settle somewhere and get a permanent license.'

‘How do you do things like that?' she asked wonderingly.

Warren smiled at her over the top of his menu. ‘Magic,' he said, eliciting a small smile from her.

The waitress was high school age, slim and pretty, and smiled when she came over, pencil poised above her order pad.

Warren asked for coffee and a BLT with crisp bacon.

Tally ordered the first thing that came to mind: a grilled cheese and coffee. It was an extraordinary luxury to be able to eat whatever she wanted, even something so mundane.

The young waitress smiled again and went off.

‘So,' Warren said, flipping open the catches on his attaché case, ‘let's get this out of the way while we wait. Then we can talk.'

‘Of course,' Tally said again.

Warren brought out a good-sized manila folder and placed it on the tabletop, then momentously opened it. He withdrew a legal-size brown envelope and slid it over to her, saying, ‘Your temporary license, the title to the Benz, and the insurance policy. The registration is in the glove compartment.' Next came a larger clasp envelope. ‘Check book, cash, credit card, and the current bank and trust statements. Look everything over. If you have questions, you can call me any time.' He looked up at her. ‘You do know that, don't you, Tally?
Any time
.'

‘Yes.'

‘Okay. Now for the signatures.' He took a fountain pen from his inside jacket pocket and placed it carefully on the tabletop before picking up several documents. ‘This top one acknowledges that you've received the items.' He handed her the pen and indicated the line at the bottom. ‘If you'll just sign there, and the copies as well.'

The pen was a black Mont Blanc with a gold nib, and it sailed smoothly across the pages.

Mental note: buy a Mont Blanc fountain pen.

‘Good, thank you.' He returned those documents to their folder and picked up the next. ‘This is the letter of agreement we discussed last time I came up to see you.'

‘I remember.'

‘Once you sign this, Tally, any connection with the family is officially severed.'

As she signed, she said, ‘I can't help wondering why they waited until now for this. They severed me long ago.'

‘It makes no more sense to me than it does to you, dear,' he admitted. ‘This is all your mother's doing, of course. She is a
cold
woman.' He seemed to shiver without any physical movement, and she was reminded of how much she liked his honesty. Always had.

‘A couple more to sign and we're done. One is for the trust, stipulating that you are assuming control of the funds, and the other is for the bank account and the credit card. The last one is my surrender of your power of attorney.'

She signed everything, in triplicate. Warren placed copies in an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven envelope and passed it to her. ‘Your copies,' he said. ‘Once you're settled, stow them in a safe deposit box.'

‘I will do that,' she assured him, trying to show some warmth. She knew her manner was distant; it was hard to switch from cool self-preserving to engaged and friendly. Fifteen years made for an ingrained habit that might never get broken.

‘And that is that!' he declared, snapping closed the latches on the case and gazing at her. ‘Now! Tell me. Have you some idea of what you're going to do?'

She shook her head. ‘All I know is that I'm going to get as far away from here as I can.'

‘Like where?' he asked with interest.

‘I'm going east. When I find a place I like, I'll stop.'

He smiled, and she thought, not for the first time, of what a very kind man he was. And handsome, still. He had to be in his late fifties but didn't look it. Dark-haired, dark-eyed, fair-skinned with a smile that dimpled his cheeks; a good height, trim and well dressed. He'd been coming to see her two or three times a year for the past fifteen years – not on family business, but because he'd known her most of her life and cared about her. He'd been in the courtroom, her only outside support. And when the judge had pronounced sentence on her, Warren had covered his eyes with his hand and wept soundlessly. She'd been so completely dazed at that point that she'd studied him with something akin to fascination. The family lawyer who cared more about her than her own family – a fact to ponder for five thousand three hundred and seventy-two days.

‘Will you let me know where you are when you stop?' he asked.

‘I will,' she said. ‘I definitely will.'

‘This is my last . . . act, I guess, for the family.'

‘Oh?'

‘I've turned them over to one of the junior partners. I'm retiring.'

‘Oh! Won't you be bored?'

‘Tally, the last thing I will be is bored with three kids who view Alexis and me as unpaid babysitters. Four grandkids all under five keep us very not-bored. Luckily, we rarely have all of them at the same time. Ah, great! Here's our food.'

‘I can't picture you as a grandfather.'

‘I'll see that you get some snapshots to help you with that.' He smiled again as he lifted the top of his sandwich, making sure the bacon was well done.

Amazing, she thought, the things you don't forget – like driving a car. When they left the diner, Warren handed her the keys, then went to the passenger side. She got behind the wheel and studied the instrument panel while the air conditioner worked to dispel the accumulated heat inside the car.

The car was a big beast, yet responsive and quick. In seconds, she'd accelerated up to sixty miles an hour and her chest was a cage filled with fluttering birds. Her foot shook and she had to focus furiously to keep it firmly on the accelerator. God! She was
out
!

At the airport, she stood outside the terminal to say goodbye to Warren. He hugged her – a truly startling physical contact, the first she'd had with another person in thousands of days – then stood with his hands on her shoulders and said, ‘If you need
anything
, call me. Alexis and I care about you, dear. Please remember that.'

‘I will.'

‘Try to find your life,' he said. ‘It's still out there somewhere.'

‘That was a long time ago, Warren. I have to find something else now.'

‘You always did love to haggle over semantics,' he said with another smile, withdrawing his hands from her shoulders. ‘Just, please, stay in touch. Otherwise, I'll worry.'

‘I will. Thank you so much – for everything.'

‘You're a good woman, Tally. Someday you'll be vindicated.'

‘I never will be,' she said softly, ‘but it doesn't matter.'

‘It
matters
,' he insisted. ‘Take good care. Okay?'

‘I will. And I'll be in touch.'

He hugged her, kissed her cheek – leaving behind the scent of citrus cologne – then released her.

She watched him go into the terminal, then stood for a moment looking around at the people coming and going, porters and cab drivers; varicolored motion, tidal and dizzying.

‘You'll have to move your car, Miss,' someone said, and she turned to see a police officer smiling at her across the roof of the Mercedes.

‘Yes,' she said, ‘sorry,' and hurried through the sickening heat back to the driver's side of the car.