Remember Mia Page 4

  “You were sort of an only child?”

  Jack then told me how his father, Earl, had left his mother when he was still in diapers. Earl, a big-rig driver who spent a majority of the year on the road, met another woman, a beauty salon owner named Elsa. He gave up his trucker job, something he had refused Jack’s mom for years, and started driving a city bus instead. He didn’t disappear from Jack’s life. No, he did something much worse.

  “I ran into my father in school, in front of the principal’s office. I hadn’t seen him in years, couldn’t even remember the last time he’d spoken to me. For some odd reason that only a ten-year-old can comprehend, I felt he had come for me. Just when I was about to run into his arms, I heard the principal’s voice over the PA system. George Connor, please come to the front office. That was the day I learned of my half brother, George. And that we lived close enough to go to school together. Five blocks, to be exact.”

  I didn’t know what to say so I asked him about his mom. He let out a breath that sounded like a groan. “In a way, she killed herself,” he said, and I could tell it was an emotional subject for him. “She started working three jobs, trying to send me to private school after the whole incident with my brother. She wasn’t feeling well for a long time, and when she finally went to the doctor, it was too late. She had ignored all the signs for too long and was diagnosed with colon cancer. Eventually she had surgery but they just stitched her back up, there was nothing they could do. The cancer had spread to her brain and her liver.”

  I thought about my own family and how my mother didn’t seem to feel any guilt pursuing her photography career. I remembered all the nights without dinner on the table and the door to the darkroom locked. Many years after my parents had passed, I still couldn’t make up my mind if I should feel cheated out of her attention or happy she had a career of her own.

  That night, we broke the thirty-days-no-sex rule and made love for the first time. It was a chaotic mess: him fidgeting with the condom wrapper and me not knowing where to put my legs. When I woke up the next morning, Jack was sitting in bed, furiously writing in a notebook.

  “Are you writing me a poem?” I asked jokingly.

  “A speech,” he said. Jack had been selected to deliver the keynote speech for an annual function sponsored by the New York City Bar Association for over eight hundred law students. For the next two weeks he outlined the speech, then revised it just to start all over again. The night of the event I watched him deliver the speech and didn’t see a hint of anxiety. He spoke with confidence, made eye contact, and told anecdotes and jokes. Something wasn’t right, there wasn’t even a hint of anxiety in his voice or his demeanor. Later I found out that speaking in front of crowds wasn’t his only problem.

  On our way to the reception room, Jack excused himself, his forehead covered in sweat. People were asking for him, wanting to meet the bright young attorney who had delivered such an inspiring and confident speech. I waited in front of the restroom, then checked the coatroom and behind the stage, but Jack had all but disappeared. His cell went to voice mail and I finally decided to hail a cab and go home. I found him vomiting behind a porta-potty in a construction zone in the parking lot.

  Jack mumbled something about an upset stomach. “Go in and let my boss know I have a stomach virus,” he said in one uninterrupted breath and then continued to dry heave. It wasn’t just a fear of speaking in front of crowds but having to mingle with people that did him in.

  “A slight bout of anxiety. Not a big deal, I’m working on it,” he confessed later. “I prefer a courtroom to a cocktail party. So what?”

  —

  A few months later, I told Jack I might be pregnant. There was a long silence followed by an unsure smile.

  “Let’s get married,” he said while we waited for the test results.

  “Don’t do this because of what your father did, Jack,” I said and wished I hadn’t said it out loud. Jack’s face seemed to melt, his eyes turned big, wounded almost. He recovered quickly and smiled at me again, this time with his lawyerly confidence in place.

  “What my father did is irrelevant. I don’t allow other people’s shortcomings to affect my life decisions. And most of all”—his voice became gentle and he held my face and kissed me—“it feels right. It just does.”

  By the time the faint pink line appeared in the result window, we were engaged. Neither one of us was sure if it was the right decision but I trusted Jack to make the decision right. I pushed my doubts away and, like shells on a beach, I collected my feelings; there was excitement and joy and an immediate attempt to make a switch from pregnancy to baby, from I’m pregnant to I’m going to be a mother, and everything about that seemed to leave me raw, like sunburned skin. The fact that I felt inadequate, even at that moment, would emerge again and again in the months that followed.

  We went to the courthouse and married in front of the justice of the peace. There was no stretch limousine, no heaving the bridal bouquet into a group of shrieking bridesmaids, no festivities, no honeymoon, no father-in-law telling Jack to take good care of his daughter, no family to toast the bride and groom. Jack wasn’t big on celebrations and it was all the same to me. I decided to keep my maiden name and Jack didn’t put up a fight.

  The courthouse clerk took a photo of us, the only one we have of our wedding day. Jack wore a black suit and a dark blue tie. I was in a cotton dress, white, versatile, appropriate for many occasions. In the picture Jack’s got his arm around my shoulder, allowing me to lean into him. Behind us on the wall, a blueprint of the original courthouse layout, the light-colored lines on the blue background reminiscent of prints on my father’s study wall. In the left corner of the photo, even though I tried to crop it out later, on the hallway courthouse bench, Jack’s briefcase photobombing us from the edge of the picture.

  We always meant to find a special frame for the wedding photo, but it was to remain in its original frame. Plain black wood. And then we never really thought about it anymore.

  —

  On the day of the twenty-weeks anatomy scan, we were ushered into a small examination room. I glanced at the screen mounted above the keyboard.

  “Hi, I’m Debra.” A woman in a spotless pink uniform entered. “Before we get started,” she said and vigorously pushed buttons on the keyboard, “would you like to know the sex of your baby?”

  The sex of our baby. I looked down at myself, anxiously scanning the small bump protruding from my abdomen. So far I was hardly showing, and the notion that there was a human inside of me, however small, seemed inconceivable, let alone that it was a boy or a girl.

  “Yes, we’d like to know,” Jack said.

  The truth was that I hadn’t decided if I wanted to know the sex and the fact that he answered for me made me furious. Furious that he was speaking on my behalf. But I knew that if I was to question him later, he’d just come up with an example of what I had said to make him believe that I wanted to know, that it was a good idea, that we had agreed, and knowing the sex was the right thing to do.

  The nurse looked at me and I nodded and managed a smile. She got up and turned off the lights. The room was warm and intimate, and the dark allowed me to blink away the tears that had formed in my eyes.

  “I apologize, this is going to be cold,” Debra said as she squeezed gel on my belly, making me shiver. Jack reached for my hand and together we stared at what looked like a triangular slice on a pitch-black background.

  “Here we go,” Debra said and put the head of the wand on my abdomen. “That’s the spine,” she said and pushed harder to get a better picture.

  My baby’s spine, tiny little bones in a perfect line, was a lovely string of pearls. My throat closed up and I stared at the image in awe. Debra pushed another button and the image went fuzzy. I blinked quickly so I wouldn’t miss anything.

  The nurse adjusted the wand and a face came into being. It seemed
spooky at first, like a skull mask, but it was the most beautiful face I had ever seen. The lips seemed to pucker, the chin was slightly recessed. I could hardly breathe at the thought that there was a human being inches below my skin.

  I heard the nurse’s voice from far away, pointing out all the major organs.

  Larynx is fine, cross section of the brain, kidneys, liver, lungs, heart.

  When she said heart, Jack squeezed my hand. Hard.

  Much to his dismay, I had read obsessively on the development of the fetus in utero. I was fascinated by a story of a doctor who performed fetal heart surgery on a woman with an ectopic pregnancy. The article described the intact and fully transparent embryonic sac, and the image of a tiny human, no larger than an inch, swimming in amniotic fluid, its head bowed and legs flexed upward.

  I wasn’t even in my second trimester then, and I knew every congenital heart disease by name, aortic valve stenosis, ventricular septal defect, anomalous pulmonary venous return, and had asked for extensive testing to be done, but my obstetrician had declined.

  “There is no reason whatsoever to suspect your baby has any kind of hereditary malformation or defect.” Dr. Bowers had taken off his glasses and looked at me as if I were a child asking for a trip to Disneyland.

  “Both you and your husband are healthy and it’s just not justifiable,” the doctor had said.

  Even before Dr. Bowers had declined to do any more tests, Jack had long refused to accompany me to any new appointments, had even gone so far as to forbid me to see another specialist. Jack also refused to engage in conversations about the articles I read, and so I tried to silence the worry in my head, kept it in a safe place along with the anxiety and the panic.

  The nurse had just told us the baby was fine, the ultrasound was perfect, but I was so nervous that suddenly the baby started doing summersaults inside of me.

  “A perfectly healthy baby, did you hear that?” Jack said and stroked my cheek.

  “And now the sex of the baby,” the nurse said and dug deep into my abdomen, “if the baby is willing to give up the information, that is. Girl parts look like three lines, boy parts, well, pretty much like you expect them to look. Unfortunately baby’s legs are pulled up and we can’t see anything.”

  “I see it, right there, it’s a girl.” I pointed at the lines I thought were the unmistakable signs of a vulva.

  “Don’t get carried away, you’ll be in for a rude awakening if you interpret it yourself,” Jack said and furrowed his brow. His hand tightened around my hand as if he was trying to squash my enthusiasm.

  The nurse smiled at him. I understood; it was hard not to smile at a father-to-be, hard not to feel privileged to share these moments with expecting parents.

  “A girl,” I said.

  “She’s right, you might as well buy all pink.” Debra’s voice reached me from afar. “I’ll print that profile shot for you.”

  A flurry of images popped into my head: bows and dresses, tea sets and dollhouses, braids and ponytails, and nail polish. All my worries had magically disappeared, like footsteps in the sand erased by a single ocean wave, one minute there, then gone.

  —

  After thirty-two hours of labor, “normal for a first-time mom” according to Dr. Bowers, I was exhausted and all I wanted was for the pain to stop and to close my eyes. After four hours of unsuccessful pushing, he suggested a cesarean section.

  When Mia finally came into the world, she was purple and limp. The doctor suctioned her throat and, after what seemed like an eternity, put her on my chest. Wrapped in a flannel blanket, she rested in my arms, and we looked at each other. Even though I had prepared for childbirth, had done Lamaze and infant care and CPR classes, had watched countless births on TV, natural and cesarean, and imagined it a hundred times, the moment still took me by surprise. She was so beautiful and fragile, and I felt an overwhelming sense of trepidation, as if I might break her.

  The fact that she was healthy was the biggest miracle to me. The whole “ten fingers, ten toes” thing didn’t make a lot of sense to me. What about her heart, her brain, her lungs? When I asked the nurse for the Apgar score, she looked at me puzzled. “She’s a beautiful baby, perfect in every way, everything is fine.”

  What does she know? What I held in my arms was the product of cell division and multiplication, a process that had begun at a furious rate only minutes after conception. Cells had traveled down the fallopian tube to the uterus. By the end of the first week, a single cell had transformed into millions and into a body big enough to be seen without a microscope. Cells had formed muscles, the circulatory system, the skeleton, the kidneys and the reproductive organs, the nervous system, senses, and skin. And the heart had begun beating after three weeks. And now she was here and I was unable to go back and make right what rogue cells had potentially done wrong.

  But then I looked into Mia’s eyes, steel gray and unable to focus, seemingly out of line and slightly crossed, the puffiness of her eyelids making it almost impossible for her to open them wide, and I knew that she needed me and that I was put on this earth to protect her, and for a short moment in time I didn’t worry about anything at all.

  CHAPTER 6

  I hear a forceful knock on the door. By the time I open my eyes, two men in suits have entered the room and introduce themselves as Detective Walter Daniel and Detective Sydney Cameron. Detective Daniel is a large middle-aged man. His bulky body renders him soft, especially around his eyes. He takes out a small notepad with a flip cover and stands beside my bed, ready to take notes.

  I start with the day I moved to North Dandry and Jack went to Chicago. I tell them about the locks I had installed, which causes Detective Daniel to nod approvingly. When I catch myself rambling, I slow down, tell myself I must consider carefully what I’m going to say next. When I finish my story with leaving the police precinct, Detective Daniel motions to the younger detective, whose name I can no longer remember. The younger detective, very short with feminine hands, gets up and leaves the room. Detective Daniel pulls up a chair and sits next to my bed.

  My head is pounding and I feel like I’m hooked up to a bag of caffeine. I’m trying to remember, and at the same time I’m trying not to say too much. I’ve been watching his face closely and as my story has progressed, his demeanor has changed; first he stopped smiling, his brows rose intermittently, then they furrowed. Then his face went blank.

  When I tell him I don’t know where my daughter is, he stops taking notes and doesn’t seem to get the urgency. Kidnapped is the word I use.

  He sits there and just looks at me. Looks at me as if I were a child telling a tale of monsters under the bed. I realize he doesn’t believe me, and then it hits me like a brick; there’s no urgency in his behavior, no AMBER Alert, no press conference, no urgent phone calls, no commands given to uniformed officers. That’s what’s supposed to happen, but he just stares at me. Does he not believe me? I must make him believe me.

  “I locked the doors! No one could’ve come in—I’m sure of that. I know I should’ve . . . but I wasn’t . . . I never left the door unlocked! I checked every night.”

  “They’re looking for your daughter as we speak.” He closes the cover of his notepad and slides the pen in his suit pocket. He lifts himself off the chair, sighs heavily, and pinches his lips as his kneecaps make a cracking sound. “What do you think happened?”

  I close my eyes and take a deep breath. The odor of disinfectant is overwhelming and the headache that started behind my eyes has moved to the back of my head.

  “Please, somebody must have seen something. I can’t remember anything but I know I’ve never been in Dover. I’m bad at reading maps, I wouldn’t know how to get there. I don’t think I’d just drive up there for no reason. It’s all very confusing.”

  “Maybe you just drove and you decided to stop there. It may not have been your destination. Just a place t
o stop.”

  “Stop for what?”

  He ignores my question. “We’ll need a photograph of your daughter.”

  “Hundreds. I have hundreds of pictures of her. At my house. They are in a black camera bag, on memory cards.”

  “We found those.” He pauses ever so slightly, then continues. “We need a recent portrait, you know, with her face. A likeness of her that people can recognize.”

  I must think about this carefully. “It’s hard pointing a camera at her. The flash startled her and I haven’t taken any portraits, not lately. She’s been so fussy, I didn’t want her to . . .” I must be vigilant. Speak slowly. I must make sense. I must convince him. “I don’t have any recent photos of her. She’s only seven months old. The doctors said, they told me she . . . she . . . she’s a colicky baby. The doctors told us there was nothing wrong with her. Just a colic. It was going to pass any day.”

  “How old did you say she is?”

  “Seven months.”

  “Babies are colicky at that age? I have three kids. I can’t say I took care of them, but my youngest was colicky. They usually grow out of that pretty quickly.” His brows are raised. So are his suspicions. “Did you take her to a doctor?”

  Pacifier, warm baths, soft blankets. Burp the baby. Hold the baby. Rock the baby. Walk the baby, drive with the baby. Soothe the baby.

  “They did a couple of tests for reflux disorders. She gained weight, never had a fever. He said she was fine and to wait it out.” They also told me if I ever felt that I couldn’t cope, to go to the nearest emergency room, but I don’t mention that part to the detective.

  “All right,” he says and scribbles something in his notepad. “How about DNA—a brush maybe? Or a bottle she drank out of? Or a handprint or a footprint? You know, those kits you buy at a department store, where you use clay and take an impression of a foot or a hand?”