Pressure Drop (19 page)

“What?”

“Howie's got a fax machine in his Porsche.”

“What for? I thought he was a psychiatrist.”

“Some land business. He does it while he's on the road. Every night the car fills up with paper and Tucker and I have to take turns cleaning it out in the morning, so Howie can look it over at breakfast. And the other day it was Tucker's turn and he didn't do it and Howie lost fifty grand he could have made. And I got blamed.”

“Why?”

“Because,” Danny said, turning on Matthias in anger, “he said it was my turn, and they believed him.”

“What did your mother do?”

“Oh, she backed him up. He can do no wrong. He gets straight A's and Howie's already talked to someone at Harvard about him. He shot an eighty-four last week from the blue tees and he's captain of the tennis team. He's Mr. Wonderful and I'm a jerk.”

“You're not a jerk.”

Danny didn't speak. Matthias, aware of the weakness of his own response, remained silent too. He spent the rest of the flight formulating ideas. The wheels were down when he finally said: “Any of your friends into scuba?”

“Some.”

“Well, you're good at that.”

“It's not the same.”

“As what?”

“Tennis. Golf.”

Matthias smiled. His son saw him smiling and seemed a little taken aback. Perhaps he hadn't seen him smile enough. “That's true,” Matthias said. There wasn't much bragging to be done about scuba. “But what about free diving?”

“Free diving?”

“Want to try some?”

“With you?”

“Sure. Brock and I will take you out. I'll bet you could pull forty feet right now.”

“I could?”

“Yup. You've got the body for it.”

“I do?”

“Yup. And you're ready.”

18

Nina lay in her bed. The television was on.
Rosemary's Baby
. A strange choice for Thanksgiving evening, Nina thought, but she wasn't really watching it. She was thinking about the half-black baby girl, now in the hands of the child welfare people. Nina could picture the girl's face very distinctly; the image of her own baby's face appeared much less clearly. Only her fingers, as though they contained their own organs of memory, had vivid recall: she could still feel the baby's fine blond hair, so long at the back.

He didn't have a name. Henrik, she thought, and suddenly despised her frivolity so much she squirmed on the bed.

A bottle of wine sat on the end table. Nina drank from it steadily. Her thoughts turned toward Tuesday: her fortieth birthday, and the first anniversary of the day the words “a baby” had popped out of her mouth in answer to Jason's question about what she really wanted. A big decision, Dr. Berry had told her, although she hadn't understood what he meant at first.
How far are you prepared to go
—
to have a baby, I mean
. Nina thought about what he had said. And all at once, she really did understand it; more than that, Dr. Berry's statement seemed to come to life in her mind. The first thing it did was couple with what was happening on the TV screen. The juxtaposition shocked her. She got out of bed, her eyes fixed on John Cassavetes. Of course, these were just a bunch of good actors getting the most out of a good story and having some fun at the same time: she could see that in the extra little twist of Cassavetes's lips. But, like Rosemary, she had allowed sperm of uncertain provenance inside her body—although in her case no one had conspired to get her cooperation. She had done it to herself.

And now she was being punished.

But that was sick thinking. Nina could not accept the existence of any punisher, any judge, who would harm a baby. She had never been, would never be able to do that. She snapped off the TV.

That left her alone with an empty screen, an empty bottle and an empty bed. And an empty crib in the next room. She turned off the lights and tried to sleep. She sensed
Rosemary's Baby
still unreeling, somewhere beyond the audible and visible parts of the spectrum. Only connect.

But with whom? Jason was in Vermont for the weekend. Suze was still in L.A., acting as some sort of agent for Le Boucher, who had lucked into a major role in a barbarian movie when the leading lady had torn her hamstring on the first day of shooting. Suze had asked if Nina wanted her to fly back, and Nina had said no, half-hoping Suze would anyway. But Suze hadn't, and the other, non-hoping half didn't really care. Suze couldn't help her. Who could?

Nina dressed and went down to the street, catching Jules in the act of stuffing a bottle in his pocket. “Happy Thanksgiving, Ms. Kitchener,” he said, slurring just a little. She saw his face too late recalling her situation as she walked out into the night.

A cold wind blew. Nina walked. The city had a smell the wind couldn't quite blow away, as though something had plugged the entire sewage system, and somewhere below things were approaching a critical mass. Nina passed by the usual sights without really noticing: a woman with a stack of videocassettes under her arm, a man lying in a fast-food doorway, wrapped in a Hefty bag. Two eyes looked out at her from his emaciated face; for a moment Nina thought he was about to say something, but he did not.

Nina walked. She walked herself into fatigue and beyond. Then, finally, when she had walked her mind quiet and turned for home, “Salut Demeure” began to play in it.

Her feet took over then and walked her to the hospital instead.
Sometimes they stroll back into the hospital, leave the baby and stroll out
. Yes. Of course. Reality lights up, if only for a moment, and they try to undo what has been done. Nina walked faster and faster. She was running by the time she got there.

Random details impressed themselves on Nina's brain: the hiss of the sliding doors; the too-bright lobby; crushed coffee cups and a blob of pink gum on the stairs. Then she was on the fourth floor, outside the nursery window.

There had been a population explosion since her last visit. Almost every bassinet was filled, including the one at the far end of the first row, where a blue-wrapped bundle now lay. A blue-wrapped bundle with a blond tuft of hair sticking out of the blanket.

The next thing she knew, Nina was inside the nursery, standing over the bassinet. There was a blond baby boy in it, but he wasn't hers. One glance at his features brought back the nearly lost image of her own son's face. But doubt stirred in her mind anyway; was there just a remote chance she could be wrong? Very gently, Nina began unwrapping a corner of the blue blanket, to see the identification bracelet on the baby's wrist. She was careful not to disturb the baby, so she had still not seen the bracelet when strong arms seized her from behind.

“Help! Help!” someone cried, right by her ear.

Nina struggled, twisted, saw she was being held by a tall nurse, not Verna Rountree, but a nurse she hadn't seen before.

“Help!” the nurse shouted. Babies began to cry. People came running. “I caught her red-handed, I caught her red-handed,” the nurse told them, gradually lowering her voice. “She was just about to snatch another one.”

They surrounded Nina. They knocked her to the floor, perhaps not deliberately. They stared down at her, yelling and questioning; the babies cried. Nina lay on her back, unhurt but unable to make a sound. Then one face came closer, separating itself from the crowd. It was the head nurse.

“Oh, for Christ's sake,” she said.

The head nurse took Nina down to the lobby and called a taxi. “I can walk,” Nina told her.

“You've done enough walking. But you'd better think about getting some therapy.”

“Therapy?”

“To get you through this.”

“I don't need therapy. I need my baby back.” Nina was angry, but she couldn't find the strength to raise her voice.

The head nurse looked at her closely. “Are you planning to sue?”

“Sue?”

“The hospital. The administration's worried about it.”

“It hadn't occurred to me.”

“No? They say you're some kind of wheel downtown.”

A taxi pulled up. The head nurse walked Nina to it and opened the door for her. “Anyway, I hope you do.”

“Why?”

“They deserve it.”

“For what happened to me?”

“No,” the head nurse replied. “In general.”

The door closed. The taxi pulled away. The driver was listening to a late-night call-in show on the radio. A woman said: “I hate all the holidays, but Thanksgiving is the worst. It's the pits.”

“You're the pits, lady,” said the host, cutting her off. “You depress me. Hello, line two? Hoboken? Hoboken, you're on the air. What's on your mind? Hoboken?”

Nina spent the rest of the night lying in bed with her eyes open. At first light she rose, walked past the closed door of the nursery and pulled the Lifecycle out of the hall closet. She sat on it and began pedaling. Almost immediately she felt weak and tired, and her mind, rather than shutting down, focused sharply on the baby. Nina got off the bike after only a few minutes.

She called Detective Delgado's office. “Delgado's not in,” a man told her.

“When can I reach her?”

The man called to someone nearby: “When's Delgado back?” Then he said to Nina: “She's out of town all week.”

“All week?”

“Annual vacation.”

“But—”

“Got to put you on hold for a second.”

Click. Nina was cut off instead, like the depressing woman who hated Thanksgiving. A sob rose in her throat. She clamped it back down. “Stop it,” she said aloud. Use your brain, your fucking business brain. Someone must be handling Detective Delgado's caseload. Nina reached for the phone. It rang just as she touched it.

“Yes?” said Nina, answering it.

“Hello.” It was a woman, with a quiet voice, even hesitant; not Detective Delgado, not the head nurse: no one she knew. “Is this Nina Kitchener?”

“Yes.”

“I hope I haven't called too early.”

“You haven't.”

Silence. Fragments of another conversation buzzed softly on the line; Nina wondered if it was a long-distance call.

The thought might have carried down the wire, because the woman said: “I'm calling from Boston. My name is Laura Bain. The NBC station here showed that interview with you.”

Silence.

Nina, thinking of her encounter in the alley by the pizzeria, and the girl and the man who had traded a baby for ten thousand dollars and were still on the loose, pressed the
RECORD
button on her answering machine. But if the woman had some scam in mind, she seemed in no hurry to begin.

It was Nina who broke the silence. “And?” she said.

“I feel very badly for you. And I'm really sorry for bothering you at a time like this. I know what you're going through.”

“Do you?” Nina replied, unable to keep the bitterness out of her tone; she felt a pang of guilt about it—even over the phone and in her condition she could sense how much stronger than the other woman she was.

“Unfortunately I do,” Laura Bain said in a voice that sank away to almost nothing. “My baby was kidnapped five months ago.”

“Oh God.”

Silence. More conversations whispered in the wire; someone laughed in one of them. Nina sensed the answer, but she asked anyway: “Have you got him back yet?”

“Her,” said Laura Bain. And: “No.”

“I'm sorry.”

Nina heard Laura Bain take a deep breath. “The reason I'm calling is that while I was watching you on TV I had a thought and it just won't go away. I—I've got to ask you something.”

“What?”

“Did you use a sperm bank?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Was it the Cambridge Reproductive Research Center?”

“No. The Human Fertility Institute. Here in New York. Why?”

“I used a sperm bank too. The Cambridge one.”

Nina waited for the woman to continue. When she didn't, Nina said, “I have no idea what you're getting at. Why did you even think of asking if I'd gone to a sperm bank? I never discussed that with the news people.”

“Because you remind me of me,” Laura Bain said. “I think we should meet.”

19

Long ago at Camp Wapameo, reading in her bunk by flashlight while the other girls slept and the counselors sat around the fire on the beach, swatting mosquitos and trying to tune in rock 'n' roll from anywhere on a cheap transistor, Nina had come upon a story about a drunken man whose hat falls into a mysterious ring and disappears. Reaching for it, the man stumbles into the ring and falls forward in time. There he meets another man, a little older than himself, whom he finds troubling. Not long after, he steps into another ring, meets a man older and more troubling than the first. And into another ring, and so on. Eventually it hits him that all the men he encounters are himself, at later stages of life. Nina remembered the story the moment she spotted the woman she took to be Laura Bain.

The woman, standing just beyond the security station for the Pan Am shuttle gates at Logan Airport, wore a finely tailored tweed coat and was biting her lower lip. She looked about forty-five years old. Her face was thinner and paler than Nina's; her hair was almost the same shade of brown, except she had a lot of white in it, and Nina still had none. Her dark, deep-set eyes were alert, even intense, as she scanned the line of arriving passengers. They lit on Nina and recognized her immediately; for a moment Nina thought something uncanny was going on. Then she recalled that the woman had seen her on TV. But she was still thinking of the time machine story when the woman stepped forward.

“Hello, Nina,” she said in the same quiet, flattened tone Nina had heard on the phone, a tone that didn't match the nervous energy in the movements of her face and body. “I'm Laura Bain.” The women faced each other. They might have shaken hands, might even have embraced, but their timing was off and in the end they did nothing. “Hungry?” Laura said.