The Nesting Dolls (4 page)

Gracie rang with ebullient loose-limbed grace; Taylor was surprisingly focused; but Isobel, her mother’s daughter, shook her bell with furrowed brow and tight lips, bent on a perfect performance. As they finished, Zack whipped out his camera and snapped three forbidden photographs before I batted down his arm.

“Against the rules,” I said.

“I’ve only been a father for two years. I have to make up for lost time.” He snapped a couple more pictures, then returned the camera to his pocket.

The service ended. Students began moving down the aisle with baskets of candles, which they asked the person at the end of each row to distribute. The students then lit the candles of the people with aisle seats and invited them to light the candle of the person next to them. Faces softened by candlelight, the audience joined the choirs in the recessional “Joy to the World.” It was a transcendent moment but, as Robert Frost knew, nothing golden can stay. The last
line of the carol was sung; the candles were extinguished; the gym lights were flicked back on, and we were, once again, fragmented into our separate selves.

Despite the blizzard, no one seemed in a rush to leave. The adults were chatting; students were clinging to one another with the desperation of those who knew it might be five minutes before they could start texting again. Finally, I spotted Isobel, Taylor, and Gracie. They’d changed back into their street clothes and were standing near an exit, laughing and surrounded by friends. I pointed them out to Zack. “Now there’s the picture I want.”

“Let me get a little closer,” he said. He pushed his wheelchair forward and began snapping. He was just in time to capture a disturbing tableau. The woman we’d seen that afternoon on the Wainbergs’ front path approached the girls. She had the baby seat with her; she appeared to say something to Isobel, then she handed her the baby seat and disappeared through the exit.

We were with the girls in seconds. “What’s going on?” I said.

Gracie was the first to speak. “That woman just gave her baby to Isobel.”

Isobel shook her head. “She didn’t just ‘give’ the baby to me. She made sure she knew who I was first. She asked if my mother was Delia Margolis Wainberg, and when I said yes, she said, ‘Tell her I couldn’t do it. This child belongs with her.’ That’s when she handed me the baby seat.”

I looked down at the child. He was dressed in a Thomas the Tank Engine snowsuit, and his toque was pulled down over his ears. He was perhaps six months old with the kind of intelligent gaze people tag as “alert.” I squatted down beside him. “How are you doing, big guy?”

He raised his arms and kept his dark eyes focused on mine. I unbuckled him and picked him up.

Taylor came close. Her adolescent cool had deserted her.
“His mother
is
coming back, isn’t she?” she said, and her voice was small and scared.

As Zack wheeled in for a closer look, he squeezed Taylor’s arm, but he didn’t answer her question. My husband was more charmed by children than many men I knew, but when he gazed at the baby, he wasn’t smiling. His eyes moved to me. “Let me hold him, would you?” Zack took the child, removed his toque, and ran his hand over the baby’s springy black curls. He held the child out in front of him and examined him closely. “Did you girls get a good look at the baby’s mother?” he asked.

“Not me,” Gracie said. “I was too busy watching Declan Hunter embrace Taylor with his eyes. Sooooo romantic.”

Taylor shot Gracie a look that would have curdled milk, then turned back to us. “I saw the mother,” she said. “She looked like Isobel.”

Isobel’s blue eyes were troubled, but as always, she was precise. “Not the way I look now – the way I’ll probably look when I’m older.”

Then, for the second time that night, the gym was plunged into darkness. This darkness didn’t inspire awe – simply confusion. There was a moment of stunned silence, some sputterings of nervous laughter, and then, obeying a response that had become second nature to us all, we reached for our cells. Within seconds, the gym was dotted with rectangles of light that darted through the gloom, fireflies for our electronic age.

The baby began to cry and I reached down and took him from Zack. The child’s hair smelled of Baby’s Own soap.

“This certainly complicates matters,” Zack said, and I could hear the edge in his voice.

“They’ll get the power back,” I said. “We’ll just have to sit tight.”

“Great advice,” he said. “Except while we’re sitting tight, that child’s mother is going to disappear without a trace.”

Fifteen minutes later, the school, and reportedly most of the city, was still without light. A spirit of cheerful anarchy had seized the crowd. Plunged into darkness in the company of friends and cellphones, the students, their voices shakily arrogant, split the silence with what Walt Whitman described as the barbaric yawps of the young. The adults were resigned. Blizzards and blackouts are part of a Saskatchewan winter. Everyone knows that, sooner or later, blizzards stop; power returns; streets are lit; traffic lights function – and life goes on.

Enjoying the moment was a sensible option, but not for Zack and me. As we waited by the door through which the baby’s mother vanished, we were isolated by a growing fear and frustration. Zack was accustomed to deciding on an outcome and making it happen, but that afternoon, nothing was breaking his way. He couldn’t get either Delia or Noah on the phone and Police Inspector Debbie Haczkewicz’s private voicemail told him she would call when time permitted.

The room was growing noticeably cooler. I zipped up the baby’s snowsuit, put his toque back on him, then wrapped
him in the blanket that had been in the baby seat. Swaddled and held close, he fell asleep on my shoulder.

“One possibility, and it’s chilling, is postpartum psychosis.” Zack spoke softly as if to protect the child in my arms from hearing what he was about to say. “I had a client who heard voices telling her she had to kill her baby. She tried to get help, but everyone told her the ‘baby blues’ were common, and the feelings would pass. The voices became more and more insistent, so finally she threw her baby off the Albert Street Bridge.”

My heart clenched. “What happened to the mother?”

“She was arrested. Arrangements were made for her to undergo psychological assessment, and she was released. She walked out of court, drove home, and hanged herself.”

“Do you think this baby’s mother is suicidal? When she gave the baby to Isobel, all she said was ‘I couldn’t do it.’ That might just mean she felt she couldn’t raise her son, so she was giving him to someone who could.”

“Possibly,” Zack said, “but I don’t buy it. Mothers who abandon their newborns in the bathroom at Walmart or leave them in hospitals or fire stations are usually young and poor. When I was taking pictures of the girls I caught a glimpse of this boy’s mother. She wasn’t a kid, and she didn’t look poor.”

The penny dropped. “Zack, take out your camera,” I said. “She’ll be in those pictures.”

The first photo was a dud. With the breathtaking symbolism of the quotidian, the baby’s mother was heading through the door marked
EXIT
, her back to the camera. Zack scrolled to the previous picture. In this one the mother was handing the baby seat to Isobel. Her coat collar was turned up, and her dark hair had fallen over her face. Zack pushed the zoom button, isolating the woman’s profile. She’d been
moving, and the photo was blurred. He flicked to the first picture he’d taken, and when he saw it, he breathed a single word: “Bingo.” Then he handed the camera to me.

Isobel had been right. The woman in the picture was an uncanny projection of what she, herself, would look like as an adult.

Zack was on another track. “She looks like Dee when we were in law school.” He slipped the camera back in his pocket, took out his BlackBerry, and tried three numbers in rapid succession. “Yet again, no Debbie. No Delia. No Noah. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, my love, but it is getting cold in here.”

On cue, the baby in my arms began to cry lustily.

“Fuck it. I’m sick of waiting,” Zack said. “I’m going to text Taylor and tell her to round up Izzy and Gracie. Then we’re going to take this boy down to Regina General. They have auxiliary power so they’ll be able to keep him warm and fed until somebody figures out what to do next.”

I kissed the baby’s head. “Sound good to you, bud?”

“You’re liking that little guy, aren’t you?” Zack said.

“Baby lust,” I said. “Our littlest granddaughter is already four. It’s been a while since we had a baby in the family.”

“I don’t believe this is the last we’ll see of this one.”

“Zack, what do you think is going on?”

He sighed. “I wish I knew. All I know is this was not a random act. The mother said her son belongs with Delia, and one look at that picture proves that she and Dee are related. When we ran into her at the Wainbergs’ this afternoon, the mother was taking the baby to Delia. She backed off because of the party, but she took the first available opportunity to get the child into Isobel’s hands.”

“She must have seen the girls’ picture in the paper and made the connection,” I said. “Wainberg isn’t a common name and there is that stunning resemblance.”

“So the deed was done,” Zack said. “And now we have to deal with the consequences.”

When Zack’s phone rang, I tensed. I waited for a howl, but the little guy had snuggled in. It appeared our luck was turning. Not only had the baby slept through the ringtone, but the person calling was Inspector Debbie Haczkewicz. Zack’s account of the evening’s events was factual and concise, but his concern about the missing woman’s mental state was palpable. When he hung up, he sounded weary but satisfied. “Success,” he said. “Apparently it’s shit city out there. No power except on the east side. Traffic lights are out and the roads are godawful, so there are plenty of accidents. According to Debbie, some of our less principled fellow citizens are taking advantage of the blackout to smash windows and do a little Christmas shopping. It’s a bad night to be a cop, but Debbie’s going to send an officer to take the little guy to Regina General, and she’s going to put out an all-points bulletin on the mother.”

“Good,” I said. “So we should just wait here for the girls and the police.”

“Yep. Nothing to do but sit tight.”

“I noticed that when you described the baby’s mother to Debbie, you didn’t mention the connection with Delia.”

“Time enough for that,” Zack said. “It’ll be easier for Delia to hear the story from me.”

“It’ll be a shock,” I said.

Zack’s tone was pensive. “I wonder if it will be,” he said. “Only one way to find out.”

This time when he called Delia, Zack hit pay dirt. He gave her a brief account of the events of the evening, and apparently she didn’t ask questions. When he was finished, he listened for a moment. “Okay, I’ll call when we’re getting close,” he said.

I shifted the baby’s weight in my arms. “That was short and sweet.”

“Short, sweet, and only the beginning,” Zack said. “Delia’s going to meet us outside their house. Noah’s been driving home the sobriety-challenged, so he hasn’t ploughed their driveway, and Dee thinks we’d get stuck. Also she wants to make sure that before she and I talk, Isobel is out of earshot.”

The girls joined us, and not long afterwards a police officer found us, shone a flashlight on her badge, and took the baby. Her actions were swift and professional, but the darkness made the action surreal and, for me, deeply unsettling.

All of my children had been students at Luther: the three oldest for four years each, and Taylor for one semester so far. The campus was as familiar to me as my own backyard, but that night I lost my bearings. The school and the residences seemed part of an alien landscape, and the students bent over their shovels in the snow-choked parking lot had the cool menace of figures in a Magritte painting. Zack offered to drive, and I was relieved. I was normally a confident driver, but that night I felt unmoored.

Gracie Falconer’s house was the nearest, so we dropped her off first. It had been a silent drive, but Gracie was a girl who believed in happy endings, and as she opened the car door, her voice was plaintive. “This is going to be okay, isn’t it?”

Zack and I exchanged glances, but neither of us offered any reassurance. After Gracie was safely in the house, Zack called Delia and told her we were on our way. When we pulled up in front of the Wainbergs’, Delia was huddled in the doorway. As soon as she spotted our car, Delia turned on the flashlight in her hand and began plodding towards us. I handed Isobel our flashlight, and she started towards her house. Halfway up the path, she and her mother passed one another without either a greeting or an embrace.

There was a puff of cold air when Delia climbed into the back seat. Delia’s husky mezzo cracked as she asked Taylor
to keep what she was about to hear private until Delia had had a chance to talk to Isobel. Then she leaned forward to get as close as she could to Zack. “What’s the situation?”

“The police took the child to the General for the night and they’re out looking for his mother.”

“I didn’t know there was a baby,” Delia said.

“But you do know the woman,” Zack said.

“We exchanged a few e-mails, and I spoke to her on the phone that day you were in the car with me, Joanne. I never met her face to face.”

Zack took out his camera, pulled up the photo of the woman, and handed the camera to Delia. “There’s her picture.”

Delia’s intake of breath was sharp. “I always wondered … ” she said.

Zack’s voice was low. “Dee, what’s going on?”

She ignored Zack’s question. “When can I get the child?”

“The child
is
related to you, then,” Zack said.

“The child’s mother is my daughter,” Delia said tightly. “And that’s as much as I can say tonight.”

Zack didn’t push it. “All right,” he said. “Tomorrow, we’ll see what can be done about getting the little boy.”

“The child is a boy.” Delia’s voice was a whisper.

“Yes,” Zack said. “And he looks just like Izzy did when she was a baby.”