What Was Mine (3 page)

The press has it all wrong. It was not premeditated.

T
he agency had summer hours: every other Friday off.

August 10, 1990, was an off Friday for me. I convinced myself, as I sometimes did before pointing the car toward IKEA, that I needed to buy something there. The heat was unbearable, air conditioners were taxing operational systems all over the East Coast, and there were rumors that the strain would cause a blackout. I needed candles and IKEA sold them—perhaps sells them still—in handy boxes of many for a bargain price.

There I was, innocently trawling the aisles, empty yellow bag slung over my shoulder. (I always took a bag from a greeter when I came in, so as to look shopperly.) I was trying to remember where candles were, when I came upon a baby sitting alone in a cart. Not sitting, exactly. The baby was too young to sit. She was slumped in a plastic infant carrier which was the same yellow as the bags. The carrier was attached to the seat of the shopping cart, as was common in the days before car seats became portable. The baby was in a fallen-over position that looked extremely uncomfortable. Her eyes were open and wide and blue. She was staring at me and my skin prickled all over. Her face looked exactly like the one on the cover of a picture book I'd loved as a child:
Baby's First Christmas.
Whenever I thought of having a baby, hers was the baby's face I'd imagined. She was a girl, I knew. Her sunsuit was pink. She
looked at me wonderingly, as if trying to work out where she'd seen me before. When she smiled a gummy grin, I felt a sea swell under my breastbone.

No one else was around. The baby was alone in the long, empty aisle. Her eyes were bright with expectation. A wisp of blond stood at the top of her head. It was as if the cart was a spaceship that had landed, bringing her to me.

“How old is she?” asked a passing shopper who was pregnant and pushing a cart full of wicker. She gazed at the baby with admiration and I welled with an inexplicable pride.

“Two months,” I said, without thinking, beaming idiotically, as if the baby were mine.

“Two months? She's enormous!” and I guessed that I had grossly miscalculated.

Now the baby was listing further in the seat, held by straps, but not very tightly. There was a chance she could fall. I saw that the woman expected me to prop her up.

I can honestly say that my only intention in reaching into the cart was to right the baby. But as soon as my palms pressed against her doughy arms, I felt a force so strong I can still feel the bind in my chest. Her skin was cold. She had goose bumps. She was dressed for heat, not for air-conditioning, wearing a lacy bib, but no shirt. The folds of her neck were slick with drool, making her susceptible to drafts. She could catch pneumonia!

As I straightened her in the seat, she gazed at me with what looked to be gratitude. I inhaled a sweet scent from the down on her scalp and a flow of something warm started through me.

The pregnant woman leaned on her cart and pushed away.

How could someone leave a baby alone in a shopping cart? Anyone might come along and take her, someone who might do her harm. I couldn't just leave her there.

I decided to take her to the front of the store, to one of the cashiers.
As soon as the cart began to move, the baby brightened and looked around, pumping her bare feet as if to help propel us on the little journey we'd embarked on together. The cart glided easily, almost of its own accord, down one aisle and up another, toward the bank of cash registers at the front of the store.

Then, it was moving away from the registers, toward the exit sign, four vivid red letters lurid in their suggestiveness to me. I told myself: I was only taking her outside for a minute, to get her out of the cold. She could catch a chill. A deathly chill. The air outside would warm her up.

And then, we were within inches of the exit doors, when alarms went off, and I do what I always do when I panic—I froze. A tumult sounded, electronic bells were banging and bonging, and the baby began to cry as a woman in uniform hurried toward us. I felt a sudden distance from my own body, as if I were watching myself on a movie screen, wondering how the picture would turn out.

The woman smelled like jasmine, which, oddly, was the name on the badge over her breast:
Jasmine, Security.
But her eyes weren't accusing, they were apologetic.

“Guess your baby forgot to pay for this,” she said, smiling as she leaned into the cart and wriggled a rubber duck from inside the baby's sunsuit. She squeaked the toy, which made the baby stop crying, and waved us into the bright, waiting world.

My ears were throbbing with the sound of my own heart as I unstrapped the baby. I lifted her cautiously out of the cart. She was heavier than I thought she would be. Talcum, a scent I hadn't inhaled in years, came to me as I pressed her soft weight to my chest. Rubbing her back in circles to keep her calm, a motion resurrected from years of babysitting, I dropped my chin on her back (a possessive gesture I noticed often in mothers) and walked quickly—but not too quickly—through outer doors which opened automatically to release us. Us! Oh, the enormity implied by that diminutive
word, how exhilarated I was by its sudden insinuation into my consciousness.

The heat of the unconditioned air was a shocking contrast to the cool inside the store and this moving from the comfort of one place to the shock of another brought to mind the process of birth, which I'd often imagined—though not in this way.

I
even apologized to her. God forgive me. It never crossed my mind she was a kidnapper. It was my first job as security. It was a sophisticated system, state of the art they'd invested in because they were afraid of high shrinkage—retail for shoplifting—because of the area. I was told the system was sensitive. They were still getting the kinks out. I was supposed to check bags of anybody who set off the alarm, but the lady didn't have any bags. I saw the duck in the baby's clothes. It had a sticker. Stickers were always falling off one thing and onto another, and sure enough, the duck was marked
SHOWR CRTN.
I sent them on their way.

The security cam hadn't worked that day. Some electronic had failed. We didn't know it until the next day when the FBI requested tapes. There was no footage to identify her and I couldn't remember anything about her except she was white. If only I'd detained her for a minute, things could have been different, is what I kept telling myself for years.

H
ow many times have I relived that terrible day, the day of the “event,” as Tom, my ex, called it almost as soon as it happened, distancing himself from it, or trying to, as if it had impaled some other family, some far-flung unlucky family you read about in the news.

Luck had always been with us before. We both had good jobs, or what I thought was good in those days, when career and financial success were still paramount. Tom was a lawyer on Wall Street and I'd just been promoted to sales manager at AT&T, a top-ten company for working mothers. We'd recently renovated a colonial in Cranford, in a good school district. The mortgage was already half paid down.

Of course, luckiest of all, we had a new baby. A wondrous, perfect baby girl, Natalie. Tom thought she was named for his mother, but secretly, I'd named her after the secretary to my first boss, a girl whose carriage and delicate facial structure I found so beguiling that my breath stopped each time I had to approach my boss's desk.

That morning, I overslept the alarm. I was tempted to leave out this detail later, in the recountings I made to the police and the press. I thought it made me sound lazy and was afraid this detail—a lackadaisical mother!—might prejudice people against me and reduce the urgency of the search. But I didn't hold back even this
morsel of memory, in case it was an important piece to the puzzle. I was already beginning to apprehend the connectedness of the universe.

At 7:58 a.m. the phone rang, pulling me out of a dream. I remember the time because I was shocked to see the numbers on the Dream Machine clock switching over, dropping from 7:57 to an impossible 7:58, with a soft click, well past the time I'd usually be getting Natalie up and changed and fed and ready for Charu to dress her in whatever outfit I'd laid out on the bathinette.

What was the dream, a policewoman wanted to know, but how could I remember? I didn't put much stock in dreams in those days and didn't see what dreams had to do with the nightmare of the reality that had descended upon us.

Still groggy from sleep, I reached for the phone, knocking over a wineglass that was on the nightstand. I never could get that red stain out of the carpet, though I scrubbed it with every product imaginable. When we put the house on the market a year later, I pulled the bed over, to hide it.

I couldn't tell who had called, at first. The snooze alarm was going off and the buzzer was so loud I couldn't hear whoever was on the other end of the line. At first, I thought it must be Tom calling from the office, but he'd still be on the 7:49, his car phone out of his reach, embedded in the dashboard of his new car parked at the lot. The only way he'd be able to call from a train would have been from a cell phone which he didn't have, practically no one had one in those days, no one but me. The company had given it to me the month before. AT&T had just started a policy of letting new mothers work off premise. My last month on maternity leave, an IT guy had come out to the house to set me up with a company computer, fax machine, even a cellular phone, a new compact model the company was coming out with and touting because it weighed less than a pound. I could test-drive it for R&D, he said.

I thought maybe the caller was Tom's mother. She sometimes called at odd hours and maybe they were putting off their drive up from Virginia. They were due to drive up that weekend, to meet the baby. It was already Friday! They'd be there the next day and there was still lots to do to get the house ready for them. I'd wanted to give them the master bedroom, but Tom felt that wasn't necessary, they could stay in the room we both used as an office. That room was fine, but its bathroom needed a few things: a shower curtain, a bath mat, a hanging shelf for toiletries. I planned to run out after a meeting, to go shopping at Conran's, which was a few blocks away from the AT&T office on Forty-Eighth where I worked.

When I heard Charu's voice, my heart sank. If Charu was calling, it meant that she wouldn't be coming at 8:30 like she usually did. Without a babysitter, I was in trouble—or so I thought, then still unaware of what real trouble was. Without a babysitter, I couldn't go into the office, I wouldn't be able to deliver the report I was due to present at the meeting that afternoon. My boss had chosen me to present it in his stead and I'd been up until 2 a.m. the night before, rearranging slides and rehearsing words I had memorized, words meant to sound spontaneous, but which I didn't dare trust to spontaneity, because the thought of public speaking sent shivers down the back of my legs. Little did I know that my preparation that night was readying me to speak on television, for the first time.

A
s I was talking to Charu, Natalie woke up. I could hear her on the monitor, the little song she used to sing to herself upon waking. I knew exactly how long that song would last—three minutes. Three minutes would give me just enough time to call the office and say I wasn't coming in. I dreaded making that call. The report was important. If I delivered it well, it could mean I'd get the new account I'd
been angling for. But of course, by the end of the day, my career wouldn't matter to me anymore.

I hung up with Charu. I wasn't angry with her, as some news reports said I was. How could I be angry? It wasn't her fault that her son was sick and she couldn't come in. I was frustrated with myself for having no backup to call. I supposed I could call in a sitting service, but I worried about leaving a four-month-old baby in the care of someone I hadn't met. Of course, later, I wished with all of my heart that I'd called in that service.

I left a message with the group secretary saying I wouldn't be in. My boss wouldn't be happy, but what could I do? Bring a four-month-old in and hope she wouldn't roll off the table when I made the presentation? Now I hear the company has day care on-site, but that was a distant dream in 1990.

I still ache to remember how distracted I was with Natalie that morning which turned out to be the last I'd spend with her for twenty-one years. I look back at my old, unseeing self lifting my baby out of the crib, thinking not of her, but of the consequences of having to take care of her, and wish I could reach back and shake myself into consciousness.

If I could grab back a minute of my life, it would be when I laid her on the vinyl mat of the changing table, raining talcum on her as she gurgled and kicked in the moment before I put on her last diaper. I'd look at her, really look at her as I buttoned the straps of her new sunsuit, inhaling her sweet scalp as I took my daughter into my arms for what would be the last time in her babyhood. I'd give her my full attention, instead of what I was thinking of instead: of the report due at work, the visit from Tom's parents the next day. No. If I could take back any minute, of course, it would be when I turned my back on her in the store. That's the minute I'd go back to, and change.

I worked at home that morning at the dining room table, Natalie happy in her swing beside me. She loved to go back and forth in that swing.
Battery-operated swings had just come out. Tom and I called it our time machine, because putting her in it gave us at least twenty minutes to do whatever we had to do. We assumed we had all the time in the world with her. She'd sit in that swing with a beatific expression, listening to an electronic version of “It's a Small World.” Her eyes fixed on some odd object of fascination: a knob on a cabinet, a water stain on the baseboard. She'd assume a half smile, then list to one side, a position that looked uncomfortable but didn't seem to bother her. She'd frown when I'd right her and soon she'd be happily listing again, her lids drooping lower and lower until she passed out, as if drunk.