Wish Club (14 page)

“I saw Henry O’Connor in the hall. He’s calling 9-1-1.”

“Good.” Marion gave the baby a quick once-over before she clamped down on his umbilical cord with her fingers. She turned to the boy on the examining table behind her, whom Claudia hadn’t noticed until right then. “Sean, you’re done,” she said, nodding her head toward the door. “Tell Mr. Redding I said you can sit out gym today.”

Sean was staring, red-nosed and open-mouthed, at the bloody baby in Marion’s arms. A little trickle of snot seeped from one of his nostrils.

“Sean, I said you’re done.”

“Uh,” Sean tore his eyes from the baby and looked up at Marion. “Uh, Mr. Redding said he wanted a node.”

“Just tell him I SAID SO and go tell him NOW.”

Sean stared at Marion with a stunned look for about a nanosecond before he tore out of her office.

Marion calmly pulled a sheet from a drawer under the examining table and wiped the baby off before pulling out another one and wrapping him up in it tightly.

She held him so naturally, pacing the room, her shoulders relaxed. Claudia knew she’d raised four children and the majority of them now had children of their own. She was accustomed to holding little babies, and she made it look as if it were the most natural thing in the world to be standing in the first-floor nurse’s office at the Arthur G. Strawn Academy holding a baby that had just been pulled out of the trash.

The baby must have understood he was in good hands because he stopped his crying. “You are quite a little trooper.” Marion’s nose did Eskimo air kisses with the baby’s nose. “We’ve got an ambulance on the way. They’re going to take you to the hospital where you’ll get some extra-special care.”

Watching Marion pace the office, idly chatting and cooing over the newborn, Claudia could almost forgive her for all her nosey, boorish gossip and uninvited advice.

Well, the gossip this little incident was going to stir up would surely blow away anything Marion could dish out. The news vans would probably be rolling up shortly after—maybe even before—the ambulance did. Claudia didn’t have to look outside the door to know the two girls sitting in the waiting area were long gone—discreetly text-messaging their friends while hiding behind locker doors, all symptoms of premenstrual cramping long forgotten.

“You found him in the trash can?” Marion looked up at her now.

“He sounded like a cat. I thought someone—I thought there was a cat, a kitten in there at first. But the blood. I couldn’t believe it when I reached in and found him. I mean a baby! Who could do such a thing? To a baby?”

“Did you see the mother? Who was it?”

“There was no one else around. I have no idea where she is—or who she is.”

“Call Charles’s office. He needs to know about this. Let’s get him down here. And we need to try to find the mother, too.”

Claudia went over to Marion’s desk and picked up the phone to call Headmaster Peterson.

It felt as if her whole body were vibrating, she was so angry—or sad. Maybe
betrayed
was the better word, because she didn’t feel like crying. She felt like a part of her world had cracked. Like the vibration in her chest was the aftershock of the earthquake that had just rocked her foundation. Claudia had spent the better part of her life always trying to believe the best of people. She knew the world wasn’t perfect; obviously bad things happened and bad people existed, but they all had the fictional quality of a media story, an intangible feeling of distance to them. The media turned events into stories. It’s what they did. But the stories made it seem like bad things only happened far away, in bad places and in bad neighborhoods. Not here. Not in her world. Not at her school, in the bathroom she used every day.

Peterson’s receptionist picked up the phone. “Is Charles there? It’s Claudia Dubois.”

“Headmaster Peterson is not available at the—”

“You need to tell him to get down to Marion’s office right away.”

“He’s asked that he not be—”

“It’s an emergency…You have to tell him. Interrupt whatever he’s doing and just tell him.” Claudia hung up the phone.

They could hear sirens approaching. Marion looked up from her cooing. “I think it would be best if we drew as little attention to ourselves as possible.”

Claudia nodded. This was the Marion she knew. The one who would try, like Peterson, to avoid scandal for the school.

Marion looked down, frowning, at the front of Claudia’s blood-stained sweater.

“Oh.” Claudia quickly took her jacket off, pressed it to her stomach, and crossed her arms over it to hide most of the blood. “Better?”

Marion nodded, but one corner of her mouth was still turned down in a frown.

“I’m going to cover him as much as I can with the sheet. It’s only a few steps to the front door, but…you should hold your arms just like that, but maybe you’re in pain?” She looked pointedly at Claudia. “Maybe you slipped on the floor in the bathroom and hurt your arm. Something like that.”

Claudia looked back at her for a moment, then decided it would be best to play along. “Okay, I get it, make it look like
I
got hurt.”

Marion nodded. “Any loud murmurs from our little champ here and your pain immediately escalates. Kapeesh?”

“I—yeah, okay—but don’t you think it might already be too late? That boy, Sean—and the two girls in the waiting room. Henry O’Connor.”

Marion silenced her with a look.

“Okay, okay. My arm’s hurt.” Claudia didn’t want any trouble with Marion, because she knew Marion and Peterson were close. Peterson had probably gotten an earful about Claudia’s slacker tendencies from April. She didn’t need trouble with Marion, too. Claudia would play along with the ruse for her own sake—if not for the sake of the fine reputation of their fine school.

The ambulance pulled into the circular drive in front and the paramedics were getting out when Claudia rotated out the door, meeting them on the sidewalk. They saw the blood on her sweater and she had to hold them off, telling them their patient was coming through the revolving door behind her.

With her arms wrapped around herself in an effort to keep warm now, instead of hiding blood, Claudia stood at the back door of the ambulance watching the two men check out the baby. They worked quickly, putting a clamp on his umbilical cord and taking his vital signs.

A handful of students had stepped outside the school lobby and gathered on the sidewalk next to the ambulance. They stayed several yards away from Claudia, but more students were coming up from the street on the front sidewalk.

“He’s going to be okay, right?” Claudia asked, leaning in a little closer to the back door.

“These babies tend to be pretty resilient,” one of the paramedics said without looking up.

She couldn’t imagine how many of “these babies” he must have seen to make him so jaded by the time he got to this one.

“What’s going to happen to him?”

He shrugged. “Social Services usually takes over at the hospital.”

Claudia glanced at the small crowd that was gathering before looking at Marion. “Maybe I should go with.”

Claudia couldn’t decipher Marion’s odd look—confused, her lips thrust out and eyebrows raised. Didn’t she understand why Claudia wanted to follow this baby? Or was she pissed that she hadn’t thought of it first, it being in keeping with the whole broken-arm ploy? Or maybe Marion was thinking it was typical of a teacher to try to play hooky in the middle of the day—just another slacker.

The driver shrugged at Claudia again.
Whatever.
It was obvious he didn’t care if she stayed or went. “If you’re comin’,” he said, “you gotta come now.” He shut the rear doors of the ambulance and pointed up front toward the passenger side, before disappearing around the back.

With a quick glance at Marion, Claudia walked over to the passenger side and climbed in. Before her door was shut the driver started pulling out of the drive, at the same time reaching over to the center console to press a button. The siren started.

From the rearview mirror outside her window, Claudia could see Peterson spinning out of the revolving door. He met Marion on the sidewalk and he reached out as if to touch her upper arm, but he pulled his hand back at the last second. They exchanged a few words and Peterson gestured his arm out at the ambulance as it rolled away.

Peterson was tall and always looked distinguished in his dark suits and gleaming black Salvatore Ferragamo oxford shoes, but he had a disheveled quality about him now. His face was flushed, his tie just ever so slightly askew.

Claudia watched them grow smaller in the mirror, then out of sight completely as the ambulance turned the corner and sped on its way. She stared at the mirror even after they’d disappeared, and she noticed that the usual admonition, “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear,” was missing.

Chapter Fourteen

The
ambulance driver appeared nonchalant as he wove quickly in and out of traffic. Claudia couldn’t tell if he was oblivious to her presence or, worse, showing off because of it. He picked up the radio from the center console and told whoever it was on the other end that Unit Eight was a “two-four” at Strawn and they were “five-out” from Mercy. Claudia assumed he would call Mercy next to give their ETA, like they did on TV, but he just put the mike back in its cradle.

They raced through the familiar streets faster than she’d ever gone down them before, and she wondered if the baby’s condition was that critical or if the driver was just driving that fast because he could. Although there were a surprising number of assholes who wouldn’t move out of the way for an ambulance. Maybe that was how the driver got his contempt for the road. Claudia could see one such asshole in her side mirror, a black Lexus following closely behind them, passing all the drivers who had pulled over, turning someone else’s misfortune to his advantage—a real-life ambulance chaser.

What a world to be born into, she thought. A world in which it seemed no one gave a shit about anyone else, in which everyone seemed only to care about themselves: a world in which a young girl can give birth in the bathroom of a prestigious private school and literally throw her baby away. Why? Because it interfered with what? Her plans for herself? Other people’s plans for her? What? There was not one single reason—not any combination of reasons—that Claudia could think of to excuse it.

It was so unfair. All the effort she and Dan had been putting into trying to have a baby, and here some teenager just effortlessly gives birth in a high school bathroom and, seemingly just as effortlessly, abandons it.

Claudia wondered why the girl had done it that way, why she hadn’t gotten help from someone—a teacher or her parents—anyone. There were posters all over the place, on the buses and on the subway, asking “Pregnant? We can help.” But Claudia realized the Strawn girls weren’t exactly the public-transportation type.

That girl must have felt she was all alone.

How long would it take them to find her? And what about the father? This could become a huge, long-drawn-out mess. Peterson must be having a cow. The thought gave Claudia schadenfreude as she imagined him pacing up and down his office, wearing out his expensive shoes, worrying about the potential disgrace to the Strawn Academy.

Claudia wondered how anyone could have hidden an entire pregnancy. April Sibley had used the bathroom earlier during third period—maybe she had seen something. Claudia visualized the way April’s forehead had furrowed while taking her test, the way her hand had gripped her pen with white knuckles. She’d seemed so agitated.

Oh my God. Maybe it was April.

No, of course not April. Even though this baby was small, he looked to Claudia’s inexpert eye to be about full term, and April hadn’t put on any weight—well, not that Claudia had noticed anyway. April had always been a little on the plump side. But certainly someone so hell-bent on becoming valedictorian wouldn’t allow herself to get pregnant, wouldn’t let something like this get in the way—

Oh my God.
Peterson was really going to have a cow—or maybe a grandnephew. What kind of a mother would April be? She was so young.

Well, you never know. People can surprise you sometimes. Maybe April, or whoever it was, would rise to the occasion, but Claudia still thought it would be better to be raised by people who really wanted you in the first place, by people who loved children and who wanted nothing more than to have children.

People like her and Dan.

The idea came into focus in her mind the way a stereogram did. It crept into view like the 3-D image, appearing briefly only to quickly disappear, and finally reappearing for good when she focused on it the right way. Once she got it. She remembered how empty her arms had felt when she’d handed the baby over to Marion; how, after just a few short moments, they missed the weight and warmth of him. Maybe, just maybe, she was meant to find this child. Maybe, somehow, he was meant to be hers.

Oh that’s crazy. No way. Not a baby that could be one of her student’s. Maybe April’s. Related to Peterson. No.

Claudia crossed her arms over her chest and looked out the window, trying to ignore the recklessness of the driver.

But maybe.

And then it hit her. Her wish. The chant from Wish Club.

The connection came barreling into her like a sucker punch.
No more waiting, no more strife, bring to her a brand new life.

Had they done this? Could she be the one responsible for
this?
They’d wished that she get a baby
without delay
and here it was, one month later and she had found a baby. No one can deliver a baby more
without delay
than that.

She stared out the front window of the ambulance, numb and not seeing. Her head vibrated with thoughts of wishes and connections and fate and hope. She didn’t notice they were near the hospital until the driver shut off the siren and it began to wind down.

The ambulance pulled up the ramp and stopped by the entrance to the emergency room.

Claudia thought it was something you’d probably never notice—how long it took for the sound of the siren to dissipate completely—unless you were actually inside the ambulance. The men took the baby from the back and slammed the doors.

She got out, too, and started to follow them, thinking it was a strange thing for her to be paying attention to right now—the long slow exhalation of a siren, a sigh that had become softer and softer until it faded out, as if all its air had been spent.

The
playground music of squeaky swings and high voices filled the background while Jill sketched at the edge of the park. The mild, late-February weather had brought everyone out today, enjoying a reprieve from the cold and the snow, which still sat in huge gray piles from when it had been plowed.

Charcoal dust coated Jill’s fingertips, making them look a little like the soot-coated piles of melting snow that surrounded her as she worked sketching the naked trees. She liked the way the catalpa trees looked in winter, their gnarled and confused limbs clinging to the seedpods, waiting for a real spring day to litter them down. She didn’t like the way her drawing was going, however. Everything seemed just a little bit off—out of perspective or proportion. It was just a rough patch, that was all. “You can’t be Picasso every day.”
Who’d said that?
She couldn’t remember where she’d heard it, but she figured whoever had said it must have been an artist, too.

Jill was taking a break from her studio, where her painting over the past few days had become more and more laborious. Taking advantage of the warm weather, Jill had come outside to try to shake off some of her tension or nerves or whatever it was that was making it so challenging to work. She really had put a lot of pressure on herself, trying to make this show her big, breakout show. And that big canvas.
Ugh.
It was good to get away, to work on something different to try to spur her creativity. Jill focused on the gnarled branches again, trying to bring them back into scale with the rest of the tree.

Every now and then a yell from the playground would rise above all the others, and she’d just now heard someone yell, “Mom?” Jill stopped her drawing and looked up, half expecting to find a bloody mess of a child in a heap by the slide.

Twenty-seven
years ago, she’d been the bloody mess. The morning it had happened had started out like any other, with her nanny, Sophie, waking her up, but during breakfast the day’s planned course of events had changed and her mother had ended up being the one to get her dressed.

“I just bought those, Jilly,” her mother had complained.

Jill’s tights wouldn’t come up all the way at the crotch. They hung suspended between her thighs, and she could feel the breeze through the fabric when she penguin-walked over to where her mother was standing.

A six-year-old Jill smiled into her mother’s forehead while being jostled back and forth, her mother working the tights up, pulling the fabric up her legs in increments until the crotch of her tights hung only a couple of inches below her own. She pulled Jill’s skirt down over them. “I suppose that will have to do.”

Jill could still feel a breeze on her groin when she walked, and the way the elastic rested on her hips seemed precarious, but she didn’t dare argue with her mother on an occasion like this. White tights and a skirt for the playground were bad choices, too, but Jill didn’t dare tell her mother that either, for fear of jeopardizing this fortuitous turn of events. Besides, she knew from experience that nothing she could say about her outfit would change her mother’s mind. Her mother’s word on fashion was the last word. Period.

Her nanny, Sophie, had suggested during breakfast that they go for a walk in the park and feed the ducks in Lincoln Park Zoo, usually one of her favorite past times. But this morning Jill had caught sight of her mother getting coffee in the butler’s pantry.

“I don’t want to feed the ducks. We always have to go feed the stupid ducks,” Jill had said, her fork in her fist, a piece of French toast still stuck in the tines. “I want to go to the playground. Why do I always have to feed the stupid ducks?”

“Okay,” Sophie said, “we be going to playgroun’ then. After breakfast, we can be going.”

“Why can’t Mommy go too?” Jill’s voice started ratcheting up a little louder, a little whinier. “When can Mommy take me? I always have to go with you.”

“You mom very busy. I be taking you to playgroun’.” Sophie had spotted Mrs. Trebelmeier in the butler’s pantry too, and a flicker of fear had passed across her face.

“She’s always busy. What does she always got to do?” Jilly’s sad, sad voice now. “How come she can’t
ever
take me?”

Her mom had come around the corner with her coffee cup in her hand. “How come you can’t ever take me anywhere?” Jill pouted, eyes brimming with just the right amount of water, even though
real
tears had not been an intentional part of this tantrum.

Her mother’s blue eyes glared at her, and Jill’s lower lip quivered, also quite unintentionally.

Sensing the danger, Sophie tried to intervene. “You mom very busy. After breakfast, I be taking you to park—”

“—the playground.”

“—the playgroun’. You mom has lots things to do today.” She stopped, apparently unable to explain what those things might be. Mrs. Trebelmeier glared at Sophie, raising the level of fear in her nanny’s eyes. But then: “My schedule’s not too full this morning, Sophie.” Mrs. Trebelmeier had surprised them both. “I could take Jilly to the park for a little while.”

It was a cold morning under an overcast sky, but Jill’s face was radiant as she held her mother’s hand on their walk to the playground. She had the most beautiful mother: refined, almost regal, and always perfectly turned out.

Jill’s face fell as they approached the playground, though, when she saw that none of her friends were there. She and her mother had arrived a little earlier than usual because Jill hadn’t performed her standard morning litany of tantrums; there had been none of the
I’m not wearing that, I don’t want to brush my teeth, Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! You’re pulling my hair,
You
tie my shoes.
Today, Jilly had been the perfect little lady.

She headed for the merry-go-round first, pushing one foot along the concrete. The hulking metal wheel ground to a squeaky start. She held on to the cold bar and smiled at her mom each time she circled past her bench. Her mom had a pleasant enough expression on her face, but her eyes were focused far away, not on her daughter going around and around.

The merry-go-round was hard for her to push all by herself and Jill quickly lost interest, never able to build up enough speed for her satisfaction. She abandoned it for the slide. The soles of her patent-leather Mary Janes slipped over the metal steps as she scrambled to the top. She slid down with her hands in the air and this time her mother did smile back before calling out, “Be careful not to get your new tights dirty.”

Where could they be?
Jill thought on her way up the steps again. Surely some other kids should be here by now. She scanned the playground as she slid down. She thought she spotted one of her friends outside the far gate and she reached up a hand to wave, but it was just a short blond woman walking by. The ground caught her by surprise and her feet stubbed into it, flipping her over and landing her head on the cement. There was a moment immediately after she hit, before it started to hurt, when she opened her eyes and stared into the ground without moving her head, a moment when she thought, “I’m okay.” But then the pain started, and she peeled her head off the ground, reaching a hand up to find blood.

She couldn’t breathe normally; she could only suck in tiny gasps of air. She got to her knees, but they’d been scraped and she sank back onto the ground. Still the tears wouldn’t come, there was only her heart palpitating hard in her chest and the strange hyperventilating sensation. Blood soaked the hand she held to her forehead, and she looked through her hair for her mother, who was still seated on the same bench, with her gaze directed above and past Jill.