Читать книгу Little Girl Gone: The can’t-put-it-down psychological thriller - Alexandra Burt - Страница 11

One year, I told myself, take one year and figure out what you want. The concept of ‘wanting’ was a very vague one and after spending a larger part of the self-imposed deadline in bars, flirting with men who meant nothing to me, I was waiting for some sort of a sign, some sort of higher intervention one might refer to as palm reader stuff. I’d walk down 57th Street and tell myself the next billboard that catches my eye, the next car graphic, tote bag, or flier blowing my way was going to be the answer.

At the time, I worked at a health insurance call center where I met a woman who, at first glance, seemed out of place. Delilah, middle-aged, short and heavy set, was covered in tattoos she hid amazingly well under white oversized blouses and cardigans. She was far removed from the twenty-somethings filling up the cubicles around her. Every time she pushed back her cardigan sleeves, a gesture signaling a difficult customer, a tattoo on her forearm emerged; ‘Dead Men Tell No Tales.’

‘You keep looking at my tattoo,’ she said and muted her headset in the cubicle next to mine.

‘Quite the message,’ I replied.

‘Kind of a funny story,’ she said.

She told me she’d been a prison guard for 25 years and with every passing year her people skills took a turn for the worst. Her husband left her and none of her children were speaking to her. As a matter of self-preservation she decided to spend the rest of her working career in customer service.

‘Forces me to work on myself every day,’ she added and switched to a noncommittal voice accepting the next call in the queue.

The concept intrigued me and I wondered about my own character shortcomings. If I had to challenge a part of myself, what part would that be? At the end of my shift I came to the conclusion that I did not like people very much, never sought lasting friendships, and distrust of humanity was an issue I ought to tackle. That day, I quit my job at the call center and decided to become a waitress.

Two days later I found a job as a hostess at ‘La Luna,’ a bar and grill in Manhattan, mostly frequented by judges, DAs, defense lawyers, prosecutors, and armies of executives working in the surrounding buildings. La Luna’s neighborhood on Lexington and 50th was a hodgepodge of restaurants and bars, office buildings, law offices, and an occasional Starbucks to break up the monotony.

I saw Jack standing in line, waiting to be seated. He wasn’t stunningly attractive or anything unusual that caught my eye, but still I couldn’t wait for him to get to the front of the line. I liked the way he looked into my eyes and weighed his words before he spoke.

‘Jack Connor,’ he said and straightened his tie. He was expecting a party of two to join him and demanded the best table in the house.

‘Important meeting,’ he added and followed me to a table at the far end of the restaurant.

When we reached it, he looked around and pointed towards a table by the front window.

‘I think I’d prefer that one.’

That’s how I met Jack. Me challenging myself, him telling me what I offered him wasn’t good enough. Later Jack read my name off the tag on my blouse, his voice a soft baritone.

‘Estelle Paradise.’

Over the years, I had heard many jokes regarding my name and I was prepared for one then. Too often, high-powered lawyers saw me as easy prey or a cheap thrill on a Friday afternoon.

Jack was lanky and wholesome, but the dark circles under his eyes spoke of long hours and work beyond his physical capacity. I realized that his left eyebrow was noticeably raised and had a much more pronounced curve, as if the world was under his constant scrutiny.

‘You keep looking at my eye,’ he said.

‘I don’t mean to, I’m sorry.’ I blushed and turned away. There was something slightly off about his face and his facial expression seemed to be in a constant state of disapproval.

‘Hypertropia,’ he said and wiggled his brows. ‘It’s a muscle imbalance, the visual axis of one eye is higher than the other. It’s hereditary. I wore glasses when I was younger but short of surgery one eye will always be slightly higher.’

We parted and I forgot about him until the very next day when he dropped by for a drink. He sat at the bar and watched me as I walked the floor.

‘You know what you should do?’ Jack asked that day.

‘What’s that?’ I held a stack of menus between us like a shield.

‘Check to see the progression of the tables instead of just marking the occupied tables at your station.’

‘And why would I do that?’

He looked at me puzzled. ‘To see if the tables are on dessert or if they’ve paid their checks. It expedites the operation.’

‘I’ll keep that in mind,’ I said and laughed, trying not to focus on his eye again.

‘Would you go out on a date with me?’ Jack’s voice shook slightly, enough to be noticeable if you paid close attention.

‘We’re not allowed to go on dates with patrons,’ I lied and brushed invisible crumbs off my blouse. No one cared who we dated, the waitress and hostess turnaround was staggering. Looking back, was I playing hard to get? I guess deep down I didn’t want him to give up.

His eyes remained on my chest, and then he got up and downed his drink. ‘If I stop coming will you go out with me then?’

‘Don’t hold your breath,’ I said and smiled at him.

A month later, we went on our first date. I wore my best dress, black, sleeveless, while he wore khakis and a blue unbuttoned shirt. A movie and then dinner, during which we both had too much to drink. In my tipsy stupor I must have told him about my rent being late because he offered to pay for the next month.

‘Come on,’ he said, ‘let me do something for you.’

That line got to me. Any other night the comment wouldn’t have, I was used to getting by and had always been able to muddle through, but money was tight, I was struggling to keep up with my student loan payments, and I was stuck in a hostess position because all the waitress slots, popular due to the high tips, were filled.

That night, Jack’s shirt smelled of starch and I wondered how his lips would feel on mine. My mouth on his mouth. A taste of his lips, of what life could be if I let him do something for me. I had yet to increase my love for humankind in general and wondered at Delilah’s story setting me on this unexpected path.

Our second date, during which I expected reality to set in and expose how different we really were, Jack sealed the deal for me. On our way to the restaurant we walked down Lexington, and as the temperature dropped, he put his coat around my shoulders. The itchy wool and the smooth lining was every cliché of every romantic movie I had ever seen. The guy who put his coat around the girl’s shoulders is the good guy. Good guys give you their coat, bad guys take your clothes off.

After dinner I told him about my dating rules. ‘Thirty days. No making out, no sex.’ It was more or less a joke but Jack – unshakable, undeterred Jack – didn’t flinch.

‘I’ve got my own rule. It’s more like one hundred and eighty days, but okay. I accept,’ he said and added. ‘So, we’re officially on probation?’

‘Speaking of probation, whose side are you on?’ I asked while we passed the Met Life building. ‘Career wise,’ I added and moved my body closer to his as we walked hand in hand. ‘I’ve always wondered how lawyers figure out if they should become a defense lawyer or a prosecutor. Seems like two sides of the law to me.’

‘You just pick a side,’ he said and furrowed his brow as if my question made no sense at all.

When I asked him what he wanted to do years from now, he said ‘I like being a defense lawyer but I’m leaning more towards Assistant DA. From there, District DA, then judge.’

‘And then you’ll run for public office like mayor or something?’ I joked.

‘Mayor?’ He paused. ‘Probably not. I don’t do well with crowds and public speaking. Supreme Court maybe. They submit their rulings in writing. Seems like the perfect fit.’

I didn’t know what to make of his comment – his choice of career seemed odd to me – but maybe there was a difference between speaking in front of crowds and arguing a case in court. All in all his arrogance was harmless and refreshing.

‘Defenders probably see the good in everyone,’ I said. ‘Prosecutors expect everyone to be a criminal. Don’t you have to take a stand in your heart?’

‘My heart? That’s a very emotional way of looking at the world.’

‘Tell me about growing up,’ I said, wanting to change the subject.

Jack named his childhood experiences like a grocery list. ‘New Jersey, public schools, wrestling team, single mom.’ He paused slightly, then continued. ‘An only child, sort of. My mother was a state employee at the NY city library. We struggled, to say the least. My mother was a saint, she never even raised her voice at me.’

‘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 spoke 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 bury myself into his arms, I heard the Principal’s voice over the loudspeaker. 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. When 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 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. She had surgery but they just stitched her back up, there was nothing they could do. Eventually the cancer 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 died in a car accident, I still couldn’t make up my mind if I should feel cheated out of her attention or happy for her to have had a career of her own.

That night, we broke the 30-days-no-sex rule and made love for the first time. It was a chaotic mess of fidgeting with the condom wrapper and not knowing where to put our 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. He spoke with confidence, made eye contact, and told anecdotes and jokes. There wasn’t even a hint of anxiety in his voice or his demeanor and later I found out that speaking in front of crowds wasn’t his problem at all.

On our way to the event room, Jack excused himself, drops of perspiration emerging from his hairline. 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 bathroom, checked the coatroom and behind the stage, but Jack had all but disappeared. His cell went to voicemail and I finally decided to hail a cab and go home. I found him vomiting behind a portaloo in a construction zone in the parking lot.

Jack was covered in sweat and 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. I always doubted the explanation and wondered if it wasn’t about speaking in public but having to mingle with people afterwards 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. Can we drop it now?’

Jack was unpredictable in many ways. He was confident on one hand, yet socially inept on the other. I observed a temper when things went out of control but Jack’s attitude was covert to anyone who didn’t know him. As moody as he was, he didn’t take kindly to people who exhibited the same characteristics; if I seemed grumpy, he assumed I was mad with him – no other explanation occurred to him. There were battles I chose not to fight, and I learned early on which ones those were.

A few months later, I told Jack I might be pregnant. There was an unsure smile and a long silence as we waited for the test results. I watched him pace around the room while the minutes passed slowly; there was so much sincerity in him and it felt as if we’d known each other forever. By the time the faint pink line appeared in the result window, reality started to set in. Before I fully comprehended what just happened, happiness spread across his face. I remember thinking he’s the person I want to love forever.

‘Let’s get married,’ he said.

‘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.

‘What my father did is irrelevant. I don’t allow other people’s shortcomings to affect my life decisions. You have to remove yourself from that. But …’ his voice became gentle and he held my face and kissed me, ‘my child won’t be raised by another man.’

Like shells on a beach I collected my feelings; there was excitement and joy – I loved Jack, of that I was sure – and trepidation. Apprehension that we were making the right decision, that I was about to become the most important person in someone’s life, and then there was sheer confusion. I had never asked myself if I wanted to be a mother. Becoming Jack’s wife wasn’t that far of a stretch but motherhood seemed almost alien. My mind attempted 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, and 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. No white stretch limousine, no heaving of the bridal bouquet into a group of shrieking bridesmaids, no rice, 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. Later I thought about it and realized maybe it was my way of holding on to my family that I had lost a long time ago? I didn’t dwell on it.

The courthouse clerk took a photo of us, the only one we have of our wedding day. We didn’t ask, the clerk basically insisted.

Later, months later, as I flipped through our only photo album, it occurred to me that there were so few pictures of us they were almost not worth organizing. A picture of us in front of a Christmas tree at Jack’s law firm, our smiles bright, Jack’s bowtie and starched shirt immaculate, my hair slightly ruffled, my eyes somewhat cast with the effects of too many martinis. We won a trip to the Bahamas that day, but Jack donated the tickets to a charity because he couldn’t take any time off. One on New Year’s Eve, table decorations of upturned black top hats, confetti in our hair. The only memory of that night’s the hangover I had the next day.

In our wedding picture Jack wore a black suit and a dark blue tie. I was in a cotton dress, white, versatile, appropriate for many occasions. The pregnancy wasn’t showing yet, my stomach was still flat. 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, the hallway courthouse bench, Jack’s briefcase photobombing us from the edge of the photograph.

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

On the day of the 20 weeks 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 fact that there was a human inside of me, however small, seemed inconceivable, let alone the fact 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 so cold that it made 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 beautiful string of pearls. My throat closed up and tears gathered in my eyes. 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. What I had known for a while was now visible on a screen; a human being floating 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 Jack’s dismay, I had not only read compulsively on fetal development, I was also obsessing about anything hereditary. Fascinated by a story of a doctor who performed fetal heart surgery on a woman with an ectopic pregnancy, I had found an article that described the intact and fully transparent embryonic sac. And there was the image of a tiny human, no larger than an inch, swimming in amniotic fluid, its head bowed and legs flexed upward.

I religiously followed Dr Bowers’ advice, took my daily vitamins, got a lot of sleep, didn’t lift anything heavy, but the part about her being in my potentially faulty body was something that pushed me over the edge. I assumed I was unlucky somehow – I had lost my family, had had no luck with relationships in general, romantic or otherwise, I’d bought a used car once and its engine went up in flames two weeks later, neither college nor jobs had ever resulted in a career – so there was some sort of tragic tie to everything I did. My marriage to Jack was different; Jack was his own person – and for all accounts, everything he’d ever touched he’d turned into gold – but this pregnancy was all up to me. This fetus inside of me relied on my body, but what about those things beyond my control? Would I be able to pull this off without a hitch?

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 coronary malformation or defect.’ Dr Bowers had taken off his glasses and looked at me as if I was 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 appointments, had even gone so far as to forbid me to see another specialist. Jack also refused to engage in such conversations and so I tried to silence the worry in my head, kept it in a safe place along with the anxiousness and the panic. I didn’t want to go there then, when we had just seen our baby’s face on the monitor.

The nurse had just told us everything was fine, the ultrasound was perfect, but I was so anxious that suddenly the baby started doing somersaults inside of me. I wanted to tell Jack about my fears, about my attempts to do everything possible to make sure this baby was going to be healthy.

‘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 Jack. All that boyish charm, a father-to-be, eyes blazing, making even her feel special sharing this moment with us, as if nothing mattered more than that Jack was engaged and reassuring.

‘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 32 hours of labor, ‘normal for a first time mom’ according to Dr Bowers, I was exhausted and had almost forgotten why I was even there. All I wanted was for the pain to stop and to close my eyes. After four hours of unsuccessful pushing, Dr Bowers ordered a caesarean 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 caesarean, and imagined it a hundred times, this 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. Had I really pulled this off? Had I been able to make bones from my bones, flesh from my flesh, a healthy and perfect baby? She looked the part but the whole ten fingers, ten toes thing didn’t make a lot of sense to me. What about her heart, her brain, her lungs? How could I ever be sure she was all right? So much room for error, so much at stake.

I asked the nurse for the Apgar score and she looked at me puzzled. ‘You have a beautiful baby, she’s 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 travelled 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 had potentially gone wrong. Rogue cells, unlucky DNA, how could I ever rest assured?

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 then 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 her heart.