Seven Minutes to Noon (12 page)

“Now would be a good time to let her.” Dr. Matteo leaned forward and placed a hand on Alice’s belly. “Maybe you can’t hear this right now, Alice, but I’ll say it anyway. Dealing with grief when you’re pregnant is a terrible thing. But please, let’s see if you can find a way.”

Alice and Mike left the hospital arm in arm, he detaching to open every door for her, she thanking him quietly each time. But beneath his gallantry and her appreciation of it, a silence loomed between them. They had always been good — too good — at politely avoiding tension, keeping it to themselves until its elements had formed into digestible nuggets. They held their silence on the drive home, until Mike suddenly veered the pickup around a pothole, startling Alice.

She looked at him, his sharp profile edged in sunlight as the pickup passed from under a shade tree. “How are you feeling, Mike?”

“Fine.”

“No, I mean
feeling,
about Lauren. Not ‘do you have a cold.’”

His response was strange, she thought: sad eyes, a self-deprecating shrug of his shoulders as he steered them onto Court Street. “Kind of numb, I guess,” he finally said. “I don’t know what to feel. I mean, it’s kind of terrifying, Alice, isn’t it?”

“Kind of?”

He turned left down Union Street and stopped at a red light. Looked at her. In the harsh noon sunlight that poured through the windshield, his skin looked rich and imperfect as handmade paper. Raw, without color. He hadn’t shaved that morning.

“Are you going back to work today?” she asked him.

“I don’t think so,” he said, glancing at the back of the truck with its load of oak.

“You just picked that up?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

But she knew his deadline for the furniture show was looming; she knew how much it meant to him to do well there.

“Go,” she said. “I’ll be fine. Mom’s on her way.”

“No, Alice, I don’t want to leave you alone.” He turned onto President Street and found a parking spot on their block.

“I’m okay. I’ll rest until she gets here.”

In his moment of hesitation, she knew she was giving him what he wanted: to be alone with his inchoate sadness.

“You sure?”

“I think it’s better if you work.”

He took a long breath. “Maybe just for an hour or so. I could deliver the wood, and Diego could get started on the table.”

She kissed him good-bye and got out of the pickup. Walking along the sidewalk, up their front stoop, she could feel him impatiently waiting for the click of the front door. She turned and waved to him. He waved back. As soon as the door closed behind her, she heard the truck drive away.

She went straight to the bedroom and lay down in the quiet early afternoon, waiting for time to pass, grateful to have been forgiven by blind luck for causing an accident that could have cost her and others so much. She lay there, wishing Mike had chosen to come inside with her, but glad she hadn’t made him. She lay there, missing
Lauren and realizing it was an ache that would not soon disappear. And she lay there, searching her mind for avenues to Ivy, any thought or memory or clue that might help the police track the baby down. Was there anything, any small detail lodged in her mind — a memory, a remark — that might hint at such greedy brutality? Who could have done such an awful thing? Was it someone who knew Lauren? Or a random snare of evil she had stumbled into? Alice lay on her bed, wishing she had never left her dark bedroom this morning. Through the open curtains she watched a lush green tree juggle coins of sunlight outside her window. Only when the doorbell rang just before two o’clock did she get up.

As soon as she opened the front door, Lizzie put down her suitcase and stepped inside. She had lost weight, cut her hair very short and bleached it white-blond in her quest to appear younger than her sixty-one years. She wore new calico rectangular glasses and bright red lipstick. But she didn’t look young; she looked like herself. Beautifully real and consistent under the layers of effort and California glitz.

“Come here, babydoll.”

Stepping into her mother’s arms, Alice smelled the familiar perfume and felt her face screw up reflexively. A lurching breath threatened more tears.

Lizzie drew Alice against her, murmuring, “Come here, come here, come here.”

Nell and Peter were ecstatic to see their grandmother waiting for them outside school at three o’clock. Bypassing Alice, they flew at Lizzie, who fell to the knees of her white slacks and embraced both children at once. They doused her in a rain of chatter all the way to Sweet Matilda’s, where they were being treated to a “fancy snack.” Alice phoned Mike’s cell to let him know where to find them, leaving a message on his voice mail. She didn’t really mind that the delivery had taken longer than expected, but she had begun to miss him and to entertain a tiny, unfamiliar sense of abandonment at his decision not to stay with her that morning.

High tea arrived on a tiered tray of crustless sandwiches, petit fours, droplet cookies, muffins and scones. Alice and Lizzie shared a pot of chamomile tea. The children snuggled on either side of Lizzie on the wall bench while Alice sat alone in a chair, facing them. In her heart, she wanted to be over there in her mother’s lap too. But this was good enough. Just being here together. Every now and then Lizzie sent Alice a kiss through the air.

“How long are you staying, Gamma?” Nell asked. Lizzie was
Gamma
to both children, starting with Nell’s early attempts to say
Grandma.
When Peter learned to talk, he had automatically adopted the nickname.

“Just two nights, sweets. Gamma’s got business in
LA.” She kissed the top of Nell’s messy strawberry head, then stayed fair by kissing Peter’s chocolate mop.

“Really, Mom?” Alice said, failing to hold back her disappointment. “You came so far.”

“This is nothing,” she said. “I’d travel to China for just one meal with my family.”

“Can’t you stay a little longer? You could help me look at houses,” Alice said, thinking a project might attract her.

“How’s that going?” Lizzie nibbled off an edge of lemon poppy muffin, leaving a batch of crumbs stuck to her lower lip.

“Two new businesses and now a new house,” Alice said. “If we’d kept our old jobs, it’d be a cinch to afford whatever we wanted. Almost.”

“You two did the right thing, changing your lives.” Lizzie cleaned the crumbs off her lip with a napkin, leaving behind a lipstick kiss. “This tragedy with Lauren just proves it. It can all change in one second” — she snapped her fingers — “just like that.”

Alice’s heart began to sink, again, at the thought of Lauren. Why had she mentioned the house hunt? There was no way she could traipse around looking at homes, chatting with brokers, running calculations through her mind for the perfect, winning numbers. Not yet. Mr. Pollack,
owner,
would have to understand.

“What about that broker Maggie’s babysitter hooked you up with?” Lizzie asked. “You had such a good feeling about that one.”

“Never mind, Mom.” Alice broke a corner off a scone, then returned it to the plate. “I can’t deal with it right now, anyway.”

“How can you not deal with it?”

“Mom—”

“You have a family. Do not allow this to turn into yet another crisis.” Lizzie tilted her chin proudly up, the angle briefly magnifying her eyes behind her narrow glasses. “Anyway, how long did you think you could last
in that apartment? Were you planning to put all four kids into one room?”

Yes,
Alice thought but didn’t answer. It was a large, beautiful room. Alice had envisioned two sets of bunk beds; people in the city did it all the time. But she had to admit that, put so bluntly, it sounded like a patently bad idea.

“Please,
Gamma,” Peter begged, nuzzling closer into Lizzie’s armpit. “Stay.”

“I wish I could.” Looking squarely at Alice, Lizzie added, “I’ve got a few more things to tell your mother that don’t carry on the phone. Two days should do it.”

The voice that was too loud over the phone was pitched perfectly for Lizzie in person. As a teenager, Alice had once accused her mother of thinking of herself as larger than life. “Wrong,” Lizzie had countered. “I’m as big as life. I match it. When you grow up, you’ll learn the difference.”

By now Alice knew. The difference was in the choices you made, how you calibrated your reactions. Her mother had always dived into the wave when it overtook her.

Just before five o’clock, Mike finally called Alice, offering to pick up some Middle Eastern food on his way home. Alice agreed it was a good idea. Strangely, he said nothing about his long absence or his failure to return her earlier call.

“That was a long hour,” she said, wanting to hold on to her understanding of him, with its implicit forgiveness, but instead succumbing irresistibly to resentment. Why had he needed to escape her today? Why hadn’t he been able to forgive her for the accident? Why was work and not home a balm for his pain?

“It was the longest hour of my life,” he said quietly. “It’s over now.”

She wondered if the wood ever got to the workshop. If the table had taken shape.

“I was getting a little upset—” she began.

“You don’t have to tell me, Alice. I know.”

They stayed on the phone, saying nothing. Finally she let go the strand of her irritation; it was useless and almost arbitrary in the context of everything else.

“It’s okay,” she told him. “Just come home. We’re all waiting for you.”

Half an hour later Alice, Mike, Lizzie and the kids were seated around the kitchen table, eating paper plates of humus, baba ghanoush, skewered lamb and fresh pita. Mike seemed okay, Alice thought, considering. Today had been painful; she had missed him more these hours than she had thought she could since their first bloom of love. She
was
glad he had taken some time, since he needed it. And glad he was back home.

Lizzie was to sleep on the foldout couch in the living room. Mike took the kids downstairs to put them to bed while Alice arranged the sofa bed. Lizzie got changed in the bathroom, emerging in a lavender spaghetti-strap nightgown with feathery trim at her knees and matching slippers that looked like powder puffs. Her skin was loose and tan, but not from lying on the beach; Lizzie worked long hours, and her tans were purchased at a salon.

Alice pulled back the covers and got into the sofa bed, laying her head on the pillow. Lizzie slid in next to her, running her fingers through Alice’s short peachy hair. Her mother’s soft skin was still heaven to Alice.

“I never knew where you got this red hair,” Lizzie said. “It didn’t come from Rich and it didn’t come from me.”

“Do you remember you used to tell me my freckles were fairy dust?”

Lizzie’s laugh was throaty. “Oh yeah, that one. Sure, I remember.”

“I believed you.”

“Well, babydoll, it was what you needed to hear back then.” Lizzie traced Alice’s face with her fingertip: forehead, nose, cheekbones, chin. It was what she had done to help Alice relax at night when she was young, troubled by insomnia even then.

“I took the sleeping pill the doctor gave me,” Alice said, “but I don’t feel it working yet.”

“It will. Just wait. You’ll see.”

“Thanks for coming, Mom.”

“Mmm hmm.”

Downstairs, the bedtime clatter quieted. Peter was always put to bed first, being the youngest, then Nell. Mike was probably lying in Nell’s bed right now, telling her a story.

“Tell me a story, Mom.”

“Do you remember your father?”

“A little, not much. I was eight when he left. Shouldn’t I remember him better?”

“He was a bastard, a real loser, but when he dumped us for that bimbo, my heart was broken,” Lizzie said. “I mean
broken.”

“She was a marine biologist, I thought. Didn’t she work in Daddy’s lab?”

“She was a
bimbo.
It works better for me that way. Do you remember what I did when he left?”

“I remember you were kind of quiet. It scared me.”

“It scared me too.” Lizzie’s fingertip lingered on Alice’s forehead. “The first thing I did was I went shopping, for both of us. Then I sold all our old stuff. Then I sold the house. Then we moved to California.”

“I remember all the new clothes — that part was fun. But I was mad at you for selling my old stuff because I wasn’t finished with it.”

“I figured that out later. Sorry. But we humans make mistakes.”

Alice propped her head on her hand and faced her mother. Lizzie was lying flat on the scant mattress, staring at the ceiling, having let Alice take the whole pillow. The intensity of her eyes betrayed her irreverent tone.

“The thing is,” Lizzie said quietly, “he never came looking for us. I made a lot of noise leaving and he never noticed.”

Now it was Alice’s turn to trace a fingertip along her
mother’s face. Free of makeup, a web of fine lines mapped her skin. She was still so beautiful to Alice.

“Another thing.” Lizzie turned onto her side to face Alice. “Even though I might have still loved him in a certain way, he was
over
for me. I left him behind in Long Island. He did not come to California with us in any way, shape or form. I refused him in my heart.”

Alice had always wondered how her father could just leave them like that. As a wife, she found it painful to imagine. As a parent with a daughter nearly the same age, she found it shocking.

“Alice,” Lizzie said, “when that bastard-whoever-he-is murdered Lauren, when he took her from us, he took you too. Don’t let him have that power over you. Don’t!”

The force of that last word startled Alice into tears. “I don’t have control over my feelings, Mom.”

“I’m here to tell you you’re wrong. You do. You have got to steel yourself against the pain. Make yourself some armor and wear it, just like I did. You have children — falling apart is not an option.” A tear rolled onto Lizzie’s lower lash and she ignored it, but Alice couldn’t; she reached over and flattened it with her fingertip.

“You make it sound so easy, Mom.”

“I never said it was easy, did I?”

Alice fell asleep next to Lizzie and slept there all night long. A solid twelve hours, nearly a good sleep.