Authors: Tish Cohen
T
he thing about using the car as an infant sleep aid is, sometimes you’re too damned tired to navigate the streets safely. The second night passed much in the same way as the first. Sylvie slept for about an hour and a half—time Eleanor stupidly wasted showering and cooking up penne noodles because she realized she hadn’t eaten all day—then woke up to scream triple murder.
There’s been no further contact from Sylvie’s father. With any luck, he’s satisfied with Sylvie having been successfully placed and has gone back to his wife, children, and money.
After lining up the usual suspects—bottle, bath, diaper change, burping, etcetera—and failing with each, at about six in the morning, Eleanor makes peace with the situation. She turns on a movie,
My Cousin Vinnie
, and settles down with Sylvie on a duvet spread on the living room floor. Angus watches, a huge sloppy grin on his face. At least Sylvie can feel loved while she bawls. And at least she’ll be safe should her fledgling mother pass out.
They both must have drifted off sometime around six thirty. When the phone rings just after eight, Eleanor, in a
scratchy-eyed stupor, knows enough to grab it quickly but has no idea what to say. She goes with nothing.
“Eleanor? Is that you?” It’s Ruth.
She can’t speak to the woman. Maybe just for now, maybe forever. It’s a decision she can make when she has had a full night’s sleep. Should such a night ever arrive. Eleanor reaches out a hand, finds the receiver button, and ends the call.
I
t’s just before eight on night three when Eleanor bundles a weeping Sylvie into fleecy jacket and sheepskin booties, and carries her and the stroller down to the darkened street. Cold rain is starting to fall and their breath puffs are quickly blown away by wind. The car is out of the question; Eleanor can barely keep her eyes open. She tucks Sylvie into the Guzzie + Guss, quilt across her legs, and covers the entire stroller with a clear vinyl rain shield. That her girl is warm and dry is all that matters.
The odd person out on the street is well bundled. A few doors up, a woman cloaked in a charcoal cape and with a tam pulled over her ears ambles out of the variety store eating a candy bar. Farther up, a man in a plaid car coat unloads crates from the back of an old truck.
Eleanor considers, for a moment, going back upstairs for a thicker jacket and her trademark scarf, but the logistics—removing the quilt, pulling the somewhat settled Sylvie out of the stroller, hauling the expensive Guzzie + Guss into the lobby lest it “wheel itself away,” and climbing all those stairs—clear the idea from her head.
There is something about November in Boston that has
always enchanted Eleanor. Something about seeing the city in its bare bones, stripped of the greenery that dresses things up in the warmer months. The gnarled architecture of a tree’s naked branches when seen in the foreground of a beautiful historic building is the very essence of the city. There’s a certain intimacy in seeing the streets undressed like that—before December’s snow and the tiny white lights and streets full of Christmas shoppers, after the flashy romance of the autumn leaves—it reminds her of Angus’s collar being off. When he isn’t Angus out for a walk, or Angus with proof he’s been vaccinated against rabies. When he’s just had a bath in the tiny tub that only comes up to his ankles and is drying off, collar-free, on the rug by the window. Himself. Raw.
Rain spatters down Eleanor’s neck as they cut through the park. She shivers. Surely it’s cold enough to snow. She’ll walk brisker is all. She’ll warm up.
Only she doesn’t. Maybe the combination of not enough sleep and no jacket lining blocks the rush of warm blood to muscles. By the time they she realizes where she’s taking them, they’re nearing Battersea Road. Eleanor’s teeth are chattering, and she can barely feel her toes. Of course maybe this is what a heart attack feels like. Her left arm is a bit numb.
As cars rush past on Beacon Street and a taxi honks its horn, Sylvie calms. She points up at the flickering gas lights with a drool-soaked finger.
“Pretty lights?” Eleanor says. “Aren’t they pretty?”
Sylvie’s mouth attempts the word in silence, her index finger still in the air.
Eleanor did not expect the sidewalk in front of Isabelle’s house to be scattered with evergreen boughs and red dogwood branches. Nor did she expect the woman herself to be outside after dark. But in the feeble light from the gas lamps and her own porch light, Isabelle teeters atop a ladder, wearing baggy jeans tucked into yellow Hunter rain boots. She hacks violently at the earth in her flower box with what appears to be a pair of silver salad tongs.
“That couldn’t wait until tomorrow?” Eleanor says over the crying that resumed once they hit the bumpity-bump of Beacon Hill’s brick sidewalks. “You’re going to fall to your death up there in the dark.”
“Just trying to give the place a bit of evergreen cheer in all this gray gloom. That’s what people do outside of the slums, Eleanor Sweet. They pretty up their environs.” She looks down. “Now what have you done to that child to have her cry like that?”
“She’s having trouble adjusting.”
Or she hates me
.
“Perhaps it’s having a mother who takes her for an evening stroll in a monsoon,” Isabelle calls down, wiping rain from her face and leaving a dirty streak on her chin.
Maybe it’s exhaustion, maybe it’s seeing Isabelle all alone and scaling the side of her house, but Eleanor is overwhelmed with the need to confess. “Would you mind coming down here a sec?”
“I’m coming down, but if this is a big, sappy thank-you, I think I’ll pass. I didn’t ‘search’ for the accolades then and I don’t do it now.” She steps down the ladder, but before she nears the bottom, Eleanor blurts it out.
“I drove out to Ethan’s house, Isabelle. I saw his wife.”
Isabelle stops her descent. “Whoever authorized you to do such a thing?”
“I left a message just like you do. A note. And she’s been in touch. She wants to speak to you.”
“How dare you tamper with my life.” Isabelle shakes her head. “And hers!”
“Her name is Tiffany Runion and she’s very interested.”
“
You
are giving
me
her name? Hah!” Her hand grips the edge of the wet ladder.
“Isabelle, please come down.”
“I will do as I choose.”
“I just can’t stand to see you like this. You’ll rattle around this huge house alone for the rest of your life because you’re too proud to contact his family.”
“Presumptuous thing. You think because you’re merging with your birth family that everyone on earth should follow suit? This is why I got out of the business. Because of people like you who get overly sentimental about the past. Some birth mothers adopt out for a reason. They don’t want to see their babies ever again!”
“That’s not why you quit.”
“I will not be lectured to in such a fashion.” She climbs all the way down and starts gathering up her branches. The salad tongs fall to the sidewalk with a clatter and she lunges angrily to snatch them up.
Sylvie’s cries lessen as the patter of rain on the plastic stroller shield grows faster. Louder. Eleanor watches Isabelle pile the branches by the side of her porch. Quieter now, she says, “You got out of the business because Ethan is dead and you can’t stand the guilt.”
“What did you say?”
“Your plan isn’t going to work. The only thing that will help you now is getting to know his family. Your family.”
“I will thank you to stay out of my—”
“Don’t make the same mistake, Isabelle. It may be too late for you and Ethan, but his children. His wife. Don’t let a lifetime pass without meeting them.”
“Go. Do you hear me, Eleanor Sweet? Go. Get off my property and leave me to manage my life the way I see fit.”
Eleanor stares at her a moment, Isabelle’s silver hair drenched now. Her collar flattened. Her cheeks are hollow, her eyes sunken. Her mouth grim.
Without a word, Eleanor turns the stroller around. She bumps it along the brick sidewalk back to Beacon Street, rain stinging her face like needles.
O
n the walk back, Sylvie’s crying rises in pitch until Angus is howling alongside her.
Eleanor pushes the stroller up the slope after cutting through the bowl of the park and heads straight along on Newbury. The temperature has dropped considerably since they left the apartment, and freezing rain sits like glittery slop on the sidewalks and streets. Every step Eleanor takes, her boots slip sideways.
From the end of the block, she can see busyness in front of her store and picks up her pace. Even Angus seems fascinated by the people walking this way and that, and he strains against his leash, helping propel them forward. Lights flood out not from Pretty Baby but from Death by Vinyl. A couple walks out of the shop with two black shopping bags and hold the door for three hooded teens to tumble in.
Music thumps from Noel’s place and it isn’t “Bohemian Rhapsody.” It’s something else, something frantic that Eleanor doesn’t recognize right away. The Sex Pistols, “God Save the Queen.” That’s what’s playing. She stops in front of the store and peers inside. Noel is busy at the cash, ringing in the purchase of two girls who are taking pictures of themselves
with the Sasquatch. Small armies of teenagers prowl the store, and one gangly boy with a shaved head comes out of the change room curtain to model a unicorn skeleton T-shirt for his girlfriend. The skater kids gather around a phone booth kitted out with headphones and a turntable. Above it all, a disco ball turns slowly. Angus presses his nose against the window and whines, his tail wagging.
Death by Vinyl, it appears, is open for business.
Eleanor looks down at the stroller. Sylvie, who until this moment has been inconsolable, is quiet. She stares, her body hiccuping with calm, at the tiny droplets of disco-ball light creeping across Noel’s ceiling.
Eleanor’s phone rings from her pocket. Nancy. At this hour, it cannot be good news. Eleanor covers one ear and picks up. “Nancy, hi.”
“Hon, I’ve been trying to get to you all day but have been battling the California office. Domenique has come forward again.”
“Oh shit.”
“He doesn’t necessarily want Sylvie back, which is the good news. But this has come as a big shock to him. Now normally the courts won’t overturn an adoption once it’s taken place as it’s disruptive to the baby, but in this case the natural father didn’t know about his child’s existence. So we’re on thinner ground here.”
“I can’t lose her, Nancy. I can’t.” Eleanor’s heart hammers in her chest, her throat, her stomach. Her shoulder hurts so bad she has to sit on Noel’s window ledge.
“I know, sweetie. I’m doing everything I can here. A judge down there is going to hear his argument tomorrow. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know which way we’re headed next.
Just try to stay positive in the meantime. We at the agency will do everything we can to support you and …”
Eleanor lets the phone slide into her bag. Sylvie smiles, points at Noel’s ceiling as if to show Eleanor. She can’t, she
cannot
lose her daughter.
Noel looks up from the cash, sees Sylvie in the stroller, and lunges for the stereo to turn down the music. “I’m so sorry. Did I wake her?” he says through the doorway.
“No.” Eleanor feels tears sting her eyes and blinks hard. There is no way she’ll cry in front of Noel.
“I opened. Almost nine o’clock at night, but I opened.”
“Yeah.” She nods, biting down on her lip. “That’s great. Really.”
“Excuse me?” A woman and her preteen son approach Noel from behind, a handful of DVDs in the boy’s hands. “Are these ones on sale?”
Noel nods yes and turns back to Eleanor. “Everything okay? You don’t look so good.”
She stands. “Sylvie’s father wants to overturn the adoption. And I want to pick her up and flee. Anywhere he can’t find us. I’ve waited my whole life for her. I can’t lose her now.”
Noel pulls her close and presses her head into his shoulder. “Hey, hey. Stop that talk. You’re not going on the run with your infant daughter.”
It feels good, to be held again. It feels safe. She allows it, then pulls back. “I am. You’ll see. I’ll pack up the Bug and take her and Angus and we’ll just drive. I’ll change my name. I’ll get some job as a bartender or a chambermaid in some isolated town. I’ll—”
He pushes the hair off her face. “Eleanor. You’re not running, do you hear me? Running is only going to prolong
the outcome. You’re going to take charge of this situation. Face it.”
“Face it how?”
“You’re going to call your contact at the agency and you’re going to tell him or her that you want to speak with Sylvie’s father yourself.”
“I am?”
“You are. Now get out of here so I can serve my customers.” He turns away.
“Noel?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks.” With a wave, she pulls the stroller away to unlock her periwinkle door. Holding it open with her knee, she scoops up Sylvie, whose face crumples like a paper bag. The infant lets out a sadder-than-sad moan and once again begins to sob.
It can only be me, Eleanor thinks. It’s me making her this miserable. Maybe she
would
be better off with her father.
A
t one in the morning, Jonathan slides the stethoscope up the back of Sylvie’s tiny T-shirt as Eleanor holds her close and coos in her ear. The crying hasn’t abated. After taking Sylvie’s temperature, after writing three unsent e-mails to Nancy to explain that Sylvie is desperately unhappy and that her father is probably right to remove his daughter from her care, after contemplating driving Sylvie down to Mass General to Emerg but deciding she was so bleary-eyed she’d probably qualify as Under the Influence, she finally did it. She broke down and called Jonathan.
Eleanor rocks the whimpering Sylvie as Jonathan listens to her heart, her lungs. The child is yawning violently now. She’s tired herself out. Satisfied, Jonathan wraps the stethoscope around his hand and slides it into his medical bag.
“I don’t see anything at all that would alarm me. Her heartbeat’s good. Ears are clear, abdomen feels normal. Breathing is clear, she has good oxygen. I think you’re just looking at a bit of anxiety, combined with jet lag and a pretty major life change.”
Relief floods Eleanor to her toes. She pops a pacifier into Sylvie’s mouth and the child’s jaw works away at it. Sylvie’s eyes droop shut. She forces them open again. “It’s as if she won’t let herself sleep. As if she doesn’t trust me or something. Doesn’t feel safe.”
“Nah.” He reaches down to scratch Angus’s back. Angus’s legs nearly give out with pleasure. The dog is in ecstasy having Jonathan back in the house. He grins up at his favorite master, tongue lolling out of his mouth like a great sopping towel. Behind him is the rocking horse, which Eleanor dragged out of the closet before Jonathan’s arrival. “Nothing that sophisticated, trust me.” He glances around at the walls they painted yellow. “The room looks good. Cheery.”
“Doesn’t seem to be cheering
her
.” Eleanor sets the now-calmer Sylvie into the crib. The baby looks alarmed at first, then sucks hard on the pacifier and allows Eleanor to tuck the blanket around her. When Eleanor turns on the mobile—smiling zoo animals in faded colors—Sylvie is mesmerized.
Jonathan is at her side, his hands on the rail of the crib he assembled himself. “She’s even more beautiful in real life.”
Eleanor nods. “Isn’t she?”
“You’re good with her. Better than most new moms who come in.”
“You’re just saying that.”
“Seriously. You couldn’t be more natural if she’d been born to you.”
A buzzer goes off in Jonathan’s pocket and he checks a small black beeper. “Sorry,” he says to Eleanor as he reaches for his jacket on the rocking chair. “On call tonight. New doc’s wife is in labor. I have to go relieve him.”
“It’s fine. Thanks for coming.”
Jacketed now, he makes no move to leave. “There are things in life I regret. Being in Europe backpacking when my grandfather had his heart attack. Not going back to med school for a specialty that would allow me to work days like a regular human.” He stares at her. “And this. I’m ashamed of myself.”
She doesn’t know what to say. A few weeks ago, she’d have taken this as an opening. He wants to come back, she’d have convinced herself.
“If you ever want to discuss things, I’d be open to that.”
Always so cryptic. “You mean us? Discuss us?”
“Yes.”
“Sylvie’s here now. She comes with me.”
If Domenique doesn’t take her away
.
“I know.”
“So the us you’re open to discussing is the three of us.”
“Yes.”
She glances at the rocking horse behind him. He can be so good, Jonathan. But he’s become changeable. One day he’s out, the next day he’s in her bed. If she allows him a major role in Sylvie’s life, he could do that to her too. Easily. He could be the perfect father or he could bolt again. Even if Sylvie is removed from Eleanor’s life, Jonathan remains a question mark.
Too many seconds pass.
“Okay. Gotta fly.” He kisses her forehead and marches toward the door, Angus trotting in his wake. Eleanor follows them.
With a quick salute, he starts down the stairs. She remembers the “Dada” DVD. If he’s even remotely open to coming
back, watching the video could stir just the right thing in him. She calls, “Jonathan?”
He stops, looks back.
No. It’s wrong. “Thanks for the house call.”