Pretty Baby: A Gripping Novel of Psychological Suspense Read online

  From the recesses of my briefcase—sitting on the floor beside the front door—my cell phone rings and Heidi and Zoe turn to me, wondering whether or not I’ll abscond with the phone in the middle of dinner to my office, the third bedroom we converted when it was clear there would be no more children for me and Heidi. I still catch her sometimes, when she’s in the office with me, her eyes roving along espresso office furniture—a desk and bookshelves, my favorite leather chair—imagining something else entirely, a crib and changing table, playful safari animals prancing on the walls.

  Heidi always wanted a big family. Things just didn’t work out that way.

  It’s rare that we get through a quick dinner without the obnoxious sound of my cell. Depending on the night, my mood—or, more important Heidi’s mood—or whatever emergency cropped up at work that day, I may or may not answer it. Tonight I stuff a bite of chili into my mouth as a rebuttal, and Heidi smiles sweetly, which I take to mean: thank you. Heidi has the sweetest smile, sugar-coated and delicious. Her smile comes from somewhere inside, not just planted on those cupid’s-bow lips. When she smiles I imagine the first time we met, at a charity ball in the city, her body cloaked in a strapless vintage tulle dress—red, like her lipstick. She was a work of art. A masterpiece. She was still in college, an intern at the nonprofit she now all but runs. Back in the days when pulling an all-nighter was a piece of cake, and four hours of sleep was a good night for me. Back in the days when thirty seemed old, so old in fact that I didn’t even consider what thirty-nine would be like.

  Heidi thinks that I work too much. For me, seventy-hour workweeks are the norm. There are nights I don’t get home until two o’clock; there are nights I’m home, but locked in my office until the sun begins to rise. My phone rings at all hours of the day and night, as if I’m an on-call physician and not someone who deals with mergers and acquisitions. But Heidi works at a nonprofit agency; only one of us is making enough money to pay for a condo in Lincoln Park, to cover Zoe’s expensive private school tuition and save for college.

  The phone stops ringing, and Heidi turns to Zoe. She wants to hear more about her day.

  It turns out that Mrs. Peters, the seventh grade earth science teacher, wasn’t there and the sub was a total... Zoe stops herself, thinks of a better adjective than the one implanted in her brain by misfit preteens...a total nag.

  “Why’s that?” Heidi asks.

  Zoe avoids eye contact, stares at the chili. “I don’t know. She just was.”

  Heidi takes a sip of her water, plants that big-eyed, inquisitive look on her face. The same one I got when I mentioned the 3:00 a.m. call. “She was mean?”

  “Not really.”

  “Too strict?”

  “No.”

  “Too...ugly?” I throw in to lighten the mood. Heidi’s need to know sometimes puts a strain on things. She’s convinced herself that being an involved parent (and by this I mean overinvolved) will assure Zoe that she’s loved as she enters into what Heidi calls: the tumultuous teenage years. What I remember from my own tumultuous teenage years was the need to escape my parents. When they followed, I ran faster. But Heidi has taken out books from the library: psychology books on child development, parenting with love, secrets of a happy family. She’s bound and determined to do this right.

  Zoe giggles. When she does—and it doesn’t happen often—she becomes six again, consummately pure, twenty-four-karat gold. “No,” she answers.

  “Just...a nag then? A nasty old nag,” I suggest. I push aside the black beans and look for something else. A tomato. Corn. A chili scavenger hunt. I avoid the vegetarian meat crumbles.

  “Yeah. I guess so.”

  “What else?” Heidi asks.

  “Huh?” Zoe’s got on a tie-dye shirt with the words peace and love written in hot pink. It’s covered in glitter. She’s got her hair in this side ponytail thing that makes her look too sophisticated for the tangerine braces that line her rambling teeth. She’s drawn all over her left arm: peace signs, her own name, a heart. The name Austin.

  Austin?

  “What else sucked?” Heidi asks.

  Who the hell is Austin?

  “Taylor spilled her milk at lunch. All over my math book.”

  “Is the book okay?” Heidi wants to know. Taylor has been Zoe’s best friend, her bestie, her BFF, since the girls were about four. They share matching BFF necklaces, skulls of all things. Zoe’s is lime green, and draped around her neck at all times, day or night. Her mother, Jennifer, is Heidi’s best friend. If I remember correctly, they met at the city park, two little girls playing in the sandbox, their mothers taking a breather on the same park bench. Heidi calls it happenstance. Though I believe, in reality, Zoe threw sand in Taylor’s eye and those first few moments weren’t so fortunate after all. If it hadn’t been for Heidi with her spare water bottle to wash off the sand, and if Jennifer hadn’t been in the midst of a divorce and desperate for someone on whom to unload—the story might have had a very different ending.

  Zoe replies, “I don’t know. I guess so.”

  “Do we need to replace it?”

  No comment.

  “Anything else happen? Anything good?”

  She shakes her head.

  And that, in a nutshell, is Zoe’s sucky day.

  Zoe is excused from the table without eating her chili. Heidi convinces her to take a few bites of a corn bread muffin and finish a glass of milk, and then sends her to her room to finish her homework, leaving Heidi and me alone. Again, my cell phone rings. Heidi jumps up to start the dishes and I linger, wondering whether or not I’ve been excused. But instead I grab some dishes from the table and bring them to Heidi who’s dumping Zoe’s chili down the garbage disposal.

  “The chili was good,” I lie. The chili was not good. I stack the dishes on the countertop for Heidi to rinse and hover behind her, my hand pressed to plaid red flannel.

  “Who’s going to San Francisco?” Heidi asks. She turns off the water and turns to face me, and I lean into her, remembering what it feels like when I’m with her, a familiarity so ingrained in us both; it’s natural, habit, second nature. I’ve been with Heidi for almost half my life. I know what she’s going to say before she says it. I know her body language, what it means. I know the inviting look in her eye when Zoe is at a sleepover or long after she’s in bed. I know that now, as she slips her arms around me and pulls me into her, locking her hands around the small of my back, it isn’t an act of affection; it’s one of ownership.

  You are mine.

  “Just a couple people from the office,” I tell her.

  Again with the big inquisitive eyes. She wants me to elaborate. “Tom,” I say, “and Henry Tomlin.” And then I hesitate, and it’s probably the hesitation that does me in. “Cassidy Knudsen,” I admit, meekly, throwing in the last name as if she doesn’t know who Cassidy is. Cassidy Knudsen, with the silent K.

  And with that she removes her hands and turns back to the sink.

  “It’s a business trip,” I remind her. “Strictly business,” I say as I press my face into her hair. It smells like strawberries, sweet and juicy, combined with a hodgepodge of city smells: the dirtiness of the street, strangers on the train, the musty scent of rain.

  “Does she know that?” Heidi asks.

  “I’ll be sure to tell her,” I respond. And when the conversation goes quiet, the room silenced except for the indelicate propulsion of dishes into the dishwasher, I seize my opportunity to slip away, wandering into the bedroom to pack.

  It isn’t my fault I have a coworker who’s nice on the eyes.

  HEIDI

  When I wake in the morning, Chris is gone. Beside me, on the distressed wooden nightstand, is a mug of coffee, tepid and likely filled to the gills with hazelnut creamer, but still: coffee. I sit up in bed and reach for the mug and the remote control and, flipping on the lifeless TV, stumble upon the day’s forecast. Rain.

  When I finally wobble down the hall to the kitchen, bypassing Zoe’s s
chool portraits from kindergarten through seventh grade, I find her standing in the kitchen, pouring milk and cereal into a bowl.

  “Good morning,” I say, and she jumps. “Did you sleep okay?” I ask, and kiss her gingerly on the forehead. She congeals, uncomfortable with the mushy stuff these days. And yet, as her mother, I feel the need to show my affection; a high-five—or secret handshake as Chris and Zoe share—simply won’t do, so I kiss her and feel her pull away, knowing I’ve planted my love for the day.

  Zoe’s dressed already in her school uniform: the pleated plaid jumper and navy cardigan, the suede Mary Janes that she hates.

  “Yeah,” she says and takes her bowl to the kitchen table to eat.

  “How ’bout some juice?”

  “I’m not thirsty.” Though I see her eye the coffeemaker nonetheless, a door that she previously opened and I firmly closed. No twelve-year-old needs a stimulant to get going in the morning. Yet I fill my mug to the brim and douse it with creamer, sit beside Zoe with a heaping bowl of Raisin Bran and attempt to make small talk about the anticipated day. I’m inundated with yeses, noes, and I don’t knows, and then she scampers away to brush her teeth, and I’m left with the silence of the kitchen, the steady percussion of raindrops on the bay window.

  We head out into the soggy day, bypassing a neighbor in the hall. Graham. He’s pressing at buttons on a snazzy watch, the gadget letting out various beeps and bleeps. He smiles to himself, clearly pleased.

  “Fancy meeting you here, ladies,” he warbles with the most decadent smile I’ve ever seen. Graham’s longish blond hair flops against a glossy forehead, strands that will soon be fully erect thanks to a generous supply of gel. He’s wet, though from rain or perspiration, I honestly can’t say.

  Graham is heading home from a morning run along the lakefront in his head-to-toe Nike attire, an overpriced watch that tracks mileage and splits. His clothing matches entirely too well, a lime-green stripe in his jacket to match the lime-green stripe in his shoe.

  He’s what one would call metrosexual, though Chris feels certain there’s more to it than that.

  “Morning, Graham,” I say. “How was the run?”

  Leaning against the wheat colored walls with their white wainscoting, he squirts a swig of water into his mouth and says, “Incredible.” There’s a look of euphoria on his face that makes Zoe blush. She glances down at her shoes, kicks invisible dirt from one shoe with the toe of another.

  Graham is a thirtysomething orphan, living in this building because the unit next door to theirs was left to him in his mother’s will when she died years and years ago, and Graham, consequently, made out like a bandit, acquiring not only his mother’s inheritance, but hundreds of thousands of dollars in a hospital settlement, as well, money that he’s slowly squandered away on fancy watches, expensive wines and lavish home decor.

  Graham planned to put the home on the market after his mother died, but instead he moved in. Moving vans replaced all of her eclectic furniture and belongings with Graham’s modern ones, so sleek and stylish it was as if he’d climbed from the pages of a Design Within Reach catalog: the crisp lines and sharp angles, the neutral colors. He was a minimalist, the condo sparse but for sheets and sheets of computer paper that littered the floor.

  “Gay,” Chris assured me after we’d stepped foot in Graham’s new condo for the first time. “He’s gay.” It wasn’t only the home decor that caught Chris’s eye, but the closets full of clothes—more clothes than even I owned—that he left purposefully open so we would see. “Mark my words. You’ll see.”

  And yet women came to call quite regularly, stunning women that left even me speechless. Women with bleach-blond hair and unnaturally blue eyes, with bodies like Barbie dolls.

  Graham had arrived when Zoe was still a toddler. She took to him like fruit flies to a bowl of browning bananas. As a freelance writer, Graham was often home, staring blankly at a computer screen and overdosing himself on caffeine and self-doubt. He came to our rescue more than once when Zoe was ill and neither Chris nor I could miss work. Graham welcomed her onto his tufted sofa where together they watched cartoons. He is a go-to when in need of a cup of butter, a dryer sheet or someone to hold the door. He’s also top-notch at expository writing, helping Zoe with English homework when neither Chris nor I could. He’s an expert at dressing a turkey, something I learned that I couldn’t do three-quarters of the way through cooking Thanksgiving dinner for in-laws.

  In short, Graham is a good friend.

  “You two should join me sometime,” Graham says about the run. I see the multitude of water bottles harnessed to his waist and think we best not.

  “You’d be sorry if I did,” I say, watching as Graham tousles Zoe’s hair and again she blushes, this time the rosy tint having nothing to do with his sexual innuendos.

  “What about you?” he says to Zoe, and she shrugs. Being twelve has its advantages, the fact that a shrug and a shy smile can get her off the spot. “Think about it,” he says, flashing that decadent smile, the teeth lined in a row like well-behaved school children, impeccably white. The insinuation of facial hair where he has yet to shave, the downturned eyes, which Zoe avoids like the plague. Not because she doesn’t like him. But because she does.

  We say our goodbyes and head out, into the rain.

  * * *

  I walk Zoe to school before continuing on to work. Zoe attends the Catholic school in our neighborhood, nestled beside a cumbersome Byzantine church, with its gray brick exterior, its heavy wooden doors, its heavenly dome that reaches to the sky. The church is entirely ornate, from the golden murals that run wall to wall, to the stained-glass windows and marble altar. The school sits behind the church, tucked away, a regular brick school building with a playground and a mass of children in matching plaid uniforms hidden beneath multicolored raincoats, their backpacks too obese for their tiny bodies. Zoe slips away from me with barely a goodbye and I watch, from the curb, as she unites with other seventh graders and hurries from the waterlogged street into the dry building, staying away from the little ones—those clinging to parents’ legs and vowing that they don’t want to go—as if they have some communicable disease.

  I watch, until she is in the building, and then continue on my way to the Fullerton Station. At some point along the way, the rain, with all of its urgency, turns to hail, and I find myself running, gracelessly, down the street, my feet stomping through puddles, splashing dirty rainwater upon my legs.

  The girl and her baby come to mind and I wonder if they, too, are somewhere out there, being pelted by rain.

  When I arrive at the station, I use my fare card to unlock the turnstile, then dash up the slippery steps, wondering if I will see them: the girl and her baby, but they are not there. Of course I’m grateful that the baby and her mother are not on the platform in this atrocious weather, but my mind begins to wander: where are they and, more important, are they safe? Are they dry? Are they warm? It’s the definition of bittersweet. I wait impatiently for the train and, when it arrives, I get on, my eyes anchored to the window, half expecting to see the two appear at any second: the army-green coat and lace-up boots, the vintage leather suitcase and sodden pink fleece blanket, the baby’s exposed creamy head, with faint, delicate plumage, the baby’s toothless smile.

  At work, a third-grade field trip arrives at our literacy center. With a handful of volunteers, we read poetry to the students, and then the students try their hand at writing and illustrating some poetry of their own, which the more adventurous of the bunch share with the group. The students coming to the center are mostly from lower class, urban neighborhoods, mostly African-American or Latino. Many are from low-income homes, and a smattering speak something other than English—Spanish, Polish, Chinese—in the home.

  Many of these children come from families where both parents work, if both parents are still around. Many are from single-parent homes. Many are latchkey kids who spend their afternoons and evenings alone. They are overlooked for mor
e pressing matters: food and housing, to be exact. A morning at our facility is about more than literacy and developing a love of sonnets and haiku. It’s about the doubt that overtakes the children when they walk in our doors (quietly grumbling about the task at hand), and the fortitude with which they leave after a few hours of hard work and the undivided attention of our staff.

  But once they’re gone, thoughts of the girl and her baby return.

  The rain has quieted to a needless drizzle when lunchtime comes. I fasten my raincoat and head outside, careening down State Street while feasting on some healthy granola bar in lieu of lunch, heading to the library to pick up a book I have on interlibrary loan. I absolute love the library, with its sunlit atrium (though not sunlit today) and grotesque granite gargoyles and millions and millions of books. I love the quietness of the library, the gateway to knowledge, to the French language and medieval history and hydraulic engineering and fairy tales, learning in a very primitive form: books, something that’s quickly giving way to modern technology.

  I pause beside a homeless woman leaning against the redbrick building, and set dollar bills in her outstretched hand. When she smiles at me, I see that many of her teeth are missing, her head covered in a thin black hat that’s supposed to keep her warm. She mumbles a thanks, inarticulate and hard to understand, what teeth she has blackened from what I take to be methamphetamine use.

  I find my book on the holds shelf and then take a series of escalators up to the seventh floor, bypassing security guards and elementary school field trips, wandering vagrant men, and women with other women, talking too loudly for the library. The library is warm and calm, and entirely welcoming as I make my way to the literature aisles in search of something enjoyable to read, the latest New York Times bestseller.

  And it’s there that I see her, the girl with her baby, sitting cross-legged on the ground in the midst of the literature aisles, the baby laid across her lap, its head elevated by a knee. The suitcase sits on the ground beside her. The girl, it appears, is grateful to be free of its weight for the time being. The girl pulls a bottle from the pocket of the army-green coat, sets it into the obliging baby’s mouth. She reaches for a book from the bottom shelf and—as I sneak into the nearest aisle, yanking some sci-fi thriller from the shelf and flipping to page forty-seven—I hear her voice softly reading aloud from Anne of Green Gables while stroking the underside of the baby’s toes.