Fresh Kills (21 page)

“… saw your name in the newspaper,” the diffident male voice said. He talked so low I could hardly hear him, as though he were sneaking a call to his mistress with his wife in the other room.

“My wife and I—” he began, then choked and started again. “That is, we both wanted—we tried everything, and now the agency says it's a three-year wait at least. We just—we can't wait three years, Ms. Jameson.” He was near tears, and I could hear a snuffling sound in the background.

“Now, honey,” he murmured; it took a moment for me to realize I wasn't honey, that his wife was sobbing next to him.

It took another moment for me to realize what this call was about.

They think I can buy them a baby
.

It hit me like a wet snowball, sending a cold trickle down my neck in spite of the balmy spring weather.

I was so shocked I just stood there, holding the phone away from my ear. Then I slammed it down; only later did I realize how rude and insensitive I'd been.

But how do you find words to tell people you're not what they think you are, when what they think is that you're a monster and a savior rolled into one?

C
HAPTER
F
OURTEEN

I got back to my office around six o'clock, having spent a long day in court trying to pretend interest in my other cases. Marvella Jackman was just covering her word processor with a plastic shroud. “There's a girl wants to see you, Ms. Jameson,” she said in her West Indian lilt. “Said she was from that group home where the other one come from.” The other one was Amber, so this must be—

“Her name is Lisa, and she's waiting downstairs at the Morning Glory.”

Lisa. I had a quick vision of a dumpy, lumpy teenager in a pink smock top, her swollen feet jammed into flip-flops, her doglike eyes riveted on Doc Scanlon. Unformed, without personality or flavor or individuality, she seemed to represent a mental construct called “teen mother.”

What was she like when she wasn't pregnant?

Tattooed. She was tattooed. And pierced. Five rings in each ear, a golden knob on one side of her nose, and a tasteful little hoop decorating one plucked eyebrow. A black leather vest with nothing underneath and a little black skirt that emphasized rather than hid the baby fat chubbiness of her thighs. Her legs ended in black combat boots with little white socks peeking over the high tops.

“Lisa?” The simple greeting turned from statement of fact into question as I tried to connect this punk queen with the pink blob I remembered from the group home.

“Ms. Jameson,” she replied, her voice still the high childlike near-whine I recalled. She plopped into one of my red leather client chairs; I tried not to think what it would feel like on bare skin after about five minutes.

“I'm really glad you're here,” I began. “I have some questions I'd like to ask you.”

“Sure,” the girl said, moving her gum from one side of her mouth to the other. It was black gum, which went with the polish on her bitten nails. She looked like Vampira's teenage sister.

“But first,” she continued, “I want to ask you to be my lawyer. After what you did for Amber—”

“What I did for Amber?” I cut in. “Amber's dead, Lisa. I don't know what you mean.”

“I mean you got her baby back. Before she died. I been thinking.” Lisa shifted the gum one more time and put her hand on the corner of my desk. “I want to give my baby a good home. I want to raise her myself. I want to change my mind.”

I raised my eyes to heaven. First phone calls from desperate parents who thought I could buy them a baby, now this.

“Lisa, I—” I paused and looked into the girl's eyes. They were a watery blue and had a childlike innocence underneath the heavy eyeliner and mascara. “How old are you?”

She stiffened, took the defensive stance of somebody who's been asked a question she doesn't want to answer. “Seventeen,” she replied.

I shook my head. “Not how old you're going to be someday. Now.”

“Fifteen.” Lowered eyes, something that might have been a blush under brown-tinged makeup. “But that doesn't mean I can't be a good mom,” she challenged.

I looked across the desk at the three-colored dragon winding along her arm, from elbow to bare shoulder, at the rose tattoo on her wrist, at the baroque design that circled the other arm like a bracelet. “How did you hide those at the home?” I asked.

She tossed off a shrug. “Oh, most of these are temporary,” she replied. “I just want to see how they look before I get them done for good. Besides,” she added wistfully, “I can't afford anything this fancy right now. I'm saving up for the dragon.”

“And the piercings?”

Another shrug. “I just took out all the rings.” She picked up a strand of mouse-colored hair and twirled it around a finger. “That Mrs. B. made me take them out,” she added. “The bitch.”

“You didn't like her?”

“She was mean,” Lisa replied. “She made all kinda remarks about the way I looked and made me wear this dorky polyester shit from the mall. So I'd look ‘respectable' when the adoptive parents came to visit.”

“Gotta admit,” I said, “you fooled me.”

Lisa grinned. Her teeth were spaced widely apart. “I guess I fooled them, too,” she agreed. “Like they really didn't know I came from Mount Loretto.”

“Mount Loretto?” I echoed.

She nodded. “Sure. Me and most of the other girls at Mrs. B.'s came from there. Doc Scanlon used to come around Mount Loretto once a week to give us checkups, and if someone was knocked up, he'd talk about adoption and set them up with a couple who'd pay their expenses. I knew a bunch of girls who gave up their babies, so when Eddie and me got into trouble, I told Doc right away. I knew he'd take care of me.”

“Eddie's the father of your child?”

“Uh-huh. And at first I agreed with Doc that giving the baby up made sense on account of Eddie's got another year on his sentence, but now—”

“Sentence?” I asked it like a question, but somewhere down deep I was less than surprised.

“Yeah. He's doing a split bit for burglary. Two to six. He'll be out next year if he don't stab a guard or something.”

“I take it he wasn't in jail when you—”

“Course not. He was out on bail. But then his Legal Aid made him plead guilty. So I decided Doc was right and I should give up the baby on account of I couldn't raise her by myself. But now I been thinking it over and—”

She wanted to talk about now, but I had questions about then.

“How did the adoptive parents react when you told them the father of your baby was in jail?” Again I knew what the answer had to be, but I wanted this artless child to say it in her own words.

“Oh, Doc took care of that. He said I should tell them I didn't know who the father was, that it could have been five or six guys. So I put down these guys from school, and I stuck Eddie's name in the middle and Doc had Ms. Hennessey send them all papers to sign giving up their right to the baby just in case they were the fathers. I don't think she told the couple Eddie was in jail.”

I was willing to bet she hadn't. Even my limited experience in the world of adoption had taught me that adoptive parents cherish a fond hope that the father of their unborn child is a nuclear physicist with a yen for teenagers. If they can't have a graduate-student mom who had a brief but passionate fling with a professor, they can at least dream of a birth father who isn't serving time. And burying the true father in a list of innocuous possibles was a good way of letting the adopters conjure up a fantasy of teen love between basically good kids who made a mistake.

“So most of the girls at Mrs. B's came from Mount Loretto? What about the others?”

“Some of them had boyfriends at Arthur Kill,” Lisa said. I nodded; if Doc found some of his brood cows at Mount Loretto, it made sense that the studs would be at Arthur Kill Correctional Facility.

“Doc used to work over there, too. He'd get talking with the guys, find out if they had pregnant girlfriends—white girlfriends—and then offer to set them up with a nice deal. That's how some of the older girls came to the house.”

“I suppose the adoptive parents didn't know about those fathers either,” I said.

“I dunno,” Lisa replied. “Listen,” she said, leaning forward, “I really want you to help me get my baby back. I talked to a welfare caseworker, and she says I can get money for an apartment and everything just as soon as I get custody.”

I ran a hasty mental check: had I asked all the questions I could reasonably expect an answer to, or was there something else I should dig for before I told Lisa I couldn't help her recover her baby?

Her response was typical teenager. She hurled herself out of the red leather chair and shouted, “You fucking bitch. You tellin' me I can't be a good mother?” She lunged at me, her heavily ringed fingers nearing my face.

For a moment I thought she was going to hit me. For a moment I almost wanted her to. I wanted to feel a fist in my face, to let someone punish me for the suffering I'd caused, however inadvertently. But then she stopped herself and gave me a contemptuous look that stripped me naked. “I bet if I wanted to sell my baby, you'd get her back for me, wouldn't you, bitch? Wouldn't you?”

Before I could answer, she flung herself out the door. I fell into the chair behind my desk and breathed heavily for a minute or two.

It was one of those Village apartments that started out as a student share—two bedrooms, four female law students. I remembered study sessions with huge vats of spaghetti cooked by Angela Romanelli, the femme fatale of our class. We'd scarf down pasta and shoot legal questions at one another until we felt ready to face Professor Lerner's Torts class in the morning. Even though NYU had a large number of women students for its time, we felt the need to band together, to support one another in our assault on the citadel of the male-dominated profession we were determined to conquer.

Now the apartment was Marla's alone. The bare-plank bookshelves supported on cinder blocks had been replaced by walnut-and-black wall units, but the oversized law texts were still there: the blue Crim Law book, the brown Torts book—huge, heavy volumes filled with outdated law. The giant pillows stacked in the corner had gone the way of the bookshelves; there was now a Laura Ashley love seat covered in a Chinese red fabric with tiny flowers. Matching Chinese red mini-blinds adorned the casement windows. A tasteful Matisse print hung over the sofa; once the walls had boasted the finest collection of feminist posters on the Eastern seaboard. There were fewer candles.

“Jeez, Marla,” I said, reverting to my student self as I looked around at a place where I'd been young, “how long's it been?”

She shrugged. “Dunno,” she replied. “Were you here for the party I gave when Angela made partner at—”

“Did she?” I asked delightedly. “Make partner?”

“I guess you weren't,” Marla said. “I thought I invited you, but maybe you were out of town or something.”

“I can't believe I didn't know she made partner, though,” I mused. “But then we haven't seen much of each other. Wall Street and Legal Aid don't socialize after law school.”

“No, you Legal Aid types are too snobbish,” she retorted. “Too busy saving the world to have time for those of us who just want to make a living.”

Typical Marla, she swept out of the living room into the kitchen on this note, cutting off my chance to rebut. I plopped onto the love seat and noted that it concealed a hidden bed; it was hard as a rock.

“Want something to drink?” she called.

“Sure,” I called back. “Can I use your bathroom first?”

“You remember where it is.” Statement, not requiring a reply.

I walked down the cramped corridor that connected the living room with the two bedrooms. The one Angela and Becky used to share was now a study, with the usual paper-strewn desk and battered file cabinets. I smiled, noting that the feminist posters had found a museum in here; they were curling at the edges and sported torn spots where they'd been taped several times too often, but at least they hadn't been junked.

It was the second bedroom that stopped me cold. I remembered it with two single mattresses on the floor, one for Marla and one for Susan Whatever-Her-Name-Was from New Hampshire—Indian print throws on the beds, more bookshelves made out of salvaged building materials, Lava Lamps, psychedelic rock posters, woven baskets the size of baby carriages, a bong and cigarette papers next to a cigar box full of badly rolled joints.

Now it was a preteen girl's fantasy bedroom. White eyelet swathed the bed from dust ruffle to sham pillows piled in a heap at the head. The bed itself was a brass curlicued affair, and the curtains at the window repeated the white eyelet motif. On the walls were framed posters similar to the ones at Marla's office. A primary-color Winnie the Pooh poster showed the famous bear floating in the air, holding a balloon. On the other wall Ratty and Mole and Mr. Toad walked arm in arm along a country lane. Baby pictures and framed valentines completed the decor.

I hadn't known Marla had a daughter.

I said as much when I returned to the living room, ready to take in more liquid after using the bathroom.

“Daughter?” she said blankly. “What do you mean?”

“The bedroom,” I said, beginning to think I'd made a huge mistake. “I couldn't help noticing—”

“That's my bedroom,” Marla replied, her eyes narrowing. “I don't know what makes you think—”

“I'm sorry,” I said, blushing furiously. “I didn't mean—”

I stumbled around, trying to salvage the situation and knowing it was impossible. No matter what I said, the damage was done.

Even as I backtracked and explained, the feeling stayed with me that this was not the bedroom of a forty-something woman. It was presexual, virginal, untouched.