One More Day (24 page)

John came back with everything on the list and spread it all out on the coffee table, as if making a statement that it wasn't prudent to put things away, to make things more permanent than they were. His cheeks were pink, like they were in the winter, like when he rushed. He hadn't left the two of them alone with that baby for very long. And who could blame him, really? Danielle loved her daughter, but she had a newfound respect for everything that John was juggling in addition to his own grief. As he folded the paper bags, crinkling them, the baby woke up with a noise that was more like the squawk of a bird.

“That's quite a distinctive cry,” Danielle said. “Something you'd remember.”

Carrie filled a baby bottle but said nothing. She'd stopped expecting people to believe her. When she thought back to the sounds the night of that first birth, all she could conjure was the quiet hush of the basement, the whoosh of the heater blowing, the tick of a grandfather clock above them in Ethan's hallway, the catch of her own ragged breathing as Ethan pulled the baby out and cut the cord. After Ethan had left the house, she hadn't heard a thing. Not the frantic crying, distinctive or not. Not the trunk slamming shut. Her lip quivered. Had she even said good-bye? Had she said she was sorry? So no, she didn't remember the sound of his cries, and she thanked God for that. But the baby's paleness, his almost-blue skin, his otherworldly hands—oh, those were precisely, exactly the same.

Danielle pulled John into the kitchen.

“So how long are we going to let her do this? A couple of hours, or—”

John breathed deeply. “I don't know. It's the first time I've really seen her happy since Ben disappeared again.”

“It hasn't been that long, John.”

“I know. But…days seem a lot longer when they're unhappy ones.”

She nodded. “Still, John, we can't just keep a strange child in the house indefinitely. We have to tell someone.”

“I know. I know it would look bad, but now that they're close to making an arrest—”

“They are? They told you that?”

“Yeah, Forrester told me.”

“So they must have enough evidence finally? They're pretty sure?”

“I guess so. They have his license plate apparently, and a witness. So no one's looking at her anymore. The car is gone—”

“Car?”

“They were following her for a while,” he said. “I saw them.”

“But…this still looks bad, John. They might change their minds about following her and making that arrest if they find a missing child in your house!”

“I checked the Amber Alerts, and there was nothing.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, positive.”

“Well, if it's an abandoned baby, I guess an hour won't matter.”

“I think we should let the baby spend the night here.”

“That's too long, John.”

“One more day won't hurt.”

Danielle winced at the phrase. But she didn't want to tell her son-in-law what Carrie had told her. She watched John watching Carrie, his gaze tender and hopeful. How could she spoil the beautiful mood with her matter-of-fact talk of ghosts and of death? If he knew what she knew, what would he do? Have her committed? Call the police? Or just struggle to stay awake all night, watching his wife, guarding the crib.

What could the harm be, after all
, Danielle thought,
of giving her daughter one more day when one more day was all she ever expected to get?

The night before, Carrie was the last person to leave the baby's room. John was not surprised by that; he was surprised she was willing to leave at all. The three of them stood over his crib before they went to bed themselves, saying their own form of prayer or blessing for a day of peace. And while they didn't discuss what they would choose to do the next day, Carrie knew in her heart she would not have to make that decision.

At five forty-five a.m., Danielle bolted upright to the sound of a scream from the room next door, followed by the baby's squawk. She grabbed her robe and ran into the nursery.

Her daughter stood next to the crib, hand over her mouth, sobbing.

“Carrie, honey, what is it?”

“He's…here!”

“Well, of course he—”

Danielle stopped talking, swallowed hard. So this was the moment of reckoning, the proof. The terrible evidence when her daughter learned she was wrong. When her daughter learned, perhaps, that she was crazy.

The baby cried out again, but Carrie made no move to pick him up.
Of course
, Danielle thought.
She knows he's a stranger now
. The bond, the spell, was broken. But hunger, need, loneliness, those continued. Carrie reached in and picked up the baby, cooing to him, walking him around the room.

“Why is he still here?”

“Carrie, I—”

“What does it mean, that he stayed and the others left?”

“Honey, you need to face the possibility that—”

“That what, Mom?”

“That you were wrong about all of this.”

“All of this?” She screwed up her face. “You don't believe anything I said either?”

“That's not what I said.”

“You don't believe your own daughter? You don't believe your own mother?”

“Carrie, calm down. What I'm saying is…”

“Yes, what are you saying?”

“I'm saying isn't it possible…that you were right about the others and wrong about the baby?”

Carrie blinked in the low light of the room.

“No,” she said. “The only one I was wrong about was Nolan, and he—he tricked me, because he was sick. I know he was sick. That's why he came to me, so I could save him.”

Danielle's mouth was a straight line, her lips disappearing. A signal, sure as birds on a wire, that she held words inside she was afraid to say.

“We have to get the baby to Ben's pediatrician,” Carrie said suddenly.

“Carrie, honey, it's been long enough. We need to get this baby somewhere safe before this goes any—”

“No, see, I'm thinking that sickness gives off the same kind of signal…I sense it around someone's body, like heat waves off a grill. It's a kind of half-dead smell, it's like…a predeath, I guess. So it confuses me.”

“Carrie,” her mother said, grabbing her hands. “Listen to me.”

“What?”

“Carrie… Your father. He—”

“What, Mom?”

“He…saw things too.”

“Things?”

“After he came back from Vietnam. Post-traumatic stress. The people who died, that his unit killed…they…sometimes came back to him.”

“What are you saying? That I'm crazy like he was? That it runs in the family?” Carrie's eyes flashed. The idea of it—and that her mother might believe it and might have told John, and John told Dr. Kenney, and someone told Maya Mercer.

“No,” Danielle said, but quietly, guiltily. “I'm saying there was a reason he drank, and a reason he gambled, and a reason he couldn't stay with the people he loved. And I'm saying that stress can do terrible things to a person's psyche.”

Carrie shook her head. The room felt smaller than it had a few minutes before. Her mother, the ultimate skeptic. Who believed only in the power of one foot in front of the other, of tackling the list, of getting it done, nothing else.
If this, then that
.

Well, she thought, when they went to the pediatrician and found out that something was wrong with this child, then it would all become clear. She'd show her.
She'd show everybody.

John, Carrie had learned as soon as she'd had Ben, was uncomfortable around babies. He'd held his newborn son awkwardly, all elbows and shoulders, too delicate with him, never sure where to put his hands. But as soon as Ben had started moving, when he'd learned to crawl and roll a ball, John had stopped being afraid he would break. Quite the opposite. He'd toss him repeatedly in the air, making him laugh, throwing him so high it had made Carrie nervous, made her cry out. She supposed it was John's sporty upbringing—everyone in his family an athlete—that made him like that. The whole clan would be arriving soon for Ben's funeral, staying in a hotel together, a bank of rooms on the same floor, as if they couldn't bear to be apart. They'd done the same for John's grandfather's funeral, for a cousin's wedding. It was how they operated: separate but together, a team. And inevitably, someone would bring a Nerf ball and the hotel pool would be transformed into a leaping, shrieking mass of them.
Moving
, Carrie would think, watching them.
They were all about motion.

So when John came into the kitchen while Danielle and Carrie were warming bottles and making coffee, they were both surprised by what he had to say.

“I guess we could find a way to keep him, right?”

“No, John,” Danielle said sharply, barely containing her horror.

“But no one's looking for him,” he said.

Carrie measured coffee grounds, poured water, her back to the others, saying nothing.

“Doesn't matter,” Danielle replied. “There will be questions eventually, questions you can't answer. Haven't you had enough media attention?”

“We could move,” he said simply.

“John, really,” Danielle said. She'd been summoned because Carrie was losing her grip on reality, and now… Was something in the water? What was happening to John?

The house phone rang shrilly. It was used so seldom, but John insisted they keep it for safety. John walked over to the handset to look at the caller ID.

“Maya Mercer,” he said.

“Don't answer it,” Carrie said.

“She'll just keep calling. You know she will.”

“You can't talk to her,” Danielle said. “What if she hears the baby? What if he cries?”

John blinked. “You tell her a friend is over.”

The phone stopped ringing, and in a few seconds, the message light flashed. Danielle picked up the car seat. “That's it. This baby is going to Safe Cradle. Now, one of you, hand over your keys.”

John looked at his wife for a second, just a second, before he reached in his pocket and fished out his car key.

The day Ben was born, Carrie had gone on a hayride. She'd been more than a week past her due date and hadn't had any Braxton-Hicks contractions, and unbeknownst to John, she had already tried eating spicy food and driving down cobblestoned streets in Philadelphia. John didn't believe in that level of intervention; he was firmly in the camp of Carrie's gynecologist, of being patient, of letting nature take its course. He would have been furious if he'd known, would have seen it as risk taking.

But Carrie was tired of being pregnant, tired of the weight hanging so low inside her she half waddled. The man driving the tractor didn't give Carrie a second glance when she climbed into the bed of the truck and sat down on a bale of hay. The other moms, dragged excitedly by their kids, smiled at her and nodded, completely understood. They rode over the hills, circling the farm, past scarecrows and bushels of pumpkins and flapping ghosts in the haunted house display. She thought nothing of those white sheets with the mournful long faces, made no connection between her past and her present, didn't see it as a sign.

Afterward, driving home, sitting at a traffic light still ten miles from home, she felt water trickling out, over the seat, onto the floor, and felt a sense of accomplishment and control. She called John, who tried to get her to wait and have him pick her up, but she refused and drove herself to the hospital.

“What were you doing in Willis Township?” he asked when he met her in the lobby at preregistration.

“Just driving around,” she said, wincing between contractions. They were coming faster than she remembered. Or did she remember at all?

Everything was different the second time. Speedier, flashier. The lights were so bright, she squinted, covered her eyes, cowering in a ball on the table. They kept moving her, trying to get her in position, manipulating her feet, her legs. Unnatural. No squatting, no moving intuitively the way she had the first time with Ethan, without guidance. Between pushes and contractions, she curled up on the hard table, wishing for the low light of Ethan's basement, the flashlight in his hand, the candles in case they needed them. She hadn't seen the terror on his face, and she didn't want to see the concern on John's, the focus of her doctor, the efficient blandness of her nurse. She didn't want to see anything but her baby, safe and sound, healthy. Hers to keep this time.

Proof that she'd been given another chance. But who knew if she'd be given a third?

Safe Cradle wasn't on the outskirts of town anymore. When Carrie was growing up, it had been just off Reservoir Road, down by the river, where the asphalt curved and took you out to nothing but water treatment plants, welding companies, factories. She thought of Ethan that night. Had he driven down there and just kept going? Got on the highway because it was near, because it spoke to him?

Perhaps that was why they moved it, why it was in town, near the firehouse. Safer, not near any ditches or bodies of water. Danielle had looked it up online, and Carrie was surprised to see the address. She'd driven by it a million times and had never noticed a logo or young women lingering outside.

Danielle insisted she be the one to surrender the baby. Just in case someone was watching. Just in case someone saw her go in. The car wasn't following Carrie anymore, perhaps, but people were everywhere. And they would happily spill their story to Maya Mercer.

“I'll go alone,” Danielle said. “It's the only thing that makes sense.”

“No,” Carrie said. “Absolutely not. I'm going with you.”

“Well, as long as you stay in the car,” John said.

Danielle got in the driver's side of John's car, and Carrie sat in the back with the baby. They drove through the neighborhoods, Danielle glancing at gardens, lawns, houses, Carrie's eyes fixed on the baby.

Danielle pulled into a parking spot adjacent to the fire station, put the car in park, and turned around to Carrie, holding out her arms.

Carrie unbuckled the seat quietly, the first time she'd touched a car seat buckle in a long, long time.

“It's the right thing to do,” Danielle said. “No matter who we believe this baby is, honey, this is the right thing to do.”

“I know.”

“I know you know.”

“Closure.” Carrie sighed.

Danielle thought of a million other things she could say but shouldn't. Like that Carrie was still young. That she and John could have another baby. That she could move to another town, under another name even, and no one would ever know she was the mother who lost her child. John had said his parents wanted them to move farther east, where they lived. She would encourage that. She would help her find a house they could afford there, help them fix it up. She could spend spring and summer with her, doing whatever needed to be done. Florida was too hot in the summer.
I miss my daughter
, she thought with a pang.
I miss being a mother. I want to be here, grandchild or no grandchild.

Danielle felt Carrie watching them as they exited the car. She approached the door slowly. Nondescript, except for small red type with a roof design floating above the words. A doorbell and a door knocker too, as if for good measure, and a camera mounted to the right, trained on the stoop. They had been right not to let Carrie go to the door.

As Danielle reached the stoop, a young girl came up the sidewalk from the right, holding a bundle in a blanket. Her eyes were red and her steps were slower than Danielle's. When she saw her, she hesitated, as if to let Danielle ring the buzzer first. But her eyes were less polite. They burned into Danielle as if to say, “Yes, I'm young and stupid and frightened. But what the hell is your excuse, lady?”

Danielle jumped when the door buzzed open, and she realized she didn't have a good excuse or a good story or even a plausible one. She turned back and looked at her daughter. In the backseat, shielded by the glass, Carrie raised her hand and waved. Danielle reached down and lifted the baby's arm and waved back.

She stepped inside and walked to the simple desk on the right of the lobby. Painted above it were the words
No questions asked
.