“You shouldn’t leave him like that. He could roll off.”
“Yeah, yeah.” He turns away, face hot. Know-it-all bitch. He changes his mind as he puts it back under his arm, eyes out the window on his stop. He wouldn’t fuck her, not even in the dark. He knows her type, all bossy and telling him “little to the left, harder, slower” and all that shit. He feels the pull toward the apartment and his Penny, the warm bed, the happy reunion, any one of their many Golden Ticket futures. Without a backward glance at Mrs. Fatty Know-It-All, he hops down the two steps into the morning damp, leaving the wadded-up wipes on the seat.
37
Cradle Will Fall
PAUL
When he first sees them coming up the walkway, Eva between two police officers, a third trailing, Paul thinks, from the way one has a hand on her elbow, that she is in handcuffs—what has happened? But then it is clear that she is unsteady, and the men are holding her up. She looks like a fish-eyed stranger; if not for the hair, like a bowl of boiled rotini dumped over her head, he’s not sure he would know her. She stumbles, stops, staring at her running shoes, and there is something spilled on her shirt. She looks so defeated Paul wants to run to her, gather her in his arms, how could this have happened?
But he can’t move, feels like the treads of his boots are affixed to the front hall floorboards with a fast-drying adhesive. The cluster, Eva and the officers, are passing the side yard, where behind them, the slope that gives Portland Heights its name falls away, a seventy-degree angle of tangles and jagged overgrowth. Paul has a flash—taking Eva by the shoulders and shoving her backward, letting her bounce between the ferns, the stubbled juvenile pines, treacherous, thorny wild blackberries, disposing of her as he did this year’s decomposing, black-speckled Halloween pumpkin. How could you let this happen!
The phone call had come less than an hour ago, 9:43, while Paul was on his hands and knees in the office hallway, blotting at the industrial mottled red carpet with guest towels he had grabbed from home. He had just realized that the merlot of the berber was bleeding into Eva’s ivory Egyptian cotton.
Paul Nova. This is Detective Haberman. We have your wife here. She’s pretty upset. Seems she thinks she’s lost your son.
As they come up the last three brick steps, Paul pulls the door open, lifting each foot like he’s wearing cement shoes, and he grabs Eva by her shoulders, pulls her over the doorjamb to him, puts his face into her hair, which smells faintly of Wyeth’s baby shampoo. He pushes her away. She is talking, a mumble of nonsense. In the air that swirls between them, Paul breathes what is smattered on her shirt in chunks and flecks—vomit—and it has transferred, a dampness on his chest, from her to him.
“What?”
“I locked the door, I thought I locked it, I thought I locked it.”
“What door?” Before she answers, Paul has a panic, feeling the police officers’ eyes on his face. What door? Had Wyeth been here, at the house? Is this his fault too? Had she left the baby with him this morning, imagining she had passed the baton, thinking she locked the front door before she left? But if that was true, then was Wyeth right upstairs, still sleeping in his bassinet?
“What door!” he yells, hope flaring in his chest, desperate to be the first to thunder upstairs ahead of her and see him, curled on his stomach, all a terrible mistake, something they will laugh over with him when he’s older, family folklore—You guys left me home alone when I was two months old!
“I thought I locked it, I’m sure…” She is still going, and Paul has an urge to slap her. He knows there is no hope—Wyeth has never in his life slept more than half an hour alone in his bassinet—but he has to hear her say it.
“What door!” he roars again, and she looks up at him, desperately, the ink of her pupils like a slick at the bottom of an old plumbing problem.
“At the gas station,” she says plaintively, and he feels first sharp relief, a pinprick in his chest, so that the flood of vindicating blame can well up beneath it: She left their newborn baby in the car at the gas station.