Here she was again, however, with the same book, and a daughter who had the potential for being even wilder than her mother. How soon before Kermit the Frog comes down from her wall and AC-DC goes up, or the Sex Pistols? After that, how soon until the worthless boys started to hang out?
Before Marlene could think, she reached out in an almost convulsive motion and pulled Lucy to her, jamming the child’s head tightly against her own.
“Mah-ummm! What’re you doing? complained Lucy.
“I’m trying to jam all my horrible experience into your head so you don’t have to go through it all over again and break my heart,” said her mother.
Lucy struggled from the head lock and gave her mother a sharp look. Marlene was about to explain (not that it could be explained) when Zak let out a cry from the nursery. In a moment Zik had joined the duet.
Marlene went down and chirped at them, changed them, tickled them, and, tucking one on each hip, walked back to the living room. They seemed solid and sturdy to her, indestructible. Boys. She had been surprised to find that although she loved them both dearly, she did not have the sort of terrified feelings for them that she had for Lucy, the sense that the child was clone of one’s own soul. The boys would be all right. They were little men already at age one, dividing the vast male province amicably between them: to the one War (Zak), Culture to the other. And, of course, they had each other: they had recently started communicating in a secret twin language.
She plopped them on the living room carpet among a scatter of soft toys. They, of course, went straight for Lucy, who made a show of playing with them for five minutes and then flounced off to her room. Another family problem, but one that Marlene thought time would heal.
Unlike, for example, the Wooten family problem, which Marlene thought that time would only make worse.
Stop it, you’re ruining my life! A spontaneous and irrational outburst from Edie when Marlene told her about what had happened upstairs at Cuff’s, and she had even spared Edie some of the wetter details. Edie had actually put her hands over her ears to bar the knowledge that in all likelihood the Music Lover was a conspiracy of her sister, Vincent Robinson, and the pianist Evarti. Marlene had sent Wolfe off to tail Robinson, without much hope, to try to catch him in the act. Which meant that Marlene would have to go back on the street, since Dane was still recovering from the shooting, having found that gun-nuttery and actually killing a human at close range are rather different things. The grand jury inquiry into the death of Donald Monto would not take place for a month. While Marlene did not think there would be any problem with it, Dane was taking it very seriously indeed.
Marlene tried to get back into her book but quickly saw the wisdom of Teresa in keeping babies out of the convents of the Discalced Carmelites. Setting the book aside, she descended to the floor and spent the next two hours in squealing mindless play, lost in motherhood’s Way of Imperfection, her lot.
FOURTEEN
Marlene came up from an unpleasant dream involving babies, whips, and priests to the furious shaking of her daughter.
“Mah-om! Get up! I’m going to be late for school, and they’re screaming their stupid heads off!”
They certainly were.
Marlene sat up, rubbed her face, and shook her head. Clearly Karp was gone. No surprise on the first day of that miserable trial, but …
“What-where’s Posie?” she asked around a thick tongue.
“I don’t know. Anyway, she’s not here,” was the reply. Marlene groaned and slipped back into automatic mode: dress, no shower, babies cleaned and fed, dog walked, Lucy to school, Marlene to the office, with the little boys.
“Sym, did Posie call or anything?”
“No.” The girl looked doubtfully at the pair of squirming rug rats. “Do I have to take care of them?”
“No, Sym, I’ll do it myself,” said Marlene, taking the proffered coffee and sticking the sheaf of message slips between her lips. “I’m sure they’ll be fine playing out on the fire escape,” she mumbled, and regretted it immediately when she saw Sym’s expression. Sym would kill for Marlene, or take a bullet, but watching babies was out, at least for now.
Marlene gulped down her coffee, placed the babies in what used to be the nursery, and which had become something of a dumpster and storeroom, removed the poisonous and deadly materials and objects, dug out the few pathetic toys that had been left behind, set up the folding gate at the nursery door, and went to her cubicle to smoke and return calls, with the door open so that she could hear any wails.
The message sheaf was unusually fat. Like Macy’s and Toys “R” Us, Marlene’s was a business that thrived amid the warmth of the holidays, reaching a crescendo around the twelve days of Christmas. It was then that the eggnog flowed and made rational such thoughts as, “Because you won’t take me back and let me be a loving dad again, I will kill you and the kids and myself.” Also, the merry season stimulated any number of women to let the guys come around, whereafter they almost always recalled just exactly why they had tossed them out in the first place, which no amount of tinsel and ho-ho-ho could disguise, and told the guys this, and got their lumps, again. It was not, for Marlene or for many of her clients, A Wonderful Life.
Three from Edie Wooten, one marked urgent. Marlene put these aside: it couldn’t have been that urgent or Sym would have beeped her. A call-in from Wolfe. Six violations of protect orders, two serious, three phone harassments. Four cold calls, ladies having problems with their gentlemen. These first, some counseling, referrals, an appointment made. Some calls to friendly cops. Calls to men, at work, telling them to cut it out, that someone was watching. An hour, two hours, passed this way. Suddenly, Marlene leaped to her feet, heart in mouth, and slammed down a ringing phone. The silence had just struck her. The babies! She dashed out.
Tranh was sitting on the floor next to the playpen. He had made up a solution of dish-washing liquid in a pan, from which he was drawing bubbles with a piece of twisted wire. The twins were rapt and cooing, clinging to the playpen’s bars, bouncing on their chubby legs and grabbing at the iridescent globes as they floated past. Tranh looked up and smiled.
“L’innocent parodis, plein de plaisirs furtifs/Est-il déjà plus loin de l’Inde ou que la Chine?” he said.
Marlene’s heart went back into its place. A Vietnamese assassin who quotes Baudelaire is watching my kids, she thought briefly, then sighed and trotted back to work. Good, affordable child care is hard to find in New York.
Karp had blocked out his opening statement over the weekend, and that morning he had reviewed it carefully with Terrell Collins, even rehearsing it a couple of times, which was a thing he rarely did. The presentation of an opening statement is a peculiar art form that, like singing the blues, has many pretenders but few masters. Like the blues, the opening statement tells a story; like the blues, it is, or must seem, extemporaneous, natural. It must have a sort of artless grace to it, yet it must also penetrate deeply, so that all the evidence that appears during the course of a long trial will be slotted by the jurors’ minds into the places that the prosecutor has prepared for each piece.
Karp was good at this, and liked doing it. On the other hand, this was not your usual liquor-store shooting. He was starting to feel … not precisely nervous, but that he was overtraining, that Waley had him spooked. Since he had arisen that morning at six, something had been nagging at his mind, and he couldn’t bring it to the surface. It irritated him, like a ripped cuticle. A half hour before they were due in court he found himself walking back and forth down the length of his office, taking deep, slow breaths and trying not to think of anything.