Mary gave him a smile, her eyes cold. She turned away, walked out of the room and to the door that had a blue bow and the number 21 on it.
She was nervous. If this one didn't work out, she might have to scrub the mission.
She thought of Lord Jack, awaiting her at the weeping lady, and she went in.
The mother was asleep, her baby cradled against her. In a chair by the window sat an older woman with curly gray hair, doing needlepoint. "Hello," the woman in the chair said. "How are you today?"
"I'm fine, thanks." Mary saw the mother's eyes start to open. The baby began to stir, too; his eyelids fluttered open for a second, and Mary saw that the child's eyes were light blue, like Lord Jack's. Her heart leapt; it was karma at work.
"Oh, I drifted off." Laura blinked, trying to focus on the nurse who stood over the bed. A big woman with a nondescript face and brown hair. A yellow Smiley Face button on her uniform. Her name tag said Janette something. "What time is it?"
"Time to weigh the baby," Mary answered. She heard tension in her voice, and she got a grip on it. "It'll just take a minute or two."
"Where's Dad?" Laura asked her mother.
"He went down to get another magazine. You know him and his reading."
"Can I weigh the baby, please?" Mary held her arms out to take him.
David was waking up. His initial response was to open his mouth and let out a high, thin cry. "I think he's hungry again," Laura said. "Can I feed him first?"
Couldn't chance a real nurse coming in, Mary thought. She kept her smile on. "I won't be very long. Just get this over with and out of the way, all right?"
Laura said, "All right," though she yearned to feed him. "I haven't seen you before."
"I only work weekends," Mary replied, her arms offered.
"Shhhhh, shhhhh, don't cry," Laura told her son. She kissed his forehead, smelling the peaches-and-cream aroma of his flesh. "Oh, you're so precious," she told him, and she reluctantly placed him in the nurse's arms. Immediately she felt the need to grasp him back to her again. The nurse had big hands, and Laura saw that one of the woman's fingernails had a dark red crust beneath it. She glanced again at the name tag: Leister.
"There we go," Mary said, rocking the infant in her arms. "There we go, sweet thing." She began moving toward the door. "I'll bring him right back."
"Take good care of him," Laura said. Needs to wash her hands, she thought.
"I sure will." Mary was almost out the door.
"Nurse?" Laura asked.
Mary stopped on the threshold, the baby still crying in her arms.
"Would you bring me some orange juice, please?"
"Yes, ma'am." Mary turned away, walked through the door, and saw the black father from number 24 just leaving the room to go toward the nurses' station. She put her index finger into the baby's mouth to quiet his crying, and she went through the stairwell's door and started down the stairs.
"She had dirty hands," Laura said to her mother. "Did you notice that?"
"No, but that was the biggest woman I ever laid eyes on." She watched Laura position herself against her pillows, and Laura winced at a sudden pain. "How're you doin'?"
"Okay, I guess. Hurting a little bit." She felt as if she'd delivered a sack of hardened concrete. Her body was full of aches and pains, the muscles of her back and thighs still prone to cramps. Her stomach had lost its bloat, but she was still sluggish and heavy with fluids. The thirty-two stitches between her thighs, where Dr. Bonnart had clipped the flesh of her vagina open to allow extra room for David's head to slide through, was a constant irritation. "I thought the nurses had to keep their hands clean," she said when she'd gotten herself comfortable again.
"I sent your father downstairs," Laura's mother said. "I think we need to talk, don't you?"
"Talk about what?"
"You know." She leaned forward in her chair, her gaze sharp. "About what the problem is between you and Doug."
Of course she'd sensed it, Laura thought. Her mother's radar was rarely wrong. "The problem." Laura nodded. "Yes, there's sure a problem, all right."
"I'd like to hear it."
Laura knew there was no way to deflect this conversation. Sooner or later, it would have to be spoken. "Doug's been having an affair since October," she began, and she saw her mother's mouth open in a small gasp. Laura began to tell her the whole story, and the older woman listened intently as Laura's son was being carried through a corridor where steam pipes hissed like awakened snakes.
Mary Terror, her index finger clasped in the baby's mouth, strode through the corridor toward the loading dock's door. Before she reached the laundry area, she stopped where the hampers were parked. One of them had towels at the bottom, and she put the baby down amid them and covered him up. The infant gurgled and mewled, but Mary grasped the hamper and started pushing it ahead of her. As she passed through the laundry where the black women were working, Mary saw the laundress who'd allowed her in.
"You still lost?" the woman called over the noise of washers and steam presses.
"No, I know where I'm going now," Mary answered. She flashed a quick smile and went on. The baby began to cry just before Mary reached the exit, but it was a soft crying and the noise of the laundry masked it. She opened the door. The wind had picked up, and silver needles of rain were falling. She pushed the hamper out onto the loading dock and scooped the infant out, still wrapped in a towel. Then she hurried down the concrete steps to her van, which she'd traded for her truck and three hundred and eighty dollars at Friendly Ernie's Used Cars in Smyrna about two hours before. She put the crying baby onto the floorboard on the passenger side, next to her sawed-off shotgun. She started the engine, which ran rough as a cob, and made the entire van shudder. The windshield wipers shrieked as they swept back and forth across the glass.
Then Mary Terror backed away from the loading dock, turned the van around, and drove away from the hospital named after God. "Hush, now!" she told the baby. "Mary's got you!" The infant kept crying.
He'd just have to learn who was in control.
Mary left the hospital behind, and swung up onto a freeway, where she merged into a sea of metal in the falling silver rain.
7: A Hollow Vessel
"Hi." The nurse had red hair and freckled cheeks, and she beamed a smile. Her name tag identified her as Erin Kingman. She glanced quickly at the empty perambulator beside the bed. "Where's David?"
"Someone took him to be weighed," Laura said. "I guess that was about fifteen minutes ago. I asked her for orange juice, but maybe she got busy."
"Who took him?"
"A big woman. Janette was her first name. I hadn't seen her before."
"Uh-huh." Erin nodded, her smile still there but the first butterfly flutters beginning in her stomach. "All right, I'll go find her. Excuse me." She hurried out of the room, leaving Laura and Miriam to their conversation.
"Divorce." It had a funeral-bell sound, coming from the older woman's mouth. "Is that what you're saying?"
"Yes."
"Laura, it doesn't have to be divorce. You could go to a counselor and talk things out. Divorce is a messy, sticky thing. And David's going to need a father. Don't think just of yourself and not of David."
Laura heard what was coming. She waited for it without speaking, her hands clenched under the sheet.
"Doug's given you a good life," her mother went on in that earnest tone of voice used by women who knew they'd traded love for comfort long ago. "He's been a good provider, hasn't he?"
"We bought a lot of things together, if that's what you mean."
"You have a history. A life together, and now a son. You have a fine house, you drive a fine car, and you're not wanting for anything. So divorce is a drastic option, Laura. Maybe you could get a good settlement, but a thirty-six-year-old woman with a baby on her own might have a hard time -" She stopped. "You know what I'm saying, don't you?"