“Of course not,” Angie said.
“Well, then?”
“It’s not simply a case of the baby grows up with the Borzakovs or you kidnap her. There were other options.”
“No,” she said, “there weren’t.”
“Why?”
“You had to be there.”
“Where?”
She shook her head and walked back to the bassinet and stood looking down into it, her arms crossed. “Angie, would you look at something for me?”
“Sure.” Angie joined her by the bassinet and they both looked in at Claire.
“See those red marks on her leg? Are those bites?”
Angie bent at the waist, peered in.
“I don’t think so. I think it’s just a rash. Why don’t you ask Dre. He was a doctor.”
“Not a very good one,” Amanda said, and Dre closed his eyes and lowered his head. “A rash?”
“Yeah,” Angie said, “babies get rashes. A lot.”
“Well, what do you do?”
“It doesn’t look really serious, but I understand how you feel. When are you seeing her pediatrician next?”
She looked almost vulnerable for a moment. “Her one-month checkup is tomorrow, so, I mean, do you think it can wait till then?”
Angie gave her a soft smile and touched her shoulder. “Definitely.”
We heard a sharp noise behind us and we all jumped in place, but it was just the mail being pushed through the brass slot in the door. It fell to the floor-two circulars, a few envelopes.
Amanda and I moved toward it at the same time, but I was closer. I scooped up three envelopes, all addressed to Maureen Stanley. One was from National Grid, a second was from American Express, and the third was from the U.S. Social Security Administration.
“Miss Stanley, I presume.” I handed the mail to Amanda and she snatched it from my fingers.
We walked back over to the baby as Dre slid his flask back into his jacket.
Angie stood over the bassinet, looking in at the baby, her features softening until she looked ten years younger. She turned from the bassinet and her face grew harder. She looked at Dre and Amanda. “On the top of the list of things that don’t add up about all the BS and half-truths you guys have been selling us since we walked through this door is this-why are you still here?”
“Here, as in Planet Earth?” Amanda said.
“No, here as in New England.”
“It’s my home. It’s where I’m from.”
“Yeah, but you’re an identity-theft master,” I said.
“I’m adequate.”
“You got Russians with blowtorches on your ass and you decide to hide out ninety miles away? You could be in Belize by now. Kenya. But you stayed. I’m with my wife on this one-why is that?”
Claire fussed and suddenly let out a wail.
“Now look,” Amanda said, “you woke the baby.”
Chapter Twenty
She took the baby into a bedroom off the living room and for a minute we could hear them in there-Amanda cooing, the baby crying-and then Amanda closed the door.
“When do they stop crying?” Dre asked us.
Angie and I both laughed.
“You’re a doctor.”
“I just deliver them. Once they leave the womb, they leave my sight.”
“You didn’t study child development in med school?”
“Sure, but that was a few years ago. And it was academic then. Now it’s a bit more immediate.”
I shrugged. “Every kid’s different. Some start sleeping regular by the fifth or sixth week.”
“Yours?”
“She went four and a half months before her sleep got dependable.”
“Four and a half months? Shit.”
“Yeah,” Angie said, “and then she started teething not long after that. You think you know what screaming sounds like now. But you don’t. You don’t have a clue. And don’t even get me started on ear infections.”
I said, “ ’Member when she got infections in both ears and a tooth coming in?”
“Now you’re just fucking with me,” Dre said.
Angie and I looked over at him and shook our heads slowly.
“How come they’re never like this in TV shows and movies?” he said.
“Right? They always conveniently go away when the main characters don’t need them around.”
“I was watching this one show the other night, right? The father’s an FBI agent, mother’s a surgeon, and they got, like, a six-year-old? One episode opens, they’re on vacation together, no kid. I figure, okay, the kid’s with the nanny, but the next scene they show the nanny moonlighting at the mother’s hospital. The kid? Driving stick-shift to get groceries, I guess. Playing hopscotch on the interstate.”
“It’s that Hollywood logic,” Angie said, “the same way in the movies there’s always a parking space right outside hospitals and city halls.”
“But what do you care?” I asked him. “She’s not yours.”
“Yeah, but…”
“But what? Let me ask you now that we’ve gotten past the kid-is-yours bullshit-you sleeping with Amanda?”
He leaned back, propped his right ankle up on his left knee. “If I was?”
“We already went down that road. I’m asking if you’re not.”
“Why would you-?”
“You don’t seem her type, man.”
“She’s seventeen years ol-”
“Sixteen.”
“She turns seventeen next week.”
“Then next week I’ll say she’s seventeen.”
“My point is, what type could she possibly have at this age?”
“And my point is, not you.” I spread my hands. “Sorry, man, but I just don’t see it. I see the way you look at her and, yeah, I see a guy waiting for that seventeenth birthday so his conscience can let him off the hook. But I don’t see anything like that when she looks at you.”
“People change.”
“Sure,” Angie said, “but attraction doesn’t.”
“Oh, man,” he said, and he suddenly looked forlorn and cast-off. “Man, I dunno, I dunno.”
“What don’t you know?” Angie asked.
When he looked at her, his hair was damper, his eyes had picked up a milky film. “I don’t know why I keep fucking myself up . I do something like this every few years just to make absolutely positive I’ll never have a normal life. And my shrink would say, sure, I engage in compulsive behaviors and I’m trying to replay patterns that go all the way back to my parents’ divorce and somehow get a different result. And I understand that, I do, but I just want someone to tell me how to stop fucking doing dumb fucking things. I mean, you know how I ended up losing my medical license and owing the Russians?”
We shook our heads. “Drugs?” I offered.
“Well, sort of. I wasn’t addicted to them or anything. It wasn’t that. I met a girl. Russian girl. Well, Georgian. Svetlana. She was, whew, she was everything. Crazy in bed, crazy out of it, too. So beautiful you wanted to eat your hand just looking at her. She…” He dropped his right foot back on the floor, sat there looking down at it. “One day she asks me to write her a scrip for Dilaudid. I say, Of course not. I quote the Hippocratic oath, the Massachusetts statutes prohibiting doctors from writing scrips for anything but diagnosed medical conditions, blah, blah, blah. Cut to the chase, she wears me down in less than a week. Why? I don’t know. Because I’ve got no center. Whatever. But she wears me down. Three weeks after that, I’m writing her OxyCon scrips and scrips for fucking fentanyl, for Christ’s sake, and pretty much anything else she wants. When that starts leaving too much of a paper trail, I start clipping the shit outright from the hospital pharmacy. I even took a moonlighting job at the Faulkner so I could do it there, too. I didn’t know it, but they were already investigating me by that point. Svetlana, God love her, she’d noticed how much I liked playing blackjack at Foxwoods the couple times we went, so she hooked me into this game over in Allston. They played it out of the back of a Ukrainian bakery. First time I played, I cleaned up. Good, fun guys, great-looking women hanging around, all of them probably stoned on my shit. Next time I go, I win again. A lot less, but I win. By the time I start losing, they’re all nice about it-they’ll accept more OxyCon in lieu of actual money, which is good, because Svetlana’s pretty much cleaned me out of money. They give me a grocery list-Vicodin HP, Palladone, Fentora, Actiq, boring old Percodan, you name it. By the time the state medical board has me arrested and files charges, I’m already in the hole twenty-six grand to Kirill’s sharks. But twenty-six grand is like tip-jar money at a coffee shop compared to what’s on the horizon. Because unless I want to do three-to-six at Cedar Junction, I got to come up with money for good lawyers. Another two hundred fifty grand in the hole to pay Dewey, Screwum and Howe, but at least I only get my license revoked, no jail time, no criminal finding. Kirill slides up to me at one of his restaurants a couple weeks later, tells me that the ‘no criminal finding’? That was his doing. And that costs another quarter-million. I can’t prove he didn’t influence the judge, and even if I could, if Kirill Borzakov says you owe him five hundred and twenty-six thousand dollars, guess what you owe Kirill Borzakov?”