born.”
“Well, she had a reason,” Dre said.
“Shut up, Dre.” She turned back to me. “Sophie wasn’t going to be raising Claire anyway-Kirill and his certifiably insane wife were.” She came over by me and sat on the edge of the coffee table so that our knees were almost touching. “They want that child. And, yeah, the easy thing would be to give her back. I sure don’t want to imagine what’s going to happen when Yefim and Pavel get me in a room alone. Yefim keeps an acetylene torch in the back of his truck. The kind they use on construction sites, with the hood and everything?” She nodded. “That’s Yefim. And he’s the sanest one of that pack. So am I scared? I am petrified. And was taking Claire away from them borderline suicidal? Probably. But you two have a daughter. Would you want her growing up with Kirill and Violeta Borzakov?”
“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
“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
“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.”
