shook his head to force away the emotions and pushed himself into the massive foyer.
The black marble on the floor reflected a perfect image of his set face, and the fear in his eyes was mirrored in the high-polished frames of his mother’s Endangered exhibit. Nicholas took two steps that sounded like primal thunder, certain that everyone now knew he was here. But no one came. He tossed his jacket onto a gilded chair and walked down the hall to his mother’s darkroom.
Astrid Prescott was developing her photos of the Moab, nomads who lived among hills of sand, but she couldn’t get her red right. The color of the ruby dust was still clouding her mind, but no matter how many prints she made, it wasn’t the right shade. It didn’t fix angry enough to whirl around the people, framing them in their nightmares. She put down the last set of photos and pinched the bridge of her nose. Maybe she would try again tomorrow. She pulled several contact sheets from her hanging line, and then she turned and saw the image of her son.
“Nicholas,” his mother whispered.
Nicholas did not move a muscle. His mother looked older, frailer. Her hair was wound in a tight knot at the nape of her neck, and the veins on her clenched fists stood out prominently, marking her hands like a well-traveled map. “You have a grandchild,” he said. His words were tight and clipped and sounded foreign on his tongue. “I thought you should know.”
He turned to leave, but Astrid Prescott rushed forward, scattering the elusive prints of the desert onto the floor. Nicholas was stopped by the touch of his mother’s hand. Her fingertips, coated with fixer, left traces of burns up the length of his arm. “Please stay,” she said. “I want to catch up. I want to look at you. And you must need so much for the baby. I’d love to see him-her?-and Paige too.”
Nicholas regarded his mother with all the cold reserve she’d proudly bred into him. He pulled a snapshot of Max from his pocket and tossed it onto the table, on top of a print of a turbaned man with a face as old as honesty. “I’m sure it isn’t as good as yours,” Nicholas said, staring down into the startled blue eyes of his son. When they’d taken that picture, Paige had stood behind Nicholas with a white sock pulled onto her hand. She had drawn eyes on the top of it and a long forked tongue and had hissed and made rattlesnake noises, pretending to bite Nicholas’s ear. In the end, Max had smiled after all.
Nicholas pulled his arm away from his mother’s touch. He knew he could not stand there much longer without giving in. He would reach for his mother, and by erasing the space between them, he would be wiping clean a slate listed with grievances that were already starting to fade. He took a deep breath and stood tall. “At one point you weren’t ready to be part of my familns A€m, y.” He stepped back, digging his heel into the melting fossil sunset of one Moab print. “Well,
“I went today.”
“I know.”
“How did you know?”
“You haven’t said three words to me since you got home. You’re a million miles from here.”
“Well, only about ten miles. Brookline’s not so far. But you’re just a Chicago girl; what could you know?”
“Very funny, Nicholas. So what did they say?”
“I didn’t know you got lunch breaks-”
“Paige, let’s not start this again.”
“So-what did she say?”
“I don’t remember. She wanted to know more. I left her a picture.”
“You didn’t talk to her? You didn’t sit down and have tea and crumpets and all that?”
“We’re not British.”
“You know what I mean.”
“No, we did not sit down and have tea. We didn’t sit down at all. I was there for ten minutes, tops.”
“Was it very hard?… Why are you looking at me like that? What?”
“How can you do it? You know, just cut to the heart of the matter like that?”
“Well,
“It was harder than putting together a heart-lung. It was harder than telling the parents of a three-year-old that their kid just died on the operating table. Paige, it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.”
“Oh, Nicholas.”
“Are you going to turn off that light?”
“Sure.”
“Paige? Do we have a copy of that picture I left at my parents’?”
“The one of Max we got with the sock snake?”
“Yeah. It’s a good picture.”
“I can get a copy. I have the negative somewhere.”
“I want it for my office.”
“You don’t have an office.”
“Then I’ll put it in my locker… Paige?”
“Mmm?”
“He’s a pretty attractive kid, isn’t he? I mean, on the average, I don’t think babies are quite as good-looking. Is that a pretentious thing to say?”
“Not if you’re his father.”
“But he’s handsome, isn’t he?”
“Nicholas, love, he looks exactly like you.”
chapter 18
I was reading an article about a woman who had a bad case of the postpartum blues. She swung from depression to exhilaration; she had trouble sleeping. She became slovenly, wild-eyed, and agitated. She began to have thoughts about hurting her baby girl. She called these thoughts The Plan and told them, in fragments, to her co-workers. Two weeks after she began having these ideas, she came home from work and smothered her eight- month-old daughter with a couch pillow.
She had not been the only one. There was a woman before her who killed her first two babies within days of their births and who tried to kill the third before authorities stepped in. Another woman drowned her two-month-old and told everyone he’d been kidnapped. A third shot her son. Another ran her baby over with her Toyota.
This apparently was a big legal battle in the United States. Women accused of infanticide in England during the first year after birth could be charged only with manslaughter, not murder. People said it was mental illness: eighty percent of all new mothers suffered from the baby blues; one in a thousand suffered from postpartum psychosis; three percent of those who suffered from psychosis would kill their own children.
I found myself gripping the magazine so tightly that the paper ripped. What if I was one of them?
I turned the page, glancing at Max in his playpen. He was gumming a plastic cube that was part of a toy too advanced for his age. No one ever sent us age-appropriate baby gifts. The next article was a self-help piece.
