Mercy Street(34)

“Shannon, are you with me?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Shannon said.

The following day the doctor would remove the laminaria. Then plastic tubing would be inserted through the cervix. The tube would be attached to a gentle suction machine.

“That’s it?” Shannon seemed wholly unimpressed. In the context of her life, this didn’t qualify as a disaster.

“Dr. Gurvitch can insert the laminaria first thing Monday morning. We open at eight.”

“In the morning?” Shannon looked aghast. “I mean, can’t we just do it now?”

Women in crisis were sometimes unbearable. Sometimes, honestly, you wanted to break them in half.

“I explained this,” Claudia said. “You’ll need two appointments, Monday morning and again on Tuesday. Remember?”

She explained the procedure again.

This time Shannon was outraged. “This is bullshit,” she fumed. “I mean, why did I even come here today?”

Claudia said, “To have this conversation with me.”

“What a fuckin waste of time! First some asshole takes my picture. Now you tell me—”

“Wait, what?” Claudia frowned. “Someone took your picture?”

“One of those assholes outside. I see him again, I’m gonna kick his ass.” Shannon sat up very straight—wide-awake now, blinking rapidly, her pupils dilated. She seemed alert but disoriented. She seemed—in Claudia’s professional opinion—out of her fucking mind.

“Shannon, I’m confused. Can you tell me exactly what happened?”

“Fuck this.” Shannon rose awkwardly from the chair, hand over her belly. “I’m outta here.”

“Wait,” Claudia said, but it was no use. Shannon was already out the door.

Claudia thought, No way in hell will she show up for that appointment.

It took a certain kind of person to do this work, and she was that kind of person. She believed this most of the time.

SOME YEARS BACK—IT MUST HAVE BEEN THE SPRING OF 2008—Claudia was riding the T to work when a story in the Globe caught her eye. A jogger on Deer Island had discovered a pile of debris washed up on the beach—a black plastic trash bag, the thick, sturdy type used by building contractors. Protruding from the bag was a tiny hand.

The bag held the drowned body of a child—a little girl, perhaps two years old. Her face was bloated beyond recognition. Her waterlogged body, wrapped in a Hello Kitty blanket, weighed twenty-four pounds. Her eyes were blue, her ears pierced though she wore no earrings. She wore a disposable diaper and pink cotton leggings printed with tiny hearts.

Who was she, and where had she come from? For the next several months, these questions would dominate the metro pages of the Globe and the Herald. The little girl had no fingerprints; the tides had damaged the skin of her hands. To readers of both papers—to the entire city of Boston—she became known as Baby Doe.

The child was found barefoot. Her shoes, if she’d been wearing any, had been stolen by the tides. Her toenails were painted cherry pink, and this was a detail the press would seize upon, a detail almost too painful to bear. Imagine someone, her mother presumably, taking the plump little foot in hand and dabbing the brush over each tiny toenail, the child squealing with delight.

Someone had loved her. The pink leggings proved it—the sort of garment a young mother might spot in a store and coo over, a miniature version of ones she herself might have worn not so long ago.

Baby Doe’s mouth was studied. Her first molars had come in, but not her second. Her teeth had been brushed regularly and were in good condition. There were no marks on her body, no signs of abuse or trauma. She appeared well nourished and well cared for, yet no one had reported her missing.

The pink cotton leggings were a brand sold only at Target, toddler size three. The word toddler made it all too real. Too painful to read and too painful to write. Imagine this child in life, wearing her pink cotton leggings, barefoot, her toes tipped in pink. Now imagine her toddling.

Well nourished and well cared for. Baby Doe appeared to be in perfect health, except for the fact that she was dead.

No one had reported her missing. How was it even possible? In a walk-in cooler on Albany Street, the little girl waited. She had been assigned a bar code and zipped into a plastic bag.

An investigation was mounted. Tides were analyzed. The beach at Deer Island faced eastward. The Coast Guard calculated reverse drifts. In salt water, at high tide, how far would a twenty-four-pound bag be carried? The terrible power of mathematics: there was, apparently, a formula for this.

The autopsy showed no drugs in her system, no pathogens, toxins, or diseases. A cause of death could not be determined. Suffocation seemed likely, but impossible to prove.

DNA was extracted. The child’s hair and clothing and blanket were combed for pollen. Incredibly, though she’d spent God knows how long in the icy Atlantic, specimens were found.

The pollen samples were sent to a lab in Houston.

The girl’s DNA was compared with databases of missing children. Incredibly, this was someone’s job. The missing children numbered in the thousands. No match was ever found.

The pollen analysis showed local pine and oak pollen mingled with soot. Baby Doe was a Boston girl.

A forensic artist made a composite image, using Adobe Photoshop: chubby cheeks and blue eyes, red-gold hair the texture of cotton candy. The hair made her distinctive even in Boston, a city with more than its share of redheads. Someone, surely, would recognize that hair.