Mother May I(13)

“Two. You keep this phone with you at all times. When I call, you answer. You take it with you to the bathroom, you hold it when you sleep.”

My heart crashed. When I slept? Did they mean to keep Robert overnight? I couldn’t live through that. I didn’t think I could live through one more second, actually, but one second passed, and then another, and I kept on living.

“I understand.”

“Three. Do exactly what I say. Nothing added, nothing skipped. That’s it. Three rules. Follow them and this will all be over tomorrow. For both of us.”

I found myself nodding, as if she could see me. Maybe her daughter could. She might be in my backyard right now, watching.

I glanced at the window, but at some point I’d closed our wooden shutters without thinking. It was a habit left over from childhood, when my mom was constantly afraid that someone would see it was only her and me inside, small and vulnerable. Trey was a sunshine person, though. It shocked me to think that only two days ago I’d been laughing with him about how our marriage was a long series of laps around the house, undoing each other’s window settings. Robert had been sleeping sweetly in my arms. Two days, but it felt a thousand years away.

Now I stared at the shutters like a feral thing, shivering, wondering if the daughter was out there. She could be three feet away, wishing me ill on the other side of my wall. She couldn’t see me, and I couldn’t see her. This was good. The old woman had looked right in the camera, showing me her face, but as a mother she’d feel protective toward her child. If I could identify the daughter, it might make it feel riskier for her to give Robert back.

Then I realized I might already have seen the daughter. She could have been the driver with the toddler who’d watched me scream and pound my steering wheel. Or driving the big SUV that had blocked the turn into my neighborhood. She could be anyone.

“I can follow rules,” I said. “I want this to be over.”

She sighed. “Mrs. Cabbat, that’s what I want, too. For this to be over.” She sounded almost sorry, which was so strange and foreign. I hated her with a black instinctual fear, huge and inadvertent, but I was also glad she had a child herself. Glad her child was female, too. It felt safer somehow. For Robert.

“How do I know he’s okay now?”

A pause, and then I heard her say, “Hey, baby? Hey there.” Her voice was gentle, almost sweet, and I heard his sleepy protest. I knew him from that sound, even under her voice and the noise of traffic. It was Robert. I felt relief, then horror. It was as if I’d had a knife in me this whole time, and she had pulled it out, then put it right back in.

“You have to burp him twice,” I blurted, my calm shell cracking. I had a vision of him colicky, crying, keeping her awake. I didn’t want her angry or resenting him. “At least twice, because otherwise he gets fussy.”

There was an awkward pause, and then she said, “Mine was that way, too. When she was small.” Her voice was gruff, but I felt a surge of hope. This tiny bit of information, one parent to another, felt like a filament stretched between us, tenuous as spiderweb, connecting us. “Say the rules back to me. I need to make sure you understand.”

I nodded. Made myself breathe in and out. “I’ll keep this between us. No police, or even family. I’ll have the phone with me, every second, and answer when you call. I’ll do exactly what you tell me to do.”

“Good,” she said. “Good.”

“Can you please tell me how much now, though? I might have to move things around.”

Whatever amount she said, I would get it. I would loot our accounts, sell everything we owned. I would steal my mother’s pistol from her gun safe and rob a bank. I’d almost rather that than call Trey’s parents for cash, but I would do that, too.

There was a small, shocked silence, and then she asked, “You think this is about money?”

“I . . . I thought—” I stammered. It had to be money. What else did we have?

“You think I’d take a baby to get money?” Her voice rose, incredulous, and Robert gave a protesting mewl. Immediately her voice softened into shushing noises. “Ch-ch-ch.”

She understood babies, this mother, and she was being gentle with him. His cry subsided. It made me grateful to her, an involuntary golden gleam inside my fear and rage and hate. Our slim connection strengthened, running back from her to me.

“I’m sorry. It was an assumption. I can’t know what you want. But I’ll do whatever you say.”

I wasn’t trying to soothe her. There was no room for pretending between us. This was truth, raw and ugly. She owned me, and we both understood that. Somewhere, in a car that was moving farther away from me every second, I heard Robert sigh and stir in her arms.

“Hm.” It was a little hum of sound, thoughtful. “I’m almost to a place where I can stop for a little. Hold on a minute.”

I waited, listening to road sounds and her breathing. The traffic sounds faded, and then her car’s engine went quiet.

Her voice dropped almost to a whisper. Intimate. Confessional. And then she told me what she wanted.





5




“Mrs. Cabbat, I’m old. You can likely hear that in my voice. What you can’t hear is, I’m also sick. The kind of sick that means I got no energy to spare, and I don’t have much time left. So I got nothing to lose. I could go to prison for the rest of my life and still be free before summer ends, you understand? I don’t care what happens to me. I only care about my daughter.”