The Perfect Mother(13)

Colette climbs the L-shaped stoop to the front door. She searches for a row of buzzers. “There’s just one doorbell. What is her apartment number?”

“Wait, look.” Francie is pointing and then running around the corner to a landscaped path that leads to a red door, left slightly ajar, on the side of the building.

Colette and Nell are close behind as Francie steps quietly into an entrance foyer. A dozen oversize Rothkoesque paintings hang on the pale gray walls, the ceilings are at least twenty feet high, and four wide marble steps lead to a hallway, down which they can hear someone sobbing.

“Oh my god,” Nell says. “This entire building is her house.”

They follow the sound, making their way down the hall and into a large chef’s kitchen, off which is a skylit staircase. A uniformed police officer, his name badge reading Cabrera, stands on the steps, listening to a crackling radio attached at his shoulder.

“Who are you?”

“Winnie’s friends,” Colette says. “Is she here?”

“Get out,” he says, visibly annoyed.

“Can we just—” Francie says.

“Out,” he says, probing his pockets for his ringing cell phone and turning abruptly to rush up the stairs. “This is a crime scene.”

They ignore him and continue on into a large living room. When they enter, they see her.

Winnie has curled into herself on a chair in front of a wall of night-blackened glass, her arms wrapped around her knees, a blanket the color of cream draped over her shoulders. Her eyes are vacant as she tugs at her lower lip. A detective is sitting a few feet away, writing in a notebook, a forgotten takeout coffee on the floor beside him.

“It was the pasta,” Alma is saying from the other end of the room, out of earshot of Winnie, her words stuttered by sobs. She sits on a soft leather sectional, clutching a rosary in one hand, pausing every so often to close her eyes and wave a handful of crumpled tissues at the ceiling, offering a prayer in a Spanish none of them can understand. She ate too much of the baked ziti she brought from home. It made her lethargic, and she took her phone to the sofa to say good night to her baby, at home with Alma’s sister. She must have fallen asleep—that’s so unlike her, she insists, throwing a shamefaced glance at Winnie, but her daughter was up four times the night before, teething. When she woke up, she checked the monitor. The crib looked empty.

“You heard nothing?” a second detective is asking. His scruffy gray eyebrows threaten to take over his forehead, and he wears a college ring on one of his thick fingers. An NYPD badge with his name in block letters—Stephen Schwartz—dangles from a thin chain around his neck, swinging back and forth, just barely, like the pendulum on a dying clock.

“Nothing,” Alma says, and then starts to sob again.

“Nothing like footsteps? No crying?”

“Nothing. No crying.” Schwartz takes the box of Kleenex from the table and extends it to her. Alma pulls, sending a poof of tissue dust into the air around his face. “The monitor. It was right there.” She wipes her eyes and points to where the detective is sitting. “Right there where you’re sitting. The whole time.”

“And the monitor was on?”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t turn it off?”

“No. I didn’t touch it, except to check it a few times.”

“What did you see when you checked it?”

“The baby. He was sleeping. It wasn’t until I woke up that I realized he was gone.”

“And what did you do when you first noticed?”

“What did I do?”

“Yeah. Did you check the window in his room? Did you look around the house? Check upstairs?”

“No. I told you. I ran back here for my cell phone. It was on the table. I called Winnie but she didn’t answer.”

“And then what?”

“And then I called Nell.”

“Did you drink anything?”

“Drink anything? Of course not. Other than the iced tea Winnie made for me.”

“She made you iced tea,” Schwartz says, writing something in his notebook. He lowers his voice. “And where did you say the mother was again?”

“Out.”

“Out, right. But did she tell you where, exactly?”

“I forget. She wrote it down. Out drinking.”

He looks up, his eyebrows raised. “Out drinking, you said?”

“Final warning, ladies,” says the police officer named Cabrera from the stairwell, walking past them with a woman in a police jacket. “Find your way out. Don’t make me tell you again.”

“We’re going,” Colette says. Francie and Nell follow her back down the hall, back into the foyer, back out onto the silent sidewalk. But not before they all walk over to Winnie, squeezing her hand. Not before they hug her so long they bring home the scent of her shampoo. Not before Francie kneels down to take Winnie’s face in her hands, their eyes inches apart. “They’ll find him, Winnie. They will. We’ll all have Midas back. I promise.” And not before they stand at the rail of her terrace, gazing out across Brooklyn at millions of windows, behind which babies sleep, safe and sound—the inhabitants possibly looking back at them, three shattered mothers, their hair whipping in the hot July wind, their hearts full of dread.