“Who else knows about Matthew?” I asked. “Does Aunt Agnes — does your mother know?”
“I haven’t told her the good news yet. It’s all happened pretty quickly.”
The inconsistencies persisted. “How quickly?”
Marla, her eyes still on the baby, said, “Okay, I haven’t exactly had Matthew for ten full months. Yesterday, late in the afternoon, around the time Dr. Phil comes on, I was doing some reviews for an air-conditioning company in Illinois when the doorbell rang.”
“Who was it?”
A weak smile. “I told you. The angel.”
“Tell me about this angel.”
“Well, okay, she wasn’t a real angel, but it’s hard not to think of her that way.”
“It was a woman.”
“That’s right.”
“The mother?”
Marla looked at me sharply. “I’m the mother now.”
“Okay,” I said. “But up until the moment she gave you Matthew, she was the mother?”
Hesitantly, as though unwilling to make the admission, she said, “Maybe.”
“What did she look like? How did she seem? Was she injured? Did you see any blood? Was there blood on her hand?”
Marla shook her head slowly. “You know I’m not good with faces, David. But she was very nice, this woman. All dressed in white. That’s why, when I picture her, all I see is an angel.”
“Did she say who she was? Did she give you her name? Did she leave any way for you to contact her?”
“No.”
“You didn’t ask? You didn’t think it was strange? A woman just coming to your door and handing you a baby?”
“She was in a hurry,” she said. “She said she had to go.” Her voice drifted off. She put Matthew in the middle of the bed and surrounded him with pillows, creating a kind of berm around him.
“Until I get a crib, I have to do this. I don’t want him rolling off the bed and hitting the floor. Would you be able to help me with that? Getting a crib? Is there an IKEA in Albany? Or maybe Walmart would have one. They’re closer. I don’t think I could fit a crib, even one that wasn’t put together, into the Mustang, and I don’t think I’d be very good at putting it together. I’m pretty clueless about that sort of thing. I don’t even have a screwdriver. Well, I might in one of the kitchen drawers, but I’m not sure. Doesn’t IKEA put a little thingy in with the pieces? So you can build it even if you don’t have a bunch of tools? I don’t want to get a used crib at a secondhand shop or an antique store, because all kinds of safety improvements have been made on them. I saw this thing on TV once where you could make the side of the crib go up and down, and this one dropped by accident on the baby’s neck.” She trembled. “I don’t want anything like that.”
“Of course not.”
“So is that something you could help me with? Getting a crib?”
“I imagine so. But there are a few things we need to sort out first.”
Marla wasn’t paying much attention to me. I wondered whether she was on any kind of medication, whether that would explain her apparent detachment from reality. If she’d been seeing a psychiatrist since losing her baby, and been prescribed anything to deal with depression or anxiety, I wasn’t aware of it. There was no reason why I would be. And I wasn’t about to start rooting about in her medicine cabinet, because I wouldn’t know what to make of what I might find.
Maybe she wasn’t on anything, and this was just the way she’d been since giving birth to a lifeless child. Dad had more or less nailed it, in his own tactless way, when he said she’d gone “a bit crackers.” I’d only heard bits and pieces of the story. How Marla’s mother, Agnes, who way back in her twenties had been a midwife before becoming a nurse, had been there at her side, along with the family physician, a doctor named Sturgess, if I remembered right. Mom had talked about their sense of horror when they realized something was wrong. How Marla had been able to hold the child, briefly, before it had to be taken away.
How it had been a girl.
“Such a sad, sad thing,” Mom said whenever her niece crossed her mind. “It did something to her. Something just snapped; that’s what I think happened. And where was the father? Where was he? Did he help her through this at all? No, not one bit.”
The father was a Thackeray College student. Seven or eight years younger than Marla. I didn’t know much else about him. Not that any of that mattered now.
Did the police have any reports of a missing baby? If the paper were still in existence, if I still carried around press credentials, I’d just call headquarters, ask if they’d heard anything. But for a private citizen it was a little trickier. Did I want to alert the authorities to anything before I’d found out what, exactly, was going on? It was possible Marla really was babysitting for someone, but had allowed some kind of fantasy to envelop her.
I mean, an angel coming to the door?
“Marla, did you hear me? There are things to sort out.”
“What things?” Marla said.
I decided to play along, as if this were a normal situation we were dealing with here. “Well, I’m sure you want everything to be legal and aboveboard. So if Matthew is going to be yours, there will be some papers to sign. Legal matters to resolve.”
“I don’t think that’s necessary,” she said. “When he gets older, like when he goes to school, or even older than that, and has to get a driver’s license or something, I’ll just tell them I lost his birth certificate, that I can’t find it. They’ll just have to deal with that.”
“It doesn’t work that way, Marla. The town keeps records, too.”
She looked unfazed. “They’ll just have to accept that he’s mine. You’re making it into a much bigger deal than it is. Society’s too wrapped up in documenting every little thing.”
“But we still need to know who bore this child,” I persisted. “Like, medical history. You need to know about his real mother and father, what diseases or conditions they might have.”
“Why don’t you want me to be happy, David? Don’t you think, after all I’ve been through, I deserve some happiness?”
I didn’t know what to say, but it turned out I didn’t have to come up with something. Marla said, “I’m going to freshen up. Now that you’re here, I can have a shower, put on some clean clothes. I was thinking Matthew and I would go out and get a few things.”
“The stroller, behind the door,” I said. “Did you buy that yesterday?”
“No, the angel brought that,” she said. “Did your mom send over some more goodies for me?”
“She did,” I said. “I’ll put everything into the freezer for you.”
“Thanks,” she said. “I won’t be long.” She slipped into the bathroom and closed the door.
I took a quick look at the child, saw that he was sleeping peacefully and unlikely to roll out of his pillow prison. I put the frozen food Mom had sent with me into Marla’s freezer — I am nothing if not practical — and then went to the living room to check out the stroller. It was in the folded position, making it easy to drop into a car trunk, or stow away in a closet.
On the right handle were more smudges that looked like the one I had seen on the doorjamb.
I opened up the contraption, tapped a small lever with my foot to make sure it was locked into position. The stroller had seen some use. The once-black rubber wheels were rough with wear. Stale, dry Cheerios were stuck in the crevices of the seat pad. A small zippered pouch was attached to the back. I opened it, reached inside. I found three rattles, a small wooden car with thick wooden wheels, a flyer for a store that sold baby supplies, a half-full package of predampened wipes, and some tissues.