“Can I have a restraining order?”
“I don’t think Alice is inclined-”
“I didn’t ask what anyone wanted to do. I asked what I could have. What the law will give me.”
Sharon sighed, put-upon. “The courts can’t write you a blank check for things that haven’t happened yet. But I can tell you that Alice will be counseled to stay away from Ronnie Fuller and your family.”
“My family? You mean she knows? You told her? Why would you tell her anything about me?” Cynthia’s voice rose, in spite of herself, frantic and out of control, and she realized someone in the adjacent lane was staring at her.
“I haven’t told her anything. I meant family in the most general way possible.”
Family in the most general way possible. Only a single woman, a childless woman, could speak of family in the most general way possible. Cynthia hung up on Sharon Kerpelman, as she had so many times before.
It took her forty-five minutes to crawl around the Beltway. That meant the end of Dr. Silverstein, Cynthia was afraid. No doctor was worth that kind of time. Between the drive and the wait in his office, she had been gone four hours, which was much too long. She parked behind the house and let herself into the back door, where she was welcomed by the security system’s polite beep.
“Hey, Momma.”
“What’s wrong with you?” Cynthia’s eyes could keep improving for ten, twenty years, and they would never be as sharp as her mother’s. Paulette Poole could see the future with her green eyes. Paulette Poole had predicted trouble when Cynthia and Warren bought this house. “Why do you want to live over there? Who are you trying to impress?” And Paulette Poole had seen from the first how the justice system, which had given the Poole family so much, would fail them when they needed it most. Paulette Poole was a witch, in the best sense of the word.
“Just traffic, Momma. Rush hour starts earlier and earlier in this city.”
“Well, you go all the way to Towson to get your eyes checked…” Paulette Poole didn’t bother to finish her sentence. Her daughter knew where she stood. Paulette Poole thought it was ridiculous for Cynthia to quit Dr. Hepple, their neighbor in Forest Park, in order to go to some white Jewish doctor just because his office was convenient to her job at City Hall.
“Where is-”
“Upstairs. With a video.”
Because her mother was there, Cynthia walked with deliberate slowness, taking the front stairs instead of the back. She heard a tinny sound from the street, the plink-plink tones of an ice cream truck, although the ditty faded so quickly that she wondered if she had imagined it. All around the carpenter’s bench / The monkey chased the weasel / The monkey thought it was a joke. She remembered a smile, a horrible, inappropriate smile, and the way her hand had ached to jump out, smack it from the child’s face.
The alcove off the master bedroom was intended to be a dressing room, but Cynthia had renovated it three years ago, insisting it was large enough. Now that it had made the transition from nursery to bedroom, it clearly wasn’t. Still, she resisted Warren ’s gentle nudging on the matter, pretending she didn’t understand why he wanted their bedroom just for them again.
Rosalind sat on the floor, eyes locked on Sleeping Beauty, singing along in a breathy baby voice. La-la-la. La-la-la. She was such an easy baby, had been from the first, and had passed through the so-called terrible twos with barely a tantrum. She had never known colic, which had troubled Olivia so, and she was seldom stricken with so much as a cold. Well, a child breast-fed until the age of two had advantages when it came to immunities.
Rosalind had also come out shockingly light and stayed that way, a trick of the blood that Cynthia’s mother claimed for her family tree, although Cynthia knew there wasn’t a fair-skinned ancestor in the bunch. No one knew what to make of the amazing hair, which hung in amber ringlets. Her eyes, however, were brown, like almost everyone else in the Poole and Barnes clans. Olivia had gotten the green eyes of this generation, and family legend held that only one child would have green eyes.
“Who dat baby?” Rosalind had asked a few weeks ago, noticing for the first time the photograph in a small oval frame on Cynthia’s dressing table. “Who dat?”
Who dat indeed? She and Warren had known they would have to tell Rosalind one day. But it had never occurred to them that a toddler would initiate the conversation with such a basic existential question: Who dat? She was your sister. Except-she wasn’t, because you and she never existed in the same plane. She is nothing to you, and never will be. And if she had not died, you might not exist, because your mother had specific plans for her life, and having a baby at age forty-one was not one of them.
Rosalind was satisfied with the simplest truth: “Olivia.” She repeated the name, patted the photo, and promptly forgot about it. All Rosalind wanted was a way to categorize and identify. That is a cow and that is a dog and that is Olivia. The cow goes moo and the dog goes bow-wow and Olivia goes…“Livvy.” Her first word, her only word, uttered a few days before she was taken. They had joked about it at the time, how the daughter was just like her mother, so sure of her place at the center of the universe, or only a few inches to the left.
Now Cynthia couldn’t help thinking it was as if Olivia knew she might never get to say her name otherwise.
On the video, the bad fairy was throwing a fit over her missing invitation. Uninvited, sent home early-it all ends the same way, doesn’t it? The bad fairy reminded Cynthia not of Alice and Ronnie but of Sharon, and their last face-to-face meeting outside Columbia Mall summer before last.
Cynthia had been struggling with Rosalind’s carriage, a European model that was a pain in the ass-so heavy, so not-portable, so impossible for any eleven-year-old to roll away. Sharon had stood, hands empty, chattering away, never offering to help. Did Cynthia miss City Hall? What did she think of the new mayor? Sharon had finally given up, moved to the suburbs, just to have the security of knowing she had a place to park after a long day. Was that so much to ask? Did that make her a hypocrite?
Then that obtuse woman had leaned into the carriage and uttered her own form of a curse: “Why, Cynthia, I didn’t know you had a baby to replace Olivia.”
The minute the words were out, even insensitive Sharon realized she had gone too far. Her cheeks burned red in a rush of blood so bright that it washed out the odd markings on the left side of her face. She scurried away, making excuses.
Not a week later, a reporter called, her voice round with fake empathy, asking Cynthia if she wanted to tell the Beacon-Light’s readers about this bittersweet happy ending, about her triumphant second act-those had been the reporter’s words-to let Baltimoreans know how she and Warren had recovered from their horrible, horrible tragedy. Those had been her exact words, too, horrible, horrible, as if repeating the word would prove that she really understood Cynthia’s plight. That was the reporter’s term as well. Plight.