Serena said, “I was doing what I thought was right.” It wasn’t the first time she’d said it.
“I know,” I said.
Yesterday, Serena and Payaso had, in essence, kidnapped Henry from the hospital nursery. I had been back up at Julianne’s trailer, getting some badly needed sleep after the restless night in the hospital. They hadn’t called to consult me. They’d made an executive decision.
There would have been some difficulty in getting Henry out otherwise. None of us were legally related to him, and the county foster-care service had been about to step in. Serena and Payaso, with their deep-seated distrust of the system, weren’t about to let that happen.
“For Skouras’s men to take him out of a foster home, that’d be child’s play,” Serena had told me afterward. “You think some skinny white do-gooders are going to be able to protect him? He needs to be with us.”
She and Payaso had recounted it for me. Cheyenne had been the third party, the getaway driver. They’d taken Payaso’s GTO to the hospital, Cheyenne waiting in Iceman’s Taurus two blocks away. Serena had gone up to the maternity ward and signed in as Encarnación Hernandez, aka Teaser, Nidia’s now-deceased cousin. It was an ID that would only lead back to Nidia Hernandez and family, not to any of us. Serena had gotten permission to hold the baby and strolled with him as close as possible to the exit. Covertly, she’d texted a single character to Payaso, an exclamation point.
That had been the signal for him to fire two gunshots in the stairwell before running out a ground-floor exit to the GTO. With the hospital’s security officers headed toward the sound of the shots, Serena had escaped with Henry. She’d jumped into Payaso’s car, and they’d driven two blocks to where Cheyenne was waiting in the Taurus. Serena had lain down out of view in the backseat holding the baby, while Payaso had gone the other way in the GTO, both cars slow and careful.
When I’d stopped yelling at Serena for taking such a big step without me-this after making such a big deal of setting me up as the leader of this whole endeavor-I’d realized that she and Payaso had been right about Henry not being safe in the foster-care system. And their plan, however audacious, had worked. The news reports had only the color and model of Payaso’s car, not the specific make, and no license number. And nothing at all about the Taurus. I had to admire both the nerve and the planning.
But what they’d done had meant that we’d have to leave Truckee. As soon as the news went out, Skouras’s men would come. Truckee was not a big place, and our East L.A. crew didn’t quite blend in, and Julianne’s place, while set back from the road, wasn’t a cabin in the middle of no-man’s-land. It wasn’t safe anymore.
I’d gone into town to buy a car seat and other things the baby would need, and then I’d simply driven us both out of town in the Taurus. White woman, white-looking baby in a car seat, unassuming domestic car: Sometimes plain sight is your best option. On the streets of Truckee, I’d passed several police cars, but if the whole town was in an uproar over a baby’s kidnapping, it had been taking place behind closed doors. No one made any attempt to detain me on my cool, law-abiding way out of town.
“They can’t stop every car with a baby in it,” I’d told Serena and Payaso. “What kind of proof could they demand from me that Henry is mine, anyhow?”
They’d gotten away shortly thereafter, taking fire roads outlined on my area map. It was only now, about two hours north of L.A. on the 101, that we’d finally felt safe hooking up again.
“Have you heard anything from Iceman and Cheyenne?” I asked.
Serena shook her head. “They’ll be all right,” she said. “Don’t worry.”
They had stayed behind an hour, in order to clean the trailer-well, maybe not Iceman, but Cheyenne probably had. I’d insisted on that. When Julianne came home, I didn’t want it to be to cigarette butts in the ashtrays and hairs in the shower drain.
I said to Serena, “Pretty soon we’ve got to call Lara Cortez, so she can get in touch with Nidia’s family. I don’t want her in a morgue cooler indefinitely.”
Serena nodded. “I’ll get a phone number from Lara and call them myself,” she said. “It’s a death notification. Believe me, in la vida, I’ve seen this news dumped on mamis and papis in really screwed-up ways. I want to handle it myself.”
“Sure,” I said.
“Can I hold the baby?” Serena asked.
There was nobody nearby who looked remotely official, so I judged it safe for Serena to be holding the baby. The nearest people to us were a young Latino family who piled out of a green minivan. The kids jumped out, racing for the water fountain. The parents, a man in a straw cowboy hat and a woman in jeans and a warm-up jacket, got out at a more leisurely pace.
I handed Henry over into Serena’s arms, and she held him adeptly, supporting his downy little head. “Hey, Enrique,” she cooed. “Que pasa, lil’ homey?”
She seemed quite at ease, and it was worth considering that if Henry lived at Casa Serena, he’d have a dozen or more experienced babysitters. Most of the sucias had grown up diapering and coddling little brothers and sisters, and many of her former homegirls had babies of their own. But I also thought of Herlinda Lopez’s death and my own shooting down in Mexico. Adrian Skouras’s baby was four days old and innocent as rain, but he had an unwanted gift for bringing terrible trouble into the lives of people around him.
Who the hell could I have given him to? Who would I wish that on?
One answer would have been for me to become his guardian myself, keeping the lightning always potentially poised over my own head. Noble, but not practical. I was inextricably linked in Skouras’s mind with his grandson. Like Nidia, I would serve to identify him wherever we went.
The woman next to me called her children, and they ran to the table, where she’d laid out a lunch of sandwiches and boxed juice, a Tupperware container of apple and orange chunks, and vanilla cookies. The kind of lunch I remembered from my childhood: inexpensive, balanced, charmless.
The best thing would be for Henry to disappear into the anonymous hands of strangers like this, into the heart of mundane working-class or middle-class life. Of course, this family was Mexican, and while I tended to think of Henry as Mexican, he was only half. Henry might grow up to be easily taken for white.
There were infertile couples everywhere who would, in theory, leap at the chance to adopt a healthy, appealing infant like Henry, only four days old. But in practice, most of those couples would ultimately shy away from a dark-alley, extralegal adoption, if I even knew how to set one up. Which I didn’t. It was too bad, really. So many childless couples, wanting-
Wait.
An audacious idea had come to me.
No way. Put it out of your head, Cain.
“What are you thinking?” Serena asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “Come on, let’s go. It’s probably not smart for you to be standing around holding him like that. We should keep moving.”
Serena handed the baby back to me. “See you soon,” she said.
I walked back to the Taurus and strapped Henry into his car seat, backed carefully out of my space, and drove toward the freeway.
But on the road, I couldn’t stop thinking about the idea that had come to me at the rest stop, and by the time I was back in L.A., I knew what I was going to do.
fifty
At Casa Serena, an informal vote overwhelmingly suggested that baby “Enrique” live with the sucias, like a mascot, a baby boy with no mother but a dozen loving, devoted older sisters. The girls passed him around among themselves so much that Serena finally had to intervene.
“He’s fine,” Heartbreaker pleaded as Serena carried him away. “Babies need stimulation.”