Hush (6 page)

When she'd completed the requisite tasks
needed to make her new home habitable, when she could no longer put
off the inevitable, she sat down at the table and opened the thick
case file, the one labeled "Madonna Murders."

Ivy stared at the glossy black-and-white
eight-by-ten. The photo was of a woman murdered in a neighborhood
park sixteen years ago, her body dragged into the bushes, her baby
discovered not far away, wrapped caringly in a blue blanket.

The way the infant was found was typical of
murder by a relative's hand, often a parent. Someone who loved the
child. But the Madonna Murderer most likely didn't know any of his
victims. If by some chance he did, he probably didn't know them
well. But in his confused mind, he thought he knew them. In a way,
he thought all of the victims belonged to him.

The mothers weren't treated with the same—for
lack of a better word—respect. Their bodies were left like so much
garbage, stab wounds to the chest and abdomen, ligature marks and
blue bruises left by the killer's fingers around the neck. There
had been an ongoing debate over what came first, the stabbing or
the strangulation. Cause of death was sometimes asphyxiation,
sometimes bleeding out.

In the tiny apartment, there were no chairs,
only the stools. Nothing to prop under the doorknob. Jinx meowed,
beginning to come out of his drugged stupor. He stepped from his
carrier on uneasy legs, drank a little of the water Ivy had poured
for him, then took a few more steps and fell over, the bell on his
collar ringing.

"You poor thing."

Ivy picked him up, the heavy limpness of his
body a stark contrast to the wired way he usually felt when she
held him. She wouldn't give him as much of the tranquilizer on the
way home.

It was apparent that he wanted to be left
alone. She removed his stretch collar, sliding it over his head.
Then she showed him the litter box, which he sniffed suspiciously
before getting back in the carrier—a vessel he normally avoided to
the extent of hissing and yowling.

Ivy hung the little red collar with its tiny
bell and silver rabies tag over the doorknob, then sat back down at
the table and took a deep breath.

The smells of the inner city ... Stale sweat,
cooking grease, moldy wallpaper glued to rotten wood. Plastic
garbage containers overflowing with soiled diapers. Sour, spit-up
milk caked to stained towels.

The sounds of the city. Sirens. The squealing
of tires on hot, sun-softened asphalt. A baby crying. The
repetitive bass of rap music coming from a chopped blue Chevy that
cruised slowly up and down the narrow street, its modified engine
producing a deep testosterone rumble.

The apartment with its air of slight decay .
. .

It all took Ivy back to a day she'd hoped to
examine from a great distance. But past and present meshed, and she
realized with dismay that her life had not moved forward in a
linear fashion, but was spiraling backward upon itself until she
was one inhalation away from yesterday . . .

They say bad things come in threes. That was
certainly true for Claudia Reynolds, the person Ivy had once been.
Within a short span of time, she had lost everyone she cared about:
her father, her mother, her boyfriend.

Under her photo in her suburban Des Moines
high school yearbook was the caption "Girl Most Likely." That could
have been taken any number of ways, but in Claudia's case it had
meant girl most likely to succeed. She'd graduated with so many
offers of full scholarships that she had been able to pretty much
take her pick of schools, and finally she had decided upon the
University of Chicago. At the time, Chicago was known as the murder
capital of the world, but that didn't stop her from settling on the
school where her boyfriend was going. She'd planned to pursue a
degree in fashion design. It seemed so frivolous now, so
shallow—and yet she was still drawn to fabrics of rich hues and
textures. And really, college hadn't been about a degree, it had
been about being near Daniel. She'd imagined their relationship
quickly blossoming to the point where they would share an
apartment. Share dreams. Share the future.

She became pregnant.

Up until the pregnancy her life had been
perfect to the point of embarrassment. Bad things didn't happen to
Claudia Reynolds. When she was little, her charm was so great that
people would rub her head for luck. On her sixteenth birthday, she
bought a lottery ticket and won half a million dollars. But later
the money was taken away because she hadn't been old enough to buy
a ticket in the first place.

Strange luck.

Once during a school hockey game, the
goaltender had her kiss his smelly gloves—and his team won. After
that, he would always look for her before he took to the ice. One
time, when she wasn't there to kiss his gloves, he broke his arm
and had to sit out the rest of the season. The next year he
couldn't get the magic back and after a month of bench-warming he
quit, taking his wounded pride with him.

It wasn't a good thing to be someone's luck.
There was so much pressure, and so many things could go wrong.

Her accidental pregnancy threw something out
of balance and suddenly her life went from charmed to cursed. And
once the bad stuff started, it didn't stop.

She'd always had weird periods so by the time
Claudia realized she was pregnant it was too late to have an
abortion—and she wasn't sure she could have gone through with it
anyway. Before she could share the news, her boyfriend tearfully
told her he'd met someone else.

A week later, her father, a grade-school
teacher, had a heart attack and died. After that, Claudia's mother,
who'd depended on her husband for everything, seemed to lose the
will to live. She mentally drifted away. Her doctor put her on
antidepressants and tranquilizers. In that numb state, she stepped
off a curb in front of oncoming traffic and was instantly killed.
But Claudia knew what had really killed her: sorrow.

And so something in the universe shifted, and
Claudia became one of those people she'd always looked at from a
distance, never thinking about what the inside of their lives must
be like.

In the three years she'd been in the
relationship with Daniel, her circle of friends had dwindled to
two—herself and Daniel. When it was over and she finally looked
back without the happy glasses, she wondered how she'd allowed
herself to turn into one of those girls who breathed for one person
and one person alone. She had allowed herself to be consumed by
someone she hadn't even really known. From that point on, she swore
she would never let a man be the most important thing in her
life.

Her parents had very little put away toward
retirement. Claudia had no recourse but to sell their house, which
was ten years away from being paid off. With the equity, she paid
for funeral expenses and outstanding bills, then moved back to
Chicago to continue her education. If she was careful, the
remaining money would last a year, maybe more. And once the baby
was born, she would get a full-time job.

She was seven months pregnant when she rented
the efficiency apartment on the second floor of a five- story
building that stood between a crumbling art-deco theater and the
Saint Cristobel Mission where the poor were fed two hot meals a
day.

Claudia worked at the mission three days a
week. She may have been pregnant, but she was still strong, still
able, so she helped out where she could. In return, she received
support from strangers.

Later the police would want to know about
everyone she'd come in contact with at the mission, everyone she'd
ever spoken to, which of course was an impossible request. She saw
a lot of the same faces, but there were new ones every day. There
were people she saw once and never again. And unfortunately, some
people simply didn't stand out. They were poor, they were dirty,
they were hungry lost souls. That's what she remembered most about
them.

She tried not to dwell on it because the
world was made of questions that had no answers, but she would
sometimes catch herself wondering how and why her luck had gone
from good to bad. Her good fortune, while not exactly making her
shallow, had given her an insulated view from a window she didn't
care to move past. She had known about poor people, she had even
participated in food drives, but she'd never understood the depths
of poverty. She'd never looked at it from the inside.

She was afraid of pain so she went to Lamaze
classes, clutching a pillow to her growing stomach. She was the
only one without a coach in a class of forty women. Jacob, a
mission volunteer, offered to be her coach, but she declined. He'd
done enough for her already.

Jacob had helped her find the apartment. His
mother was a social worker, and he knew the ins and outs of
everything available to an unemployed, single expectant mother. He
told her about free meals at the mission. He took her to a clinic
where she could get prenatal care.

Childbirth was hell.

How could this be natural? There had to be
something wrong. She was being ripped in two. And then she had
another thought: If she died, nobody would miss her. Nobody would
even know she'd ever lived.

No, the midwife told her everything was going
along fine. Everything was okay.

At 11:24 P.M., five months after her mother's
death, Claudia Reynolds gave birth to a twenty-inch, seven-
and-a-half-pound baby boy. Right then and there, when she looked
into his sweet little face, into those sweet, unfocused eyes, she
was lost, feeling a love so powerful it scared her. And she thought
she could endure all the curses in the world for him.

"His eyes," she said in amazement as the
nurse settled the wrapped infant into Claudia's waiting arms,
"they're so blue."

"Most newborns' eyes are blue. They usually
change in a few weeks."

For some inexplicable reason, Claudia felt
her baby's eyes wouldn't change. They would stay a deep ocean blue
the rest of his life.

The pain she'd felt for the last nine hours
was forgotten, replaced by a new kind of pain, the pain of a love
so bright it hurt. She could feel it in her throat, in her head,
behind her eyes.

With amazement, she touched his tiny, red,
wrinkled hands with their miniature fingernails. And later, when he
cried and cried, she cried too. And because the love she felt was
so monumental, so huge, so empowering, she knew she was going to be
the best damn mother in the world.

To say she was unprepared for motherhood
would have been an understatement. She'd never been around any
babies in her life, and didn't have an older, experienced woman to
help her. Those things combined to create a recipe for disaster,
because everybody knew that good intentions alone couldn't raise a
child.

A woman needed a plan.

A woman needed support.

A woman needed sleep. God, how she needed
sleep.

The nurses at the hospital taught her how to
bathe her son, being careful to keep the umbilical cord dry. They
taught her how to get him to latch onto her nipple, and how to
change his diaper. They taught her how to keep him warm, and how to
keep him cool.

Still, unsure of herself and her new role,
she begged to stay at the hospital one more day, just one more
day.

No.

Thirty-five hours after her baby was born,
Claudia took a cab home. With her cherished bundle, she climbed the
stairs to her apartment.

She never wondered what she had done. She
never regretted her decision to keep him. He was a plus, only a
plus. Because now her life had purpose, now she had a reason that
extended beyond her own aura of wants and needs to incorporate
another human being, an innocent, helpless child. Her child. Once
again a male was the center of her world—and she allowed herself to
be consumed by him.

She would name him Adrian.

Claudia wasn't superstitious, and yet for a
brief moment she wondered if she should name him something
biblical, just to keep God happy. But she'd had enough of men with
biblical names.

The problems started on the second day home.
He cried all the time, but when she checked his diaper, it wasn't
wet. Her breasts, which by this time were like rocks, only
frustrated him when she tried to get him to nurse.

In the middle of the night she slipped into a
pair of jogging pants because she still couldn't fit into her
jeans. With eyes burning from lack of sleep, she wrapped up her
baby, little Adrian, and carried him down the steps to the street
below, toward a corner grocery store that was open all night.

At the store, she bought a baby bottle that
was shaped like an oblong letter O, two cans of baby formula, and
returned home.

When she reached her apartment she found the
door ajar. Her negligence frightened her. In her exhaustion and
worry, she'd forgotten to close the door.

She closed it now, locking it behind them.
She put Adrian in his bassinet, washed and sterilized the baby
bottle as quickly as possible, then poured in the rich- smelling
formula.

When she dragged the nipple across the
infant's mouth, he didn't respond. He just kept crying his
openmouthed, toothless, red-faced wail that hurt her like a knife
blade. Then, as soon as some of the formula dribbled into his
mouth, his breath caught. And caught again.

And then he quit crying and began tugging
madly at the nipple, making little animal noises as he sucked.

Claudia let out her breath. The tension in
her shoulders relaxed, and she sent up a silent prayer. Thank
You.

A few moments later, milk from her heavy
breasts came down, saturating her shirt and the infant she held in
her arms; she'd simply been too tense to nurse.

Baby Adrian drank all four ounces of the
formula Claudia had put in the bottle. He still acted hungry but
she was afraid to give him any more, afraid he would spit it up or
get a stomachache.