Pressure Drop (20 page)

“Not really.”

“Me either.” A smile crossed Laura Bain's face, so quickly it barely existed, like some wondrously short-lived species on “Nova.” “I'm never hungry anymore,” Laura said. “And I used to be such a pig.”

“But it's not a weight-loss method you'd recommend.”

Laura laughed, a harsh and surprisingly loud laugh. She gave Nina's hand a little squeeze: Laura's skin felt hot, as though she were fighting a disease.

Laura unlocked her car, a Jaguar with a cellular phone inside, and drove toward the city. Nina waited for Laura to begin. Laura bit her lip and said nothing, until the phone buzzed and she picked it up. “Hello.” She listened for a few moments. Then, still in the same flat voice, but without indecisiveness, she said: “It's too early. Tell him to hold on till I'm back from Accra.” She hung up and entered the tunnel under Boston Harbor. Her hands gripped the wheel tightly, as if it might try to do something on its own at any moment.

“What do you do, Laura?”

“For a living? I'm a commodity investment analyst.” She handed Nina a card. “Strictly cocoa, actually. But I'm thinking of taking on coffee as well. More work. Less time to think about Clea.”

“Clea?”

“The—my baby. My daughter. What's your baby's name?”

Nina began to regret her trip to Boston. “He doesn't have one,” she answered. Unless, she thought, the woman with the leathery skin had given him one. She'd had plenty of time by now.

“Oh,” said Laura. They climbed out of the tunnel into hard, cold sunlight. Nina saw that Laura was crying. She looked away, but not before Laura noticed. “That wasn't true about the coffee,” she said. “How can I take on coffee? I can barely handle the cocoa anymore.”

Nina tried to think of something to say but couldn't. She didn't want to spend the afternoon locked in a Jules Feiffer dance to self-pity with this woman. As if volleying that thought back at her, Laura stuck a cassette into the player. Laura's sound system was first-rate, to Nina's ear perfectly reproducing the lifelessness of the New Age instrumental she had chosen. The music made the minutes spent in stop-and-go traffic long and gloomy.

Laura parked in front of the Beacon Hill Bistro. “Don't mind me,” she said, no longer crying, her voice even brightening a little. “I have two states of mind—basket-case and robot. I'm safely back in robot now.”

The waiter knew Laura. He led her and Nina to a quiet table in the back corner. “We've got a lovely fresh salmon today, served en brochette with a raspberry basil sauce and a little goat cheese salad on the side.”

“That sounds nice,” Laura said. But when it came she didn't touch it. She did drink all but one glass of a bottle of Bourgogne Aligoté. Nina had the rest.

“Well,” said Laura, rubbing her hands together as though kindling something positive. “Down to business.”

“I'm not sure what our business is, exactly,” Nina said.

Laura stopped rubbing her hands. She laid them on the mauve tablecloth. The nails, polished and manicured, were bitten to the quick. “Maybe it is silly,” Laura said. “Calling you. Sperm bank. Kidnapping. Ergo—what?” And maybe had the waiter not been passing at that moment she wouldn't have ordered another bottle. But he was and she did. Then she caught Nina looking at her and lost herself in thought.

“But—” she was beginning when the waiter returned. He drew the cork. “Just pour,” she told him. He raised his eyebrows the way David Niven might have if he'd ever accepted a waiter role. “I'm sure it's fine,” Laura told him. He poured and went away. “But,” Laura said, “it's been five months of doing less and less and finally almost nothing. To get Clea back. I call Detective This or Detective That once a week, as though it were any other item on my schedule. What else can I do? I've tried everything.” The robot broke down and tears came silently again. “I don't even walk the streets anymore looking for her.” She dabbed her cheeks with a thick mauve napkin. “And then I saw you. And I just thought—okay, here's a chance to do something.”

Nina didn't want to bring on the tears again, but she did want to understand what Laura Bain had in mind. “Like what, though?”

Laura's voice, which had risen slightly, fell again. “I don't know.” She stared into her wineglass.

Nina soon found herself staring into hers too, as though performing some ritual. She made herself look up. “What made you go to a sperm bank in the first place?”

Laura raised her head, slowly, like someone emerging from a trance. “Biological clock, et cetera. And I haven't had a serious man in my life since I was twenty-eight.”

“How old are you now?”

“Thirty-five.” Laura saw a reaction in Nina's face and misinterpreted it. “A little older than you, I guess.”

Laura paused, perhaps for Nina to give her age. But Nina, shocked that she was five years older than Laura, was thinking of the time machine, and how fast it could move when something happened like what had happened to Laura and to her. She had stepped into the ring; in the next five months was it going to line her face and whiten her hair and flatten her voice and leave her with wary eyes like Laura Bain's? Would that defeated face soon be her own? Nina pushed the thought away and tried to pursue whatever half-formed idea Laura had in mind: “It wasn't someone in a volunteer's uniform, was it?”

“What?”

“Who took your baby, I mean.”

“Oh, no. My—Clea—wasn't taken from the hospital. We'd already been home for two days. It was after lunch on a Saturday. The last Saturday in June. The nanny was arriving from Ireland on Monday and I was going back full time the following week. It was a nice warm day and I took Clea out in the backyard in her carriage. I've got a house in Dedham—bought for Clea, really. I sat in a chaise longue, fooling with some figures. Clea went to sleep.” Laura's eyes were drawn back to the wineglass, almost as if she were reading her story in the calm surface of the liquid. She sighed. “Then I guess I fell asleep too. I don't know why. I never need more than six hours. But I was still very tired from the birth, and Clea hadn't been sleeping much at night. I just—fell asleep.” She dabbed with the mauve napkin again, then continued. “A barking dog woke me up. It was late in the afternoon by then—I'd slept for hours. I went over to the carriage, thinking Clea had slept too—I remember feeling happy because I was beginning to worry she might be a colicky baby or even sick or something—and I pulled back the insect screen and Clea was gone.” She continued staring into the glass. Nina waited for more. But there was no more. Laura's head bobbed up suddenly and she said: “That's it.”

“That's it?”

“Nothing's happened since. Nothing good. The police came. They took fingerprints on the carriage. They questioned the neighbors. They questioned a woman who once snatched a baby at the Dedham Mall. They told me to offer a reward, which I did. They told me to hang on. I hung on. Then I saw you on TV. And there was no mention of a husband or father or anything, and I just thought—sperm bank.”

“And you were right. But where does that take us?”

“I don't know. Let's say we were divorced, or in the middle of a bad separation or something and our children disappeared like this. Where would the police go first?”

“To the father.”

“Right.”

“But there is no father, Laura. There's just frozen sperm.”

“I know. But it's something we have in common. And maybe there's more.”

“Even if there is, where would it lead?”

“I'm not sure. But I can't go on like this.” Laura's eyes were being drawn to her glass again.

“All right, all right,” Nina said, trying to make her voice gentle. “Let's try. But all I can see are differences. Your baby was taken from home, mine from the hospital. The police are pretty sure I saw the kidnapper; you saw nobody.” Nina described the woman with the leathery skin and the volunteer badge. Laura had never seen her.

“But that doesn't mean she wasn't the one,” she said. “In fact, I'm going to pass that description on to the police. Tell me more.”

Nina sensed Laura's stubbornness. Perhaps they did have something in common, after all. She told her story, starting with the message that there was a telephone call and ending with the Cabbage Patch Kid. As she spoke, what little light that had begun to shine in Laura's eyes faded; the woman was stubborn, but hope was almost gone. When Nina finished there was a long silence.

The waiter came to clear the table. Most of the customers had already gone. The restaurant grew quiet and a little eerie, like a theater after the play. Laura went to the bathroom. Nina checked her watch, wondering if she could catch the next shuttle. Laura returned and insisted on paying the bill. While signing the credit card slip, she said: “You didn't have a phone in your room?”

“What room?”

“At the hospital.”

“It was out of order.”

Laura nodded. They got back in her car and started toward the airport. New Age accompaniment played. In the pause that came while the auto-reverse reversed, Laura said: “What was your sperm donor like?”

“Why do you ask that?”

“I don't know. Clea had my features, I think, but not my coloring. She was much fairer. I hadn't requested a blond heartthrob or anything—I wanted someone healthy and reasonably intelligent, that's all. I'm just curious about him, I guess.”

“Didn't they give you the information?”

“They showed me a printout. But it really didn't say much, not that I remember.” She thought for a moment. “I'm not even sure I've got a copy.”

“My donor's name was VT-three-H,” Nina said. “Six feet tall. Blue eyes. Played soccer in college. And there was a question mark beside his ring size. That seems fitting somehow for a sperm donor.”

Laura didn't smile. She was biting her lip again. “Could I ask you a big favor?” she said.

“What?”

“If you could catch a later flight.”

“Why?”

“Because I'd like to go to the sperm bank in Cambridge,” Laura said. “I want to have a look at that printout.”

Nina didn't understand that; nor did she understand why her presence was needed. But there was no hurry to get home and being with Laura made her feel strong for the first time since the kidnapping; perhaps that was reprehensible, but it was the truth. “Okay,” Nina said.

Laura drove across the river, into Cambridge, past Harvard Square and up Massachusetts Avenue. She stopped in front of a three-story steel and glass building. They were out of the car and walking toward the entrance when Laura halted. She glanced around: up and down the block, across the street. Then she stared at the steel and glass building.

“Is something wrong?” Nina asked.

“It's gone,” Laura said.

“What's gone?”

“The sperm bank.”

Nina looked at the sign on the building:
TWENTY
-
FIRST CENTURY VIDEO AND SOUND
,
INC
. “Are you sure we're in the right place?”

Laura nodded. They went inside. A young man wearing a black leather tie came forward. “How can I help you ladies?”

“Where has the Reproductive Research Institute gone?” Laura asked.

The young man's smooth brow wrinkled. “Is that part of MIT?”

“No. It was right here in this building. Last year.”

“Gee,” said the young man. “I just started in September.”

He lent Laura the store's phone book. It had no number for the Cambridge Reproductive Research Center. Neither did the operator. Laura called her obstetrician and reached the answering service. She left a message and hung up. “That's funny,” she said.

“The rent probably went up,” Nina said.

“But where did they go?” Laura asked.

“Frankly, I don't even know what the rent is,” the young man told them. “The owner'll be back at five. In the meantime, would you ladies like to check out the new sixty-four-inch screen?”

Laura drove Nina to the airport. “Thank you for coming,” she said. “It's meant a lot to me. I'll call you when I hear from my obstetrician. If you don't mind.”

“Of course not,” Nina said.

Laura walked her all the way to the security gate. She stood there with her hollow eyes as the time machine sped her further and further from her baby. That's what Nina was thinking as she stepped forward and embraced her, once more feeling how hot she was. Then she walked quickly through the gate and down the concourse.

“Nina!” Laura called after her.

Nina stopped and turned. “What?”

“Did they want to know your SAT scores?”

“Yes. What makes you ask that?”

“I don't know. What were they?”

“My SATs?”

“Yeah.”

Nina remembered looking them up. “Fourteen-twenty, I think.”

Now she saw Laura's smile for the second time. It lasted longer than before: Laura had a beautiful smile. “I beat you,” she said.

20

Not long after midnight, Nina entered her apartment. She checked the message machine:

“Suze here,” said Suze. “I've got a new number—it's in Palos Verdes. It's—shit, it must be in my other bag. Any news? I'll call back.”

“Delgado.” The line buzzed with static. The voice sounded far away. “You've been trying to reach me? There's nothing to report. We'll contact you when there is.” Buzz. Click.

“Hello? Nina? It's Laura. Laura Bain. I guess you're not home yet. I had a thought after you left. I—I'll try to get back to you tomorrow.”

On the kitchen counter, Nina found a basket of fruit and a sinkful of red roses. She read the note, on Kitchener and Best stationery, in the basket: “Happy Birthday from everyone here.” The handwriting was Jason's but smaller than usual, subdued. No Roederer Cristal this year. Nina counted the roses: forty. The day had passed without her once thinking of it. She was a mature woman now. A mother. In some cultures she would already be a grandmother.