Remember Mia (9 page)

“What kind of locks you have now?” he asked and pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose, leaving fingerprints on the lenses.

“A latch set with a keyhole on the outside and a thumb turn on the inside. There’s also a chain door guard.” Mia started to stir in the stroller and I knew it was only a matter of minutes until she’d break out in a full-blown howl.

“Are you looking for additional security? Like a dead bolt or something?”

“There’s no such thing as too much security.” Mia started to fuss and her hands began to flail. I rocked the stroller back and forth, knowing that picking her up wouldn’t do any good. I hoped I’d make it through the lock purchase without Larry giving me any advice on how to console a screaming baby. Mia seemed more content being left in her stroller than in my arms, as if my embrace was the most uncomfortable state of being.

Larry’s eyes were huge behind the lenses as he rose his voice to top Mia’s crying.

“How about an old-fashioned alarm system sounding like sirens and hell rolled all into one?” he said. “The security company will dispatch a car within minutes. We’ve got a special going on, twenty percent off and free installation.”

“I don’t want to alert anyone, I just want to be able to lock my doors and keep them that way.” I kept rolling the stroller back and forth, trying to stop Mia’s crying.

“An alarm system is—”

“Just tell me what else you have that I can install myself.” I checked my watch. Larry took the gesture as impatience on my
part and started pulling cardboard boxes and metal parts off the shelf behind him.

“And I need tools,” I added. “Like a screwdriver and a handheld drill.”

“She’s got a set of lungs on her.” He looked down at Mia, whose face had turned red, her mouth a gaping well of fury.

“Just give me what I asked for. Don’t forget the tools.”

He wasn’t offended by my rudeness. “Are you sure you can manage? I’ll talk to the boss and we throw in a free installation. If you live in the neighborhood, that is.”

“Not too far,” I said and checked my watch again.

“I’ll install the locks myself if you’re interested.” He stepped closer, and when I reached for the boxes, he didn’t let go immediately. “Seriously, I will. We have a special going on.”

After he rang me up at the register, I left the store, knowing his eyes were following me as I walked by the glass storefront. I had seen the disappointment on his face when I paid in cash. I knew he wanted to look at my credit card and remember my name, even look me up later. Or ask for my driver’s license to find out my address.

Back home, I went to work but realized quickly that I was in way over my head. I couldn’t even hold the drill steady nor could I identify the exact spot where the screws were supposed to go.

Two hours later the metal door to my apartment was scratched and dented. I studied the parts I had bought at the hardware store. I read the back of the boxes until the words no longer made sense. The bolt throw seemed too long and I couldn’t find the steel insert. One of the locks contained a free-turning cylinder but the screws were too short to reach the wood studding beyond the doorframe. I was frustrated, sweaty, and discouraged; my knuckles were bruised.

The hardware store address and phone number were printed on the top of the receipt, and I hoped Larry’s offer for a free installation
was still good. I called the hardware store and asked for him. I heard paperwork being shuffled, and the bell above the door jangling. Eventually Larry came to the phone. I explained who I was and what I’d bought, and asked if the free-installation offer was still valid.

“Yeah, about that,” Larry said, and I heard the sound of the register open and shut. “I was wondering how those locks worked out for you. I can come by after work and take a look. What’s your address again?”

“Five-seventeen North Dandry, apartment A1. There’s a lot of construction going on and I was going to ask one of the workers, but . . . anyway . . . I don’t want to disturb them.”

“Like I said, it’ll be after hours. It’s just something we do out of courtesy for our customers.”

We agreed on a time and hung up. If Larry got the job done quickly, neither Lieberman nor Jack would ever find out that I had locks installed. After I hung up the phone with Larry, a faint whine crept toward me from Mia’s room. There was no shower in my near future but at least the installation of the locks seemed certain. After I fed and changed Mia, I stood with her in my arms, looking out the window facing the street. The windows still had their original cast-iron bars and unless someone took a metal saw to them, they seemed very sturdy and safe.

Larry appeared with his tool belt fitting snuggly around his waist, his belly drooping over in the front. He carefully laid out all the locks on the foyer tile.

“Locks have personality, you know,” he said.

“Well, they weren’t speaking to me,” I said and passed Mia from one hip to the other.

She let out a sudden screech that prompted Larry to drop the electric drill. It left a jagged crack in the ceramic tile.

“Darn it,” Larry said and inspected the damage. “Little one scared me. I’ll replace that for you free of charge.”

I didn’t care for him to come back. “Don’t worry about the tile. I’ll have that fixed. There’s lots of tiles stacked in the hallway.”

Whatever I hadn’t managed to do a couple of hours earlier took him all of twenty minutes.

“Anything else I can do for you?” Larry asked and took his time returning tools into his red Craftsman box. “While I’m here. I’m handy with a lot of stuff.” He winked at me and with the back of his hand wiped the sweat off his forehead. “If you don’t mind, call my boss and tell him about my work. It’s almost Christmas, which means bonus time.”

I promised I would and that I’d call him if I needed anything else, and shut the door quickly. It was dented, the paint scratched, but I thought that I had all the locks I needed to keep us safe. Now, even if he had a key, Jack wouldn’t be able to just barge in unannounced. And I wouldn’t have to second-guess my mental state every time something seemed out of place.

Later that night, I walked across the room to the fireplace and poked the logs until the flames grew into a joyous blaze. I sat in front of the fireplace, yoga-style, and raised my palms until the heat of the flames became unbearable. I looked around the sparsely decorated room, which consisted of a couch, a chair, and an old table.

Jack’s architect had decided to convert the brownstone into four separate units in order to take advantage of the rising real estate values. One unit was occupied by Lieberman and another by me. The two units next door were still under construction. I envisioned how this building must have been a century ago. Opulence lingered just beneath the coat of wear and tear. Single living rooms replaced double parlors, kitchens became smaller but more efficient, and entry foyers disappeared completely. The parlor doors had lost their shine and the marble mantels had long been replaced. The ceiling plasterwork was still intact but showed patches here and there. All interior doors and wood moldings showed deterioration and fatigue, but the
allure was in just that: the beauty of imperfection. I wondered how every little scratch or scrape had gotten there. The rooms were spacious, their ceilings an imposing fourteen feet. The sleek mahogany doors were the most distinctive feature of the apartment.

The ceiling work of the house was machine-made, rather than handmade, and of papier-mâché or stucco, rather than plaster. The combination of luxury, faded glory, and ornate shabbiness gave the apartment a kind of magical charm. Since the first story’s floor plan was the exact mirror image of the second floor, four identical apartments had been created by using the former grand entrance as the hallway and separating two units by a simple wall.

While the left side of the house, apartments 2A and 2B, was still under construction, the right side of the house, 1A and 1B, had been completed almost nine months ago.

Mrs. Drake, in our initial meeting, had explained the legal ramifications. I hadn’t understood most of it, but figured that the completion of the two unfinished apartments was behind schedule due to the lawsuit that Jack had filed against the contractors. The settlement stipulated that the contractors now had to complete the left part of the building within a certain time frame.

The blaze in the fireplace had eased and the shadows flickering across the walls were subtle, almost comforting. I fell asleep as the rainbow-colored craze of flames turned into a tamed orange glow, exhausting itself.

—

The next morning—four empty bottles on the couch proof of the number of night feedings—I took two aspirin for my headache. I waited for the buzzing in my head to ease, for my thoughts to stop spinning.

The doorbell buzzed, followed by Mia crying. I went to her room, picked her up, and to my surprise she settled down the second the bottle hit her lips.

Through the peephole I saw a shadow passing by the door. Later, after Mia had gone back to sleep, just as I was pulling her door shut, the doorbell buzzed again. This time I just yanked the door open. It was David Lieberman. He bowed his head and took off his hat.

“I need to measure the pressure. Looks like we have to flush the pipes.”

“I thought it was all taken care of,” I said and realized that my headache had stopped. “Kitchen or bathroom?”

“Kitchen. The pipe connections in this building are a maze.”

“So just turn on the water and check for what?”

“May I?” Lieberman put his hand on the door. Then he paused. “What happened here?” he asked, gently stroking the door’s surface with his fingertips, the tips caressing every groove and dent.

“I had some locks installed.”

“You had some locks installed.” Lieberman seemed puzzled, rubbing the chipped paint. “Low pressure is just inconvenient but high pressure can do a lot of damage,” he said and held up some sort of gauge device.

Mia was fussing in her crib. I could hear her getting more impatient, the intervals between her protests getting shorter, her objections louder and more urgent by the minute.

I opened the door and stepped aside. He went straight to the kitchen and screwed the gauge to the faucet. I mumbled an apology and went to Mia’s room to change her diaper.

I put her on the changing table, leaned over her, gently cooing, hoping she’d cooperate. The toy I handed her flew to the ground. Mia was delighted to be free of the diaper, stretching her limbs, enjoying how her legs moved without a wad of diaper between them. She was all joy and play until it was time to put on a clean diaper. I distracted her as much as possible, but her body tensed and her legs stiffened to the point that it was tedious to pull the diaper through her legs to
fasten the tabs. When I was finally done, I found Lieberman still under the kitchen sink.

“Shouldn’t a plumber take a look at this?” I distinctly remembered that he said he was just supervising the contractors. He stood by the sink and turned on the faucet. It barely trickled and the pipes emitted a humming noise, then the walls around us seemed to vibrate and I felt a tremor under my feet.

“I’m going to have to turn the water main off.” He pointed at Mia in my arms. “You’ll have to use bottled water in the meantime.”

“How long is this going to take?” He hadn’t even laid out his tools yet, and I wondered what he’d been doing the entire time I had changed the diaper and dressed Mia. I felt a tinge of impatience.

“I’ll take care of the pipes,” he said and grabbed a wrench off the counter. “You just go and get some water.” He pointed at my purse on the counter.

I wasn’t in the mood to get dressed and run to a store to purchase water, but I put Mia in her stroller and grabbed my purse, happy to get away from the noise of groaning pipes and not having to deal with Lieberman in general.

As I passed by my usual market, Mia was still crying and I decided to continue farther down the block to the next corner market. Minutes later it started to sprinkle and I covered the stroller with a blanket. By the time I entered the market, Mia was asleep. The clerk was framed by porn magazines in plastic pouches and probably had a shotgun stashed close by.

I grabbed a gallon of water and made my way to the counter. I sat the gallon on the counter. When I reached in my purse, there was no wallet. I rummaged senselessly through the compartments filled with tissues and receipts as the clerk looked at me sideways. I mumbled an apology and quickly left the market.

When I returned to North Dandry, Lieberman had left. The
second I set foot in the kitchen I spotted my wallet on the kitchen counter under a stack of mail and papers. Next to it sat a bottle of water. I shook my head, scolding myself for being so scatterbrained.

I opened the fridge door. I felt a sinking feeling of despair as I stared at an array of bottles filled with baby formula.

I didn’t even attempt to construct an elaborate rationalization as to why I couldn’t remember what I had done mere hours ago. Between the wallet, the water, and the formula, I realized that at some point I had to admit to myself that the word
forgetful
was no longer accurate and that
brain on fire
was more like it.

I tried to forget my absentmindedness but something remained with me. A nagging voice in the back of my mind that whispered
What are you going to misplace
next
?

TIMELINE OF MIA CONNOR ABDUCTION

Brooklyn, NY—
The case of seven-month-old Mia Connor is gripping the nation. Nothing short of a tragedy, the facts of Mia Connor’s disappearance seem to be pointing in a disturbing direction.

In the days before the disappearance, Mia’s mother, Estelle Paradise, had locks and bolts installed by a local hardware store. According to a store clerk from Taylor Hardware, Security & Lock, she wanted to “keep people out.” He described her as “preoccupied, a bit on the edge,” then added, “and she never tended to the baby. She was crying the entire time.”

On September 30th Estelle Paradise, 27, is seen on surveillance tapes attempting to purchase a gallon of water. She never pays for the water but storms out of the convenience store, leaving the water behind. On October 1st Estelle Paradise finds her daughter’s crib empty. She doesn’t notify the authorities.

According to surveillance tapes, she enters the 70th Police Precinct in Brooklyn on Sunday and is seen vomiting in the precinct hallway after exiting a bathroom. She then leaves without talking to the detective, who remembers her as “disheveled and worn-out.”

Estelle Paradise is found on October 4th at the bottom of a ravine in Dover, NY, with life-threatening injuries. Among other items a gun was found in the car.

She is transferred to County Medical in Brooklyn on October 5th. Upon her arrival she is listed in serious condition. The next day her husband, and father of Mia, Jack Connor, 38, arrives at County Medical. According to an unnamed source, an arraignment can be anticipated within two weeks, depending on the mother’s recuperation. She is listed in fair
condition.