The Replacement Child (8 page)

Maxine, still kneeling, braced herself against the shrine, holding the coral tightly in her hand until she felt it poking into her skin. She heard the people out in the living room talking softly.

The day after Maxine had taken Daniel home from the hospital, Maxine’s mother brought the priest to the house to bless Daniel’s nursery and the piece of coral. The priest had held the coral in his hand, saying something that was hard to understand in Spanish. Or maybe Latin. While the priest prayed, her mother made the sign of the cross with an egg over Daniel three times. Then her mother cracked the egg in a jar. Her mother smiled when she saw that the egg had two yolks. It was a good sign. When the priest was finished, Maxine had made him a meal of enchiladas and green-chile stew. Maxine’s
mother warned her not to eat the food, saying that she had to obey the
dieta,
the time after a woman gives birth when she must not eat chile or tortillas. But Maxine ignored her and ate the food anyway, thinking that it would be rude not to join the priest.

The coral had been the only thing protecting Daniel until he was baptized. He had been born the day after Ash Wednesday, during Lent. There would be no baptisms until after Easter. Maxine’s mother warned her to keep Daniel nearby in case something came for him, because he wouldn’t be protected by Our Lord until after the baptism.

At first, Maxine kept Daniel’s crib in her and Ernesto’s room. She would lie awake, staring at the crib, until she heard Ernesto snoring next to her. After she was sure that Ernesto was asleep, she would get out of bed and quietly take Daniel from his crib. She would lay him down next to her in bed with her arms around him and watch him until morning.

But Ernesto found out what she was doing one night when he reached for her. The next night, she moved both herself and Daniel into the nursery. Daniel never slept in the crib again. Instead, she would rock and nurse him all night in the blue easy chair Ernesto had bought her when he found out that she was pregnant. She eventually had a small bed moved into the room after Daniel got too big for her to hold all night. She didn’t stop nursing him until he was three and a half, when she got pregnant with Ron.

Maxine’s mother had nursed Maxine’s oldest brother until he was five, even after her mother had given birth to Maxine’s sister. There hadn’t been enough milk for both children, so her sister had been weaned after four months. Her brother stopped nursing only after her mother’s milk had dried up when Maxine was born. Her mother had been angry at Maxine and hadn’t put any coral in her crib. The same reason Maxine hadn’t put any coral in Ron’s crib.

But she had put it in Melissa’s.

Maxine set the piece of coral back down on the shrine and picked up Daniel’s baby picture. He was smiling in the picture, his dark eyes almost covered up by his baby fat. It had been taken on his first birthday. For his first-birthday party she had made him a two-layer chocolate cake. She and Ernesto sang as Daniel, with his fat hands flying around, bounced in his high chair and watched the candle burning on the cake. Maxine had been ready to slap Daniel’s hand away from the candle, but he ignored it and instead threw his face into the cake, covering his cheeks and nose with chocolate frosting.

Ron had grabbed for the candle on his first birthday, but Daniel had gone for the cake. Had that been a sign from God? Something she should have paid attention to? Maybe if she had, Daniel would still be alive.

She hadn’t even known that Daniel was taking drugs. She got a phone call one day from the auto shop where Daniel worked. They asked, “Where is he?” Ernesto went looking for him and found Daniel in his mobile home, the needle still in his arm.

It was over just like that. She never had to beg Daniel to stop the drugs or to visit him in a drug center. She hadn’t made any trips to the emergency room to be by his side. She never had to take him to the
curandera
to be healed or a priest for a blessing.

Everything had been normal. Daniel had come home every night for dinner and called her every morning. She went to his mobile home once a week and cleaned it. She did his laundry every Sunday. She had seen Daniel the day before he died. He’d talked about going into the army. He’d smiled and teased her about the tomatoes she was trying to grow and had mentioned his girlfriend.

They buried Daniel in the family cemetery. She turned forty a month later. She would kneel three times a day in front of the shrine she had to Daniel in her bedroom, praying the rosary for him. She spent the rest of her time at home in her
housecoat, cutting out every article she could find about drug abuse. She looked at newspapers only for stories about drugs, throwing them to the floor if there were none. Ernesto would clean up the papers when he got home from work. If Ron came home, he would step on them or kick them into the corner. When she found an article, she would sit at the dining-room table and highlight phrases—
distances self from family
and
seems uninterested in normal routine.
But Daniel had been fine. Everything had been fine.

She kept the articles in a shoebox on the dining-room table and would spend hours rereading them. Looking for something she should have noticed so that she could have known, could have saved him. There must have been a sign.

Two years after Daniel died, she woke up one morning with the flu. She couldn’t move when the doctor told her she was pregnant. She sat in his office chair not breathing, until Ernesto whispered in her ear, “A gift from God.”

Melissa Esperanza Baca was born at six pounds four ounces, a month before Maxine’s forty-second birthday.

At her first-birthday party, Melissa threw her face into the cake and ignored the candle.

Maxine was still kneeling in front of the shrine, listening to the people in the living room talk. She picked up the coral again and held it in her hand, turning it over several times, before throwing it as hard as she could against the wall, barely missing the crucifix above her head. The coral shattered and a few splinters flew back at her face.

L
ucy sat in the afternoon news meeting with the other editors, not listening. They were crowded into a conference room, with the overflow of people trailing out the door. The assortment of city editors, photos editors, copy editors, graphics editors, and Web editors either sat or stood according towho got to the
meeting on time. John Lopez, the managing editor, always sat at the head of the table, whether he was late or not. Dad’s chair.

Lucy was bored and was using her red pen to fill in all the hollow letters in the words
Capital Tribune
printed at the top of her news budget.

They had already discussed how they were going to handle the Gomez trial—a below-the-fold story on the front page with a single photo. The trial was continuing tomorrow, so it didn’t deserve better play yet. When the verdict was announced in a few days, they’d banner it.

Now they were talking about the bigger story—the woman who had been thrown off the Taos Gorge Bridge. They had found out that her name was Melissa Baca. One of their photographers had a picture of the cops pulling the girl’s body off the bridge. The frame showed her covered body on the stretcher with a hand visible. The assistant photo editor wanted to use the shot.

Lucy knew they would never use a dead-body photo. Northern New Mexico is one big small town. Many of their readers would know Melissa or her family. It would be bad PR for the paper to use the photo. The assistant photo editor argued that the picture represented the scene on the bridge. Besides, he said, it wasn’t any worse than what you saw every night on CNN.

Lucy was surprised that Lopez was even listening. She would have shut up the photo editor long ago. They had run a body shot only once during her three years at the paper. It was of a car crash that had killed a city councillor. The car, with the body in it, had been in the background, with cops cleaning up the accident scene in the foreground. They had thought the body wasn’t that noticeable. The next day, they were besieged by phone calls from outraged readers.

Lopez nodded as the photo editor went on, as if he were really listening. They had been talking about this for five minutes. Lucy was having a hard time hiding her impatience. Why discuss something that was never going to happen?

She interrupted. “So, are we going to have a graphic, maybe a map of where the bridge is? I mean everyone knows where the bridge is, but copy desk might need another design element for the page. Who’s designing page one?”

A copy editor across the room yelled, “Yo,” in an exaggerated Sly Stallone Rambo voice.

“Do you have room for a graphic? How do pages look?” The copy editor handed her the page layout dummies. There was plenty of room on the inside front pages, but the local section was going to be tight.

Lopez said nothing, just looked at her intently. Lucy hoped that she hadn’t just gotten herself in trouble. Not that Lopez would ever say anything. He wasn’t that kind of manager. He was more like Beaver Cleaver’s dad. He didn’t get mad, only deeply disappointed, but his disappointment was something she didn’t want.

“What’s the story with the Baca killing? What do we have?” Lucy asked.

Her boss, City Editor Harold Richards, looked at Lopez, who nodded.

“Melissa Baca was killed sometime yesterday,” Richards said. “She was from Santa Fe. I sent Tommy Martinez to talk to the family. He called an hour ago. He got a little info from some of his sources. Looks like she was twenty-three years old and a seventh-grade teacher at that private school, the Burroway Academy. Her father was a cop. He was one of the officers killed during that shootout seven years ago.” A few of the heads around the table nodded. They remembered. Richards went on, but Lucy stopped listening. She wondered if it meant something that Melissa Baca’s father had been a cop.

G
il drove up to the cinder-block house. Its white paint contrasted with the adobe-brown houses that surrounded it. The neighborhood was middle-class and had few crime problems.
Only a minor break-in every few months. The Baca house had a neat mesh-wire fence around it that was covered in ivy turned brown in the winter weather. There had been an attempt at grass in the front yard, but the dirt was taking over. There were cars everywhere. He would have suspected a party if he’d been just a neighbor passing by.

He knocked on the door. It was answered by a woman he didn’t know. He asked for Ron Baca first, but the woman said Ron wasn’t there, adding that she thought he was at work. Gil knew that Kline had given Ron some time off, but Ron might have picked up a shift. It was what Gil would have done. Get out of the house and get your mind on something—anything—else. Next he asked for Mrs. Baca. He had to show the woman his badge before he was let in. The house was crowded. Children sat on the floor watching
Sesame Street
on television. The letter of the day was
M.
Adults sat on couches and chairs along the walls. No one noticed him.

He heard voices in a back bedroom. All the lights in the room were on, even the closet light. Mrs. Baca sat on the bed and she wasn’t alone.

Gil recognized the woman with her—Veronica Cordova, Officer Manny Cordova’s mother. Manny had said that the two women were friends. Their husbands, both police officers, had died in the same shootout seven years ago. Their sons had grown up together and had been in the police academy together. Ron was now Manny’s sergeant.

Mrs. Baca and Mrs. Cordova sat on the bed, holding some blue cloth between them. Gil stepped into the room and they looked up, guiltily. He saw that the cloth was a bath towel.

Veronica Cordova dropped her edge of the towel and spoke first. “We were just looking at Melissa’s things. We found this on the bathroom floor. I thought … I thought if Maxine could just feel something … something that was one of the last things that Melissa used, it would …”

Gil said nothing. Grief made people do strange things.
Mrs. Baca was still wearing the same stained blouse. She gripped her half of the towel, wringing it.

Gil sat down next to her on the bed.

“I just came to see how you are. I haven’t learned anything yet,” he said.

Maxine nodded.

He went on. “What can you tell me about …” He was about to say Melissa’s name but had the sudden thought that if he did so, Mrs. Baca would break down. “What can you tell me about Monday night?”

He leaned closer as she started quietly. “She came home from school about five o’clock. She stayed in her room until dinner. We had cold pizza, leftovers from Pizza Hut. She left right after eight o’clock. I thought she was going to see Jonathan.” Gil assumed that Jonathan was Melissa’s “gringo” boyfriend that Manny Cordova had mentioned.

“But you actually didn’t know where she was going?” Gil asked. Maxine shook her head.

“Do you have a guess? Did she say anything during dinner that might have given an indication of where she was going?” He winced inwardly at his words. He sounded too much like a police officer. Again she shook her head.

“Who are some of her friends, someone she may have confided in?” he asked.

“Her best friend, Judy Maes, works for the city.” Maxine startled herself as she said Judy Maes’s name, and she shifted sharply on the bed, almost losing her balance. “Veronica, did someone call Judy? I forgot to tell Judy.”

Mrs. Cordova patted Maxine’s arm. “I called her. Don’t worry.”

Mrs. Baca slumped back down on the bed, her burst of energy lost.

“Did she get any phone calls while she was home last night? Anything?” Gil continued.

“No.”

“Have you noticed anyone strange hanging around? Any strange phone calls?”

“No.”

“What did you talk about at dinner?”

“I’m not sure…. I don’t …” She stopped.

“How did she seem at dinner? Happy? Sad? Upset?” Gil asked gently.

“She was fine. Everything was fine.” Maxine seemed to sag inwardly. She was swaying as she sat.

“I guess that’s all I need to know for now. I know the state police called earlier. They’re planning to come by later on tonight to ask you the same types of questions.” Mrs. Baca nodded. Gil had told Pollack that Maxine’s husband had been killed in the line of duty in the hope that they would go easy on her during the questioning. Gil continued. “Do you want me to be here?”