Chapters (13)
At dawn, the phone rang. They found her in Florida, picked her up in a convenience store buying pretzels. She was carrying the baby. Adam was all right. She didn’t want to harm him. She just wanted him, that was all. We got on a plane with the kids and flew to Fort Lauderdale. They had the baby in the hospital there. We stayed in a hotel that night, me and Craig and the three boys. We watched the news. And there on the screen was Mrs. Covet, with a serial number under her massive chin. She looked like a hardened criminal in that picture. “Woman Kidnaps Month-Old Baby.” She had no record. That’s what the police said. She had been a nurse for twenty years. A married woman with three grown children, and one day she just snapped. Fell in love with our family, like she said. All that time with us, she had yearnings, she was in pain. None of us noticed. We treated her like a joke. We didn’t care what was going on inside her, as long as she took care of us. Now she was in prison for kidnapping, all because she loved our baby too much. I felt bad in a way. Too much love had wrecked her life.
It’s nearly light. The older children will be up soon. I cling to these moments before the day begins. I hear the baby’s breathing changing; he will wake up soon. I feel the tingling pang of milk filling my breasts; a drip of it trickles down my abdomen. My third boy. He is still so new. His soft pink mouth opens, reaches out for my nipple. Eyes still shut, he roots around like a piglet. When he latches on and tastes the milk, his eyelids flutter, his eyes roll back in his head. Desire. Satiation. Desire. That’s the story of his day. I am the warmth, the smell, the anchor. He is still nearly blind, innocent to meaning; he is like a pebble, a shell, a rabbit. He is no one, he is ancient, he has a face like a very old man, toothless mouth agape, staring both into and out of the void. I stay with him always.