“How old is she?” Angie asked.
“Almost four weeks. This is the first time she’s been outside for any real amount of time. She liked it up until she started screaming.”
“Yeah, they do a lot of screaming at that age.”
“You have one?” She kept her eyes on the baby, fed her a bit more of her thumb.
“A daughter, yeah. She’s four.”
“What’s her name?”
“Gabriella. Yours?”
The baby closed her eyes—from Armageddon to serenity in under two minutes. “Claire.”
“Nice,” I said.
“Yeah?” She gave me a smile that was wide and shy at the same time, which made it twice as charming. “You like it?”
“I do. It’s not trendy.”
“I hate that, right? Kids named Perceval or Colleton.”
“Or remember the Irish phase?” Angie asked.
A nod and a laugh. “All the kids named Deveraux and Fiona.”
“I know a couple, lived up off the Ave.?” I said. “Named their kid Bono.”
A great laugh, sharp enough to jostle the baby. “No, they didn’t.”
“No, they didn’t,” I admitted. “I keed.”
We were quiet for a moment, the smiles gradually dying on our faces. The mothers and the jogger paid us no attention, but I noticed a man standing in the park halfway between the playground and the road. His head was down and he walked in a slow circle, trying really hard, it appeared, not to look our way.
“That would be the daddy?” I said.
She looked over her shoulder, then back at me. “That would.”
Angie squinted. “Seems a bit old for you.”
“I was never interested in boys.”
“Ah,” I said. “What do you tell people—he’s your father?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes uncle. Sometimes older brother.” She shrugged. “Most times people assume what suits them and I don’t have to say anything.”
“He’s not missed back in the city?” Angie said.
“He had some vacation time coming.” She waved at him, and he stuffed his hands in the pockets of his jacket and began trudging across the field toward us.
“What’ll you do when vacation time runs out?”
Another shrug. “Fall off that bridge when we come to it.”
“And this is what you want—to build a life up here in the Berkshires?”
She looked around. “It’s as good a place as any and better than most.”
“So you remember some of this place,” I said, “from when you were four?”
Those clear eyes pulsed. “I remember all of it.”
That would include the wailing, the crying, the arrest of two people who’d loved her deeply, the social worker who’d had to wrench Amanda from the arms of those people. Me standing there, the cause of it, watching.
All of it.
Her boyfriend reached us and handed her the pacifier.
“Thanks,” she said.
“No problem.” He turned to me. “Patrick. Angie.”
“How you doing, Dre?”
They lived just a mile from the dog park on the main road in a house we’d passed at least a dozen times that morning. It was a Craftsman Foursquare, the stucco painted a dark tan that contrasted nicely with the off-white trim and the copper-colored stone porch supports. It was set back off the road a few yards, a wide sidewalk bordering the houses along that stretch of road in such a way that it felt more small-town than country. Across the street was a strip of common grass and then a small access road and a white-steepled church with a brook running behind it.
“It’s so quiet here,” Amanda said as we exited our cars and met on the sidewalk, “that sometimes the gurgling of the brook keeps you up at night.”
“Yikes,” I said.
“Not a nature enthusiast, I take it,” Dre said.
“I like nature,” I said. “I just don’t like to touch it.”
Amanda lifted Claire out of her car seat and said, “Would you mind?” and handed her to me. She came back out with the diaper bag and Dre pulled the stroller out of the back of their Subaru and we headed up the walk to the house.
“I can take her,” Amanda said.
“I got her for a sec,” I said. “If that’s okay.”
“Sure.”
I’d forgotten how small a newborn was. She weighed, at most, eight and a half pounds. When the sun broke between two clouds and hit us, she scrunched up her face until it looked like a head of cabbage, her tight fists covering her eyes. Then her fists fell away and her face unscrunched and her eyes opened. They were the color of good scotch and they looked up at me with startled wonder. They didn’t just ask, Who are you? They asked, What are you? What is this? Where am I?
I remembered Gabby having that look. Everything was unknown and unnamed. There was no “normal,” no frame of reference. No language, no self-awareness. Even the concept of a concept was unknown.
The startled wonder turned to confusion as we crossed the threshold into the house and the light changed again and her face darkened with it. She had a gorgeous face. Heart-shaped, chubby-cheeked, those butter-toffee eyes, her mouth a rosebud. She looked like she’d grow into a stunner. Spin heads, halt hearts.
But as she began to fuss and Amanda took her from my arms, it also occurred to me that however she looked, she didn’t look anything like Amanda or Dre.
“So, Dre,” I said when we were all sitting in the living room by a hearth of smooth gray stone.
“So, Patrick.” He wore dark brown jeans, a pearl henley beneath a navy blue pullover with an upturned collar, and a dark gray fedora on his head. He fit in up in the Berkshires about as well as a fire. He pulled a pewter flask from the inside pocket of his jacket and took a small sip. Amanda watched him return the flask to his pocket with something that resembled disapproval. She sat on the other end of the couch and rocked the baby softly in her arms.
I said, “I’m just trying to imagine how you’ll go back to work for the Department of, uh, Children and Families when your family unit here is a bit, how do you say, fucking illegal.”
“Please don’t swear in front of the baby,” Amanda said.
“She’s three weeks old,” Dre said.
“I still don’t want anyone swearing in front of her. Did you swear in front of your baby, Patrick?”
“When she was a baby, yeah. Not now.”