A.J. hands Ismay the note to read.
“Poor thing,” Ismay says.
“I agree, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t abandon a child of mine in a bookstore.”
Ismay shrugs. “The girl probably had her reasons.”
“How do you know that it’s a girl?” A.J. asks. “It could be a middle-aged woman at the end of her rope.”
“The voice of the letter sounds young to me, I guess. Maybe the handwriting, too.” Ismay says. She runs her fingers through her short hair. “How are you holding up otherwise?”
“I’m okay,” A.J. says. He realizes that he hasn’t thought about Tamerlane or Nic for hours.
Ismay washes the dishes even though A.J. tells her to leave it. “I’m not going to keep her,” A.J. repeats. “I live alone. I don’t have much money saved, and business isn’t exactly booming.”
“Of course not,” Ismay says. “It wouldn’t make sense with your lifestyle.” She dries the dishes then puts them away. “It wouldn’t hurt you to start eating the occasional fresh vegetable, however.”
Ismay kisses him on the cheek. A.J. thinks that she is so like Nic but so unlike her. Sometimes the like parts (the face, the figure) seem hardest for him to bear; sometimes the unlike parts (the brain, the heart) do. “Let me know if you need more help,” Ismay says.
Although Nic had been the younger sister, she had always worried about Ismay. From Nic’s point of view, her older sister had been a primer on how not to live her life. Ismay had chosen a college because she had liked the pictures in the brochure, had married a man because he looked splendid in a tuxedo, and had started teaching because she’d seen a movie about an inspirational teacher. “Poor Ismay,” Nic had said. “She always ends up so disappointed.”
Nic would want me to be nicer to her sister, he thinks. “How’s the production coming?” A.J. asks.
Ismay smiles, and she looks like a little girl. “My word, A.J., I wasn’t aware that you even knew that there was one.”
“The Crucible,” A.J. says. “Kids come into the store to buy copies.”
“Yes, that makes sense. Awful play, really. But the girls get to do a lot of screaming and yelling, which they enjoy. Me, less so. I always come to rehearsal with a bottle of Tylenol. And maybe in the midst of all that screaming and yelling, they accidentally learn a little about American history. Of course, the real reason I picked it is because there are so many female roles—less tears when I post the list, you know. But now, with the baby coming, it’s starting to seem like, well, a lot of drama.”
Because he feels obligated to her for coming over with the food, A.J. volunteers to help. “Maybe I could paint flats or print programs or something?”
She wants to say How unlike you, but she resists. Aside from her husband, she believes her brother-in-law to be one of the most selfish and self-centered men she has ever met. If one afternoon with a baby can have such a refining influence on A.J., imagine what could happen to Daniel when the baby is born. Her brother-in-law’s small gesture gives her hope. She rubs her belly. It’s a boy in there, and they’ve already chosen a name and a backup name if the original name doesn’t suit.
THE NEXT AFTERNOON, once the snow has stopped and even begun to melt away into mud, a body washes up against the small strip of land near the lighthouse. The ID in her pocket says that this is Marian Wallace, and it does not take long for Lambiase to deduce that the body and the baby are, in fact, related.
Marian Wallace has no people on Alice, and no one knows why she was here or who she came to see or why she decided to kill herself by swimming into the icy waters of the Alice Island Sound in December. That is to say, no one knows the specific reason. They know that Marian Wallace is black, that she is twenty-two years old, and that she had a twenty-five-month-old toddler. To these facts, they can add what she wrote in her note to A.J. A flawed but adequate narrative emerges. Law enforcement concludes that Marian Wallace is a suicide, nothing more.
As the weekend goes on, more information about Marian Wallace emerges. She attended Harvard on scholarship. She was a Massachusetts State Champion swimmer, and an avid creative writer. She was from Roxbury. Her mother is dead—cancer when Marian was thirteen. The maternal grandmother died a year later of the same cause. Her father is a drug addict. She spent her high school years in and out of foster care. One of her foster mothers remembers young Marian always with her head in a book. No one knows who the father of her baby is. No one even remembers her having a boyfriend. She was put on academic leave from college because she failed all her classes the previous semester—the demands of motherhood and a rigorous academic schedule having become too much to bear. She was pretty and smart, which makes her death a tragedy. She was poor and black, which means people say they saw it coming.
Sunday night, Lambiase stops by the bookstore to check on Maya and give A.J. the update. He has several younger siblings and he offers to watch Maya while A.J. tends to store business. “Do you mind?” A.J. asks. “Don’t you have somewhere to go?”
Lambiase is recently divorced. He had married his high school sweetheart, so it took him a long time to realize that she was not, in fact, a sweetheart or a very nice person at all. In arguments, she was fond of calling him stupid and fat. He is not stupid, by the way, though he is neither well read nor well traveled. He is not fat, though he is built like a bulldog—thick-muscled neck, short legs, broad, flat nose. A sturdy American bulldog, not an English one.
Lambiase does not miss his wife, though he does miss having somewhere to go after work.
He parks himself on the floor and pulls Maya onto his lap. After Maya falls asleep, Lambiase tells A.J. the things he’s learned about the mother.
“What’s strange to me,” A.J. says, “is why she was on Alice Island in the first place. It’s kind of a pain to get here, you know. My own mother’s visited me once in all the years I’ve lived here. You really believe she wasn’t coming to see someone specific?”
Lambiase shifts Maya in his lap. “I’ve been thinking about that. Maybe she didn’t have a plan of where she was going. Maybe she just took the first train and then the first bus and then the first boat and this is where she ended up.”
A.J. nods out of politeness, but he doesn’t believe in random acts. He is a reader, and what he believes in is narrative construction. If a gun appears in act one, that gun had better go off by act three.
“Maybe she wanted to die somewhere with nice scenery,” Lambiase adds. “So the lady from DCF will be coming to get this little bundle of joy on Monday. Since the mother didn’t have any family and the paternity is unknown, they’ll have to find a foster home for her.”
A.J. counts the cash in the drawer. “Kind of rough for kids in the system, no?”
“It can be,” Lambiase says. “But this young, she’ll probably do all right.”
A.J. recounts the cash in the drawer. “You said the mother had been through the foster system?”
Lambiase nods.
“Suppose she thought the kid would stand a better chance in a bookstore.”
“Who can say?”
“I’m not a religious man, Chief Lambiase. I don’t believe in fate. My wife. She believed in fate.”
At that moment, Maya wakes and holds out her arms to A.J. He closes the drawer of the cash register and takes her from Lambiase. Lambiase thinks he hears the little girl call A.J. “Daddy.”
“Ugh, I keep telling her not to call me that,” A.J. says. “But she won’t listen.”
“Kids get ideas,” Lambiase says.
“You want a glass of something?”
“Sure. Why not?”
A.J. locks the front door of the store and heads up the stairs. He sets Maya on the futon and goes out to the main room of the house.
“I can’t keep a baby,” A.J. says firmly. “I haven’t slept in two nights. She’s a terrorist! She wakes up at, like, insane times. Three forty-five in the morning seems to be when her day begins. I live alone. I’m poor. You can’t raise a baby on books alone.”
“True,” Lambiase says.
“I’m barely keeping myself together,” A.J. continues. “She’s worse than a puppy. And a man like me shouldn’t even have a puppy. She’s not potty-trained, and I have no idea how to do that kind of thing or any of the related matters either. Plus, I’ve never really liked babies. I like Maya, but . . . Conversation with her lacks to say the least. We talk about Elmo, and I can’t stand him, by the way, but other than that, it’s mainly about her. She’s totally self-centered.”
“Babies do tend to be that way,” Lambiase says. “The conversation will probably improve when she knows more words.”
“And she always wants to read the same book. And it’s, like, the crappiest board book. The Monster at the End of This Book?”