Prologue
IT’S MONDAY. IT’S AUGUST. And it’s one of those days that’s already so hot at 6 a.m. that they tell you to check on your elderly neighbors and please don’t go outside if you don’t have to. So of course I’m jogging through the stifling, smelly streets of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, with a dog—a dog named The Duke. Yes. Not Duke, but The Duke. That’s his name. That’s what my son, Willie, who was four years old when The Duke was a puppy, wanted. So that’s what we did.
The Duke is a terrific dog, a mixed breed German shepherd, terrier, and God knows what else from the Brooklyn Animal Resource Coalition—BARC—animal shelter. He’s cuter than any guy I ever dated, and Willie was instinctively right about the dog’s name. He’s The Duke. The Duke is snooty and snobby and slow. He actually seems to think he’s royalty. His Highness belongs to Willie, but for forty-five minutes a day, The Duke condescends to be my running buddy.
The Duke doesn’t seem to know or care that I’ve got places to be. I’m a certified nurse-midwife, so I do my work by the schedules of a lot of pregnant women. On a normal day like today, I’ve got only a small window of time to exercise before getting breakfast on the table, because although Willie is now nine years old, he still needs a lot of looking after by me, his single mom. Then it’s a half hour subway ride into midtown Manhattan. Back to work, although I’m tired as hell from delivering a preterm last night. (Emma Rose, the infant, is doing just fine, I’m relieved to say.) Yeah, I’m beat, but I love my job as much as I hate running.
Get away from that rotten piece of melon, The Duke. Those pigeons got there first!
I tug hard on the leash. It takes The Duke a full city block to forget about the melon. Don’t feel bad for the dog; he’ll find some other rotten food to run after. If not, there’s a big bowl of Purina and some cold Chinese takeout beef and broccoli waiting for him at home.
I turn up the volume in my headphones. Okay, it’s the same playlist I listened to when I was a teenager, but Motörhead’s Ace of Spades never gets old, does it? Willie says that every band I like—Motörhead, Korn, Cake—is “definitely old school.” He’s right. But, hey, you like what you like, right? And, hey, old school isn’t so awful. At least not for me.
No, no, no. We’re not stopping to talk to Marty … “Hey, Marty, how ya doing, man?” No, no, The Duke, we don’t need any cocaine today. Keep moving. Keep moving.
Pep talk to self: Come on, Lucy Ryuan, you can do it. Keep moving. Even on just four hours’ sleep, you can do it. A little bit more. One more block. Then one more block.
And now we’re moving into Grand Army Plaza, into Prospect Park with all the other runners. God bless them. They’re all an annoying inspiration.
I’m strangely and amazingly awake on so little sleep. Now I’m into a running groove, and everything feels good, until the music suddenly stops. My cell is ringing. It’s one of my assistants, Tracy Anne Cavanaugh, a smart, energetic young woman.
“Lucy, I’m sorry, really sorry, to bother you. I know you must be—”
“What’s up, Tracy Anne?”
“Valerina Gomez is here at the hospital. Her brother brought her in. She’s at eight centimeters …”
I roll my eyes at The Duke, for God’s sake. Valerina Gomez has been trouble from the get-go. A druggie, a smoker, a drinker, and I’m afraid to think how she makes her living. Plus, just her luck, she’s carrying twins.
“Handle her till I get there. You can do that, Tracy Anne.” And, yes, there’s a very impatient tone to my voice. But Tracy Anne’s great. Tracy Anne can handle her just fine.
“I will, I will,” she says. “But there’s something else …”
“Okay, what?”
“A newborn baby has gone missing.”
I ask the question that every shocked person asks: “Are you kidding me?”
Tracy Anne doesn’t even bother to say no. Instead she says, “The hospital is going crazy. The cops. Detectives. They’re all over the place. They say this has never happened here before. I mean … I’ve heard once or twice somebody got the wrong baby to take home. And I know that—”
“Listen, don’t you go crazy, too, Tracy Anne. Just cooperate, do your job, and—”
“Lucy, what are we gonna do?”
Then, with my head aching, sweat dropping from me like rain, my stomach churning, I say something absolutely stupid.
“What are we gonna do, Tracy Anne? We’re gonna help them find the baby.”
CHAPTER 1
SHOCKINGLY, THE DOG SEEMS to know that this is an emergency. He runs with me at an unusually un-The-Dukelike pace. Once inside our little building, he takes the stairs to our third-floor apartment two steps at a time. I’ll show him who’s boss. I take the steps three at a time. When we hit the third-floor landing it’s a close call as to which of us is sweatier and smellier.
Willie sleeps in our one tiny bedroom. The living room with the foldout sofa is mine. This is particularly convenient today because there is a large selection of my clothes on both my unfolded foldout and the steamer trunk that doubles as a toy box and a coffee table.
I now begin trying to do three things at once. One, I start to get dressed. No time for a shower. A wet washcloth under my arms, a few swipes of deodorant, and a generous helping of Johnson’s Baby Powder will compensate. Two, I try to find information about the missing baby on my laptop. Nothing. Where are you, Twitter, when I need you? Three, I keep yelling toward the bedroom, “Willie, wake up!”
Within a few seconds I’m slipping into a pair of slightly stained jeans and a less-than-glamorous turquoise V-neck T-shirt, also slightly stained. Both are victims of the Chinese beef and broccoli, which The Duke is noisily eating right now.
I try searching an all-news website.
Great. I guess.
Missing baby NYC and missing baby hospital news info brings me one news brief that “an underage patient at Gramatan University Hospital (GUH) has been reported missing.”
Underage? The freaking baby is one day old. That’s PR for you.
I head back into Willie’s room. He is snoring like a 300-pound drunk. I’m surprised he doesn’t wake the neighbors, and I’ve got to wonder how somebody that little can make a noise so loud.
“Willie, get up. Come on. You’ve gotta get down to Sabryna’s. Right! Now!” Well, that sure didn’t work.
I stand in the little bedroom, and then I waste a few seconds just staring at my fine-looking son, asleep on Bart Simpson sheets. I tousle his hair. No reaction. I tousle it somewhat harder. One eye opens. Then a mouth.
“You’ve got a really huge stain on that T-shirt, Mom.”
“I know,” I say. “I haven’t had time to do laundry. And the stain is not huge. It’s medium.”
Willie now has both eyes closed again. He’s gone back to sleep. I move into very-loud-but-still-not-yelling volume.
“You’re going down to Sabryna’s in your underwear if you don’t get up right this minute. I repeat: Right. This. Minute.”
Sabryna and her thirteen-year-old son, Devan, are our downstairs neighbors. She is originally from Jamaica, and her voice still has the beautiful island lilt to it. That lilt, which Sabryna can turn on and off like a faucet, also adds a note of authenticity to the small Caribbean grocery store she runs on the ground floor. The store is a jumble of goods: baskets of plantains and bunches of callaloo greens, as well as Pringles, Skittles, cigarettes, and New York Lottery tickets.