Stealing Time

CHAPTER 40

O

n the Huas' Street in Garden City the garbage truck came on Tuesday and Friday. That morning it had come at 5:26. Nanci had been up most of the night talking with Milton and walking with the baby. Lin had hidden him in a laundry basket and Nanci hadn't even known he was there until she and Milton were halfway back to Garden City. She'd been worrying about the way she had behaved toward her cousin and the world ever since.

Just as dawn was beginning to gray the sky, she had seen the rust-colored truck rumble to a stop in front of the house. The baby, dressed in one of the expensive sleep sacks that had so baffled Nanci when she first saw them, slept in her arms. At the sound of the truck, she had been drawn to the window in the wild hope that Lin might somehow miraculously have arrived with the day. What she saw outside was a garbage man in a dark uniform and cuffed gloves almost as big as falconer's gauntlets. He walked behind the truck from the house next door and stopped at the green garbage can she'd so carefully placed right on the curb. He unlatched the clever hasp that foiled raccoons, tossed the cover onto the lawn, and effortlessly dumped three white plastic bags that had been her garbage collection since Tuesday into the truck's open jaws. Then he threw the empty can down on its side, far away from its cover, and waved his hand for the truck to move on.

This careless, almost defiant gesture reminded Nanci of herself. In the barely ten months since her cousin had arrived in New York, she had gone on with her life just like the sanitation worker, tossing the cans every which way, unaware of anyone's presence in the window. She'd worked in the library during the week, gone house hunting on the weekends. She and Milton had bought the house, moved in, and hunkered down for the last months of winter. All their short lives they'd been responsible, had struggled and saved their money for a house like this and the luxury of having a city-paid worker in his gauntlets to dispose of their private garbage from their private garbage can. And all this time, she'd scarcely thought about poor Lin.

At three in the morning she'd fed the gorgeous black-haired, blue-eyed baby, and put him back to bed. At five-fifteen she'd picked him up again. She'd sat in a chair holding him, alternately dozing and worrying. At seven he was still sleeping. She took him downstairs and put him in the plastic baby chair Milton had bought for him when they'd realized they did not want to give him back, and she made coffee. His tiny nose twitched at the smell of the coffee, and his tiny fingers moved against the satin edging of the blue flannel baby blanket that smelled of money and so perplexed Nanci when she first saw it. The baby's fancy layette didn't match her cousin's station in fife, so she'd worried that even though the baby looked like Lin and also looked like her, it might not, in fact, be Lin's baby.

If anyone asked Nanci now whose baby he was, she'd say hers. He was in her dreams, in the rhythms of her day. He was serene and unruffled, and he filled her heart without even trying. She hadn't even known how much she longed for someone other than Milton to love and care for. Milton was a man; he had his own thoughts, his own world—his restaurant, sports, and his brothers. He no longer read as much as he used to when they were dating. He worked long days, from eleven to eleven sometimes, or from eight in the morning to nine at night. He was a householder; with the responsibilities of his job and the bills to pay, he was not always as patient and understanding with her as he used to be. Someone who relied on her and needed her, someone she could share her thoughts with and teach everything she knew was what she had needed to fulfill her life.

The baby's hold on her heart and the mystery of his fancy layette were so powerful a combination that even with her cousin in danger, Nanci had not been able to tell April the truth. If the baby was Lin's, she might have a chance of keeping him. At first she'd thought Lin might have had a boyfriend who didn't intend to marry her. If he

had

married Lin, Nanci would at least have had a chance to see the baby from time to time.

But the expensive clothes that came with him made Nanci think the baby might have been someone else's. She and Milton had been astounded when their argument on the ride home from Chinatown on Tuesday had been interrupted by a baby's crying. They had not known that Lin had been pregnant. When Nanci climbed over into the backseat and found the baby wearing such fine clothes, she couldn't imagine where he and they had come from. Until she spoke with April, she did not guess that the infant she and Milton had fallen in love with at first sight was the missing baby described in the newspapers, but she knew she didn't want to give him back. She had come to believe the baby was Lin's, and since the baby was Lin's, he was also hers to keep and protect. Under no condition could he ever go back to his adoptive parents. And in this way she and Milton, formerly among the most law-abiding people in America, became criminals.

From the moment they'd conceived of the idea of having Frankie and Joey talk to Annie Lee, she'd known it was a crazy thing to do. What if the woman got stubborn and refused to say where Lin was? What if she demanded the ransom and that was the end of it? What if she didn't really know where Lin was, after all? What could they do—bully her, hit her, threaten her with a gun? She'd known Frankie and Joey for ten years. They had not been the brightest teenagers in the world, and now they were not the smartest men—still unmarried, hanging around the old neighborhood, and looking for trouble instead of work.

Around 7:40

A.M

. Nanci had the incongruous thought that she ought to go outside and bring back the garbage can lying on its side by the street. But she couldn't move. She was waiting for some word from the thugs. At a quarter past eight, she went upstairs to put the baby into the crib they'd borrowed from the next-door neighbors. He slept on. Then she padded into the bedroom to get Milton up. After his long hours at the restaurant, their speculation and worry over Lin and the baby, he hadn't gotten much sleep. Now he was out cold, his head buried in the space between two pillows. When she'd met him, he'd been a handsome boy with a lean and compact body, dreamy eyes, and long hair that fell into his eyes. Now he was an important restaurant manager, a confident young man who wore boxer shorts to bed and refused to stir when she tried to wake him.

Then the phone rang and she picked up.

"It's me. Let me talk to Milton," Frankie said.

"Frankie's on the phone," she told her husband's shoulder.

"Okay, I'm up." He roused himself and reached for the phone. "What's up?

"Oh, God, no." Milton turned away from her. "Yeah, okay. Yeah. Call me in a half-hour. Thanks."

Then he hung up without looking at Nanci and went into the bathroom to pee, still without looking at her. He didn't want to tell her what Frankie had said. She stood by the closed door, knowing she'd have to wait until he was ready.