Thus far, though, we were getting along. Maybe luck was part of it, butBaby Lovewas still on schedule and on budget. And I already had a deal nearly in the bag with Lifetime, the women's channel, that would just about cover the costs. Everything after that would be gravy. Again, hope hope. Maybe not the theatrical release I'd been praying for, but good enough—so he had to smile and not give me a hard time about the money I'd just spent. Had to, right?I took a deep breath."David, I did a little extra shooting this morning that's kind of. . . outside the plan. But it's really important. Want to hear about it?""What! I thought you were finished with principal photography." He looked disoriented, the deer in the headlights. Hints of extra crew time always had that effect on him. "You're saying this wasn't in the budget?""Just listen first, okay?" Like a politician, I avoided giving him a direct answer. I told him about the interview with Carly and the reason for it."Nice of you to share the news with me." His eyes narrowed. "I think we've got some big-time communication issues here.""Look, don't worry. I'll figure out how to save some money somewhere else.""Morgy, before we continue this unnerving conversation, we've got to have a serious review of the matter of cash flow." He frowned, then went back to whirling the pencil, his hair backlighted from the wide window, his eyes focused on its stubby eraser as though he'd just discovered a new strain of bacteria. "So let me break some news regarding the current budget."He put down the pencil, adjusted its location on his desk, and looked up. "I didn't want to have to upset you, since the picture seems to be going so well, but we've drawn down almost all our cash. I actually think that's why Nicky was here today, sniffing around, wanting to see a rough cut. He's got a keen nose for indy cash-flow trouble.""What are you saying?" It was unsettling to see David turning so serious. "Are we—?""I'm saying we can cover the payroll here, all our fixed nut, even Nicky's vig, for maybe six more weeks, if you and I don't pay ourselves. Of course, if we can get an advance on some kind of cable deal, that would tide us over more comfortably till this thing is in the can. But right now we're sailing pretty close on the wind. I've bet Applecore on your picture, Morgan. We can't screw this up."I swallowed hard. I knew we were working on the edge, but I didn't know the edge was down to six weeks."David, I'm all but ready for postproduction. I'm just thinking I may need one more interview. Just a one-day shoot. I'm going to make this picture work. You'll see."He sighed. "All right, if you think it's essential, get the footage. Maybe I can even shake another fifty out of Nicky, if I string him along about the distribution deal—don't look so alarmed, I won't go through with it. Anyway, I can tell he's impressed with the picture so far. Happy now?"No, I wasn't happy. What was I going to do if Hannah Klein had bad news? Adoption? I finally was facing the fact I'd possibly been making a movie about myself all this time. Like Yeats, penning his own tombstone. "Cast a cold eye, on life, on death. ."So why not give him the whole story?"David, if it turns out Steve and I can't have a baby, I've begun thinking about trying to adopt." There it was. More pain. "Maybe I'm about to become the heroine of my own picture."He stared at me incredulously."Morgy, you of all people should know by now that adopting would take up all your energy, like a giant sponge. Come on. I've seen your dailies. I got it, about how hard it is. You telling me now you didn't get it?"He was right. Righter than he realized. But then I thought again about Carly Grove, who'd found Kevin in no time at all, with zero hassles. The only troubling part was that it was all so mysterious. . . .After I left David's office, I remembered I hadn't actually had lunch, so I grabbed two hot dogs with sauerkraut (okay, it was junk, but I secretly loved kosher franks) and a Diet Pepsi to go, from one of the striped-umbrella vendors, then hailed a cab clutching the grungy brown bag.I was heading for Hannah Klein's office on the Upper West Side. And now I had another clock ticking in addition to the biological one. The big money clock in the sky was suddenly on final countdown.Chapter ThreeIt took only a few minutes for Hannah Klein's assistant, Lori, to run the pregnancy test that confirmed my suspicions and settled my future. Steve's and my final attempt, another intrauterine insemination (IUI, med-speak for an expensive "turkey baster") with the last of his deposit, had failed. The end. The bitter end."Morgan," Hannah declared, staring over her desk, her raspy New York voice boring through me like a drill, "given how this has all turned out, maybe you ought to just start considering adoption—if having a child still means that much to you."Hannah Klein was pushing seventy, a chain smoker who should have been dead a decade ago, and she unfailingly spoke the truth. Her gaze carried only synthetic solace, but I was probably her fifteenth patient of the day and maybe she was running low on empathy. Oddly, though, sitting there in her office, miserable, I felt strangely liberated. I adored the woman, a child of the Holocaust, with layers of steel like a samurai sword, but I also loved the thought of never again having to go through the humiliation of cowering in her straight-backed office chair, like a so-so student on probation waiting to receive my failing grade.It was now time to come to grips with what I'd known in my heart for a long time. God had made me a theoretically functional reproductive machine that just wouldn't kick over. Translation: no cysts, fibroids, polyps, no ovulatory abnormalities. My uterus and Fallopian tubes were just fine, Steve's sperm counts were okay, but no baby was swimming into life inside me.Sometimes, however, reality asks too much. It's not easy getting your mind around the idea that some part of your life is over, finally over. The baby part. To admit that it's time to move on to Plan B, whatever that is. Such realizations can take a while, especially if you've been living with high-level hope, no matter how irrational."I frankly don't know what else we can do," she went on, projecting through my abyss of gloom. She was shuffling papers on her ash-strewn desk, white hair in a bun, fine-tuned grit in her voice. Upper West Side, a fifty-year fixture. She never wore perfume, but to me she always smelled faintly of roses mixed with smoke. Earthy. "Aside from trying in vitro."We'd already discussed that, but it was definitely the bottom level of Hell. Besides, I was running out of money, and spirit. And now, with Steve gone, the whole idea seemed moot anyway."So," she concluded, "barring that, we've done everything possible, run every test there is, both on you and on your . . .""Steve," I inserted into her pause. She seemed to deliberately block his name at crucial moments. Maybe she thought I could have done better. Maybe a nice solid dentist who owned a suit instead of some freelance photo jock who showed up for his sperm counts wearing khaki safari shirts. Well, let her deal with it.". . . and I can't find anything. Sometimes, the body just won't cooperate. We may never know why. You've got to face that. But still, adoption is always an option."Adoption. All along I'd told myself I didn't have the courage, or the heart. Making movies is a full-time job, not leaving time to go filling out forms and jumping through hoops for years and years. And to cap it off, I was just two years short of the big four-oh and financially struggling—hardly an adoption agency's profile of "ideal."But now, now I'd just discovered Carly Grove and the miracle of Children of Light. So maybe there really could be a way to adopt a beautiful child with no hassles. Maybe it would simplify everything to the point I could actually pull it off. Could this be my Plan B? Then what if Steve came back? Could we be a family finally?I wasn't used to being that lucky. And I still wanted Hannah Klein's thoughts, a reality test, which was why I pressed her on the point."Truthfully, do you think adopting is really a workable idea for somebody like me? Would I—?""Morgan, I know you're making a film about the realities of the adoption process. We both realize it's not easy." She must have seen something needful in my eyes, because she continued on, adding detail, letting the well-known facts convey the bad news. "As you're well aware, finding a young, healthy, American baby nowadays is all but impossible. At the very least it can take years." She was fiddling with some papers on her desk, avoiding my eyes. Then she stubbed out her cigarette in a gesture that seemed intended to gain time. "And even if you're willing to take a baby that's foreign-born, there still can be plenty of heartbreak. That's just how it is.""I'd always thought so too," I said. "It's actually the underlying motif of my picture. But today I had an incredible experience. I filmed an interview of a single woman, early forties, who just adopted a baby boy. It took less than three months and he's blond and blue-eyed and perfect. I saw him, I held him, and I can assure you he's as American as peach cobbler. The way she tells it, the whole adoption process was a snap. Zero hassles and red tape.""That's most exceptional." She peered at me dubiously. "Actually more like impossible. Frankly, I don't believe it. This child must have been kidnapped or something. How old, exactly, was he when she got him?""I don't know. Just a few weeks, I think."Her eyes bored in. "This woman, whoever she is, was very, very lucky. If what she says is true.""The organization that got the baby for her is called Children of Light," I went on. "That's all I know, really. I think it's up the Hudson somewhere, past the Cloisters. Have you ever heard of them?"Dr. Hannah Klein, I knew, was pushing three score and ten, had traveled the world, seen virtually everything worth seeing. In younger years she was reputed to have had torrid liaisons with every notable European writer on the West Side. Her list of conquests read like an old New Yorker masthead. If only I looked half that great at her age. But whatever else, she was unflappable. Good news or bad, she took it and gave it with grace. Until this moment. Her eyes registered undisguised dismay."You can't mean it. Not that place. All that so-called New Age . . . are you really sure you want to get involved in something like that?"I found myself deeply confused. Were we talking about the same thing? Then I remembered Carly had said something about an infertility clinic."Frankly, nobody knows the first thing about that man," Hannah raged on. "All you get is hearsay. He's supposedly one of those alternative-medicine types, and a few people claim he's had some success, but it's all anecdotal. My own opinion is, it's what real physicians call the 'placebo effect.' If a patient believes hard enough something will happen, some of the time it actually might. For God's sake, I'm not even sure he's board-certified. Do yourself a favor and stay away. Oftentimes, people like that do more harm than good." Then her look turned inquisitive. "Did you say he's providing children for adoption now? That's peculiar. When did he start that?"Was I hearing some kind of professional jealousy slipping out? Hannah Klein was definitely Old School to the core."He who?" I was trying to remember the name of the doctor Carly had mentioned. "You mean—""He says his name is . . . what? Goddard? Yes, Alex Goddard. He's—"My pager chirped, interrupting her, and she paused, clearly annoyed. I looked down to see a number I knew well. It had to be Lou Crenshaw, our aforementioned security guard. He'd been off today, but there was only one reason he would page me: some kind of news from Lenox Hill.Maybe it was good news about Sarah! My hopes soared.Or maybe it was bad. Please, dear God."I'm sorry, Dr. Klein. I've got to go. Right now. It could be a medical emergency."She nodded, then slid open the top drawer of her desk and handed me a list of adoption agencies. "All right, here, take this and look it over. I've dealt with some of them, letters of reference for patients like you." She must have realized the insensitivity of that last quip, because she took my hand and squeezed it, the closest we'd ever come to intimacy. "Let me know if I can help you, Morgan. Really."Grasping the lifeless paper, I ached for Steve all over again. Times like this, you need some support. I finally glanced down at the list as I headed out. Sure enough, Children of Light was nowhere to be seen.Why not? I wondered. They'd found Kevin, a lovely blond baby boy, for Carly, a single woman, in no time at all. Theysounded like miracle-makers, and if there was ever a moment for miracles, this was it. Shouldn't they at least have been given a footnote?I wanted to stalk right back and demand to know the real reason she was so upset, but I truly didn't want to waste a moment.Lou had paged me from a pay phone—he didn't actually have a cell phone of his own—and I recognized the number as belonging to the phone next to the Lenox Hill Hospital's third-floor nurses' station. When I tried it, however, it was busy, so I decided to just get in my car and drive there as fast as I could.And as I battled the traffic down Broadway, I realized that by diverting my mind from my own trivial misery to the genuine tragedy of Sarah, I was actually getting my perspective back. That was one of the many things Sarah had done for me over the years.All right. Sarah and Lou, who figure so largely in this, deserve a full-dress introduction, so obviously I should start by admitting I'd known them all my life. Lou was my mother's half brother, three years younger than she was, who came along after my grandfather widowed my grandmother in a freak tractor rollover and she remarried a lifelong bachelor neighbor. (I have old snapshots of them, and I can tell you they all were cheerless, beady-eyed American Gothics.) I'd arranged for David to hire Lou eight months earlier, not too long after I came to Applecore. At that time he'd just taken early retirement from the FBI, because of an event that shook us all up pretty seriously.For some time now, Lou's been a rumpled, Willy Loman figure, like a traveling salesman on the skids, shirts frayed at the collars, face tinted from a truckload of Early Times. Over the past fifteen years I'd watched his waist size travel from about thirty-three inches to thirty-seven, and I'd guess it's been at least a decade since a barber asked him if he needed any off the top. Natalie Rose, his spirited, wiry wife of thirty-seven years, succumbed to ovarian cancer seven years ago last September, and I know for a fact she was the one who bought his shirts, provided him with general maintenance.My first memories of him were when he was a county sheriff in a little burg called Coleman, smack in the middle of Texas, some fifty-five long, dusty miles from the ranch where I grew up. When I was about fourteen, I remember he gave up on that and moved to Dallas, there to enter training for the FBI. He eventually ended up in New Orleans, and then, after Natalie Rose passed away and he more or less fell apart, he got transferred to New York, considered the elephant graveyard of an FBI career.Probably the reason I saw him as much as I did as a kid was because of my cousin Sarah, his and Rose's only child. She was six years younger than me, a lot when you're kids, but we were very special to each other, had a kind of bonding that I've never really known with anybody since. We spent a lot of time staying at each other's house, me the almost-grown-up, and truthfully, I loved her helplessly, like a little sister. I always wanted to think she needed me, which can be the most affirming feeling in the world. I do know I needed her.She was now lying in a coma, and the way she got there was the tragedy of my life, and Lou's. To begin with, though, let me say Sarah was a pretty blonde from the start, with sunshiny hair that defined her as perpetually optimistic—and who wouldn't be, given the heads she always turned. (I was—am—blond too, though with eyes more gray than her turquoise blues, but for me blond's always been, on balance, an affliction: Sexist film producers assume, dammit, that you're a failed showgirl, or worse. I've actually dyed it brunette from time to time in hopes of being taken more seriously.) Sarah and I had always had our own special chemistry, like a composite of opposites to make a complete, whole human being. Whereas I was the rational, left-brained slave of the concrete, she was a right-brained dweller in a world of what-might-be. For years and years, she seemed to live in a dream universe of her own making, one of imagination and fanciful states.Once, when she was five, Lou hid in his woodworking shop for a month and made an elaborate cutaway dollhouse to give her at Christmas. But when I offered to help her find little dolls that would fit into it, she declared she only wanted angels to live there. So we spent the rest of the winter—I dropped everything—hunting down Christmas tree ornaments that looked like heavenly creatures. She'd swathe them in tinsel and sit them in balls of cotton she said were little clouds.I always felt that just being around her opened my life to new dimensions, but her dream existence constantly drove Lou and Rose to distraction. I think it was one of the reasons he never got as close to her as he wanted, and his feelings about that were deep frustration, and hurt. He loved her so much, but he could never really find a common wavelength.Finally she came down to earth enough to start college, and eventually she graduated from SMU in biology, then enrolled at Columbia for premed. By then she was interested in the workings of the brain, in altered states. I didn't know if it was just more pursuit of fantasy, but at least she was going about it professionally.Anyway, when Lou got transferred to New York, he was actually delighted, since it gave him a chance to be closer to her. We all managed to get together for family reunions pretty often, though Lou and Sarah were talking past each other half the time.Then tragedy struck. She was just finishing her master's, and had been accepted by Cornell Medical—Lou was bursting with pride—when he suggested they use her Christmas break to drive back down to Texas together, there to visit Rose's grave. (I think he really wanted to show off his budding doctor-to-be to the family.) Sarah was driving when they crossed the state line into Louisiana and were side-swiped by a huge Mack eighteen-wheeler, which was in the process of jackknifing across a frozen patch of interstate. They were thrown into the path of an oncoming car, and when the blood and snow were cleared, a six-year-old girl in the other vehicle was dead.The result was Sarah decided she'd taken a human life. Her own minor facial cuts—which Lou immediately had repaired with plastic surgery—somehow evolved into a major disfigurement of her soul. All her mental eccentricities, which had been locked up somewhere when she started college, came back like a rush of demons loosed from some Pandora's box deep in her psyche. She dropped out of school, and before long she was in the throes of a full-scale mental meltdown. She disappeared, and in the following two years Lou got exactly one card from her, postmarked in San Francisco with no return address. He carried it with him at all times and we both studied it often, puzzling over the New Age astrological symbol on the front. The brief note announced she'd acquired "Divine Energy" and was living on a new plane of consciousness.Then eight months ago, the State Department notified Lou she was missing in Guatemala. She'd overstayed her visa and nobody knew where she was.So how did her "new plane of consciousness" land her in Central America? Was that part of the fantasy world she'd now returned to? Lou still worked downtown at 26 Federal Plaza, but he immediately took a leave of absence and, though he spoke not a syllable of Spanish, plunged down there to look for her.He was there a month, following false leads, till he finallyran into a Reverend Ben Jackson, late of a self-styled Protestant ministry in Mississippi, who was one of the ardent new Evangelicals swarming over Central America. The man mentioned that some chicle harvesters in the northwest Peten Department of Guatemala had found a young woman in an old dugout canoe on the Guatemala side of the wide Usumacinta River, near a tributary called the Rio Tigre, lodged in amongst overhanging trees. She'd been struck on the head and presumably set adrift somewhere upriver, left for dead. She was now in a coma, resting at Jackson's "Jesus es el Hombre" clinic, also located deep in the northwest Peten rain forest. He had no idea who she was.Lou rented a car and drove there, almost a day on unpaved roads. It was Sarah.Thus she was no longer missing; she was now the apparent victim of an attempted murder. However, rather than being helpful, the localpoliciaappeared annoyed she'd been found, thereby reopening the matter. A blondgringawas out hiking somewhere she had no business being in the first place and tripped and hit her head on something. Where's the crime?Lou brought her back to New York, using a medevac plane supplied by the State Department, which, wanting no more CIA-type scandals of American nationals being murdered in Guatemala, cooperated with great dispatch.After that, he needed a job that would afford him time flexibility, so he could be at her bedside as much as possible. David was looking for a security head, and I realized it would be a perfect match. Since we didn't really need a full-time person, Lou could spend a lot of hours at Lenox Hill, watching over Sarah.She was just lying there now, no sign of consciousness, her body being kept alive with IV I'd go by to visit her as much as I could, and almost as bad as seeing the comatose Sarah was seeing the grief in Lou's eyes. He would sit there at the hospital every day, sometimes several hours a day, fingering an old engraved locket that carried her high-school graduation picture, just rubbing it through his fingers like a rosary. We always made allowances when he wanted to take time off during one of our shooting schedules, figuring maybe he was helping her. . . .As I turned east, to go crosstown, I thought again about Sarah's condition. She and I looked a lot alike, dense blond hair for one thing, but to see her now you'd scarcely know it, since hers had been clipped down to nothing by the hospital. Her cheekbones, however, were still strong, a quality now exaggerated by her emaciated state, and her eyes, which I had not seen in years, were a deep languid, turquoise blue. But seeing her lying there inert, being kept alive with tubes and liquids, wearing pressure pants to help circulate blood through her legs, you'd scarcely realize she'd been a strikingly beautiful woman before the accident.What's worse, from what I knew, the horrific brain traumas that bring on a coma don't automatically go away when you regain consciousness. If the coma is the result of a head injury, and if it lasts more than a few days, the chances of regaining all your mental functions are up for grabs. Lou once said there's a scale of eight stages to full recovery. People who have short comas can sometimes come out of them and go through those stages quickly—from initial eye movement to full mental faculties. Others, who've been under for months or longer can require years to come back. Sometimes they can only blink their eyes to answer questions; sometimes they babble on incessantly. They can talk sense, or they can talk nonsense, incoherent fantasies, even strings of numbers. The brain is a complex, unpredictable thing. . .I always thought about this as I took the elevator up to Lenox Hill's third floor. The room where they kept Sarah was painted a pale, sterile blue, and made even more depressing by stark fluorescent lights. Everything was chrome and baked-on enamel, including the instruments whose CRT screens reported her bodily functions. None of the instruments, however, had ever shown the brain activity associated with consciousness.Lou was there when I walked in. He had a kind of wildness in his eyes, maybe what you get when you mix hope with despair. We hugged each other and he said, "She had a moment, Morgy. She knew me. I'm sure she did."Then he told me in detail what had happened. A nurse passing Sarah's room had happened to notice an unexpected flickering on one of her monitors. She'd immediately informed the nurses' station, where instructions included Lou's home number.He'd grabbed a cab and raced there. When he got to her room, he pushed his way past the Caribbean nurses and bent over her, the first time he had hoped a conversation with her would be anything but a monologue."Honey, can you hear me?"There was no sign, save the faint flicker of an eyelid.It was enough. His own pulse rocketed."Where's the damned doctor?"While the physician was being summoned, he had a chance to study her. Yes, there definitely was some movement behind her eyelids. And her regular breathing had become less measured, as though she were fighting to overcome her autonomic nervous system and challenge life on her own.Finally an overworked Pakistani intern arrived. He proceeded to fiddle with the monitors, doing something Lou did not understand. Then without warning—and certainly attributable to nothing the physician did—Sarah opened her eyes.Lou, who had not seen those eyes for several years, caught himself feasting on their rich, aquatic blue. He looked into them, but they did not look back. They were focused on infinity, adrift in a lost sea of their own making. They stared at him a moment, then vanished again behind her eyelids.He told me all this and then his voice trailed off, his despair returning. . . ."Lou, it's a start. Whatever happens is bound to be slow. But this could be the beginning. . . ."We both knew what I was saying was perilously close to wishful thinking, but nobody in the room was under oath. For the moment, though, she was back in her coma, as though nothing had changed.I waited around until eight o'clock, when I finally convinced myself that being there was not doing anybody any good. Lou, I later learned, stayed on till well past eleven, when they finally had to send security to evict him.Okay, I've been holding out on the most important detail. The truth is, I hardly knew what to make of it. At one point when I was bending over Sarah's seemingly unconscious face, her eyes had clicked open for just a fleeting moment, startling me the way those horror movies do when the "un-dead" suddenly come alive. Lou was in his chair and didn't see it, didn't notice me jump.The last thing I wanted to do was tell him about it, and I was still shivering as I shoved my key into the Toyota's ignition and headed for home. She'd looked directly into my eyes, a flicker of recognition, and then came the fear. She sort of moved her mouth, trying to speak, but all that came was a silent scream, after which her eyes went blank as death and closed again.She knew me, I was sure of it, but she had looked through me and seen a reminder of some horror now locked deep in her soul.Chapter FourLou took the next few days off to spend by Sarah's side, but nothing more happened. I repeatedly called him at the hospital to check on her, though it was becoming clear her brush with consciousness had only been an interlude. Finally, I decided to show Carly's rushes to David (he loved them) and try to concentrate on postproduction for the rest of the week and the weekend, anything to make me not have to dwell on Sarah's ghostlike, soundless cry of anguish.Postproduction. When you're shooting a picture, you have to make all kinds of compromises; but in post, with luck and skill, you can transform that raw footage into art. You mix and cut the takes till the performances are taut; you loop in rerecorded dialogue where necessary to get just the right reading of a line; the Foley guys give you clear sound effects where the production sound is muddy; and you balance the hues of reds and blues, darks and lights till you get just the right color tone.All of the polishing that came with post still lay ahead. The first step was to go through the rough cut and "spot" the film, marking places where the sound effects or dialogue would need to be replaced with rerecorded studio sound— which meant several days, maybe weeks, of looping to edit out background noise and make the dialogue sound rich and crisp. For some of it, the actors would have to come back in and lip-synch themselves, which they always hate.It was daunting, to have to work back and forth between production sound tracks and loop tracks, blending alternate takes. You had to figure on only doing about ten minutes of film a day, and then, after all that, you had to get the "opticals" right, the fade-outs and dissolves and, finally, the credit sequences.Normally, once I started post, I would have exactly ten weeks to accomplish all that before the executive producer, David, got his hands on my picture. That was the prerogative that was part of the standard director's contract. Now, though, I figured that was out the window. With the money going fast, I had to produce a rough cut and get the picture sold to cable in six weeks, period.But first things first. I deeply needed at least one more interview—Carly's was too much of a happy one-note— which was why I needed to shoot Paula Marks. It was now on for Thursday, today.The appointment had taken all weekend, including a Sunday brunch, to set up, but by that time I was sure this second mother would be perfect. She was a tall, willowy woman, forty-three, who had let her hair start going to gray. Honesty, it was right there in her pale brown eyes. She wrote children's books, had never married—she now believed she never would—and had decided to adopt a child because she had a lot of extra love she felt was going to waste. Different from Carly Grove, maybe, but not in the matter of strength, and fearless independence.We arrived around ten A.M. to discover her apartment was in one of those sprawling prewar West Side monoliths, thick plaster walls and a rabbit's warren of halls and foyers, legacy of an age before "lofts" and open spaces. Terribly cramped for shooting. But Paula agreed to let the blue-jeaned crew move her old, overstuffed couch out of the living room, along with the piles of books that lined the walls.Another issue was makeup. At first Paula insisted she didn't want any. Never wore it, it was deceitful, and she didn't want to appear on camera looking like Barbie. (Small chance of that, I thought. A little war paint now and then might help your chances of landing a father for this child.) Eventually Arlene persuaded her that cameras lie and the only way to look like yourself is to enhance those qualities that make you you. It was a thin argument, but Arlene came from a long line of apparel proprietors who could unload sunlamps in the Sahara.Paula's adopted daughter Rachel, who was a year and a half old, was running around the apartment, blond tresses flowing, dragging a doll she had named Angie. Except the name came out "Ann-gee." She was immediately adopted by the crew, and Erica, the production manager, was soon teaching her how to play patty-cake. Then Rachel wanted to demonstrate her new skills at eating spaghetti. In five minutes she was covered head to toe in Ragu tomato sauce.When the Panaflex was finally rolling, the story Paula spun out was almost identical to the one told by Carly Grove. She'd spent hours with all the legal services recommended by NYSAC, New York Singles Adopting Children, listening to them describe a scenario of delays and paperwork and heartache. It could be done, but it could take years. Look, she'd declared, I'll cash in my IRA, do anything, just give me some hope. Okay, they'd replied, tighten your belt, scare up sixty big ones, and go to see Children of Light. We hear stories. . . .Soon after she called them, the skies had opened. A New Age physician and teacher there, a man with striking eyes named Alex Goddard, had made it happen. Rachel was hers in just four months, no paperwork.Sure, she declared, Children of Light was expensive, but Alex Goddard was a deeply spiritual man who really took the time to get to know you, even practically begged you to come to his clinic-commune and go through his course of mind-body fertility treatment. But when she insisted she just wanted to adopt, he obligingly found Rachel for her. How could she be anything but grateful? She was so happy, she wanted everybody in the world to know about him.As she bubbled on, I found my attention wandering to Rachel, who'd just escaped from the crew keeping her in the kitchen and was running through the living room, singing a song from Sesame Street. Something about the way she moved was very evocative.Where've I seen her before? Then it dawned on me. Her walk made me think of Kevin. Actually, everything about her reminded me of Kevin. Were all kids starting to look the same? God, I wanted them both.Yeah, I thought, daydreaming of holding her, she's Kevin all over again, clear as day. She's a dead ringer to be his older sister. It feels very strange.Or maybe I was just seeing things. To some extent all babies looked alike, right? That is, until you have one of your own.I had to swallow hard, to try to collect my thoughts. Carly and Paula scarcely even knew each other. If Rachel really was Kevin's sister, they'd never know anything about it.Incredible . . . it was just too big a coincidence.But still. . . and what about the film footage? Show close- ups of the kids, and anybody not legally blind was going to see the similarity. . . .Why would somebody give up two children for adoption? I found myself wondering. Giving up one was tragic enough."Cut." I waved at everybody. "Take ten. We need to recharge here, take a break and stretch."Paula was caught off guard, in the middle of a sentence, and she let her voice trail off, puzzled."Hey, I'm sorry Rachel came barging in," Paula finally said. "Guess she broke everybody's concentration, huh?""Yeah, well, sometimes we all need to lean back and take a fresh run at things." I called to Rachel, who came trotting over, spaghetti sauce still on her face, and picked her up. I felt at a loss about what to do. Tell Paula her daughter had a younger brother in the Village, and she might fall apart. "I was actually curious about something. Do you know anything about Rachel's birth mother?""I don't want to know. It would disrupt my life. And my peace of mind." Her eyes acquired a kind of sadness mingled with anxiety. "I'm reconciled to the fact she probably got into some kind of trouble, may not have exactly been Nobel Prize material, but I'm a big believer in nurture over nature. That's why I write books for kids. So I think Rachel's going to end up being a lot more like me than like her real mother."Brave words. But I'll bet you anything the story of Rachel's mother is a lot more complicated than you imagine.I glanced at my watch, the hour pushing four-thirty. Time to call it a wrap. Besides, if we shot any more today, the crew would end up on overtime, and David was getting increasingly nervous about my extra costs.I also needed a little downtime to reflect."Look, I think I've got enough footage to work with for now. Let me just get the release signed take this film downtown, and get it processed. Maybe we can come back for another shoot when I figure out exactly where this is going.""Anytime. Just give me some notice and I'll try to have the place cleaned up more next time.""Don't worry. I like it to look real. Just sign the release and I'll take it from there." I was about to set Rachel back on the floor when something caught in my sweater. Looking down, I realized it was a tiny charm bracelet, with two little medallions on it. One was a little red plastic likeness of Pocahontas, the Disney character, and the other was a silver face of a cat, long and stylized. And on the back, those curious lines and dots again, only these were arranged differently from those on the one Carly's boy Kevin had."Paula, what's this? This cat. Where'd you get it?""Oh, that." She smiled. "She was wearing it when I got her, on a little silk cord around her waist, under her diaper. They told me it was a gift from her real mother, a keepsake. Sort of breaks your heart, but the way they said it, you want to keep it forever. . . ."At that moment Erica was just plugging the phone back in, and the second she did, the old, black Panasonic cordless began to ring."Hang on a sec," Paula said. "Let me get that. My agent is supposed—" She'd picked up the phone and was plopping back onto the couch. "Hi."Then her look turned blank. "No, of course not." She fell into an uncomfortable pause, looking around at everybody. Then she continued. "Nobody's contacted me." She halted again, her face white, and stared directly at me. I abruptly sensed that I was the topic of the conversation. "Sure I'm sure. . . . Yes, I remember signing. . . . Don't worry. I'd have no reason to. . . . Okay, sure, I'll let you know."She clicked off the phone and looked up with startled eyes. "It was somebody who said they worked for Children of Light. She wanted to know if you'd contacted me." Her face collapsed. "You. She asked me specifically aboutyou. By name. How did—?""I have no idea." My hands were growing cold. Had Carly told them about me? Why would she do that? "Anyway, you handled it okay."Which made me wonder. If Children of Light was such a perfect organization, why was Paula so frightened she immediately felt compelled to lie, to swear she hadn't broken their rules?"Right." Her composure was slowly coming back. "Look, now that I think about it, why should they care? It doesn't make any sense. They got their money." She turned to me. "Let me have that release."She seized the paper and endorsed it with a flourish.My pulse was still in overdrive, but I hugged her, then signaled the crew that shooting was over for the day."Okay, everybody. Time to wrap."The gang immediately began striking the lights and rolling up electrical cords. They would take the equipment back downtown and deliver the film to the lab, while I would head home. It had been a long day and lots of thinking was needed. Besides, it was starting to rain, a dismal spatter against Paula's grimy windows, as the gray spring afternoon had begun darkening toward sullen evening."Listen, I enjoyed this." Paula had taken Rachel in her arms and was stroking her blond hair. "I really love talking about her. She's changed my life."I gave her another hug. "You're great. And you're going to be wonderful in the film." If I used her. The whole thing was getting unnerving. "You have no idea how much you've helped." Then I said good-bye to Rachel, who responded with a perfect "Bye, bye" through her haze of spaghetti sauce.Okay, get the superintendent. Crank up the freight elevator. Get out of here.Scott Ventri, key grip, took charge of handling the gear, dictating which equipment got loaded on first. I watched long enough to make sure everything was going okay, and then I joined Arlene, old friend and queen of outrageous makeup, on the other elevator."You notice it?" she whispered. The door had just closed."Notice what?" I knew full well what she was talking about. But it just felt too bizarre."Those kids could almost be twins. That little boy last week, and this girl. They look just alike. It's spooky.""Guess their parents couldn't figure out what was causing those pregnancies. So they just kept having more babies." I decided to try to insert some humor, deflect the conversation. "Maybe we should tell Paula and Carly.""Very dumb." Arlene bit at a long, red, false fingernail, a perennial habit for as long as I'd known her. "We should mind our own business, that's what we should do.""Works for me. But it also proves we were smart not to shoot any footage of the kids. The whole world would realize something's funny." Then I had an idea. "Want to come downtown to my place after we unload? Have some deep thoughts over what all this means?"First the kids, then the call. What was this guy Alex Goddard, whoever he was, up to? Definitely time to talk to somebody. . . ."Gee, I'd love to," Arlene was saying, "but I can't. I gotta go out to Kew Gardens for my mom and dad's anniversary tonight. Their thirty-fifth, can you believe? Of course, I was a very late baby." She blinked her dark, languid eyes, as though rehearsing the line for a downtown club."A miracle of modern fertility science, right?" Shit. Arlene, I need you."Right." She giggled, then seemed to study the flashing lights on the elevator's control panel. "God, those kids, they're too good to be true. I'd love to have one like that." She impatiently pounded the number one a couple of times, perhaps hoping to speed our creaky descent. "I can get bonked every night of the week, but I can't get a serious boyfriend. New York's clubs aren't exactly brimming with the vine-covered-cottage-and-picket-fence type. And as for the pickings at work, given the kind of pictures David makes, forget it. Last thing I need is some twenty-year-old pothead who thinks with his wang.""I'm afraid I'm not helping you much with this one." I'd castBaby Lovemostly with Off-Broadway unknowns. The actress Mary Gregg was a veteran of Joseph Papp's original Public Theater, the experimental enterprise downtown. The few male parts all went to guys who were either gay or married."Oy, what can you do, right? If it happens, it happens." Arlene watched the door begin to stutter open as we bumped onto the lobby level. Then she zeroed in on me. "You really want a kid too, don't you? I mean, that's why you did this script, right? Which, by the way, is great. I mean the script.""I think most women do, down deep."She smiled. "Well, if I ever have one, it's going to be the old-fashioned way. It's a heck of a lot cheaper than adopting." She was heading out, into the front foyer. "Not to mention more fun getting there."On that I definitely had to agree.The lobby's prewar look was gray and dismal, and as we emerged onto the street, the rain had turned into a steady downpour. Lou was off again today, down at the hospital with Sarah, so I'd engaged a doorman from a new co-op across the street to keep an eye on our vans. A crisp twenty had extracted his solemn promise to do just that. At the moment, however, he was nowhere to be seen. Proving, I suppose, David's theory that we needed our own security guy at all location shoots.Lou, I thought, I hope you're finally getting through to her."No limo, but at least we get first call on the vans," Arlene observed, her voice not hiding the sarcasm. "Just once I'dlike to work for somebody who had serious VIP transportation.""David would walk before he'd get a limo."We were headed down the street, me digging out my keys, when I noticed the man standing in the rain. He was just behind our lead van, a three-year-old gray Ford, waiting for us.My first thought was he must be connected to Nicky Russo, David's wiseguy banker, here to bust my chops over the Teamster issue. Screw him. Just my luck he'd send somebody the very day Lou was not on hand. But then I realized I'd guessed wrong. The man was more Hispanic than Italian. He also was short, solidly built, late fifties maybe, with intense eyes and gray hair that circled his balding pate like the dirty snow around a volcano's rim. As he moved toward us, I thought I detected something military in his bearing, not so much the crispness of a soldier but rather the authoritative swagger of an officer. Well, maybe a retired officer."The paper on your windshield says you are filming a movie," came a voice with a definite Spanish accent. No greetings, no hiya, how're you doin'? Just the blunt statement. Then, having established what was already clear to all at hand, he continued. "It says the title isBaby Love. Why are you making this movie here?"That was it. I glanced at Arlene, who'd turned white as a sheet. You get a lot of onlookers around a location shoot, but not too many who challenge your right to exist, which was exactly what was coming through in his menacing tone.I handed Arlene the keys. "Here, go ahead and open up. I'll handle this."Then I turned back to him. "What you saw in the windshield of the vans is a New York City Film Board permit. That's all the information we are required to provide. If you read it, you know everything I'm obliged to tell you." I returned his stare. "However, if people ask nicely, I'm happy to answer their questions.""Are you making this movie about a person in this building? Your other films have been documentaries."God help me, I thought. Is this what my fans are like?Then it hit me. I don't know how I'd missed the connection, but now it just leapt out. First the phone call, then this hood. Somebody was tracking me."I'm scouting locations," I lied, feeling a chill go through me. "We're second unit for an action film, shooting some prep footage for the producers. Does the name Arnold Schwarzenegger mean anything to you?""Then why is the film about babies?""That's meant to be a joke. Remember the movieTwins? It's a joke title. Do you understand?"At that moment, Paul Nulty came barging out the door with a huge klieg light, followed by several other members of the crew carrying sound gear. Our cordial tete-a-tete was about to be disrupted.My new Hispanic friend saw them and abruptly drew up. That was when I noticed the shoulder holster under his jacket, containing some sort of snub-nosed pistol.Jesus, I thought, this must be what some kind of hired killer looks like. That gun's not a prop."I think you are lying." He closed his jacket and, ignoring my crew, bored in relentlessly on me, his eyes dead and merciless. "That is a big mistake."It was the first time in my life I'd ever stood next to a man who had a gun and was deeply ticked at me. He'd wanted me to see his piece, just to make sure I took him seriously. He wasn't threatening me, per se. Rather he was letting me know how strongly he cared about what I was doing.Well, damn him, but I still was scared. I might have managed to bluff Nicky Russo, but he was a guy who operated by an age-old set of Sicilian rules. This thug didn't strike me as the rule-book type.Hand shaking, I pulled out my cell phone, flicked it open, and punched in 911."Listen, if you're threatening me with a gun, I'm calling the cops. Whatever problem you have with the New York film industry, you can explain it to them."New York's police emergency number was still ringing as he abruptly turned and strode away.I clicked the phone shut and moved to get out of the way as a trolley loaded with more gear was rolled past me down the sidewalk. Unfortunately, I also took my eyes off him for a second, and when I looked up again, he seemed to have disappeared into the rain, though I did notice somebody who could have been him get into a long black car well down the block and speed off toward Broadway."What did that creep want?" Arlene asked, coming back with the keys.I was only slowly returning to reality, and it took me a few moments to form a coherent answer through all the adrenaline surging into my brain."I . . . I don't know. But I think I'd better warn everybody to keep an eye out for strangers. He's . . . he's wound a little tight, to put it mildly." I was still shaking, which she fortunately failed to notice. At that point, there seemed no great reason to spook her with mention of the gun."Boy, he wasn't just some homeless junkie," she said. "He looked like a heavy in one of David's old action pictures. All he needed was a Mack-10.""Right." Jesus, Arlene, I think he might have had one. "So let's get moving."As I watched the vans being loaded, slowly calming down, I kept thinking about him. He was undoubtedly connected to the phone call, but why would anybody be so worried about what I was doing? I couldn't think of any serious reason.Half an hour later we were all headed downtown. Along the rain-swept streets the "All Beef" hot-dog vendors cowered under their red-and-yellow striped umbrellas, while departing office workers, briefcases perched above their heads as makeshift protection, scurried along the edges of buildings searching for cabs. While Arlene continued to chat nonstop, I tried to do a little mental processing. And my mind kept drifting back to the sight of little Rachel, and Kevin. What perfect kids. The way she was running. . . .Hey, wait a minute. How could they be siblings? Brother and sister? Rachel was almost exactly half a year older than Kevin. Biology didn't work that way. No way could they be related, but still . . . they looked so alike.I realized Arlene hadn't put it together about the ages. The brother/sister theory made absolutely no sense. Those kids were born six months apart.
Thus far, though, we were getting along. Maybe luck was part of it, butBaby Lovewas still on schedule and on budget. And I already had a deal nearly in the bag with Lifetime, the women's channel, that would just about cover the costs. Everything after that would be gravy. Again, hope hope. Maybe not the theatrical release I'd been praying for, but good enough—so he had to smile and not give me a hard time about the money I'd just spent. Had to, right?
I took a deep breath.
"David, I did a little extra shooting this morning that's kind of. . . outside the plan. But it's really important. Want to hear about it?"
"What! I thought you were finished with principal photography." He looked disoriented, the deer in the headlights. Hints of extra crew time always had that effect on him. "You're saying this wasn't in the budget?"
"Just listen first, okay?" Like a politician, I avoided giving him a direct answer. I told him about the interview with Carly and the reason for it.
"Nice of you to share the news with me." His eyes narrowed. "I think we've got some big-time communication issues here."
"Look, don't worry. I'll figure out how to save some money somewhere else."
"Morgy, before we continue this unnerving conversation, we've got to have a serious review of the matter of cash flow." He frowned, then went back to whirling the pencil, his hair backlighted from the wide window, his eyes focused on its stubby eraser as though he'd just discovered a new strain of bacteria. "So let me break some news regarding the current budget."
He put down the pencil, adjusted its location on his desk, and looked up. "I didn't want to have to upset you, since the picture seems to be going so well, but we've drawn down almost all our cash. I actually think that's why Nicky was here today, sniffing around, wanting to see a rough cut. He's got a keen nose for indy cash-flow trouble."
"What are you saying?" It was unsettling to see David turning so serious. "Are we—?"
"I'm saying we can cover the payroll here, all our fixed nut, even Nicky's vig, for maybe six more weeks, if you and I don't pay ourselves. Of course, if we can get an advance on some kind of cable deal, that would tide us over more comfortably till this thing is in the can. But right now we're sailing pretty close on the wind. I've bet Applecore on your picture, Morgan. We can't screw this up."
I swallowed hard. I knew we were working on the edge, but I didn't know the edge was down to six weeks.
"David, I'm all but ready for postproduction. I'm just thinking I may need one more interview. Just a one-day shoot. I'm going to make this picture work. You'll see."
He sighed. "All right, if you think it's essential, get the footage. Maybe I can even shake another fifty out of Nicky, if I string him along about the distribution deal—don't look so alarmed, I won't go through with it. Anyway, I can tell he's impressed with the picture so far. Happy now?"
No, I wasn't happy. What was I going to do if Hannah Klein had bad news? Adoption? I finally was facing the fact I'd possibly been making a movie about myself all this time. Like Yeats, penning his own tombstone. "Cast a cold eye, on life, on death. ."
So why not give him the whole story?
"David, if it turns out Steve and I can't have a baby, I've begun thinking about trying to adopt." There it was. More pain. "Maybe I'm about to become the heroine of my own picture."
He stared at me incredulously.
"Morgy, you of all people should know by now that adopting would take up all your energy, like a giant sponge. Come on. I've seen your dailies. I got it, about how hard it is. You telling me now you didn't get it?"
He was right. Righter than he realized. But then I thought again about Carly Grove, who'd found Kevin in no time at all, with zero hassles. The only troubling part was that it was all so mysterious. . . .
After I left David's office, I remembered I hadn't actually had lunch, so I grabbed two hot dogs with sauerkraut (okay, it was junk, but I secretly loved kosher franks) and a Diet Pepsi to go, from one of the striped-umbrella vendors, then hailed a cab clutching the grungy brown bag.
I was heading for Hannah Klein's office on the Upper West Side. And now I had another clock ticking in addition to the biological one. The big money clock in the sky was suddenly on final countdown.
It took only a few minutes for Hannah Klein's assistant, Lori, to run the pregnancy test that confirmed my suspicions and settled my future. Steve's and my final attempt, another intrauterine insemination (IUI, med-speak for an expensive "turkey baster") with the last of his deposit, had failed. The end. The bitter end.
"Morgan," Hannah declared, staring over her desk, her raspy New York voice boring through me like a drill, "given how this has all turned out, maybe you ought to just start considering adoption—if having a child still means that much to you."
Hannah Klein was pushing seventy, a chain smoker who should have been dead a decade ago, and she unfailingly spoke the truth. Her gaze carried only synthetic solace, but I was probably her fifteenth patient of the day and maybe she was running low on empathy. Oddly, though, sitting there in her office, miserable, I felt strangely liberated. I adored the woman, a child of the Holocaust, with layers of steel like a samurai sword, but I also loved the thought of never again having to go through the humiliation of cowering in her straight-backed office chair, like a so-so student on probation waiting to receive my failing grade.
It was now time to come to grips with what I'd known in my heart for a long time. God had made me a theoretically functional reproductive machine that just wouldn't kick over. Translation: no cysts, fibroids, polyps, no ovulatory abnormalities. My uterus and Fallopian tubes were just fine, Steve's sperm counts were okay, but no baby was swimming into life inside me.
Sometimes, however, reality asks too much. It's not easy getting your mind around the idea that some part of your life is over, finally over. The baby part. To admit that it's time to move on to Plan B, whatever that is. Such realizations can take a while, especially if you've been living with high-level hope, no matter how irrational.
"I frankly don't know what else we can do," she went on, projecting through my abyss of gloom. She was shuffling papers on her ash-strewn desk, white hair in a bun, fine-tuned grit in her voice. Upper West Side, a fifty-year fixture. She never wore perfume, but to me she always smelled faintly of roses mixed with smoke. Earthy. "Aside from trying in vitro."
We'd already discussed that, but it was definitely the bottom level of Hell. Besides, I was running out of money, and spirit. And now, with Steve gone, the whole idea seemed moot anyway.
"So," she concluded, "barring that, we've done everything possible, run every test there is, both on you and on your . . ."
"Steve," I inserted into her pause. She seemed to deliberately block his name at crucial moments. Maybe she thought I could have done better. Maybe a nice solid dentist who owned a suit instead of some freelance photo jock who showed up for his sperm counts wearing khaki safari shirts. Well, let her deal with it.
". . . and I can't find anything. Sometimes, the body just won't cooperate. We may never know why. You've got to face that. But still, adoption is always an option."
Adoption. All along I'd told myself I didn't have the courage, or the heart. Making movies is a full-time job, not leaving time to go filling out forms and jumping through hoops for years and years. And to cap it off, I was just two years short of the big four-oh and financially struggling—hardly an adoption agency's profile of "ideal."
But now, now I'd just discovered Carly Grove and the miracle of Children of Light. So maybe there really could be a way to adopt a beautiful child with no hassles. Maybe it would simplify everything to the point I could actually pull it off. Could this be my Plan B? Then what if Steve came back? Could we be a family finally?
I wasn't used to being that lucky. And I still wanted Hannah Klein's thoughts, a reality test, which was why I pressed her on the point.
"Truthfully, do you think adopting is really a workable idea for somebody like me? Would I—?"
"Morgan, I know you're making a film about the realities of the adoption process. We both realize it's not easy." She must have seen something needful in my eyes, because she continued on, adding detail, letting the well-known facts convey the bad news. "As you're well aware, finding a young, healthy, American baby nowadays is all but impossible. At the very least it can take years." She was fiddling with some papers on her desk, avoiding my eyes. Then she stubbed out her cigarette in a gesture that seemed intended to gain time. "And even if you're willing to take a baby that's foreign-born, there still can be plenty of heartbreak. That's just how it is."
"I'd always thought so too," I said. "It's actually the underlying motif of my picture. But today I had an incredible experience. I filmed an interview of a single woman, early forties, who just adopted a baby boy. It took less than three months and he's blond and blue-eyed and perfect. I saw him, I held him, and I can assure you he's as American as peach cobbler. The way she tells it, the whole adoption process was a snap. Zero hassles and red tape."
"That's most exceptional." She peered at me dubiously. "Actually more like impossible. Frankly, I don't believe it. This child must have been kidnapped or something. How old, exactly, was he when she got him?"
"I don't know. Just a few weeks, I think."
Her eyes bored in. "This woman, whoever she is, was very, very lucky. If what she says is true."
"The organization that got the baby for her is called Children of Light," I went on. "That's all I know, really. I think it's up the Hudson somewhere, past the Cloisters. Have you ever heard of them?"
Dr. Hannah Klein, I knew, was pushing three score and ten, had traveled the world, seen virtually everything worth seeing. In younger years she was reputed to have had torrid liaisons with every notable European writer on the West Side. Her list of conquests read like an old New Yorker masthead. If only I looked half that great at her age. But whatever else, she was unflappable. Good news or bad, she took it and gave it with grace. Until this moment. Her eyes registered undisguised dismay.
"You can't mean it. Not that place. All that so-called New Age . . . are you really sure you want to get involved in something like that?"
I found myself deeply confused. Were we talking about the same thing? Then I remembered Carly had said something about an infertility clinic.
"Frankly, nobody knows the first thing about that man," Hannah raged on. "All you get is hearsay. He's supposedly one of those alternative-medicine types, and a few people claim he's had some success, but it's all anecdotal. My own opinion is, it's what real physicians call the 'placebo effect.' If a patient believes hard enough something will happen, some of the time it actually might. For God's sake, I'm not even sure he's board-certified. Do yourself a favor and stay away. Oftentimes, people like that do more harm than good." Then her look turned inquisitive. "Did you say he's providing children for adoption now? That's peculiar. When did he start that?"
Was I hearing some kind of professional jealousy slipping out? Hannah Klein was definitely Old School to the core.
"He who?" I was trying to remember the name of the doctor Carly had mentioned. "You mean—"
"He says his name is . . . what? Goddard? Yes, Alex Goddard. He's—"
My pager chirped, interrupting her, and she paused, clearly annoyed. I looked down to see a number I knew well. It had to be Lou Crenshaw, our aforementioned security guard. He'd been off today, but there was only one reason he would page me: some kind of news from Lenox Hill.
Maybe it was good news about Sarah! My hopes soared.
Or maybe it was bad. Please, dear God.
"I'm sorry, Dr. Klein. I've got to go. Right now. It could be a medical emergency."
She nodded, then slid open the top drawer of her desk and handed me a list of adoption agencies. "All right, here, take this and look it over. I've dealt with some of them, letters of reference for patients like you." She must have realized the insensitivity of that last quip, because she took my hand and squeezed it, the closest we'd ever come to intimacy. "Let me know if I can help you, Morgan. Really."
Grasping the lifeless paper, I ached for Steve all over again. Times like this, you need some support. I finally glanced down at the list as I headed out. Sure enough, Children of Light was nowhere to be seen.
Why not? I wondered. They'd found Kevin, a lovely blond baby boy, for Carly, a single woman, in no time at all. They
sounded like miracle-makers, and if there was ever a moment for miracles, this was it. Shouldn't they at least have been given a footnote?
I wanted to stalk right back and demand to know the real reason she was so upset, but I truly didn't want to waste a moment.
Lou had paged me from a pay phone—he didn't actually have a cell phone of his own—and I recognized the number as belonging to the phone next to the Lenox Hill Hospital's third-floor nurses' station. When I tried it, however, it was busy, so I decided to just get in my car and drive there as fast as I could.
And as I battled the traffic down Broadway, I realized that by diverting my mind from my own trivial misery to the genuine tragedy of Sarah, I was actually getting my perspective back. That was one of the many things Sarah had done for me over the years.
All right. Sarah and Lou, who figure so largely in this, deserve a full-dress introduction, so obviously I should start by admitting I'd known them all my life. Lou was my mother's half brother, three years younger than she was, who came along after my grandfather widowed my grandmother in a freak tractor rollover and she remarried a lifelong bachelor neighbor. (I have old snapshots of them, and I can tell you they all were cheerless, beady-eyed American Gothics.) I'd arranged for David to hire Lou eight months earlier, not too long after I came to Applecore. At that time he'd just taken early retirement from the FBI, because of an event that shook us all up pretty seriously.
For some time now, Lou's been a rumpled, Willy Loman figure, like a traveling salesman on the skids, shirts frayed at the collars, face tinted from a truckload of Early Times. Over the past fifteen years I'd watched his waist size travel from about thirty-three inches to thirty-seven, and I'd guess it's been at least a decade since a barber asked him if he needed any off the top. Natalie Rose, his spirited, wiry wife of thirty-seven years, succumbed to ovarian cancer seven years ago last September, and I know for a fact she was the one who bought his shirts, provided him with general maintenance.
My first memories of him were when he was a county sheriff in a little burg called Coleman, smack in the middle of Texas, some fifty-five long, dusty miles from the ranch where I grew up. When I was about fourteen, I remember he gave up on that and moved to Dallas, there to enter training for the FBI. He eventually ended up in New Orleans, and then, after Natalie Rose passed away and he more or less fell apart, he got transferred to New York, considered the elephant graveyard of an FBI career.
Probably the reason I saw him as much as I did as a kid was because of my cousin Sarah, his and Rose's only child. She was six years younger than me, a lot when you're kids, but we were very special to each other, had a kind of bonding that I've never really known with anybody since. We spent a lot of time staying at each other's house, me the almost-grown-up, and truthfully, I loved her helplessly, like a little sister. I always wanted to think she needed me, which can be the most affirming feeling in the world. I do know I needed her.
She was now lying in a coma, and the way she got there was the tragedy of my life, and Lou's. To begin with, though, let me say Sarah was a pretty blonde from the start, with sunshiny hair that defined her as perpetually optimistic—and who wouldn't be, given the heads she always turned. (I was—am—blond too, though with eyes more gray than her turquoise blues, but for me blond's always been, on balance, an affliction: Sexist film producers assume, dammit, that you're a failed showgirl, or worse. I've actually dyed it brunette from time to time in hopes of being taken more seriously.) Sarah and I had always had our own special chemistry, like a composite of opposites to make a complete, whole human being. Whereas I was the rational, left-brained slave of the concrete, she was a right-brained dweller in a world of what-might-be. For years and years, she seemed to live in a dream universe of her own making, one of imagination and fanciful states.
Once, when she was five, Lou hid in his woodworking shop for a month and made an elaborate cutaway dollhouse to give her at Christmas. But when I offered to help her find little dolls that would fit into it, she declared she only wanted angels to live there. So we spent the rest of the winter—I dropped everything—hunting down Christmas tree ornaments that looked like heavenly creatures. She'd swathe them in tinsel and sit them in balls of cotton she said were little clouds.
I always felt that just being around her opened my life to new dimensions, but her dream existence constantly drove Lou and Rose to distraction. I think it was one of the reasons he never got as close to her as he wanted, and his feelings about that were deep frustration, and hurt. He loved her so much, but he could never really find a common wavelength.
Finally she came down to earth enough to start college, and eventually she graduated from SMU in biology, then enrolled at Columbia for premed. By then she was interested in the workings of the brain, in altered states. I didn't know if it was just more pursuit of fantasy, but at least she was going about it professionally.
Anyway, when Lou got transferred to New York, he was actually delighted, since it gave him a chance to be closer to her. We all managed to get together for family reunions pretty often, though Lou and Sarah were talking past each other half the time.
Then tragedy struck. She was just finishing her master's, and had been accepted by Cornell Medical—Lou was bursting with pride—when he suggested they use her Christmas break to drive back down to Texas together, there to visit Rose's grave. (I think he really wanted to show off his budding doctor-to-be to the family.) Sarah was driving when they crossed the state line into Louisiana and were side-swiped by a huge Mack eighteen-wheeler, which was in the process of jackknifing across a frozen patch of interstate. They were thrown into the path of an oncoming car, and when the blood and snow were cleared, a six-year-old girl in the other vehicle was dead.
The result was Sarah decided she'd taken a human life. Her own minor facial cuts—which Lou immediately had repaired with plastic surgery—somehow evolved into a major disfigurement of her soul. All her mental eccentricities, which had been locked up somewhere when she started college, came back like a rush of demons loosed from some Pandora's box deep in her psyche. She dropped out of school, and before long she was in the throes of a full-scale mental meltdown. She disappeared, and in the following two years Lou got exactly one card from her, postmarked in San Francisco with no return address. He carried it with him at all times and we both studied it often, puzzling over the New Age astrological symbol on the front. The brief note announced she'd acquired "Divine Energy" and was living on a new plane of consciousness.
Then eight months ago, the State Department notified Lou she was missing in Guatemala. She'd overstayed her visa and nobody knew where she was.
So how did her "new plane of consciousness" land her in Central America? Was that part of the fantasy world she'd now returned to? Lou still worked downtown at 26 Federal Plaza, but he immediately took a leave of absence and, though he spoke not a syllable of Spanish, plunged down there to look for her.
He was there a month, following false leads, till he finally
ran into a Reverend Ben Jackson, late of a self-styled Protestant ministry in Mississippi, who was one of the ardent new Evangelicals swarming over Central America. The man mentioned that some chicle harvesters in the northwest Peten Department of Guatemala had found a young woman in an old dugout canoe on the Guatemala side of the wide Usumacinta River, near a tributary called the Rio Tigre, lodged in amongst overhanging trees. She'd been struck on the head and presumably set adrift somewhere upriver, left for dead. She was now in a coma, resting at Jackson's "Jesus es el Hombre" clinic, also located deep in the northwest Peten rain forest. He had no idea who she was.
Lou rented a car and drove there, almost a day on unpaved roads. It was Sarah.
Thus she was no longer missing; she was now the apparent victim of an attempted murder. However, rather than being helpful, the localpoliciaappeared annoyed she'd been found, thereby reopening the matter. A blondgringawas out hiking somewhere she had no business being in the first place and tripped and hit her head on something. Where's the crime?
Lou brought her back to New York, using a medevac plane supplied by the State Department, which, wanting no more CIA-type scandals of American nationals being murdered in Guatemala, cooperated with great dispatch.
After that, he needed a job that would afford him time flexibility, so he could be at her bedside as much as possible. David was looking for a security head, and I realized it would be a perfect match. Since we didn't really need a full-time person, Lou could spend a lot of hours at Lenox Hill, watching over Sarah.
She was just lying there now, no sign of consciousness, her body being kept alive with IV I'd go by to visit her as much as I could, and almost as bad as seeing the comatose Sarah was seeing the grief in Lou's eyes. He would sit there at the hospital every day, sometimes several hours a day, fingering an old engraved locket that carried her high-school graduation picture, just rubbing it through his fingers like a rosary. We always made allowances when he wanted to take time off during one of our shooting schedules, figuring maybe he was helping her. . . .
As I turned east, to go crosstown, I thought again about Sarah's condition. She and I looked a lot alike, dense blond hair for one thing, but to see her now you'd scarcely know it, since hers had been clipped down to nothing by the hospital. Her cheekbones, however, were still strong, a quality now exaggerated by her emaciated state, and her eyes, which I had not seen in years, were a deep languid, turquoise blue. But seeing her lying there inert, being kept alive with tubes and liquids, wearing pressure pants to help circulate blood through her legs, you'd scarcely realize she'd been a strikingly beautiful woman before the accident.
What's worse, from what I knew, the horrific brain traumas that bring on a coma don't automatically go away when you regain consciousness. If the coma is the result of a head injury, and if it lasts more than a few days, the chances of regaining all your mental functions are up for grabs. Lou once said there's a scale of eight stages to full recovery. People who have short comas can sometimes come out of them and go through those stages quickly—from initial eye movement to full mental faculties. Others, who've been under for months or longer can require years to come back. Sometimes they can only blink their eyes to answer questions; sometimes they babble on incessantly. They can talk sense, or they can talk nonsense, incoherent fantasies, even strings of numbers. The brain is a complex, unpredictable thing. . .
I always thought about this as I took the elevator up to Lenox Hill's third floor. The room where they kept Sarah was painted a pale, sterile blue, and made even more depressing by stark fluorescent lights. Everything was chrome and baked-on enamel, including the instruments whose CRT screens reported her bodily functions. None of the instruments, however, had ever shown the brain activity associated with consciousness.
Lou was there when I walked in. He had a kind of wildness in his eyes, maybe what you get when you mix hope with despair. We hugged each other and he said, "She had a moment, Morgy. She knew me. I'm sure she did."
Then he told me in detail what had happened. A nurse passing Sarah's room had happened to notice an unexpected flickering on one of her monitors. She'd immediately informed the nurses' station, where instructions included Lou's home number.
He'd grabbed a cab and raced there. When he got to her room, he pushed his way past the Caribbean nurses and bent over her, the first time he had hoped a conversation with her would be anything but a monologue.
"Honey, can you hear me?"
There was no sign, save the faint flicker of an eyelid.
It was enough. His own pulse rocketed.
"Where's the damned doctor?"
While the physician was being summoned, he had a chance to study her. Yes, there definitely was some movement behind her eyelids. And her regular breathing had become less measured, as though she were fighting to overcome her autonomic nervous system and challenge life on her own.
Finally an overworked Pakistani intern arrived. He proceeded to fiddle with the monitors, doing something Lou did not understand. Then without warning—and certainly attributable to nothing the physician did—Sarah opened her eyes.
Lou, who had not seen those eyes for several years, caught himself feasting on their rich, aquatic blue. He looked into them, but they did not look back. They were focused on infinity, adrift in a lost sea of their own making. They stared at him a moment, then vanished again behind her eyelids.
He told me all this and then his voice trailed off, his despair returning. . . .
"Lou, it's a start. Whatever happens is bound to be slow. But this could be the beginning. . . ."
We both knew what I was saying was perilously close to wishful thinking, but nobody in the room was under oath. For the moment, though, she was back in her coma, as though nothing had changed.
I waited around until eight o'clock, when I finally convinced myself that being there was not doing anybody any good. Lou, I later learned, stayed on till well past eleven, when they finally had to send security to evict him.
Okay, I've been holding out on the most important detail. The truth is, I hardly knew what to make of it. At one point when I was bending over Sarah's seemingly unconscious face, her eyes had clicked open for just a fleeting moment, startling me the way those horror movies do when the "un-dead" suddenly come alive. Lou was in his chair and didn't see it, didn't notice me jump.
The last thing I wanted to do was tell him about it, and I was still shivering as I shoved my key into the Toyota's ignition and headed for home. She'd looked directly into my eyes, a flicker of recognition, and then came the fear. She sort of moved her mouth, trying to speak, but all that came was a silent scream, after which her eyes went blank as death and closed again.
She knew me, I was sure of it, but she had looked through me and seen a reminder of some horror now locked deep in her soul.
Lou took the next few days off to spend by Sarah's side, but nothing more happened. I repeatedly called him at the hospital to check on her, though it was becoming clear her brush with consciousness had only been an interlude. Finally, I decided to show Carly's rushes to David (he loved them) and try to concentrate on postproduction for the rest of the week and the weekend, anything to make me not have to dwell on Sarah's ghostlike, soundless cry of anguish.
Postproduction. When you're shooting a picture, you have to make all kinds of compromises; but in post, with luck and skill, you can transform that raw footage into art. You mix and cut the takes till the performances are taut; you loop in rerecorded dialogue where necessary to get just the right reading of a line; the Foley guys give you clear sound effects where the production sound is muddy; and you balance the hues of reds and blues, darks and lights till you get just the right color tone.
All of the polishing that came with post still lay ahead. The first step was to go through the rough cut and "spot" the film, marking places where the sound effects or dialogue would need to be replaced with rerecorded studio sound— which meant several days, maybe weeks, of looping to edit out background noise and make the dialogue sound rich and crisp. For some of it, the actors would have to come back in and lip-synch themselves, which they always hate.
It was daunting, to have to work back and forth between production sound tracks and loop tracks, blending alternate takes. You had to figure on only doing about ten minutes of film a day, and then, after all that, you had to get the "opticals" right, the fade-outs and dissolves and, finally, the credit sequences.
Normally, once I started post, I would have exactly ten weeks to accomplish all that before the executive producer, David, got his hands on my picture. That was the prerogative that was part of the standard director's contract. Now, though, I figured that was out the window. With the money going fast, I had to produce a rough cut and get the picture sold to cable in six weeks, period.
But first things first. I deeply needed at least one more interview—Carly's was too much of a happy one-note— which was why I needed to shoot Paula Marks. It was now on for Thursday, today.
The appointment had taken all weekend, including a Sunday brunch, to set up, but by that time I was sure this second mother would be perfect. She was a tall, willowy woman, forty-three, who had let her hair start going to gray. Honesty, it was right there in her pale brown eyes. She wrote children's books, had never married—she now believed she never would—and had decided to adopt a child because she had a lot of extra love she felt was going to waste. Different from Carly Grove, maybe, but not in the matter of strength, and fearless independence.
We arrived around ten A.M. to discover her apartment was in one of those sprawling prewar West Side monoliths, thick plaster walls and a rabbit's warren of halls and foyers, legacy of an age before "lofts" and open spaces. Terribly cramped for shooting. But Paula agreed to let the blue-jeaned crew move her old, overstuffed couch out of the living room, along with the piles of books that lined the walls.
Another issue was makeup. At first Paula insisted she didn't want any. Never wore it, it was deceitful, and she didn't want to appear on camera looking like Barbie. (Small chance of that, I thought. A little war paint now and then might help your chances of landing a father for this child.) Eventually Arlene persuaded her that cameras lie and the only way to look like yourself is to enhance those qualities that make you you. It was a thin argument, but Arlene came from a long line of apparel proprietors who could unload sunlamps in the Sahara.
Paula's adopted daughter Rachel, who was a year and a half old, was running around the apartment, blond tresses flowing, dragging a doll she had named Angie. Except the name came out "Ann-gee." She was immediately adopted by the crew, and Erica, the production manager, was soon teaching her how to play patty-cake. Then Rachel wanted to demonstrate her new skills at eating spaghetti. In five minutes she was covered head to toe in Ragu tomato sauce.
When the Panaflex was finally rolling, the story Paula spun out was almost identical to the one told by Carly Grove. She'd spent hours with all the legal services recommended by NYSAC, New York Singles Adopting Children, listening to them describe a scenario of delays and paperwork and heartache. It could be done, but it could take years. Look, she'd declared, I'll cash in my IRA, do anything, just give me some hope. Okay, they'd replied, tighten your belt, scare up sixty big ones, and go to see Children of Light. We hear stories. . . .
Soon after she called them, the skies had opened. A New Age physician and teacher there, a man with striking eyes named Alex Goddard, had made it happen. Rachel was hers in just four months, no paperwork.
Sure, she declared, Children of Light was expensive, but Alex Goddard was a deeply spiritual man who really took the time to get to know you, even practically begged you to come to his clinic-commune and go through his course of mind-body fertility treatment. But when she insisted she just wanted to adopt, he obligingly found Rachel for her. How could she be anything but grateful? She was so happy, she wanted everybody in the world to know about him.
As she bubbled on, I found my attention wandering to Rachel, who'd just escaped from the crew keeping her in the kitchen and was running through the living room, singing a song from Sesame Street. Something about the way she moved was very evocative.
Where've I seen her before? Then it dawned on me. Her walk made me think of Kevin. Actually, everything about her reminded me of Kevin. Were all kids starting to look the same? God, I wanted them both.
Yeah, I thought, daydreaming of holding her, she's Kevin all over again, clear as day. She's a dead ringer to be his older sister. It feels very strange.
Or maybe I was just seeing things. To some extent all babies looked alike, right? That is, until you have one of your own.
I had to swallow hard, to try to collect my thoughts. Carly and Paula scarcely even knew each other. If Rachel really was Kevin's sister, they'd never know anything about it.
Incredible . . . it was just too big a coincidence.
But still. . . and what about the film footage? Show close- ups of the kids, and anybody not legally blind was going to see the similarity. . . .
Why would somebody give up two children for adoption? I found myself wondering. Giving up one was tragic enough.
"Cut." I waved at everybody. "Take ten. We need to recharge here, take a break and stretch."
Paula was caught off guard, in the middle of a sentence, and she let her voice trail off, puzzled.
"Hey, I'm sorry Rachel came barging in," Paula finally said. "Guess she broke everybody's concentration, huh?"
"Yeah, well, sometimes we all need to lean back and take a fresh run at things." I called to Rachel, who came trotting over, spaghetti sauce still on her face, and picked her up. I felt at a loss about what to do. Tell Paula her daughter had a younger brother in the Village, and she might fall apart. "I was actually curious about something. Do you know anything about Rachel's birth mother?"
"I don't want to know. It would disrupt my life. And my peace of mind." Her eyes acquired a kind of sadness mingled with anxiety. "I'm reconciled to the fact she probably got into some kind of trouble, may not have exactly been Nobel Prize material, but I'm a big believer in nurture over nature. That's why I write books for kids. So I think Rachel's going to end up being a lot more like me than like her real mother."
Brave words. But I'll bet you anything the story of Rachel's mother is a lot more complicated than you imagine.
I glanced at my watch, the hour pushing four-thirty. Time to call it a wrap. Besides, if we shot any more today, the crew would end up on overtime, and David was getting increasingly nervous about my extra costs.
I also needed a little downtime to reflect.
"Look, I think I've got enough footage to work with for now. Let me just get the release signed take this film downtown, and get it processed. Maybe we can come back for another shoot when I figure out exactly where this is going."
"Anytime. Just give me some notice and I'll try to have the place cleaned up more next time."
"Don't worry. I like it to look real. Just sign the release and I'll take it from there." I was about to set Rachel back on the floor when something caught in my sweater. Looking down, I realized it was a tiny charm bracelet, with two little medallions on it. One was a little red plastic likeness of Pocahontas, the Disney character, and the other was a silver face of a cat, long and stylized. And on the back, those curious lines and dots again, only these were arranged differently from those on the one Carly's boy Kevin had.
"Paula, what's this? This cat. Where'd you get it?"
"Oh, that." She smiled. "She was wearing it when I got her, on a little silk cord around her waist, under her diaper. They told me it was a gift from her real mother, a keepsake. Sort of breaks your heart, but the way they said it, you want to keep it forever. . . ."
At that moment Erica was just plugging the phone back in, and the second she did, the old, black Panasonic cordless began to ring.
"Hang on a sec," Paula said. "Let me get that. My agent is supposed—" She'd picked up the phone and was plopping back onto the couch. "Hi."
Then her look turned blank. "No, of course not." She fell into an uncomfortable pause, looking around at everybody. Then she continued. "Nobody's contacted me." She halted again, her face white, and stared directly at me. I abruptly sensed that I was the topic of the conversation. "Sure I'm sure. . . . Yes, I remember signing. . . . Don't worry. I'd have no reason to. . . . Okay, sure, I'll let you know."
She clicked off the phone and looked up with startled eyes. "It was somebody who said they worked for Children of Light. She wanted to know if you'd contacted me." Her face collapsed. "You. She asked me specifically aboutyou. By name. How did—?"
"I have no idea." My hands were growing cold. Had Carly told them about me? Why would she do that? "Anyway, you handled it okay."
Which made me wonder. If Children of Light was such a perfect organization, why was Paula so frightened she immediately felt compelled to lie, to swear she hadn't broken their rules?
"Right." Her composure was slowly coming back. "Look, now that I think about it, why should they care? It doesn't make any sense. They got their money." She turned to me. "Let me have that release."
She seized the paper and endorsed it with a flourish.
My pulse was still in overdrive, but I hugged her, then signaled the crew that shooting was over for the day.
"Okay, everybody. Time to wrap."
The gang immediately began striking the lights and rolling up electrical cords. They would take the equipment back downtown and deliver the film to the lab, while I would head home. It had been a long day and lots of thinking was needed. Besides, it was starting to rain, a dismal spatter against Paula's grimy windows, as the gray spring afternoon had begun darkening toward sullen evening.
"Listen, I enjoyed this." Paula had taken Rachel in her arms and was stroking her blond hair. "I really love talking about her. She's changed my life."
I gave her another hug. "You're great. And you're going to be wonderful in the film." If I used her. The whole thing was getting unnerving. "You have no idea how much you've helped." Then I said good-bye to Rachel, who responded with a perfect "Bye, bye" through her haze of spaghetti sauce.
Okay, get the superintendent. Crank up the freight elevator. Get out of here.
Scott Ventri, key grip, took charge of handling the gear, dictating which equipment got loaded on first. I watched long enough to make sure everything was going okay, and then I joined Arlene, old friend and queen of outrageous makeup, on the other elevator.
"You notice it?" she whispered. The door had just closed.
"Notice what?" I knew full well what she was talking about. But it just felt too bizarre.
"Those kids could almost be twins. That little boy last week, and this girl. They look just alike. It's spooky."
"Guess their parents couldn't figure out what was causing those pregnancies. So they just kept having more babies." I decided to try to insert some humor, deflect the conversation. "Maybe we should tell Paula and Carly."
"Very dumb." Arlene bit at a long, red, false fingernail, a perennial habit for as long as I'd known her. "We should mind our own business, that's what we should do."
"Works for me. But it also proves we were smart not to shoot any footage of the kids. The whole world would realize something's funny." Then I had an idea. "Want to come downtown to my place after we unload? Have some deep thoughts over what all this means?"
First the kids, then the call. What was this guy Alex Goddard, whoever he was, up to? Definitely time to talk to somebody. . . .
"Gee, I'd love to," Arlene was saying, "but I can't. I gotta go out to Kew Gardens for my mom and dad's anniversary tonight. Their thirty-fifth, can you believe? Of course, I was a very late baby." She blinked her dark, languid eyes, as though rehearsing the line for a downtown club.
"A miracle of modern fertility science, right?" Shit. Arlene, I need you.
"Right." She giggled, then seemed to study the flashing lights on the elevator's control panel. "God, those kids, they're too good to be true. I'd love to have one like that." She impatiently pounded the number one a couple of times, perhaps hoping to speed our creaky descent. "I can get bonked every night of the week, but I can't get a serious boyfriend. New York's clubs aren't exactly brimming with the vine-covered-cottage-and-picket-fence type. And as for the pickings at work, given the kind of pictures David makes, forget it. Last thing I need is some twenty-year-old pothead who thinks with his wang."
"I'm afraid I'm not helping you much with this one." I'd castBaby Lovemostly with Off-Broadway unknowns. The actress Mary Gregg was a veteran of Joseph Papp's original Public Theater, the experimental enterprise downtown. The few male parts all went to guys who were either gay or married.
"Oy, what can you do, right? If it happens, it happens." Arlene watched the door begin to stutter open as we bumped onto the lobby level. Then she zeroed in on me. "You really want a kid too, don't you? I mean, that's why you did this script, right? Which, by the way, is great. I mean the script."
"I think most women do, down deep."
She smiled. "Well, if I ever have one, it's going to be the old-fashioned way. It's a heck of a lot cheaper than adopting." She was heading out, into the front foyer. "Not to mention more fun getting there."
On that I definitely had to agree.
The lobby's prewar look was gray and dismal, and as we emerged onto the street, the rain had turned into a steady downpour. Lou was off again today, down at the hospital with Sarah, so I'd engaged a doorman from a new co-op across the street to keep an eye on our vans. A crisp twenty had extracted his solemn promise to do just that. At the moment, however, he was nowhere to be seen. Proving, I suppose, David's theory that we needed our own security guy at all location shoots.
Lou, I thought, I hope you're finally getting through to her.
"No limo, but at least we get first call on the vans," Arlene observed, her voice not hiding the sarcasm. "Just once I'd
like to work for somebody who had serious VIP transportation."
"David would walk before he'd get a limo."
We were headed down the street, me digging out my keys, when I noticed the man standing in the rain. He was just behind our lead van, a three-year-old gray Ford, waiting for us.
My first thought was he must be connected to Nicky Russo, David's wiseguy banker, here to bust my chops over the Teamster issue. Screw him. Just my luck he'd send somebody the very day Lou was not on hand. But then I realized I'd guessed wrong. The man was more Hispanic than Italian. He also was short, solidly built, late fifties maybe, with intense eyes and gray hair that circled his balding pate like the dirty snow around a volcano's rim. As he moved toward us, I thought I detected something military in his bearing, not so much the crispness of a soldier but rather the authoritative swagger of an officer. Well, maybe a retired officer.
"The paper on your windshield says you are filming a movie," came a voice with a definite Spanish accent. No greetings, no hiya, how're you doin'? Just the blunt statement. Then, having established what was already clear to all at hand, he continued. "It says the title isBaby Love. Why are you making this movie here?"
That was it. I glanced at Arlene, who'd turned white as a sheet. You get a lot of onlookers around a location shoot, but not too many who challenge your right to exist, which was exactly what was coming through in his menacing tone.
I handed Arlene the keys. "Here, go ahead and open up. I'll handle this."
Then I turned back to him. "What you saw in the windshield of the vans is a New York City Film Board permit. That's all the information we are required to provide. If you read it, you know everything I'm obliged to tell you." I returned his stare. "However, if people ask nicely, I'm happy to answer their questions."
"Are you making this movie about a person in this building? Your other films have been documentaries."
God help me, I thought. Is this what my fans are like?
Then it hit me. I don't know how I'd missed the connection, but now it just leapt out. First the phone call, then this hood. Somebody was tracking me.
"I'm scouting locations," I lied, feeling a chill go through me. "We're second unit for an action film, shooting some prep footage for the producers. Does the name Arnold Schwarzenegger mean anything to you?"
"Then why is the film about babies?"
"That's meant to be a joke. Remember the movieTwins? It's a joke title. Do you understand?"
At that moment, Paul Nulty came barging out the door with a huge klieg light, followed by several other members of the crew carrying sound gear. Our cordial tete-a-tete was about to be disrupted.
My new Hispanic friend saw them and abruptly drew up. That was when I noticed the shoulder holster under his jacket, containing some sort of snub-nosed pistol.
Jesus, I thought, this must be what some kind of hired killer looks like. That gun's not a prop.
"I think you are lying." He closed his jacket and, ignoring my crew, bored in relentlessly on me, his eyes dead and merciless. "That is a big mistake."
It was the first time in my life I'd ever stood next to a man who had a gun and was deeply ticked at me. He'd wanted me to see his piece, just to make sure I took him seriously. He wasn't threatening me, per se. Rather he was letting me know how strongly he cared about what I was doing.
Well, damn him, but I still was scared. I might have managed to bluff Nicky Russo, but he was a guy who operated by an age-old set of Sicilian rules. This thug didn't strike me as the rule-book type.
Hand shaking, I pulled out my cell phone, flicked it open, and punched in 911.
"Listen, if you're threatening me with a gun, I'm calling the cops. Whatever problem you have with the New York film industry, you can explain it to them."
New York's police emergency number was still ringing as he abruptly turned and strode away.
I clicked the phone shut and moved to get out of the way as a trolley loaded with more gear was rolled past me down the sidewalk. Unfortunately, I also took my eyes off him for a second, and when I looked up again, he seemed to have disappeared into the rain, though I did notice somebody who could have been him get into a long black car well down the block and speed off toward Broadway.
"What did that creep want?" Arlene asked, coming back with the keys.
I was only slowly returning to reality, and it took me a few moments to form a coherent answer through all the adrenaline surging into my brain.
"I . . . I don't know. But I think I'd better warn everybody to keep an eye out for strangers. He's . . . he's wound a little tight, to put it mildly." I was still shaking, which she fortunately failed to notice. At that point, there seemed no great reason to spook her with mention of the gun.
"Boy, he wasn't just some homeless junkie," she said. "He looked like a heavy in one of David's old action pictures. All he needed was a Mack-10."
"Right." Jesus, Arlene, I think he might have had one. "So let's get moving."
As I watched the vans being loaded, slowly calming down, I kept thinking about him. He was undoubtedly connected to the phone call, but why would anybody be so worried about what I was doing? I couldn't think of any serious reason.
Half an hour later we were all headed downtown. Along the rain-swept streets the "All Beef" hot-dog vendors cowered under their red-and-yellow striped umbrellas, while departing office workers, briefcases perched above their heads as makeshift protection, scurried along the edges of buildings searching for cabs. While Arlene continued to chat nonstop, I tried to do a little mental processing. And my mind kept drifting back to the sight of little Rachel, and Kevin. What perfect kids. The way she was running. . . .
Hey, wait a minute. How could they be siblings? Brother and sister? Rachel was almost exactly half a year older than Kevin. Biology didn't work that way. No way could they be related, but still . . . they looked so alike.
I realized Arlene hadn't put it together about the ages. The brother/sister theory made absolutely no sense. Those kids were born six months apart.