Chapter 9: Five O'Clock
Patricia called at two-seventeen in the afternoon.
"They found Dana," she said.
"She was at her apartment, forty minutes from here.
The welfare check confirmed the infant is present and healthy."
I sat down on the kitchen floor.
I didn't plan to.
My legs simply stopped working.
"Is she—" I couldn't finish the sentence.
"She is healthy.
She is fine.
She has been well cared for, physically." A pause.
"Dana did not resist.
When the officers arrived, she opened the door.
She was holding the baby."
"What did she say?"
"She said, and I am quoting directly — 'I knew this was coming.
Robert promised me it was legal.'"
I pressed my hand over my mouth.
"She is going to cooperate," Patricia said.
"She is already speaking with investigators.
She is not going to protect Robert.
I want you to understand what that means for the case against him."
"What does it mean?"
"It means he has no one left to hold the story together." A brief pause.
"The baby will be brought to the courthouse.
You can be there when she arrives, or I can have her transported directly to you.
Whatever you want."
I looked up.
Willie was standing in the kitchen doorway in his school clothes, still wearing his backpack.
He had just come home.
He was watching me on the floor with very wide eyes.
"Willie," I said.
My voice came out strange.
"Come here."
He crossed the kitchen in four steps and crouched down beside me.
"Patricia," I said into the phone.
"We'll come to the courthouse."
I ended the call.
Willie was still watching me.
"Is it about my sister?" he said.
"Yes."
"Is she okay?"
"She's okay." I put my hand on the side of his face.
"She's coming home, Willie."
He stared at me.
His chin started to tremble.
"Today?"
"Today."
He made a sound I had never heard from him before.
Not crying exactly.
Something that had been held too long finally letting go.
He leaned forward and pressed his face against my shoulder and I held him on the kitchen floor while my mother stood in the doorway with her hand over her heart and didn't say anything at all.
We drove to the courthouse at three-thirty.
Willie sat in the back seat holding the stuffed rabbit in his lap.
He had gone upstairs and gotten it without being asked.
At four-fifty-five, a woman in a gray jacket carried a baby through the side door of the courthouse and placed her in my arms.
She was small.
She had Robert's dark hair and my mother's nose and a crease across her cheek from sleeping.
She was not crying.
She looked up at me with the unfocused, serious expression of a newborn trying to understand the world.
"Hi," I said.
My voice was barely sound.
Willie pressed close to my side.
He looked down at her for a long moment.
Then he very carefully tucked the stuffed rabbit into the blanket beside her.
"That's for you," he told her.
"I picked it out.
It took me three weeks."
She blinked.
He looked up at me.
"Can I hold her?"
"Yes," I said.
"Sit down first."
He sat down on the courthouse bench and I placed her in his arms and he held her with the concentrated seriousness of someone who understood exactly how much this moment weighed.
My mother stood behind us.
May you like
I heard her crying quietly.
I didn't look away from my children.
