Mother's Milk

ONE

Barrett gagged at the stench of death – a mix of escaped gases and something slightly sweet, even though the two teens, a boy and a girl, hadn’t been that way long. To the tall, darkly beautiful, thirty-three-year-old forensic psychiatrist they looked asleep, slumped on a pile of decorative pillows like the fussy ones you get at discount stores with purple, hot pink, and wine-colored silk with exotic tassels and bits of gold and silver embroidery. Someone had tried to make this top-floor Alphabet City tenement apartment a home. Barrett struggled to push past the shock, the sheer waste of two young lives. She had to get her bearings and figure out what she’d stumbled into – the room had a purpose; mattresses heaped with pillows lined three walls, each separated from the next by an artistically stenciled and painted table – a twenty-first-century opium den with a do-it-yourself makeover.

As her nose, more acute since the birth of Max four months ago, took in the smells – Indian patchouli, a trace of pot, and that unmistakable reek, sweet, not yet rot – she touched the girl first, praying she was wrong. So young, please let there be a pulse. Two long fingers of her right hand homed in on the carotid, pushing in, the flesh still warm, her hair, streaked with honey highlights, soft and scented with a fruity conditioner … no pulse. The girl’s eyes were open, the whites starting to dry, staring at the ceiling with its layers of flaked paint over zinc tiles. The boy was handsome, still with a bit of baby fat to his cheeks, dark curly hair, his brown-eyed gaze fixed on his arm where a spot of fresh dried blood showed his last injection site. The needle and the small alcohol burner they’d used to cook their dope lay on the floor between them. Barrett eyed the Ziploc bags on the table, some still filled with dirty white heroin – an overdose with dope to spare. She muttered and caught the panic-stricken expression of Lydia, the crisis outreach social worker from the forensic center and mother of four she’d dragged along after the call from Jerod. And where the hell are you? she thought, picturing the young man who’d been so frantic on the phone.

‘I’ll call the cops,’ Lydia said, pulling out her cell, her thick frame plastered against the far wall of the room.

Barrett crouched by the bodies and half-listened as Lydia phoned the crisis team and told them to send the police. Tears welled; these were just kids … so young … somebody’s children.

She froze at the sound of footsteps in the hallway. She called out, ‘Jerod, is that you? It’s Dr. Conyors … Show yourself.’ She glanced toward the open door and saw movement in the shadows and a disturbance in the dust that glittered in the light. She wiped back a tear as fear throbbed and awful thoughts barreled into her brain, like if something should happen to her, who’d care for her baby? And shouldn’t she have thought of that before coming on this outreach? What am I doing here?

The footsteps stopped. Barrett slowed her breath, everything about this felt wrong; a set-up, but now was not the time to try and figure out why Jerod, a twenty-two-year-old homeless schizophrenic with a drug problem, would do this to her, one of the few people in his sad life who actually gave a damn. The fingers of her right hand snaked inside her shoulder bag and into the leather holster where she kept a small 9mm Kahr polymer handgun – a gift from Detective Ed Hobbs. She motioned for a wide-eyed Lydia to keep back as she pulled the slide on the pistol and edged flat-footed toward the door. She made no sound as she listened for whoever was outside. If it were Jerod, he’d make noise – almost couldn’t stop himself, with his jangled energy and the voices inside his head that ordered him about whenever he stopped his medication, which was most of the time.

Her gut twisted at the hard-metal click of a safety not more than a few yards away on the other side of the door. She pictured her baby – Max – safe with her mother. She had a split-second recognition that once again she’d placed herself in mortal danger and could imagine what Hobbs would say, how she was supposed to be a ‘goddamn shrink and not Rambo’. A siren wailed from down the avenue, grew louder. Barrett held her position, the footsteps started again. She raised the pistol, aiming at the door frame. They were getting closer, moving faster, and then stopped. The siren pulsed louder; it was joined by a second.

She stood frozen, her gun raised, body tense, and then she both felt and heard footsteps running away. Carefully, she peered around the door. She spotted a man in jeans, sneakers, a leather coat, and short spiky blond hair running toward the stairwell – she couldn’t see his face. ‘Jerod!’ She sprinted after him, her heart pounding. It didn’t look like him, unless he’d lopped off his trademark dreadlocks, and this man was shorter.

‘Barrett!’ Lydia shrieked, her voice an octave higher than usual. ‘Where are you going? Don’t leave me!’

Barrett stopped and looked back at Lydia, her chunky body in jeans and a green button-down blouse, one hand clutching the door and the other gripping her cell phone. Her dark eyes bore into Barrett’s. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked, her tone accusatory, angry and close to tears. ‘You’re not a cop.’ Lydia fixed on the gun. ‘Why are you carrying that? Please don’t leave me. I’m so frightened.’

Barrett said nothing as they heard the commotion of heavy feet running up the stairs. A woman’s voice called out, ‘Dr. Conyors, are you there?’

‘We’re up here … top floor,’ Barrett called, putting the safety back on the Kahr and slipping it into its holster. A female officer entered, followed a few steps later by her uniformed male counterpart. They looked at the dead teenagers, and the woman, looking to Barrett, commented, ‘They drop like flies … overdose?’

‘Seems like,’ but something was off, she was finding it hard to think. ‘Problem is we came here to pick up one of our regulars at the forensic center. He said he needed to go into the hospital.’

‘Jerod hates the hospital,’ Lydia said, talking fast. ‘We should have known something was wrong. He was different on the phone, not his usual. Scared … And you can’t trust a thing out of a junkie’s mouth. We should have brought an escort. I told you that. Oh my God. We could have been killed.’

‘Who’s this Jerod?’ the female cop asked, as her partner called for the crime-scene team.

‘Jerod Blank,’ Barrett said, feeling bad for Lydia, who was shaking. ‘Twenty-two, raised mostly by the Department of Family and Youth Services and now pretty much living on the streets with occasional trips to psych hospitals … or jail, where he gets put on meds for his schizophrenia. But he never stays on them.’

‘So where is he? And why did he want you here?’ the cop asked.

‘Good questions.’ Barrett walked over to a boarded-up window and peered through a crack. She saw a bunch of kids shooting hoops in the pocket park between this building and the next. ‘There was someone else up here,’ she said, ‘ran off when you all came.’

‘Your Jerod guy?’

‘I don’t think so.’ Barrett pictured Jerod – rail-thin, tall, weird tattoos on his arms, pale blue eyes, and a mass of dirty-blond dreads – and her last interaction with him a couple months back. He’d been arrested for shoplifting a cell phone and the judge had looked at his record of bouncing in and out of psychiatric hospitals, stabilizing, stopping his meds, doing drugs and petty crimes. He’d wanted to send the youth to prison for a few months to teach him a lesson. Jerod had been desperate, begging Barrett to help him. Frightened witless, he’d started to talk about killing himself, better to be dead than go to prison; he knew he wouldn’t survive there. Barrett, who genuinely liked Jerod and saw in him a good heart, a twisted wit, and potential that might never get tapped because of his shitty birth family and all the bad things that had happened to him growing up as a ward of the state, had gone to bat with the judge, putting together yet another in-patient stay with the promise of a group home once he got out – problem was after two weeks in the hospital he’d been released and gone AWOL from his group home.

Now she looked across at Lydia. ‘It wasn’t him. Someone else wanted a look at these two.’

‘Maybe they had a stash and some of their friends wanted the leftovers,’ the male officer remarked, as he snapped digital photos of the youths.

‘Maybe.’ Barrett, unconvinced, thought up a list of questions and bits of information that didn’t lie flat, starting with the two dead kids who didn’t look like street junkies, well dressed, good haircuts, clean … somebody’s kids, probably eighteen or nineteen … maybe younger. Plus, even down-at-the-heel apartments in the East Village weren’t cheap. ‘You need us here?’ she asked, feeling a desperate need to get out of that place and to see her baby.

‘Nah,’ the female officer said, ‘we’ll just get the basic information from you. I don’t think the ME is going to have a lot to say about these two; probably just run the toxicology. We get at least half a dozen of these a week, the life expectancy of a New York City junkie is not a long one.’ She shook her head. ‘The thing that kills me is they seem to keep getting younger.’

TWO

Outside the apartment, Barrett put on dark glasses and tried to steady her breath. Her pulse raced, the beats pounding in her ears. ‘Lydia,’ she said, trying to keep the tremor from her voice, ‘why don’t you take the state car and go back to the office without me. I’ve got some business to take care of.’

‘I have to fill out an adverse-incident report,’ Lydia said, her expression unreadable, as she fished out the keys.

‘Of course,’ Barrett said, wishing there was something she could say to make this long-time state employee feel less freaked out. ‘You did well in there, Lydia. You kept your cool.’

‘I’m shaking … I can’t stop thinking about what might have just happened. There was someone else there. I heard it. I kept thinking about my kids …’ She looked around nervously. ‘He could still be here.’

Barrett scanned the block, noting how the building they’d been in, and the ones on either side, seemed to be the only holdouts in this neighborhood of recently rehabbed and pricey apartments. ‘I know, but we’re out of there; it’s OK. The cops will take care of it.’

Lydia looked at her. ‘Why would Jerod do that? He could have gotten us killed.’

‘I don’t know,’ Barrett said. ‘But I intend to find out.’

‘We should have had a police escort.’

Barrett sensed a veiled accusation – You’re supposed to be the boss, why would you put us … me … in this kind of jeopardy? ‘Are you going to be OK? If you wanted to take the rest of the day that would be fine.’

‘Seriously?’

‘Of course, just let your supervisor know that I approved it.’

‘But I have to fill out the adverse-incident form first, if you don’t do it within twenty-four hours it’s considered delinquent, and they write you up.’

‘Right,’ Barrett said, and felt a moment’s concern over how Lydia might interpret the morning’s events. But she’d just have to deal with that; right now her internal clock was racing a mile a minute, she desperately wanted out of there, all she could think about was seeing Max and the growing urgency in her chest. ‘I got to run, Lydia, fill out the form and leave it with my secretary – I’ll do my section when I get back. Then go home.’

Without looking back, and realizing she should have done more of a debriefing with Lydia, she nearly ran toward Avenue A, her eyes trained on the northbound lane looking for a cab. She flagged one down and as she got in, glanced at the digital clock on the small TV screen on the back of the driver’s seat. 11:15 and she had to be back at the office no later than 12:30, and God help her if she missed her one o’clock with Janice Fleet, the Commissioner of the Department of Mental Health. She gave the driver her address. ‘Please hurry.’ Twelve minutes later he pulled up to her condo, in a somewhat drab-fronted red-brick building on West 27th.

She keyed in through the security door and sprinted up the three flights to the one-bedroom condo she’d bought with her husband Ralph – the first anniversary of his murder just past. She unlocked and caught the first saliva-stirring whiff of just-out-of-the-oven cheese biscuits. Her mother Ruth was in the galley kitchen, her thick auburn hair tied back in a blue kerchief, gold hoops in her ears and dressed in jeans and a form-hugging black T-shirt with the logo for the Night Shade, a gay bar in the East Village where she’d worked as a bartender for over fifteen years.

‘Hey, Mom,’ Barrett said, dropping her briefcase by the door, slipping off her blazer, and unbuttoning her blouse; she made a beeline for Max in his mesh-walled playpen. He had just gotten to the stage where he could raise his head on his own, and he attempted to pull himself up by his chubby arms, nearly making it, almost crawling. His crystal-blue eyes looked up at her as she knelt down and scooped him up. She settled back in the massive oak rocker her sister had bought for her at the 26th Street flea market, and which her mother had embellished with vibrant needlework pillows. She held Max close and breathed deep the intoxicating mix of baby shampoo and that other indescribable scent that was … well … Max. His mouth searched out her nipple while his tiny fingers kneaded the flesh of her breast. A word passed through her mind – sanctuary. Followed by a surge of panic as she thought back to where she’d just been.

‘Have you eaten?’ Ruth asked, as she peeled overripe bananas and threw them into the bright red enamel mixer that Barrett had received as a wedding present, and which up until her mom had come to help with Max had been in its box buried at the back of a cabinet.

‘No time,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a meeting from hell in –’ she glanced at the clock – ‘a little over an hour and a stack of paperwork I need to get through before then.’

‘You can’t keep this up,’ Ruth said, her voice rich with the slow open vowels of rural Georgia. ‘Do you have any dark rum?’ she asked as she proceeded to throw ingredients into the mixer without benefit of measuring cups or spoons – butter, vanilla, egg yolks, flour, baking soda, salt, chopped walnuts, raisins.

‘Not likely,’ Barrett said, as she cradled Max, marveling at his silky hair … and not wanting to think about how he was probably too blond for people to think that he was the child of her and her half-Cuban husband.

‘What about nutmeg?’

‘Sorry. I’d have thought you’d know by now, if you don’t buy it, I probably don’t have it.’

‘Shameful. I know I taught you how to cook. Cinnamon?’ Ruth persisted.

‘Maybe, I think I made eggnog a couple years back, check in the cupboard over the silverware.’

Barrett repositioned her chair so she could watch her mom as she fussed in the kitchen. She gently rocked and let herself enjoy the moments of peaceful nursing, a blissful island in the too-fast chaos of her life. Since returning to work two months back it had felt as though she was on some hellish treadmill and that no matter how fast she ran, she was constantly falling behind. The fact that Max was born a month premature, her water breaking in the middle of a case conference she was chairing at Croton Forensic Hospital, was almost a symbol of how everything happened just too fast.

She rocked and marveled at the efficiency of her mother in the kitchen, like a dancer, trained by years of raising two children and dealing nightly with a bar-room full of thirsty patrons. At nearly fifty, Ruth looked like a woman in her thirties, even though Barrett knew her dark auburn hair now came from a bottle. ‘So what have you and Max been up to?’ she asked.

Ruth leveled her gaze at her daughter. ‘Well, considering I didn’t get off work till four A.M., we took a nap until ten. I thought this afternoon we could take a walk through the park and do a bit of shopping. You in the mood for a pork roast? Or how about a spiral ham, sweet potatoes, and collard greens with bacon?’

‘You’re trying to kill me, aren’t you? Fried chicken last night, you’ve used my bread-maker more in the past few months than—’

‘Dear, it was still in the box, as was this gorgeous mixer. Which, if you’re wondering what to get me for my birthday …’

‘Duly noted,’ Barrett said.

‘You need to eat,’ Ruth said, ‘if not for yourself, for my little prince.’

‘So that’s what this is all about, fatten me up for Max.’

‘Do you know how many calories you lose through breast milk? And you were saying you were worrying that you didn’t have enough.’

‘Point taken, but I’m not sure the Paula Dean diet is the way to go.’

‘You watch what you say about Paula. I love her, in fact this banana-bread recipe is off her website.’

‘The woman would deep-fry water,’ Barrett said, ‘it can’t be good for you.’

‘Moderation,’ Ruth shot back, ‘all things in moderation,’ and then, lowering her voice, ‘Not that you’d know a thing about that.’

‘I heard that.’

‘Good.’

‘Mom, please don’t start.’

‘I didn’t say a word … but if I did it would be to say that you’re working too many hours and too many days, and with a new baby and no husband you’re not going to be able to keep this up. Trust me, I know.’

Barrett shook her head, as she looked at Max, who seemed to have had his fill. She reached for one of the many blue terry-cloth nappies Ruth had whipped up out of old towels and laid it over her shoulder. She draped him over it, and ran her hand over his soft smooth back, rubbing, patting, and waiting for her reward of a juicy belch. ‘We do what we have to do. And what I have to do is work and make money to keep a roof over our heads. And don’t tell me you don’t know what that’s like.’

‘Of course I know what that’s like,’ Ruth said, pulling a brown-paper bag from out of a drawer. ‘I just didn’t want you to repeat my mistakes.’

Barrett looked at the milky wet spot on the nappy and gave Max an extra few pats to see if anything more needed to come up. A random thought zipped through her head. Mission accomplished. She’d made it home, nursed; a quick glance at the clock showed she’d probably just make it back in time. ‘Mom,’ Barrett said, ‘I don’t think you really made mistakes. You married too young because you got pregnant and that’s what girls in Williamson, Georgia, were supposed to do. You had no choice, and getting me and Justine away from that place and our father was the bravest thing anyone could have done. I don’t remember a lot about him, but I know that he beat you, and that I’d hide under my bed, and I still get nightmares about that night he came and tried to take us back.’ Her eyes misted. ‘Those weren’t mistakes, if I can be even half as brave.’

‘Hush,’ Ruth said, wrapping biscuits in tinfoil and throwing them into the paper bag along with a bottle of iced tea, a sandwich, and something else covered in foil. ‘I was out of my mind. I don’t think I was brave, more scared than anything, and too young and stupid to realize the risks I took. I knew if I stayed with your daddy it was only going to get worse.’

Barrett felt torn, desperate to get back to the office, but hungry for these scraps about her early childhood and the family her mother had left when she was only twenty, and which she rarely spoke of. ‘Don’t you ever miss them?’ she asked, having seen her mom weep over Christmas cards that arrived each year from her mother – a grandmother Barrett couldn’t even picture.

‘Only my mother,’ Ruth said, ‘but just like I don’t want you to repeat my mistakes – and yes, I made my choices and some were just plain stupid – I won’t repeat hers. I remember something she used to say about my father after he’d yelled at her, or called her stupid, or embarrassed her in front of company, she’d tell me, I pick my battles. Problem is, I don’t think she ever won any. And wouldn’t you know, the first time I fall in love, it’s with a man just like my daddy only better-looking and meaner. That night we left Georgia, I truly believed he was going to kill me. I can’t even remember what set him off. All I could think with him pounding away at me,’ she continued, now pouring batter into just-purchased loaf pans, ‘was, I’ll be dead and who’s going to take care of my girls? When he finally passed out, I just grabbed you and Justine, got in the car, and drove. I remember thinking, Please God, just let me win this one battle.’

‘I remember some of it,’ Barrett said. ‘Your face was horrible, by the end of the ride you had huge black eyes.’

‘I was a mess, twenty years old, two babies, and a Chevy station wagon that blew its transmission on the Bowery.’

Barrett glanced again at the clock; 12:15, her paperwork was not going to get done, but she loved the next part of the story. ‘And that’s when you met Sophie and Max,’ she said, reluctantly standing, as loving memories of the elderly Polish couple – Holocaust survivors who had taken them in – flooded her. She rubbed her nose against her baby’s and put him back down in the pen. He looked at her wide-eyed, his arms reached toward her, and he tumbled forward.

‘I love that you named the baby after him,’ Ruth said, heading toward the door as Barrett buttoned up.

‘If he’d been a girl I would have called her Sophia … I miss them both so much.’

‘Me too,’ Ruth said, while trying to stuff the too-full paper bag into the gaping side pocket of Barrett’s briefcase.

Barrett was about to protest – she had no time for lunch – when her eye caught the blinking light on her phone. ‘Who called?’

‘Someone from the hospital, some kind of review board or something.’

Barrett’s island of calm evaporated, replaced by a dull dread. She pressed play and heard a secretary’s practiced lines. ‘Dr. Conyors, this is to inform you that the six-month review for James Cyrus Martin IV is scheduled for July 15th. If you wish to give testimony at the hearing please respond to the office of the Release Board no later than June 30th.’ She left the number and the machine clicked off. She looked at her mother. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I figured you’d hear it later. Will you go?’

‘I don’t know … I have to get back to the office, love you, Mom,’ she said, making a fast exit, running down the stairs, needing to get out of there and away from Ruth’s searching eyes. The mere mention of Jimmy Martin filled Barrett with a fear that seemed endless. And the secrets that she’d kept from her mother, who knew only that James Martin and his twin Ellen had kidnapped Barrett and her sister, and killed a number of people, including Barrett’s husband, Ralph. Barrett had killed Ellen Martin in the process of breaking free and Jimmy had been imprisoned in the forensic hospital, from which he should never have been released. And what Ruth Conyors most crucially didn’t know, and what Barrett would never tell her, was that Jimmy Martin had raped her, albeit through artificial insemination, and that he – not Ralph – was Max’s biological father.

THREE

With minutes to spare, Barrett made it back to her ninth-floor office with the bagged lunch her mother had stuffed into her briefcase. It was an odd mix of Barrett’s usual super-healthy regimen and Ruth’s comfort foods – a turkey and Swiss on homemade multigrain, honey-mustard oil-free dressing, lettuce, tomato, with an unsweetened bottle of iced tea, also four cheese biscuits, still warm wrapped inside the foil, and two pieces of cold fried chicken left over from yesterday. She was starving and quickly popped one of the buttery biscuits into her mouth. She could hear her mother’s voice as she savored the first bite – You’re losing the weight too fast, it’s no wonder your milk is drying up. ‘God, this is good,’ she said aloud, as she picked at the crispy skin on a chicken breast. She settled back into her chair, cracked open the iced tea, and sank her teeth into the chicken as the intercom buzzed and one of the lights lit. Her secretary and