SUZETTE Arguello and I ended up in a tea shop on Union Street, sipping green tea while the babies snoozed quietly in our laps. After her face had resumed something of its normal color, and I had reassured myself that the woman wasn’t about to drop dead of a heart attack over the handlebars of her $750 stroller, Suzette had agreed to accompany me for a reviving beverage. At that point, I think, she realized there was no way to keep her secret any longer, and the only thing left to do was effect some kind of damage control.
I let her take a few trembling sips before I began. My first question was very simple. “Why?”
“Why did you steal your grandchild? Why didn’t you just ask Sandra to let you keep him while she was in prison?”
She dabbed delicately with a napkin at her upper lip. She was remarkably good at managing with one arm, while the baby slept in the crook of the other. “You did not know my son’s girlfriend very well.” This was not a question; there was no doubt in her voice.
“No.”
“She refused to give Noah to me. I offered to care for him from the very beginning, even though Gabriel and Sandra both knew my position on their addiction and its consequences.”
“Your position?”
“I have always insisted that Gabriel would have to deal with the consequences of his addiction on his own. We are willing to help him maintain sobriety, but we are not willing to clean up the messes he makes with his drug use. But I made an exception in the case of the baby. I even approached Sandra myself.”
“While she was in jail?”
Suzette nodded. I noticed that while she spoke she rocked the baby very gently, almost imperceptibly, keeping him comforted and asleep. “I wrote her a number of times. I even arranged for a visit. She refused to put me on her visiting list, but my husband sits on the state parole commission. One of his colleagues pulled some strings for me. I came to the prison fully expecting to visit with her, but she would not see me. They tried to bring her down, but she refused. In the end, not even the threat of solitary confinement convinced her to see me.”
“Did they put her in the SHU, into solitary?”
She shrugged. “I imagine they did.”
Sandra chose to spend time in segregation rather than see her boyfriend’s mother? Why did she hate Suzette Arguello so much?
Noah yawned and stirred. Suzette bent over, pulled out a baby bottle from her elegant silk diaper bag, and slipped it deftly between the baby’s lips. He began pulling on the bottle, immediately calmed down.
“But why did you go through this elaborate ruse? Why not just petition the court? Your son is a drug addict, your daughter-in-law was in jail. She had no other close relatives. I’m sure you would have been awarded custody of Noah anyway. And temporary custody would have turned into a permanent adoption within six months. According to the law, Sandra had only six months to reclaim her baby before her parental rights would have been terminated.”
Suzette looked almost confused, as if what I said was so foolish she could not even comprehend it. “We could never have done that.”
“Why not?”
“A court petition would have resulted in a termination hearing. Gabriel would have testified against me. The media would have gotten wind of it, and it would have been horrifying. A complete circus,” She shuddered. “The very idea is ridiculous.”
I put my nearly untouched cup of tea back down in its saucer. “Wait a minute. Are you telling me you cooked up an elaborate plot to steal your grandchild so that you wouldn’t be embarrassed in the newspapers?”
“You don’t understand.”
“No, I obviously don’t.”
It took her a moment to answer. In the meantime, she spread a cloth diaper on her shoulder. It was trimmed with blue plaid and embroidered with the initials N.F.A. It took me a moment to figure out the monogram. She must have changed the baby’s name from Noah Anthony Lorgeree to Noah Francisco Arguello, after his grandfather. She lifted the baby onto her shoulder and began patting his back.
Finally I said, “Help me understand. Explain it to me.”
“I can’t,” she said. “I can’t explain to someone who has not experienced what it’s like to live in the public eye. An Arguello family custody trial would have been front-page news in the San Francisco Chronicle, and all over the country. We would have become the butt of late-night comedians. Analysts would have picked the case apart on Court TV. My brother-in-law is the lieutenant governor. He will be governor one day, and perhaps president. I could not risk embarrassing him.”
“And you don’t think this will embarrass him? You don’t think that you bribing a couple of junkies, and God only knows who else at the Department of Social Services, might embarrass him?”
Noah burped suddenly and his grandmother cooed proudly. “There’s a good little man,” she said. She deposited him back in his stroller. “There is no need for this to become public.”
“No?”
“No.”
I said, grimly, “Sandra Lorgeree is dead. She was murdered in prison.”
“I had nothing to do with that.” She was looking into my eyes, and once again I wished I were one of those people with the magical ability to tell when someone is lying just from the steadiness of their gaze. Hers didn’t twitch or shift, but still I had no idea if she was telling the truth.
“Maybe that’s a matter for the police to determine,” I said. “Once they have all the facts before them.”
Suzette suddenly grabbed my free hand, the one that was not holding Sadie. “Please,” she said. “Please, I’m begging you. I didn’t hurt Sandra. I know how this looks to you. I know. But all I wanted was to save my grandchild. I didn’t hurt her. I have no idea how she died. Please, believe me.”
I looked down at our interlocked hands.
“Please, Ms. Applebaum,” she said. “Do you know what would have happened to Noah if I hadn’t stepped in? If he had gone to foster care? Gabriel identifies as Mexican American. The baby would be considered biracial. Do you know what the chances of a biracial boy being adopted are? They are terrible. Truly terrible. Noah would have been shuttled from one foster home to another. I was a member of the board of supervisors, I know just how dreadful our foster care system is, how dangerous it is for children.”
“His mother wanted him. She wanted him to go to her family.”
“What family? She had no family! She wanted to punish this beautiful boy because she hates me. Well, I wouldn’t let her do that. I couldn’t.” She spun the stroller around so that the round-faced baby faced me. His head was cocked to one side, and a small smile played across his sleeping face. He was too young for the smile to be anything but gas, but it was charming, nonetheless. “Could you have allowed this precious child’s mother to make a decision that would ruin his life?”
As I stared into the stroller, the baby shifted to his side and stretched, his back arching, his round behind poking out, and his tiny hands balling into fists on either side of his head. He pursed his lips, frowned, and then smiled again, his face spinning through expressions like the pictures in a slot machine. He burped and his grandmother leaned forward, delicately blotting away the tiny froth of milk that bubbled on his lips. She stroked his cheek with the back of her impeccably manicured index finger, her touch feather-light against his velvet skin.
What would I have done in her place? I would have risked any amount of shame and embarrassment to fight for this child, newspapers and political careers be damned. But what was I going to do now? That was the real question. What was I going to do, knowing what I knew, when Noah’s mother was dead and none of her relatives were in any shape to care for him? The only person who wanted this baby was sitting across the table from me.
I had found Noah, and I had come no closer to finding Sandra’s murderer. If anything, I felt further away from knowing what had happened in the exercise yard of Dartmore Prison than I was a few hours before.
“What will you do?” Suzette asked as I got to my feet and gathered my baby and my things.
“I have no idea.”
“That’s not good enough.”
“You’re telling me?”