“No one’s fine with a newborn, Miss Zott. The little gremlin will suck the life right out of you. Look at you—you’ve got the death row look. Let me make you some coffee.” She started toward the stove but was stopped by the fume hood. “For the love of god,” she said, “what the hell happened to this kitchen?”
“I’ll make it,” Elizabeth said. As Mrs. Sloane watched, Elizabeth drifted to the stainless-steel counter, where she picked up a jug of distilled water and poured it into a flask, plugging the flask with a stopper outfitted with a tube wriggling from its top. Next, she clipped the flask onto one of two metal stands that stood between two Bunsen burners and struck a strange metal gadget that sparked like flint striking steel. A flame appeared; the water began to heat. Reaching up to a shelf, she grabbed a sack labeled “C8H10N4O2,” dumped some into a mortar, ground it with a pestle, overturned the resulting dirtlike substance onto a strange little scale, then dumped the scale’s contents into a 6-x 6-inch piece of cheesecloth and tied the small bundle off. Stuffing the cheesecloth into a larger beaker, she attached it to the second metal stand, clamping the tube coming out of the first flask into the large beaker’s bottom. As the water in the flask started to bubble, Mrs. Sloane, her jaw practically on the floor, watched as the water forced its way up the tube and into the beaker. Soon the smaller flask was almost empty and Elizabeth shut off the Bunsen burner. She stirred the contents of the beaker with a glass rod. Then the brown liquid did the strangest thing: it rose up like a poltergeist and returned to the original flask.
“Cream and sugar?” Elizabeth asked as she removed the stopper from the flask and started to pour.
“Mother of god,” Mrs. Sloane said as Elizabeth placed a cup of coffee in front of her. “Have you never heard of Folger’s?” But as soon as she took a sip she said no more. She’d never had coffee like this before. It was heaven. She could drink it all day.
“So how have you found it so far?” Mrs. Sloane asked. “Motherhood.”
Elizabeth swallowed hard.
“I see you’ve got the bible,” Mrs. Sloane said, noting Dr. Spock’s book on the table.
“I bought it for the title,” Elizabeth admitted. “Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. There seems to be so much nonsense about how one raises a baby—so much overcomplication.”
Mrs. Sloane studied Elizabeth’s face. A strange remark coming from a woman who just added twenty extra steps to making a cup of coffee. “Funny, isn’t it?” Mrs. Sloane said. “A man writes a book about things of which he has absolutely no firsthand knowledge—childbirth and its aftermath, I mean—and yet: boom. Bestseller. My suspicion? His wife wrote the whole thing, then put his name on it. A man’s name gives it more authority, don’t you think?”
“No,” Elizabeth said.
“Agreed.”
They both took another sip of coffee.
“Hello there, Six-Thirty,” she said, extending her free hand. He went to her.
“You know Six-Thirty?”
“Miss Zott. I live just there—across the street! I often see him out and about. By the way, there’s a leash law in effect—”
At the word “leash,” Madeline opened her tiny mouth and let loose a bloodcurdling cry.
“Oh Jesus Mary mother of god!” Mrs. Sloane swore as she leapt up, Madeline still in her arms. “That is truly hideous, child!” She looked into the small red face and bounced the bundle around the laboratory, her voice raised above the noise. “Years ago, when I was a new mother, Mr. Sloane was away on business and a horrible man broke into the house and said if I didn’t give him all our money, he’d take the baby. I hadn’t slept or showered in four days, hadn’t combed my hair for at least a week, hadn’t sat down in I don’t know how long. So I said, ‘You want the baby? Here.’？” She shifted Madeline to the other arm. “Never seen a grown man run so fast.” She glanced around the room uncertainly. “Do you have some fancy way of fixing a bottle too, or can I make it like normal?”
“I’ve got one ready,” Elizabeth said, retrieving a bottle from a small pan of warm water.
“Newborns are horrible,” Mrs. Sloane said, clutching at the fake pearls around her neck as Elizabeth took Madeline from her. “I thought you had some help; otherwise I would have come earlier. You’ve had so many, well, so many men dropping by at the oddest hours.” She cleared her throat.