When they reached the waiting area for Burke Goldman Finn & Emerson, Johanna stunned Lewyn by putting him in charge of the now dozing child.
“What?” he said, with great alarm. “But what if she wakes up?”
“You’ll figure it out,” said Johanna, not looking back as she followed a young man down a corridor.
Wait, he called after her, though perhaps not aloud. His heart was thudding. Before him, clammy, slumped in her plastic cradle, the nine-month-old person, shiny in the face with something unspeakable emerging from a single nostril, made him want to gag.
“Ooh! Can I peek?” The receptionist had stepped out from behind her desk. She leaned forward from the waist, her back remarkably straight, as if she’d spent hours in a yoga practice preparing for just this maneuver. “What a sweetie!” she whispered. “What’s her name?”
“Uh, Phoebe,” said Lewyn.
“Pretty! What does it mean?”
He looked at her. What did it mean? Who asked a question like that of a stranger? He’d been told that the P of the baby’s name was for our grandfather Philip Hirsch, Johanna’s father, who’d collapsed the previous winter at our cousin’s wrestling match in New Jersey and never regained consciousness, but Lewyn hadn’t known what it meant then, and he didn’t know what it meant now.
“No clue,” he said.
The woman stared at him. After a moment she said, “Well, she’s certainly cute.”
She returned to her desk and her computer.
“Ba,” said Phoebe, his sister, from the plastic chair, but she hadn’t woken herself up, not quite. His sister’s fat lips and little chin were working against an imaginary bottle. “Nipple,” the word came to him, bringing with it another involuntary wave of nausea. She was still zipped into her padded down garment, the hood over most of her face, her fists only half protruding from the once-white cuffs of its sleeves. He wondered for the first time whether our mother was breastfeeding this baby, then he realized she couldn’t be. Had she breastfed him and his siblings, though? He’d never thought about that before, and he wished he weren’t thinking about it now, since the idea of it, of them, sharing her, maybe simultaneously two at a time, posed a violent threat to what remained of his composure. What if it woke up and wanted food? What if it wanted to look at him, and he was forced to look back?
“Mr. Oppenheimer?”
The receptionist was holding the mouthpiece of her headset away from her very red mouth.
“Would you go into the conference room, please? It’s the fourth door on the left. Mr. Goldman will meet you there.”
Lewyn gaped at her. “I … well…” he managed. She only smiled, rictus red.
“Please, they’re waiting for you.”
“But, what about her?”
The receptionist eyed him. “I’m afraid I can’t watch her here.”
The infant chose this moment to wake. She took a look around the unfamiliar room, and then at her barely less familiar brother, and prepared to wail.
“Fine,” he said, grabbing the handle grip. The baby arched up to get a better look at him. If they truly wished for a screaming infant in the “conference room,” then that was what they’d get. Ahead of them, down the carpeted corridor, a man with closely cropped red hair stood in the hallway.
“Good,” he said simply. “Thanks for waiting.”
Lewyn pushed the stroller into the conference room.
“Oh,” Johanna said immediately. “She needs a change, doesn’t she?”
Did she? Lewyn thought. The other person in the room, a bald man, or nearly bald but for a semicircle of white at ear level, looked unmistakably horrified. He was seated on the other side of the conference table and hadn’t gotten up.