Chapter 51
Even when your baby is gone, you never stop being a mother.
Dominic was mine for two weeks. I loved him more than I thought it was possible to love another person. And then after those two weeks, he was gone.
It’s been nearly five years since Dominic disappeared, but I haven’t given up.
Not even close. I haunted the police station for months after his disappearance, begging them to look for him.
But when they finally took me seriously and admitted that he actually existed, things took a turn for the worse.
They started to think that Clay might have actually killed Dominic—by negligence or not wanting to be burdened—and then gotten rid of his body.
They were so convincing that I started to believe it too.
They got those corpse-sniffing dogs to search the neighborhood, and I barely slept for the next several weeks. I kept expecting to get a call that my son’s dead body had turned up, but that call never came. They never found him.
I never gave up on Dominic, but I also had to let go to some extent.
If I didn’t, I would have spent every waking hour searching for him until I eventually starved to death on the street.
A friend of mine offered me a job opportunity in the Northeast, and with my record, I couldn’t afford to turn it down.
When I moved, it wasn’t reasonable to take his bassinet and baby clothing, so I donated all of it.
I figured when I found him, he’d be too big for all that stuff anyway.
The only thing I saved was the elephant toy, which I planned to give to him when we were reunited.
And we would be reunited.
Clay served time in jail for possession, and he tried to talk to me when he got out, but I refused to take all his calls and wouldn’t open the door when he showed up at my apartment.
He got down on his knees and begged me for forgiveness, sobbing that he couldn’t live without me, but I couldn’t even look at him, much less forgive him.
At best, he didn’t protect Dominic from being taken. At worst, he might’ve killed him.
After I moved out of St. Louis, I never saw him again. A couple of years ago, I heard that he died of an overdose. I wasn’t surprised. I didn’t bother to go to his funeral or even shed a single tear. If I thought it would have brought Dominic back, I would have killed him myself.
The job opportunity was in New York City, where I worked with my friend for a while, then bounced from job to job.
Every apartment I had was a dump, and I got paid minimum wage.
There were days when I wanted a hit so badly, it was physically painful, but Dominic kept me clean.
If I started using again, I’d never be able to find my son.
And my gut was telling me that he was out there somewhere and that he needed me.
Now I’ve got a good gig working for the Simington family, doing some housework and helping to take care of their two children.
The kids are great, and I try not to think about the fact that the youngest is only a little older than Dominic would have been.
I mean, a little older than Dominic is. The only bad part of the job is Kathy, the housekeeper, who hates my guts.
During the first week I was working there, the kids and I made a mess in the kitchen baking cookies, and I really meant to clean it up, but after I got the two of them out of the bath to wash the flour out of their hair, I completely forgot.
Even worse, Maxim Simington scolded Kathy for leaving a messy kitchen before I could let everyone know it was my fault.
After getting reamed out, Kathy can’t forgive me.
She is always telling Rhona Simington that I’m flirting with her husband, trying to get me fired. Thankfully, Rhona doesn’t believe it.
At night, I dream about Dominic. My son is still alive. I know that he has to be. If he were dead, I would feel it. It would be like if somebody cut off my leg; I’d notice. Just because he’s not actually with me, it doesn’t mean that he isn’t somewhere out there.
I fantasize sometimes about his life. I imagine that some rich couple adopted him, and he’s got everything he could ever dream of. It’s so much nicer than thinking about him being dead and buried in the ground.
I’ve always been living paycheck to paycheck, but one of these days, I will scrape together enough money to hire a private detective to help find him. But right now, I can’t even scrape enough together to fix my cracked rear fender.
While I am driving over to the children’s school, my phone starts ringing. I glance at the screen, and the name “Lola” flashes. I wince like I always do when she calls. Lola is part of my old life, which included Dominic. It’s painful to talk to her.
But then again, she used to be my best friend. She was the only one there for me when Dominic disappeared and Clay was in jail. So I put the phone on speaker.
“Ronnie?” she says.
“Uh-huh.” I keep my eyes on the road. People drive like maniacs around here. “Everything okay?”
“Yes, but…” Her voice is high-pitched and excited. “Ronnie, I might have a lead about Dominic.”
What?
I don’t have much time before I need to pick up the kids, but I pull over on the side of the road. I pick up the phone and press it to my ear. “What about Dominic?”
“I don’t want you to get your hopes up,” she says, “but you know how I told you I got that job at town hall in the records department?”
Lola’s life has been going pretty good. Like me, she got herself clean, and she is still living in St. Louis, where she scored a decent job, and she is engaged.
But what I envy most about her is the fact that she doesn’t have nightmares every night about the moment she opened Clay’s car door to only discover an empty back seat. “Yes…” I say.
“Well, this woman named Lorraine Paxson who used to work here just retired,” she says, “and I got to talking about her with another woman who works here, and she was telling me all these stories about sketchy things that Lorraine used to do. Like, if you wanted some certificate but you didn’t have everything you needed, you’d just slip Lorraine a few bucks and she would make it happen. ”
“Okay…”
“So I got to thinking about Dominic,” she goes on, “and how if someone did take him and wanted to pretend he belonged to them, they would need a birth certificate, right? But those are hard to get outside a hospital, because you need proof of the pregnancy and delivery.”
“They could have just gotten a fake one,” I point out.
“Maybe,” she says, “or maybe Lorraine somehow made it happen. It would have made sense for the kidnapper to take the baby across state lines before trying anything, but if they knew Lorraine was a sure thing, they might have gone to her first. Anyway, I got curious, so I started searching the database for a couple of weeks around when Dominic disappeared. And here’s the wild part…
” She pauses. “There was a birth certificate for a boy named Theodore issued about a week after Dominic disappeared, and the name of the mother was Naomi Paxson. Same last name as Lorraine!”
“Do…do you think they’re related?”
“They are! I looked up Naomi Paxson’s birth certificate, and Lorraine is her mother.”
I sit there for a moment, absorbing this information. Is it possible that this is somehow linked to Dominic? Did Naomi Paxson find Dominic in Clay’s car and take him for herself, then get her mother to make her a birth certificate, officially claiming the baby as her own?
“Is there a father listed?” I ask.
“Yes. Jeremy Roth is the father.”
I turn this information over in my head. “I don’t know, Lola,” I say. “I don’t want to get my hopes up. It just seems so…unlikely.”
“But it’s worth investigating, isn’t it?”
The hopefulness in Lola’s voice tugs at me. In the months after Dominic’s disappearance, I was always hoping he would turn up. I still feel that way, of course, but I’ve become more realistic. I don’t think my missing son is going to somehow just fall into my lap.
But I miss feeling hopeful. I miss that feeling, like I might actually get him back—like I might get to hold him in my arms again one day.
He would be five years old. He’s still young enough for the stuffed elephant that I have brought with me everywhere I have moved since the day he disappeared.
“You’re right,” I say. “It’s worth investigating.”