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“She was playing to herself,” Concetta said. “She woke up . . . she couldn’t get back to sleep right
away . . . so she played herself a little lullaby.”
6
One Monday afternoon just about a year after the fall of the Twin Towers, Abra—walking by now and
with recognizable words beginning to emerge from her all-but-constant gabble—teetered her way to
the front door and plopped down there with her favorite doll in her lap.
“Whatcha doon, sweetheart?” Lucy asked. She was sitting at the piano, playing a Scott Joplin rag.
“Dada!” Abra announced.
“Honey, Dada won’t be home until supper,” Lucy said, but fifteen minutes later the Acura pulled
up the drive and Dave got out, hauling his briefcase. There had been a water-main break in the
building where he taught his Monday-Wednesday-Friday classes, and everything had been canceled.
“Lucy told me about that,” Concetta said, “and of course I already knew about the 9/11 crying jag
and the phantom piano. I took a run up there a week or two later. I told Lucy not to say a word to
Abra about my visit. But Abra knew. She planted herself in front of the door ten minutes before I
showed up. When Lucy asked who was coming, Abra said, ‘Momo.’ ”
“She does that a lot,” David said. “Not every time someone’s coming, but if it’s someone she knows
and likes . . . almost always.”
In the late spring of 2003, Lucy found her daughter in their bedroom, tugging at the second drawer
of Lucy’s dresser.
“Mun!” she told her mother. “Mun, mun!”
“I don’t get you, sweetie,” Lucy said, “but you can look in the drawer if you want to. It’s just some
old underwear and leftover cosmetics.”
But Abra had no interest in the drawer, it seemed; didn’t even look in it when Lucy pulled it out to
show her what was inside.
“Hind! Mun!” Then, drawing a deep breath. “Mun hind, Mama!”
Parents never become absolutely fluent in Baby—there’s not enough time—but most learn to
speak it to some degree, and Lucy finally understood that her daughter’s interest wasn’t in the
contents of the dresser but in something behind it.
Curious, she pulled it out. Abra darted into the space immediately. Lucy, thinking that it would be
dusty in there even if there weren’t bugs or mice, made a swipe for the back of the baby’s shirt and
missed. By the time she got the dresser out far enough to slip into the gap herself, Abra was holding
up a twenty-dollar bill that had found its way through the hole between the dresser’s surface and the
bottom of the mirror. “Look!” she said gleefully. “Mun! My mun!”
“Nope,” Lucy said, plucking it out of the small fist, “babies don’t get mun because they don’t need
mun. But you did just earn yourself an ice cream cone.”
“I-keem!” Abra shouted. “My i-keem!”
“Now tell Doctor John about Mrs. Judkins,” David said. “You were there for that.”
“Indeed I was,” Concetta said. “That was some Fourth of July weekend.”
By the summer of 2003, Abra had begun speaking in—more or less—full sentences. Concetta had
come to spend the holiday weekend with the Stones. On the Sunday, which happened to be July sixth,
Dave had gone to the 7-Eleven to buy a fresh canister of Blue Rhino for the backyard barbecue. Abra
was playing with blocks in the living room. Lucy and Chetta were in the kitchen, one of them
checking periodically on Abra to make sure she hadn’t decided to pull out the plug on the TV and