The Swap

by Robyn Harding

  * * *

  So why didn’t I call the police? Why didn’t I tell them I’d shot Freya to protect Maggie? Because they wouldn’t have believed me. When the cops interviewed my parents, they would have told them about my “inappropriate” friendship, their sexual concerns. Thompson would have told them I was obsessed with Freya, distraught because she wouldn’t love me back. I had gone to her house drunk and with a loaded gun.

  And who would believe that a woman would murder her own baby with a hammer?

  Nobody.

  69 jamie

  As I did every morning, I poured a cup of coffee, sat at the kitchen table, and looked at Freya’s Instagram. It was an exercise in torture: seeing my former best friend on her trip to wine country, looking gorgeous on her oceanside deck, snuggling with her adorable daughter. It made me feel sick, sad, and jealous. But it was the only way I could catch a glimpse of Maggie, to ensure that she was safe and thriving. Our pricey lawyer had instructed us to stay away from the trio while our petition for a paternity test traveled through the courts. Low had not fed me any information for a few days, and I was still waiting for the results from the secret DNA test. Social media was my only connection to our child.

  Freya’s post, that morning, was a photo of her with the baby. But this image was different than the rest. Maggie, wearing only a diaper, appeared to be screaming. Freya, dressed in a sexy white outfit, was struggling to breastfeed her. Her expression was overwhelmed, angry, and disappointed, all at once. The caption was long and cryptic.

  You see my photos and you see a beautiful woman with a beautiful baby and a beautiful home. But you don’t see the loneliness and despair. You don’t see the hurt and sorrow. No one wants to hear about the dark side of motherhood. No one wants to talk about the difficulties of bonding with your child, of breastfeeding, of playing the role of mommy when you don’t feel it. I can’t tell anyone about the black thoughts where I want to hurt my own child, when I want to make her disappear. And when I say my baby would be better off without me, no one wants to listen. No one wants to hear it. But it’s the truth. And I will do what is best for my daughter. Goodbye.

  #postpartumdepression #sacrifice #sorry

  I took the phone to Brian’s office, where he was working on his latest novel.

  He read it, his brow furrowed, then looked up at me. “What does it mean?”

  “It’s a suicide note,” I said, my voice barely a whisper. “I’m sure of it.”

  “No,” he said. “Who would leave a suicide note on Instagram?”

  “Lots of people,” I said. “Freya.”

  He knew I was right. I could see it in his eyes.

  “I have to call Max,” I said. “I have to go over there.”

  “You can’t. Any contact could be seen as harassment. It could be used against us in court.”

  “But if Freya is dead…”

  “But if she’s not…”

  Neither of us spoke for a few moments, the weight of what Freya may have done settling on us. Finally, I said, “Low might know something.”

  Brian nodded. “It’s worth a try.”

  But Low had been banished, she said, when I phoned her. “I don’t know what’s going on with her. She wasn’t coping. She was freaking out. But when I tried to help her, she sent me away.”

  “Do you think she would… kill herself?”

  “She talked about it. A lot. I didn’t think she really meant it.…” I heard Low sigh. “I’ll try to talk to Max. I’ll keep you posted.”

  And so, we waited.

  “We’ll know the truth, soon enough,” Brian said. “Small towns like to talk.”

  But that day passed, with no answers and no whispers. And then another. Low didn’t respond to my texts. I didn’t reach out to Max. I convinced myself that Freya was fine. Her Instagram post was just a cry for attention. She was being overly dramatic, as was her habit, manipulating people into worrying about her. I screenshotted the post to use as evidence of her instability in our custody fight.

  It was on the morning of the third day, when Brian and I were having toast and coffee in our pajamas, that a vehicle crunched down our drive. Visitors to our home were rare in general, and even more rare at 6:45 A.M. We both moved to the front of the house and peered out the window. Crawling toward us was Max’s black Range Rover.

  My heart was in my throat as I watched the big athlete get out of the vehicle and walk around to the back door. He moved slowly, like he was in pain. Or in mourning. Or both. Reaching into the back, he withdrew a bucket car seat. And in it was our beautiful baby.

  “He brought Maggie,” I whispered, tears filling my eyes.

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” Brian said, practical and cautious. “We don’t know why he’s here.”

  I hung back as Brian opened the door and ushered Max and the baby inside. Max had a bulging diaper bag on his shoulder, and my chest fluttered with hope. There would be no need to pack so much gear for a short visit.

  He eschewed pleasantries. “Freya’s gone,” he said.

  Brian’s eyes flitted to mine. Then he said, “Gone where?”

  “She just disappeared.” He swallowed. “The police think she jumped off a cliff into the ocean.”

  “Oh God,” I cried. While I had suspected suicide, hearing it articulated was devastating. Tears pricked my eyes for the loss of the woman I’d once loved, the woman I’d thought was my best friend, the mother of the beautiful little girl before me.

  “They’ve dragged the coastline near our property, but they haven’t found her.”

  Brian said, “Could she have left? Gone back to LA or somewhere else?”

  “Her wallet and credit cards are still at the house. Her parents and old contacts haven’t heard from her. Only her phone is missing. I don’t know if you saw her Instagram post…”

  “We did,” I said. “We’ve been concerned.”

  “I would have called you, but the police have been interrogating me.” He shifted the car seat into his other hand. “I’ve been cleared.”

  Brian and I both nodded. “Good.”

  Max took a labored breath. “I want Maggie to live with you.”

  “Really?” I gasped, not sure I could believe my own ears.

  “She doesn’t belong to me. I know that. And I can’t take care of her on my own. She deserves two parents who will love and adore her.”

  “We will,” I said, the tears spilling over. “I promise.”

  “Thank you,” Brian said, clearing the emotion from his throat. “We’ll be the best parents we can be.”

  “I’m moving back up north,” Max continued. “I need to be close to my family. I need some quiet. I’ve put the house on the market, but you can come and get her furniture. We’ve got everything she needs.”

  I nodded slightly, but I was too overcome to speak.

  “I called my lawyer in the city about custody. Freya named me as the baby’s father, so my attorney said a formal adoption will be the easiest. The paperwork shouldn’t take too long.”

  He set down the car seat and knelt to peer in at Maggie. “Have a good life, little one.” He stroked her soft cheek with his big fingers.

  Maggie gurgled and smiled at him. My heart twisted in my chest.

  “She’ll be happy here,” Max said to us. “This is right.” Without looking back, he left.

  * * *

  That’s how Maggie became ours. It was an adjustment, at first, but we joyfully made it. I cared for her in the mornings while Brian wrote. When I opened the store at ten, he took over the childcare duties. At noon, after she had her lunch, Brian brought Maggie to the store, where she napped in the back room. I’d found a new assistant—a lovely senior named Joyce, who was more than capable of managing customers while I tended to my daughter’s needs. At the end of my shift, I took Maggie home for dinner, a bath, and bed. I was exhausted but happy. The baby was happy, too. She never made strange with us; she never seemed to miss Freya and Max. It was like she, too, kn
ew this was where she belonged.

  Two weeks after we became parents, a manila envelope arrived at Hawking Mercantile. I barely glanced at the unfamiliar return address; I knew it was from Max’s lawyers. These would be the documents required to make our parenthood official. Excitedly, I slid my thumb under the sealed flap and pulled out the pages. But they weren’t custody papers. They were the results of Maggie’s paternity test.

  We didn’t need them now. Maggie was our child and biology was irrelevant. And Brian wouldn’t thank me for going behind his back, for ignoring his advice. I would destroy the report, put it through a shredder or toss it in the fire. But first… I had to look.

  It stated, unequivocally, that Maggie was not Brian’s child.

  I sat down heavily on the stool behind the till. Maggie was Max’s daughter. Freya had been fighting to keep her child from us because we had no claim to her. But Freya had lied about the date of conception. Faked the ultrasound images. Perhaps she’d been unsure of her daughter’s paternity, too. But now, I knew the truth. As I slipped the papers back into the envelope, I wondered if Freya had had other lovers I didn’t know about. But no… we had been friends when Maggie was conceived. I would have known if she had been sleeping with other men.

  Joyce must have noticed my shock, because she asked, “Are you okay?”

  I forced a smile. “I’m fine.”

  And I was fine. This didn’t matter. This didn’t change anything. The adoption papers would arrive soon, and Maggie would be legally ours. One day, she would want to know about her birth parents, might want to test her DNA. One day, we would bring Max back into his daughter’s life, but not now.

  Now, she was ours.

  70 low

  I don’t like to say that the Hawking police were stupid, but they were stupid. They were so fixated on Max, on his fight with Freya, and on searching the main house, that they barely inspected the studio. They walked through it, climbed up into the attic, and opened the kiln. When they found it empty but for a tiny pile of ash, they closed the lid and walked away. They may have known that a cremation oven leaves approximately one cubic inch of ash per pound of body (I knew this because Freya had been commissioned to make an urn a few months back). But they didn’t know that incinerating a person at significantly higher temperature reduces that residue. And if they had sifted through the fine dust that once was Freya, they would have found it: a small misshapen disk the size of a large thumb print. It was an alloy of copper and lead, melted and then hardened. It was the bullet that had been buried in her heart.

  It was the only souvenir I kept of the woman I’d loved so fiercely. Her phone and her rings were at the bottom of the Pacific, along with the gun and the shell casing. I’d taken Vik’s aluminum fishing boat out for the afternoon and jettisoned the evidence off the side. (No one thought my trip was unusual. Before Freya, I used to spend hours alone on the water under the auspices of fishing.) I burned the sex photos of Freya and Max, and then I laid low for a couple of weeks, photographing my siblings, enthusiastically eating my mother’s dal, acting normal. When I knew that no one could ever link me to Freya’s disappearance, I returned to the scene of the crime.

  The FOR SALE sign was already planted on the verge as I pulled into the driveway. Max was in the garage, packing up his boating gear, but he emerged when he heard my vehicle.

  “You’re leaving,” I said, as I got out of my truck.

  “Yep. The police cleared me. Did they talk to you?”

  “For about five minutes. They wanted to know about Freya’s ‘state of mind.’ ”

  Max nodded. It was clear to everyone that she’d been suicidal. “I’m going back to the Yukon,” he said.

  “And Maggie?”

  “She’s with Brian and Jamie. They’re her parents, now. She’ll be better off.”

  I nodded my agreement.

  We were both taciturn types, so there was a long tense silence while thoughts raced through my mind. Max had been unconscious when I shot Freya; he couldn’t know that I had killed her to save his daughter. Unless… somewhere in his injured brain, he had heard the gun go off. Unless, his sightless eyes had flickered open and witnessed what I had done. Did he know that I had considered, however briefly, incinerating his body, and running off with his wife?

  “Take anything you want,” Max said. “From the house or the studio. Freya would have wanted you to have it. I want you to have it.”

  Okay, so he didn’t know.

  I said, “I don’t want anything of hers.”

  “She cared about you, Low. As much as she was capable of caring about anyone. She hadn’t had an easy life. It fucked her up.”

  I’ll say. But I didn’t. I forced a tight smile. “Good luck, Max.” I wandered down to the studio.

  * * *

  That’s when I scooped Freya’s ashes out of the kiln and found the pellet that had ended her life. There were shelves of her pots, vases, and dishes, at various stages of finish. They were delicate and beautiful, made by her talented hands. But I didn’t want reminders of that toxic relationship and its violent end. Even if I had, I couldn’t take them where I was going. No, I wasn’t here for me. I was here for Maggie.

  Selecting a small bud vase, glazed in robin’s-egg blue, I deposited a sprinkling of Freya’s ashes in the bottom. It was not an urn, exactly; no one would know that the fine powder inside was anything but dust from the studio. But I would take it to Maggie. She should have a little piece of her mother.

  I drove to Jamie’s store. When I entered, I was greeted by an elderly woman with a big smile. “Hello,” my replacement said. “Can I help you find something?”

  What a keener. I’d let customers browse for a while before I pounced on them. “Is Jamie here?”

  The smile slipped from her face as she recognized me, as she put the pieces together. I knew what she thought, what everyone in town thought. That I was part of the sordid sexual shenanigans that led to Freya’s suicide. That the five of us had had daily orgies until Freya found herself pregnant by her best friend’s husband.

  “She’s in the back room with the baby.”

  I brushed past her. “I know the way.”

  The door to the storage room was slightly ajar, so I pressed it open. The space had been transformed into a kind of nursery, with a playpen and a rocking chair. Jamie was seated with Maggie in her arms, giving her a bottle. The expression on her face was pure bliss.

  “Hey,” I whispered.

  She looked up and smiled at me. “Low.”

  “I brought this. For Maggie.” I unwrapped the newspaper protecting the vase and set it on a shelf.

  “It’s beautiful. Freya was so talented.” Jamie’s eyes were misty. “To think she felt so desolate and overwhelmed that she…” She couldn’t say it.

  “But it all worked out for the best,” I said lightly.

  She half shrugged, half nodded. She didn’t want to articulate the truth.

  “I’m leaving,” I said. “In a few weeks.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “My friend Thompson and I are moving to Seattle.”

  “Thompson?” She cocked an eyebrow and her lips twitched with a smile.

  “It’s not like that,” I snapped. Thompson and I were not romantically involved. But I had gone to the drugstore to apologize for my behavior in the barn that day.

  “Sorry for being a drunken asshole,” I’d muttered. Thompson was still hurt, still angry. He’d given me the cold shoulder, and so I had slunk away. So much for trying to be a decent human being.

  But a few days later, after he’d heard about Freya’s disappearance, he had shown up at my house. “Sorry for your loss.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I know how you felt about her. This must be really hard.”

  “You were right. It wasn’t real,” I said. “I’m trying to let it go and move on.”

  He kicked the ground with his ratty sneaker. “Want to get some pizza?”

  It’s n
ot like I had anything else to do. “Sure.”

  It was in “our booth” that I told him I was leaving the island, that I needed a fresh start. He had chewed thoughtfully for a moment before he said, “Want a roommate?”

  “I’m not into you,” I said quickly.

  “Yeah, I got that,” Thompson said, with the slightest roll of his eyes. “But I could use a change of scene, too. We could split the rent on a two-bedroom place.”

  I had taken a sip of Coke. “You’re sure you’re not in love with me.”

  “Super sure.”

  And so, I had agreed.

  But now Jamie was looking at me like I was about to elope. “Thompson wanted to move, and I needed a roommate,” I said. “I’ll start college in the fall.”

  “That’s amazing.” Jamie’s face lit up. “I’m so proud of you.”

  “It was always my plan,” I lied.

  It hadn’t been, as you know. I’d been scared to leave the island, afraid I wouldn’t fit in in the big wide world. But Freya had changed me. For better or worse. She had pushed me to the brink of my sanity, forced me to commit an unthinkable act, and I had done it. I had killed the woman I loved to protect a baby from certain death. And I had gotten away with it. There was no need to feel fearful or intimidated anymore. By anyone.

  I was formidable.

  Maggie had finished her bottle and was dozing in her mother’s arms. Jamie carefully rose from the chair and placed her baby in the playpen. I watched the sleeping child for a moment. She looked so much like Freya. Would the resemblance haunt Jamie and Brian? Would Maggie inherit the cruel, sociopathic-bitch gene? Or would the love of two solid (if a little dull) parents allow her to grow up stable, confident, normal…?

  Jamie ushered me out of the room and back into the shop. There were a couple of customers, but the old lady had them well in hand.

  “Thanks for bringing the vase. And for coming to say goodbye.”

  “Sure.”