by Laura Hankin
As the other women looked at one another in shock, a slow siren of a wail rose up through Ellie’s body. “Are you kidding me?” she yelled, collapsing onto a couch. “Vicki gets to be totally okay? What kind of random monsters run TrueMommy? Are we being tortured by Satan or something? Is this a psychological experiment designed to break us? Good job, Satan. I’m breaking!” As Ellie began to cry, Meredith sat down next to her and stroked her hair.
“Have you guys been to the website?” Claire asked. “It just says ‘Under Construction,’ and then lists an e-mail address. And I couldn’t find anything else about it on the Internet.”
“I know,” Amara said. “I looked last night. I couldn’t find anything about a Dr. Lauren Clark from MIT either.”
“What?” Gwen asked. “But when we started taking it, I looked it up—I did research. I always do research! They had a website then with all sorts of testimonials and this nice, clean design. I haven’t googled it since February, though, so maybe it was all fake and they just put it up when they were trying to convince us to buy in?”
“We’ve got to destroy TrueMommy,” Amara said. “I want those motherfuckers to wish they’d never been born.”
“I agree,” Ellie said through her sniffles as she crammed another Oreo into her mouth.
“Whitney,” Claire said, clearheaded and ready for action, “you should post something about it on your Instagram. Blow the whole thing wide-open. Because they’ve got to be taking advantage of other moms too, right?”
“Yes! Whitney, you should,” Gwen said, nodding. “You have so many followers. It would definitely get the word out.” They all looked at Whitney, who hadn’t moved from her strange, inward stillness on the couch.
“Maybe,” Whitney said at last, her eyes still unfocused, her hands still clenched in her lap, pressing the nail of her right thumb, hard, into the flesh of her left palm.
“‘Maybe’?” Claire asked, bouncing Charlie in her arms.
“What do you mean, ‘maybe’?” Amara asked. “This is serious, Whitney.”
“I know that,” Whitney said, and for the first time on this uncommon day, she looked at them straight on. “So think about the consequences. Yes, I have a lot of followers. And they love me—they love us. But they hate us a little bit too, because we show them the life they want and will probably never have. If we tell them about TrueMommy, that all this perfection we’ve been selling them is a lie, imagine how gleefully they’ll rip us apart. They’ll think we knew exactly what we were doing. This is what scandals are made of. It’ll be goodbye to the coffee-table book, and hello to a whole different kind of fame: the Pill-Popping Playgroup, the Stay-at-Home Junkies.”
“Please tell me that this isn’t about the fucking coffee-table book,” Amara hissed, her hands clenching into fists.
“It’s not,” Whitney said. “It’s about the fact that once we go public, we could have people—reporters, tabloids—invading every aspect of our lives. They’ll follow us around, sticking cameras into our babies’ faces. They’ll interview people from our past, asking if they ever could have known we’d turn out like this. They’ll try to dig up other unsavory things we may have done. We’ll be marked forever as bad mothers. I don’t want this to be the first thing that someone sees when they google Hope twenty years from now, but it might be. Our children will get dragged into this.”
“Wait,” Gwen said, shaking a bit and cradling Reagan in her lap. “No one would call Child Protective Services on us, right? They couldn’t— I mean, we didn’t know.”
“Oh, God. We all kind of did, though,” Amara said, sinking down onto the floor, her face naked and vulnerable. She reached out to take Charlie from Claire and held him close against her chest. “Right? I mean, none of us has been shouting from the mountaintops that we were taking this supplement. On some level, we knew something was off about it. It was too good to be true—the energy it gave us, the way it was finally easy to lose weight. How could we not know?” The other women’s eyes grew guilty. Gwen began to silently cry, large droplets streaming down her cheeks as Amara went on. “They’ll ask me why I was paying for it out of my private banking account, why I didn’t talk about such a big monthly purchase with my husband. They’ll ask Whitney why she didn’t write long, glowing posts about it online.”
The mothers all clutched their children and looked at one another with a growing certainty. Claire sensed a seismic shift, a planet stopping its spin mid-orbit and heading the other way, the wrong way.
“Don’t post about it, Whitney,” Ellie said.
“No,” Claire said. “Come on. I think people will think that you’re brave for coming forward.”
“And I think that you’re vastly overestimating the generosity of human nature,” Amara said.
“Then I could tell people,” Claire said. “I could try to spread the word.”
“We’re your only playgroup. It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out how you knew about it. With all due respect, Claire,” Whitney said, “this isn’t your decision to make. You’re not the one who will suffer.”
“I could look into filing an anonymous complaint with the Better Business Bureau,” Gwen said. “Then at least we’ll have done something.”
“That’s a really good idea, Gwen,” Whitney said. “And when TrueMommy contacts me about the next shipment, I can tell them that we know what they’re up to and threaten to go public if they don’t stop what they’re doing. They don’t need to know that we don’t mean it. Maybe that will be a deterrent.”
“So we don’t spread the word,” Amara said. “But is there some way under the radar that we can figure out what the fuck is going on with these monsters?”
“A private investigator,” Gwen said haltingly. She cleared her throat. “It’s embarrassing, but I was doing research on them anyway, because of the Christopher . . . thing. I found some guys online who seemed like they might be good. I could hire one of them for both—”
Whitney inhaled sharply. “You want to entrust this information to a stranger from the Internet who seems like he might be good?” she asked, her eyes blazing. “You want a private investigator—not exactly known to be the most honorable guys on the planet—poking around in your life, having dirt on you, the kind of dirt that could impact your child’s well-being?”
“I–I—” Gwen stuttered, then shook her head.
“The more people who know about this, the greater chance it has of coming out, of destroying everything,” Whitney said. She took a deep breath and looked them each in the eye. “No. I vote that we don’t tell anyone about this. No friends, no husbands. We keep going about our lives as normally as we can. We help one another get through this, like we’ve helped one another before. We do our best to move forward. I know we want to destroy TrueMommy—believe me, I’d like nothing more than to burn them to the ground—but we’ve got to think of our families. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” Ellie and Meredith said in unison.
Vicki nodded.
“I . . . I guess so,” Gwen said.
They all looked at Amara. “Yeah,” she said, and then let out a long, low sigh. “Shit. Yeah.”
Whitney fixed her gaze on Claire, and the other mothers followed suit. “Claire,” she said, “we need to know that you understand and that you’re with us on this.”
“I . . . ,” Claire said, shifting uncomfortably. “I mean, I’m not going to tell people if you don’t want me to.”
“We need your word,” Whitney said. “No getting drunk with your friends and bringing it up as a fun, crazy anecdote, even with our names removed. You can’t ever say anything about this.”
“Okay, I won’t,” Claire said, but the other women looked at one another, unconvinced. She’d marched into the apartment today like a savior, and now she’d become a threat.
“Oh, I know!” Ellie said. “Tell us something incriminating so that
we have dirt on you too. Then, if you tell, we tell.” Meredith nodded and leaned forward like she always did when juicy gossip came up at playgroup, but this time, she had no hint of excitement on her face, just worry.
“I don’t really know if there is anything,” Claire said. “I probably drink too much?”
“So do we all,” Ellie said. “That doesn’t count.”
Claire caught Amara’s eye, and she knew that Amara was thinking about Vagabond and Marcus and Quinton’s cancer scare, about everything that Claire had revealed to her that day in her apartment. Amara swallowed. Then she shook her head.
“Come on,” Amara said. “Let’s not be ridiculous. We can trust Claire.”
“Okay,” Whitney said. “Then it’s settled.”
Chapter 24
Amara and Claire walked out of Whitney’s building together in silence. In his stroller, Charlie was quiet, almost contemplative, with his bow lips turned down. Claire felt contemplative too and deeply unnerved. Across the street in Central Park, the daffodils bloomed and shook in the breeze.
“It is strange about Vicki,” Amara said, and cleared her throat. “That she was the only one still breastfeeding when we started taking TrueMommy and the only one who ended up with placebos.”
“What do you mean?” Claire asked.
Amara furrowed her forehead as if staring at a complicated jigsaw. “Well, it seems like the TrueMommy people didn’t want to give her something that might get into her breast milk and hurt her baby, right?”
“Yeah,” Claire said. She stopped walking and chewed on the sleeve of her hoodie. “Yeah, that’s got to be the reason.”
Amara’s words came more urgently now. “But I don’t think she breastfed in front of Dr. Clark, so how did TrueMommy know?”
“Holy shit,” Claire said as the two women stared at each other. “What are you saying?”
Amara thought for a second and then shook her head, all her energy draining away. “Nothing. I’m being ridiculous. She must have put it on the form.” She rubbed her eyes, her face more drawn than Claire had ever seen it. “You could submit a form each month if you wanted to, to tell them what issues you were having so they could specifically ‘curate’ a vitamin mix for you, which of course they probably never did.”
“Yeah, but is Vicki the type to fill out a form? It’s Vicki.” Claire paused. “It’s convenient too that the flighty one who forgot to take the pills regularly is the only one who ended up with the placebos.”
“Well, Dr. Clark probably realized she was flighty from meeting her. It’s hard not to. So let’s just forget it.” Amara turned to keep walking, but Claire tugged at her shoulder
“Really, though, how did TrueMommy know?” Claire asked.
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” Amara said, her voice tightening in frustration. “There’s nothing to talk about.”
“This might sound a little crazy,” Claire said. “But is it possible that someone who knows you guys could be connected somehow? Feeding TrueMommy information or something?”
“You think someone targeted us personally?” Amara asked, her jaw clenching. “Like who?”
“I don’t know! Someone who’s jealous of you, maybe.” Claire gasped. “Like Joanna. From what you told me, she’s not exactly the most stable person in the world, and—”
“Claire,” Amara said. “Are you a conspiracy theorist? One of those ‘nine-eleven was an inside job’ people? Do you believe that the government killed JFK and faked the moon landing and that Beyoncé is part of the Illuminati?”
“. . . No.”
“Well, that’s what you sound like right now. Maybe poor, depressed Joanna pushed drugs on us, because she’s jealous of our playgroup? You don’t even know Joanna. She’d never do something like that. This is clearly a fucked-up scam targeting rich mothers with online presences, and we all fell for it, and that’s that.”
“You’re the one who brought up that something seemed fishy—”
“Yeah, and then I realized that I was being nuts! This isn’t a game, some fun little mystery to solve. It’s my life, and it’s really, really bad.”
“I know.” Claire reached for Amara’s hand, but Amara pulled it away. “I’m sorry. It’s just, if it is targeting other mothers . . . you can’t be okay with this secret pact you guys made in there. You’re not all starring in I Know What You Did Last Summer: Mommy Edition. What about your responsibility to the women out there who are still falling for it?”
“My responsibility right now is to my child. I’ve been failing him for months, and starting now I need to do whatever I can to protect him.”
Claire threw up her hands. “I don’t understand you sometimes! You’re so freaking smart and amazing, but you just give up on things like this, like your job, so you can maintain some kind of status quo—”
“You don’t understand,” Amara snapped, “because you aren’t a mother! All right? You don’t understand what it’s like to worry every single minute that you’re doing something to hurt your child, who is the most precious thing to you in the entire world, and then to realize that while you were reading and rereading your baby books, all along you were actually doing something that none of those books ever mentioned, something that could fucking ruin him and his future.” She spoke slowly and deliberately, every word like a tiny poison dart. “Don’t lecture me about responsibility, Claire. You’ve never had a real responsibility in your life. Grow up already.”
The poison darts hit their marks. Claire cleared her throat. “Wow. Okay,” she said.
Amara sighed. “Oh, Lord. I didn’t mean that. Obviously, I’m extra irritable right now.”
“Classic withdrawal temper,” Claire said. “And I didn’t mean to lecture you.”
“It’s fine. I think I just need to get home,” Amara said. “I shouldn’t have brought this up in the first place. Can you please promise me that you’ll leave it alone?” Claire hesitated for a fraction of a second, and Amara’s eyes narrowed. She leaned forward. “Hey, I vouched for you back there. I made the decision to trust you because you’re my friend and I care for you, and now I need you to prove that I was right to do that. Promise me, Claire.”
“Okay,” Claire said. “I promise.”
Amara stepped back and let out a long breath. “All right, then. Thank you. I’ll see you at a playgroup tomorrow.” She stopped and shook her head. “No, there’s no way I’m making it out of the house for that. I’ll see you at the photo shoot Thursday.”
“See you then,” Claire said.
Chapter 25
Amara tossed and turned the entire night. Awful nightmares flashed through her head, a sequence of dreams in which Charlie died because of her negligence. The blanket in his crib smothered him while she danced and laughed like an idiot alone in the living room. He fell off the balcony at playgroup while she drank a glass of wine inside. He choked on a grape, he stuck his finger in an outlet, he toppled a chest of drawers on top of himself, all while she did nothing, nothing, nothing.
Each time a dream woke her up, she crept out of bed. She moved through the apartment, which was as silent and full of dread as a log cabin in the woods, and went to his nursery. She stood above his crib and watched him breathe, the palpitations of her heart booming out into the peaceful room. As she listened to it beat, she became aware too of her own mortality in a way that she’d never been before. There was so much danger in the outside world, within her own body. An accidental overdose, a car crash, a sudden malfunction of her cells could whisk her away from Charlie in a flash, leaving him wounded for the rest of his life, one of those motherless children who was always searching for something he’d never be able to have.
She normally woke up in the morning when Daniel’s alarm went off, but on Tuesday, Daniel had to poke her awake right before he left for work. He handed her a mug of coffee with a fresh swirl of milk di
sappearing into it. “Someone was restless last night,” he said. “You feeling okay?”
She looked up at his kind, concerned face, and a bolt of rage passed through her. Not at Daniel, but at the injustice of it all. Why was there no fucking TrueDaddy? The answer was clear. Because men wouldn’t fall for it. Not that they were smarter—Amara firmly believed she could trounce the average man in a battle of wits—but because they weren’t primed from birth like women were, told that they could be anything they wanted to be while handicapped at every turn by invisible forces, told that they were more than just their looks while also culturally programmed to believe that their value was tied to their desirability. Men aged into silver foxes while women aged into obsolescence. And when you added in children, oh, that was when everything really went to shit. Because even though fathers stamped children with their last names, the world didn’t ask as much of them. No one really expected fathers to consider giving up their careers to put their children first, to stop managing a company and start managing a household. Women had to grapple with a choice that men never did while remaining uncomplaining and generous so that they didn’t nag their husbands straight into the arms of less complicated lovers. And now moms weren’t even allowed to acknowledge how much work it all was anymore. Modern women of privilege had to claim that their manic exercise routines were about strength, not a body ideal; that their beauty regimens were all natural, designed for emotional balance and skin health, rather than for looking nubile for as long as possible. No wonder they were easy targets. TrueMommy was the same old patriarchal bullshit dressed up as empowerment, and Amara had fallen for it like a fucking idiot.
Daniel kissed her forehead. “Oh, you’re sweaty!”
Despite what all the women had said at playgroup, she should tell him the truth. They were partners, after all. They’d taken vows to support each other for better and for worse, and getting accidentally hooked on Mommy Speed definitely qualified as “worse.” Whitney had said “no husbands,” but Whitney’s husband was pompous, selfish Grant. Daniel was different.