The Perfect Mother

by Aimee Molloy

  Chapter Nine

  Night Four

  I feel better here.

  Shaded by the trees and shadows, the brim of a hat. Only two hours from the city, and yet I may as well be an entire world away. Thank god. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to leave, but I simply packed the car in the middle of the night and headed out before the sun rose, not a word to anyone, letting myself in before the neighbors were awake, using the key left in the flowerpot.

  It was the right choice, to leave the city and come here. I feel stable, lucid. Euphoric, even. To be honest, I haven’t felt this good in months. It’s probably the good country air, and those pills the doctor gave me before I left the hospital, something to take the edge off.

  Okay, I need to get down to business. I don’t know why I’m feeling coy about writing this, but . . .

  Joshua and I. We’re back together.

  It’s too good to be true, and god how I hate to jinx it, but there you have it. I did it. I went to see him. I thought he was going to be angry with me for showing up like I did, telling him I just needed to say my piece, once and for all. But he wasn’t angry. I held myself together and explained how hard it was being without him, and how hopeless and depressed I’ve been, reminding him how happy we were in the beginning, those long nights in the bath. Lying in bed on Sunday mornings, reading aloud. Shakespeare. Maya Angelou. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. And you know what? He let me talk. No, he wanted to hear these things.

  “I’ll take care of things,” I said. “For you. For us.” He smiled. “If I do, will you come home with me?” I moved closer, pulling him toward me, lost in the feel of his skin, his smell, his body pressed against mine. “You need me as much as I need you. You know it.”

  I can’t lie. I’m nervous. I’m having trouble trusting any of my decisions, and this one is no different. But then I keep thinking about that sign hanging in Dr. H’s waiting room.

  Some want it to happen. Some wish it would happen. Some make it happen.

  It makes me laugh now, remembering my first time meeting Dr. H, how I took that tacky plaque off the wall and carried it inside his office. The room smelled of carpet soap and a lingering trace of woodsy cologne left behind by his last patient. “You’re kidding,” I said, kicking off my flip-flops and tucking my legs under me, the plaque in my lap.

  “What?” he asked, his hands clasped in his lap, benevolence in his eyes. (He’s from Milwaukee.) “What am I kidding about?”

  “This plaque. What? Were all the cat posters saying Hang in There sold out?”

  But that plaque was right. I couldn’t sit around for the rest of my life thinking about being with Joshua. I couldn’t just wish to be with him. I had to make it happen, whatever it took.

  It’s not going to be easy. I think we both know that. We’ll stay here for as long as we can, until we figure out where to go next. I’m considering Indonesia, like in that book everyone loved. I’ll cut my hair. We’ll rent a house on a rice paddy, do yoga, find ourselves. I’ll learn to cook.

  But the details can wait. Right now, I just want to be here, enjoying the fresh air and warm breeze, with Joshua. This evening I grilled steaks for dinner and opened the most expensive bottle of wine I could find in the cellar. We lay in bed afterward, and after he fell asleep, I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I know he’ll wake up and wonder where I am, but I’m so content, wrapped in this silk robe, listening to the crickets, gazing out at the starlit fields left behind by people who can’t afford to farm any longer.

  I will say this: I need to stop reading the news. The media—all of them—they’re obsessed with the story. The former actress who had it all.

  Money!

  Beauty!

  A gorgeous new baby!

  Patricia Faith is even intent on making something of the date—the coincidence of a baby disappearing on the Fourth of July, his mother freed from the burden of motherhood, on Independence Day. The date, like his name, has taken on some sort of symbolic meeting. Midas. The great Greek king who turned everything to gold and then who, at least in Aristotle’s telling, starved to death for his “vain prayer.” (In other versions, of course, he was rescued at the last moment from certain death.)

  But what did I expect? Of course they’re obsessed. Entire careers have been built around stories like this. It upsets Joshua that I’m reading about it, but I’m having a hard time pulling myself away. I need to know what people are saying. Where fingers are being pointed. Especially today, now that Bodhi Mogaro was found. People have taken to the comments sections like members of a fevered mob. A guy caught with $25,000 in cash? Someone just bought himself a seat in the electric chair.

  Children are abducted all the time in Africa and in the inner cities of America, and nobody seems to care about that. Those stories don’t make it to the front page of the New York Times.

  Why is this newspaper not reporting on the eyewitness accounts of a middle-aged Caucasian man spotted the night of July fourth, sitting on a bench across from her building. It’s on all the crime blogs and confirmed by at least two anonymous sources within the NYPD. The guy is a registered sex offender, on probation after molesting a young boy.

  I’ll admit it. That last piece of information made me smile. I planted it myself. Why? Because somebody is going to pay for what happened, and I’m going to make goddamned sure it’s not me.

  Anyway, I should allow my mind to rest, to enjoy how peaceful I feel. Or how peaceful I would feel if I wasn’t so on edge, if I wasn’t imagining, every moment, that I hear my baby crying.

  Chapter Ten

  Day Five

  To: May Mothers

  From: Your friends at The Village

  Date: July 9

  Subject: Today’s advice

  Your baby: Day 56

  Happy birthday, baby! Your little one is eight weeks old today. You did it! (It’s hard to even remember a time before you became a mother, right?) Time to celebrate these last few weeks of nurturing, feeding, snuggling, and loving your new little wonder. And go ahead, have that piece of cake. You’ve earned it.

  They found a little boy, in New Jersey.

  The entire police force of a small beach community had been summoned, but it was a member of the volunteer search team who discovered him. He was a mile down the beach, walking along the reeds looking for shells, two hours after wandering away from his parents in the moment it took his mother to unpack the sandwiches.

  A girl in Maine was last seen getting off the school bus near her home. The police searched through the night, created a command post along Route 8; a rescue dog was brought in. The next morning, she was found alive at an uncle’s house.

  It happens all the time: a kid goes missing, only to be discovered safe and sound not long after. But, Francie notes once more as she scrolls through the stories on the Center for Missing Children’s website, these kids were all found within twenty-four hours.

  Five days.

  It’s been five whole days, and the police are saying nothing. Not whether they’ve found any trace of Midas, no word on whether he’s safe. They haven’t even released any information linking Bodhi Mogaro—who is still being detained on trespassing charges—to the abduction.

  Francie takes the bottle from the steamy pot of water on the stove and carries Will to the rocker, a few inches from the window fan. Shading him from the sunlight filtering through the curtains, she nestles him into the crook of her arm and lifts the bottle to his mouth, hoping (she can’t deny it) that he’s going to refuse the formula, that he’ll accept nothing other than her milk, that he’ll cry in disgust at the chemical smell. She teases his lips with the gummy orange nipple and he opens his mouth—the thin gray liquid spreading across his bottom lip—and then drinks in quick, nearly frantic gulps.

  Francie ignores the twinge of disappointment and reaches for the remote. Oliver Hood is being interviewed on CNN. A civil rights attorney who made a name for himself arguing for the release of six prisoners from Guantanamo, he announced yester
day that he’s taken on Bodhi Mogaro’s case, pro bono.

  “As far as I understand things,” the host—a middle-aged man in dark-framed glasses and a bold checked shirt—is saying, “Mogaro is currently being held on trespassing charges. But the real interest is in determining his role in the abduction of Baby Midas. Oliver Hood, what can you tell me?”

  Hood is a slight man with large round eyes. “Well, I can tell you a lot of things, but the main thing I want to say is that my client is innocent. He didn’t knowingly trespass, and he most certainly didn’t have anything to do with the disappearance of Baby Midas. This is a textbook case of racial profiling. What is the evidence against him? He was seen around Winnie Ross’s building, and he’s of Middle Eastern descent. That’s it.”

  “Well, if you talk—”

  “And it gets worse. I spoke to two detectives who say the man identified by an eyewitness as Bodhi Mogaro the night of July 4, the man said to be walking near Ms. Ross’s building, ostensibly at the time of the abduction, yelling into a phone, acting erratically”—Oliver Hood pauses for effect—“is not Bodhi Mogaro.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Hood holds up a photo of a man wearing a white surgical coat. “His name is Dr. Raj Chopra, and he’s the head of surgery at Brooklyn Methodist Hospital. He was rushing in to work, on his night off, to assist with a bus crash in which two little kids and a young mother were badly injured.”

  Francie closes her eyes, letting it sink in. Bodhi Mogaro wasn’t even there that night? If that’s true, it’s possible the police have no credible leads.

  “Well, some might argue you shouldn’t take anything a detective is saying about this at face value. Not with the mess they’ve made of this case. And your claim certainly doesn’t explain why Mogaro had that cash in his car.”

  “I’ve spoken at length with Bodhi, his wife, and his parents. Bodhi was in Brooklyn to collect money from friends and relatives in the area, to help pay the funeral expenses of an aunt who’d died back in Yemen. It’s what they do in the Muslim culture.”

  The host smirks. “And drink beer and smoke cigarettes, as Bodhi Mogaro was allegedly doing the night of July 3, as he sat on a bench watching Winnie’s house? Is that also what they do in the Muslim culture?”

  Oliver Hood laughs. “Look. Mr. and Mrs. Mogaro are new parents.” He lifts another piece of paper from the desk in front of him and holds it to the camera. Francie gasps. It’s the photograph of Bodhi Mogaro she saw at Colette’s apartment; the one in which he’s smiling widely, a baby resting on his forearms, sunglasses on his head. “This is the so-called kidnapper and his six-week-old son. Did he have a drink and a smoke one night? Yeah, but come on. He’s a new dad. Cut the guy some slack.”

  “And his flight?”

  “He missed his flight. He overslept. It was an honest mistake. He couldn’t afford another plane ticket, so he rented a car to drive home.”

  The host squints at Oliver Hood. “He was picked up three days after missing that flight. I don’t think it takes three days to drive from Brooklyn to Detroit. Even my wife’s eighty-four-year-old granny could make that trip in one day.”

  “He stopped to see an uncle in New Jersey. Then he got lost on the way. He didn’t know he’d driven onto army property. I’m telling you, Chris, the guy is innocent. It’s tragic what’s happening to him. The police better show some credible evidence and charge him, or they gotta let him go.”

  “Okay, I have to say, you make an interesting argument. This will certainly be fascinating to watch. Thank you, Oliver Hood. Now, with me via satellite from Santa Monica is my next guest, the author Antonia Framingham.” Francie sits forward. She loves this woman. She’s become very wealthy from a series of young adult mysteries—Francie has devoured every one of them—and announced yesterday that she was donating $150,000 to the NYPD to help with the investigation. Her own daughter was abducted fifteen years earlier. The police never had a single credible lead.

  “Why, Antonia, did you decide to donate this money?” the host asks her.

  “Because I know there’s nothing worse than a mother losing a child.” Francie looks down at Will, at his sparkling eyes gazing up into hers as he drinks from the bottle. “Any mother who has ever lost a child knows—”

  Francie mutes the television and sets the remote on the table beside her. The brakes of a bus whine outside her window, and the taste of diesel fumes wafts into the room, settling on her lips. She doesn’t want to think about Antonia Framingham’s loss. Or about Winnie’s loss. She particularly doesn’t want to think any more, as she has these last few days—the thoughts careening around her mind—about the loss of her own three children.

  The first one, a daughter. She’s been seeing it, so clear in her head when she’s alone. The white tiled room, the stink of antiseptic, the terrified faces of the other teenage girls waiting on the hard plastic chairs in the reception area. They, at least, were there with someone—equally terrified boys; girlfriends who sat nervously beside them, chewing half of the stick of gum they’d broken apart to share. One girl was even there with her mother, who wore large hoop earrings and clung to her daughter’s hand, telling the nurse she didn’t care what the rules were, she was going to accompany her daughter into the room. Francie’s mom was waiting for her in the car, driving circles around the Big Lots parking lot next door to the clinic, afraid she’d be spotted by someone from church.

  “You understand the risks to your body?” a nurse asked Francie after she was finally led to a sterile, chilly room and handed a blue paper gown.

  “Yes.”

  “And you have the father’s permission?”

  “My father is not around,” Francie says. “He left when I was a baby.”

  “Not your father. The baby’s.”

  “Oh.” She felt a flash of panic. “Do I need that?”

  The nurse looked up. “Not legally. But it would be nice.” Francie kept her eyes on the floor. “Can I have the father’s name?”

  “His name?”

  The nurse’s pen was suspended over her clipboard. She released a highly irritated sigh. “Yes, his name. I’m assuming you know it?”

  Of course she knew his name. James Christopher Colburn. Twenty-two years old. Graduate of St. James University, volunteer with Catholic Volunteers, science teacher at Our Lady of Perpetual Help. She’d stayed after lab and told him, explaining about the morning sickness and the positive pregnancy test. He collected his things, said he had to go, telling her he’d call later that night. The gym teacher was in his place at the front of the classroom the next day. She never saw him again.

  “No. I don’t know his name.”

  The nurse shook her head, her stiff blond curls swaying against her shoulders, saying something under her breath as she made a note on the paper. “Sign here, saying you consent to the procedure.” She cracked her gum. “Gotta make sure you won’t regret it.” Francie’s hand shook as she signed her name. She wanted to tell the woman that she didn’t consent to the procedure. She wanted to keep the baby. She could do it, she thought. The baby wasn’t due until the summer. She could give birth after graduation, get a job to support them.

  But her mother forbade it. “No, Mary Frances. I won’t hear of it. There is no room in my life for this,” Marilyn said as she roughly kneaded a ball of dough. “Things are difficult enough, raising two daughters on my own. I don’t need a baby to feed on top of everything else.”

  “Are you okay?” Marilyn asked when Francie eased herself into the front seat of her mother’s Cutlass an hour after the procedure.

  “Fine. It was quick.” They never spoke of it again.

  The two other babies she lost, the miscarriages—those were equally heartbreaking. The first, just four months after their wedding, was so early it wasn’t even real. That, at least, is what the OB in Knoxville had told her. “It’s very early, just a collection of cells. Don’t worry. Keep trying.”

  What wasn’t real about it? she wanted to a
sk, as Lowell held her hand that morning in the doctor’s office, the ghostly blue ultrasound gel drying on her abdomen. The names she’d picked out? The life she’d been imagining?

  The second—two years later, after seventeen tortured months of trying unsuccessfully to get pregnant, and then a round of IVF on her doctor’s advice—was the result of an embryo abnormality. “Something we can’t explain,” the doctor said this time. “It’s rare for someone in their twenties to have reproductive issues. But try again. Perhaps you’ll have better success on your second attempt.”

  She could explain it. It was exactly what the nurse at the clinic had warned her about—that her decision would be something she’d come to regret. That there would be consequences. In the days leading up to the appointment, Francie would lie in bed, convinced the baby was a girl, picturing what she would look like, wishing she was strong enough to stand up to her mother, to do whatever it took for her child. To parent this baby the way she wanted to. But she didn’t do anything. She was powerless.

  Francie wipes the tears from the corners of her eyes, and when she glances back at the television, Midas is on the screen. It’s a photo of him on his back, his fists at his cheeks, staring into the camera. She reaches for the remote and turns up the volume. Antonia Framingham is holding a tissue to her nose.

  “I can’t help but picture Midas, the way I used to lie in bed and picture my daughter after she went missing.” She sniffs. “It’s like I can see him. He’s alone somewhere, without his mother, an ache in his tiny heart, wondering where she is. Wondering when she’s coming to get him.”

  Francie turns off the television and throws the remote onto the couch. She’s had more than she can handle for the day. She walks to the kitchen, quietly placing the bottle in the sink. The formula has left Will peaceful and sleepy, and she gently fastens him into his stroller, lifting it down the four flights to the foyer, and then out into the heat and up the hill, six blocks to the park. She stops at the bodega for a Diet Coke—her first taste of caffeine in more than a week. By the time she takes a seat on the bench, her bench, in front of Winnie’s building, her T-shirt is glued to her lower back. She sets the stroller in the shade and reaches into the diaper bag for her camera, blowing the dust from the lens before standing on the bench to see over the stone wall and into the park, sweeping across the meadow to the black willow, where the May Mothers will be meeting in thirty minutes.