Conundrum. My little Conundrum. Whatever do we do?
I kissed his sleepy mouth once more. I wrapped him in his blanket. I pulled it up gently to cover his face. The sun was streaming through the trees, breaking through the morning fog. Light dappled across the blanket. It was warm. He was still. I held him, rocked him gently, like a mother would rock a baby to sleep.
Hush, little baby, don’t you cry.
Rocking, gentle, gentle, go gently, Conor, go gentle into the night.
I breathed in his smell. I hugged him close for the final breaths he would suck into those tiny lungs. I loved him. I loved him so.
After many minutes, I pulled him away. I lifted the blanket from his face. It was done. What is done cannot be undone, but I did not want it to be.
Yes. He was gone. I had taken him. I had taken what she did not deserve. What she did not want. She would thank me, somehow. It would be what she wanted. What she needed.
I have always been so good at knowing what she needs.
I set Conor gently back into his stroller. I pulled the strap over his limp body to hold it in place. I laid the blanket over his legs, as it had been before.
There, there, Conor, I cooed. Mama will be back soon.
I had done it. For you, Merry, for you. Because I know you far better than you know yourself.
All right, all right. Here is another truth.
The operating table, the smell of sterility. The anesthetist saying, Count backwards from ten. Ten, nine, eight, seven…When you wake up, we will have taken out all the malformed parts of you.
It’s for the best, the doctor had reassured me.
I don’t see a future with you, was what Thomas had said, and he wasn’t the first man to say it either.…
And why? Because you are broken, because you are not enough. Now I was broken worse than before. Irreparably, in fact.
They cut you open and scrape it all out, scoop it from you like the innards of a melon. The knots of flesh and malevolent cells. Scoop, scratch, snip. It’s all gone. Everything that sat there waiting inside you, biding its time from girlhood to womanhood, knowing all the secrets, promising all the gifts.
One day, your body whispers in your ear, one day you will perform miracles with your flesh.
Ovaries, womb, gone, eradicated. You weep for what is lost but the tears wash nothing away, they just empty you out even further. The parts of you that make life are broken. The parts that do the opposite are strong.
Menopause, the doctor said, outlining the symptoms that would soon set in. Old woman symptoms, the kind that make them rant and sweat and dry all over. It can’t be me, it can’t be me but it is.
Oh, here’s a fun little fact: It’s only in the Western world that women experiencing menopause suffer from hot flashes. The heat is shame, red and urgent despair at the loss of one’s place in society. Everywhere else, menopause is but a gateway to another glorious stage of life.
I almost told Sam that one night. I thought the anthropologist in him would get a kick out of my snippet of wisdom.
My mother, dying slowly and alone in the hospice while I spent two weeks in Ibiza with a tech entrepreneur who’d brought three women along just in case he got bored.
She’d been too late for any lifesaving operation. All those years living with a gynecologist, she’d decided she didn’t need to consult one outside the home.
It was stage three cancer when they found it, a thick ball of malicious cells, their roots twisted deep into the wall of her womb. Genetic, a little gift she’d pass on to me later.
I was by her side when she died, my father lied. I was holding her hand when she went.
Later, when I spoke to the hospice nurse, she told me that my father hadn’t visited in days. Fortunately, your friend was here, she said. Merry. She came every day to visit.
She was with her at the very end.
Unfair. Unjust. You ache for all the lost things, but it doesn’t bring them back.
Count yourself lucky. This is what my gynecologist had said. Oh, yes, lucky old Frank. Always showered with such an abundance of good fortune.
I was given two weeks to recover from the surgery. My boss sent flowers and my personal assistant, Jill, visited me in the hospital. She bought a pile of magazines for me to read, and a folder full of documents for me to sign.
Shall I pick you up when you’re ready to leave? she asked.
I’ll take a taxi, I replied.
Back at home I shuffled around the apartment clutching my lower half, pressing at the hollows, waiting for the symptoms to kick in. Thirty-five! I was thirty-five.
I’d told none of my friends. I received no visitors or phone calls. It was just me, alone in that beautiful London apartment, walls and ceiling, windows that looked out on a park full of strollers and children chasing puppies and brightly colored plastic balls. I shut myself inside the bathroom and screamed till my ears screamed back. You have nothing, all this you have built and still you have nothing.
In the mirror the woman is flawless, long and lean and tan and tight, everything she’s supposed to be in order to be considered beautiful. No unwanted hair, no fat, no lumps of cellulite. Breasts high and round, belly flat and smooth.
Exhausting, it is, the constant upkeep.
Skin still youthful, face not yet marked with lines of time or hardship. Hair long and thick. In good shape, well put together, that’s what they say. Often it’s enough to turn heads, to warrant a line rehearsed and smooth. You feel the eyes track you, top down or in reverse, depending on what their thing is, ass man or tits. Then the approval, an inward grunt you can almost hear. You’ll do.
And still, it’s not enough. You’re an eight or a nine, real quality, they say, but when you open your mouth, their faces cloud over. They tell you that you plummet.
You’re too intense.
You’re too needy.
You’re too ambitious.
You’re too everything.
And now this.
Now this.
I curled up on the bathroom floor and stayed there.
It was Jill who found me. She’d come for another signature; she had a spare set of keys. The doctor was called, the wound ruled septic, the patient ruled broken down, though not yet beyond repair. They drained the yellow pus and pumped antidepressants into my veins. The psychologist asked me useless questions and made notes in a file.
Jill called to say that the boss recommended I take a leave of absence.
Six months, she said. To give you all the time you need.
Of course we both knew what it meant.
I looked around the apartment. I knew I could not stay.
It was then that I called Merry. Merry, stranded on her island in the frosty Baltic, sent into exile by the shameful husband, trapped with a child. I wanted to see it, Merry and Sam in Sweden, a pantomime not to be missed. I wanted to see her misery. I wanted to use it to soothe my own. I waited until I was cleared to fly and booked my flight.
Ah, the best-laid plans. Well. I can’t say I didn’t try. For a moment I thought we could all get what we wanted. For a moment I thought we could both win.
Me, happy. Merry, free. It seemed possible. It seemed to make sense.
And then not. It was just a confusion. A great and awful confusion.
I told her last night I did it for her.
I didn’t.
I did it for me. For all the rejection and cruelty, for all the things stolen, for all the ways I have been left robbed and bereft. Tit for tat, this for that.
She’s with the police now. The detective will be making her notes, searching Merry’s face as she speaks. Why did I do it? Why did I tell her everything, or at least a version of everything?
Because I wanted to give it to her, my cards revealed. I thought, let her decide which truth she wants to tell. I’ll accept the outcome, whatever it is. I am ready. I welcome it. I am too tired of fighting against it.
We hugged last night. We held each other tightly. This morning she
gave me a weak smile. She is making as if she understands. As if it is all settled between us, truths balanced out on a set of scales. But who can ever tell?
Fate, that other coldhearted bitch, the most ruthless mistress of them all. I want her to have her way with me. I want her to decide this for once and for all.
See, Daddy, turns out I’m a gambler too.
Merry
Detective Bergstrom wanted to slap me. I could tell by her face, by the way she held her hands under the table, out of the way.
I said it again. I just don’t think she could have done it.
But just yesterday you said—
I realize that I was only projecting my anger onto her. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t her. She’s my friend, Detective Bergstrom. Why would she ever want to hurt my child?
You’re taking back everything you said about her.
I sighed. I made a horrible mistake. It was a terrible thing to even suggest. I realized that last night.
So suddenly she wasn’t jealous. She wasn’t trying to steal your husband. She wasn’t manipulative and malicious.
She’s my best friend.
So she didn’t know where you were going.
No.
She was at home all morning. She never left.
She’d been baking. She couldn’t have left the house with the oven on.
Baking, she said. And I suppose she’d had contact with Conor in the morning? Enough to explain DNA transfer. On him. On his blanket. On the blanket used to smother your child.
That is correct, I said. I can confirm it all.
Merry, you understand what you’re saying here?
I do.
You’re absolving her of all blame. You’re making it impossible for us to prosecute Frank.
Why would you prosecute her? I said. She didn’t do it.
Detective Bergstrom pressed at her temples. Exasperated, and who could blame her?
Merry, do you understand that the investigation will probably turn back to you?
I shook my head. Well, actually, no, I said. It won’t.
Someone did this, Merry. And I sure as hell won’t rest until I know who.
Detective Bergstrom, I said. I think we both know that the investigation will need to be wrapped up soon enough.
She folded her arms across her chest.
I did some research of my own, I said. These cases are almost impossible to prove, aren’t they? Babies who die from asphyxiation. What is the saying? “The only difference between a SIDS death and a suffocation is a confession.”
That’s it, isn’t it. There’s no real way to tell.
Unbelievable, she said. Merry, you are quite something.
You have no confession, Detective Bergstrom. It wasn’t me. And it wasn’t Frank.
I’ve been very open with you, I said. I’ve given you all the information I could. I’ve told you everything that happened.
I took a sip of water. I tried to remember all the things I had wanted to say.
I’m grateful, my husband and I are truly grateful, for all your efforts. For everything you’ve done to get to the bottom of our son’s death. But what if you’ve been wrong this whole time? What if it’s just an awful, tragic case of sudden infant death. Inexplicable. No one’s fault.
Detective Bergstrom slammed a hand on the table. But it is someone’s fault, Merry, she hissed. And you and I both know it.
I shook my head. No, I said. I really don’t think that’s the truth at all.
She sat and stared at me from across the table.
Truth, she said at last. Let me tell you what I’ve learned about truth, Merry. It always comes out eventually. It always finds you out in the end.
I stood up. I’d like to go home now.
Of course, she said. But before I forget—the strangest thing.
She smiled at me, a smile far from friendly or kind.
Sam, on the day Conor died. Well, you should ask him where he was, she said.
And why.
She opened the door and ushered me out.
I drove home, stomach lurching as I pulled into the drive. I looked over at Karl and Elsa’s house. It has been deathly quiet for days, no movement in or out. I wonder where Freja is. I wonder if we will ever again have a barbecue with the lovely Swedish neighbors.
At the paddock, I could see Mr. Nilssen busy with his horses. You are welcome to bring your son over to feed them, he told me, the first and only conversation we ever had. He looked up and gave me a somber wave.
I went inside the house. There was a half-eaten sandwich on the kitchen counter. I picked it up and took a bite. Then I went into the bathroom and washed the makeup from my face. The water was icy. It would not turn warm.
Frank was in the spare room. Her suitcase open on the floor. She was packing the last of her things inside.
I leave tomorrow, she said. First thing.
Good, I said.
I took her phone from my pocket and placed it on the bed. She glanced at it and then back at me.
The case is over, I said.
She nodded. She didn’t look surprised, or particularly relieved.
You didn’t tell her.
No.
Our secret, Merry. Just for us. She gave me a little smile. Everybody wins, she said.
I held myself up against the doorframe.
Frank, I said.
What is it?
I never want to see you again.
How curious the words felt in my mouth. How untrue.
She continued to ball socks and wedge them into the suitcase, seemingly unperturbed by all the events of the last few weeks, by the possibility of prosecution, by the certainty of banishment from my life. Inside me, the knot twisted.
Do you hear me, Frank? I said. Never, ever again.
She looked up and gave me a smile. Of course, Merry, she said offhandedly. Whatever you say.
I left the room and walked over to the barn. Sam was awake, hunched over a box, putting together the pieces of what looked like an old train set. He barely noticed when I opened the door.
Sam, I said. I just came to tell you. It wasn’t her. I wanted it to be, I wanted to blame someone. To have an answer. But it wasn’t Frank who did it.
He looked at me. There’s evidence, that’s what you said.
I know. I wanted to explain it. But we can’t change the truth. The truth is, it wasn’t her.
That’s what you believe? he said.
It is.
And the detective?
I don’t know. These cases, it’s hard to find answers. It was more than likely sudden infant death. Just cold, cruel fate. God-awful bad luck.
Bad luck, he repeated. Huh.
I looked at him. Why was he not angrier? Why was he taking my word for all of this? Sam, I said. Where were you the day he died?
His hands were on me in an instant, pinning me to the wall, holding me in place.
He put his face up close to mine. He smelled rancid, sour and stale. His beard scratched at my chin. He turned and spat at my ear, the glob of spit landing on my shoulder.
You don’t get to ask me questions, he said. Understand?
You’re hurting me, I whispered.
Hurting, he said. You don’t even know what that means.
He turned from me and went back to the trains.
I ran inside to the bathroom, to throw up, to wipe his smell from my skin. The bruises on my neck were thick and blue, welts of disgrace and shame.
Bad luck, I’d said.
I pictured Val in Connecticut, dropping her daily button on the rug.
Perhaps fate is more accurate.
Sam bursting through the bathroom door to catch me with the pregnancy test in my hands, a pregnancy test I had planned to discard under a pile of vegetable peelings and crumpled tissues. A pregnancy I’d already decided to have terminated. Only there was Sam, home early because he’d just been fired.
Fate. An intervention from above.
I did it for yo
u, Merry, Frank had said; the ever-loyal friend. I did it so you would be free.
In the mirror, my face twitched. Ever so slightly, around the mouth. Just that one word. One little word.
Free.
You are free.
As the bruises darkened with blood under the skin, I stood and watched.
I could not help but smile.
Frank
It is over at last. My final night.
Outside, the wind rattles against the door like an angry houseguest locked out. Me, perhaps, in elemental form. The air is bitter, biting. It snaps at the flesh and turns everything blue.
It will be a long winter. A harsh one. There will be no escape from its icy grip.
I look around the room that has been my bedroom, already just the spare room once again. I thought I might feel a twinge of something, sadness or regret, but looking at the bed and drawers and wardrobe, the cheap brass lamp and the throw that itches against my skin, it all seems suddenly the stuff of another life. I check the shelves and under the bed, I open and close the wardrobe doors one last time. I put the last of my toiletries into my suitcase. I curl a hand to the bottom to feel for Bear.
A small something to take with me. A reminder.
Of me, there is nothing left, not a single trace of the months I spent in this room, within these four white walls. I will leave tomorrow; the taxi will come before the sun is even up. The first flight out. I would have gone sooner, but it might have raised suspicions. Fleeing the scene, and all.
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