What Has Mother Done?

by Barbara Petty

  Annie’s expression relaxed as she gazed at Mother. “Look at her. She’s happy as a pig in shit.” Then she walked over and quietly closed the door to the studio. “I don’t want to distract her,” she said as she padded back to Thea, who had taken a seat at the table. She pulled out a chair, then hesitated. “Want something to eat?”

  Thea shook her head. She shot a glance over to her mother and wondered how long it would be before she’d be demanding food. Oh, well. She’d deal with that later.

  “Good.” Annie sat down, adding, “The thought of eating makes me want to puke.”

  Thea lowered her eyes and sipped at her strong coffee. She bided her time, trying hard to keep her gaze away from the haggard, haunted woman facing her—but not succeeding. Annie had a bit more color now, but she was still so pale that her faded freckles stood out the way they had when she was a child. The circles under her eyes were a deep indigo, and Thea suspected it had been a while since her friend had a good night’s sleep.

  Annie was avoiding looking directly at her and, for a moment, Thea had the oddest feeling: it was as if she were sitting across from a near-stranger. She’d had that feeling sometimes here in Rockridge when she’d run into old classmates. After the first exchanges and updates, they’d both realize that they had nothing more to say to each other. They’d never really known each other that well in the first place, and time and distance had given them even less in common. But this was Annie, her best friend since kindergarten. Certainly this couldn’t be the case with her? Or could it?

  At last, Annie’s eyes met hers, and she heaved a great sigh. “Look,” she said, “I was not trying to commit suicide, despite how it might have looked.”

  Thea gave a slight shake to her head as Annie’s usual directness brought her back to the present. “Okay, I admit it. When I first saw you that thought did cross my mind. But I knew you couldn’t do that to Joe.” Then she added, “Besides, I didn’t see any pills. Still, you gave me quite a scare.”

  Annie lowered her gaze. “I don’t know what I was thinking. Today was just the breaking point. I couldn’t take it anymore…”

  Annie’s story came out slowly, painfully. She started with what had happened this morning: she had driven Joe to school, feeling distracted and out of sorts. Joe didn’t say anything to her, but she knew he was aware of her mood. When she came home, she felt as if her body was a jangled bundle of nerves, so she decided to take a long soak in her Jacuzzi.

  “And,” she added, tapping the side of her head to indicate the craziness of her logic, “just to make it a bit more relaxing, I thought I’d have a glass of wine—which, as you know, is something I hardly ever do during the day. It messes up my hand-eye coordination when I’m painting.”

  Annie went on…after the first glass of wine, she never made it back to the Jacuzzi. That glass turned into another, and then she opened the second bottle. Somewhere along the way she had wandered out to her studio. She couldn’t remember why she had thrown her artwork around. “Probably just mad at myself,” she opined.

  “I don’t think you did any permanent damage,” Thea said. “Except that Mother did step on a couple of your sketches.”

  Annie shrugged. “No great loss.”

  “I’m going to get us some more coffee.” Thea rose and retrieved the coffee carafe. She poured them each another cup and set the carafe down on a hotpad. She eased back into her chair and gave her friend an evaluating look. “How are you feeling now?”

  A fleeting, sheepish grin flitted across Annie’s face, then turned into a grimace. “Stupid,” she said. “I’ve got to get sober before Joe gets home. I don’t want him to see me like this.”

  Thea glanced at her watch. 12:45. “You’ve got some time,” she said. “But I want to go get him today.” When Annie had been in the shower Thea had already texted Joe to tell him that his mother was fine. If she picked him up, she could give him more reassurances without having to reveal all of the details.

  Annie nodded. “Good idea.”

  Thea stole a glance out to the studio. Mother was still occupied with the chalks and the sketchpad. It was quite amazing to see how intense her focus was on this activity when most of the time she could barely concentrate for more than a couple of minutes straight.

  As Thea turned her attention back to Annie, she could see tears gathering in her friend’s eyes again. “What?” she asked gently.

  Tears rolled down Annie’s cheeks. “I can’t take it any longer,” she sobbed. “I’m dying inside.”

  Thea held her breath. What could she say to that? It was clear that her friend needed to unburden herself, but she could only do it in her own way and in her own time. Nothing Thea could say or do would help her along.

  Annie sobbed a bit longer, then in a deliberate, searching way, lifted her eyes to lock in on Thea’s. “I’m going to tell you something that you can never tell another soul. If you do, it will absolutely kill me. Once I tell you this I can never take it back. So my life is in your hands.”

  Thea’s whole body went cold. She spoke in a hesitant voice, uncertain how much she could pledge to Annie. “You know I would never do anything to hurt you, but…”

  “No buts!” Annie’s voice was harsh. “Unless you promise me, unless I know I can absolutely trust you, I’m not saying another word.” Her eyes were ablaze with the raging fire of desperation.

  For a split second, Thea was frightened by what she saw in the troubled woman across the table. But then another, more powerful feeling stole over her: this was Annie. She was closer to her than she was to her own sister. And Annie needed her, she needed to trust her with whatever awful secret she had been carrying around.

  Thea took a deep, ragged breath. “Okay. I promise,” she choked out. “You have my word.”

  CHAPTER 38

  Thea watched as Annie rubbed her hands over her face, her fingers stiff, stretching the skin taut underneath them. Was she wiping tears away? Stalling? Or could it be that Annie was attempting to scrape away the past much in the same way she was scraping away a layer of skin?

  Thea was dealing with her own anxiety about what was coming next. Deep in her gut she could feel the clutch of fear that she had often experienced at the top of an unfamiliar double-black-diamond ski slope—for experts only. That moment just before she pushed off the crest to surrender to the mountain and the pull of gravity. Was she up to the ride? For a split second, she actually felt dizzy. Were they setting off an avalanche? She shivered.

  “What’s the matter?” Annie’s voice cut through the quiet. “You look sick.”

  Startled, Thea came back to the moment. “It’s nothing.” She settled herself, wrapping her hands around the coffee mug.

  Annie took a deep breath, then exhaled. “Okay,” she said, the single word full of resignation. It was a signal she was ready to begin. Not eager, but willing herself to get it over with. Her eyes took on a far-away glaze as she opened her mouth to speak. “Do you remember when I was pregnant with Heather?”

  The question surprised Thea. “What? Vaguely.”

  Annie’s voice was a monotone, as she continued, “I was so happy at first. Dan and I had been waiting to have a baby until we could afford it. I was so worried that it might never happen, but then there it was. Right away, I had such terrible morning sickness, I could barely eat anything without throwing up. It got a little better, but it lasted much longer than it should have. I pestered my doctor with questions, but he kept assuring me that the baby seemed fine—I was just having a tough pregnancy.

  “I didn’t agree. I thought something was wrong, but nobody would listen to me. Dan didn’t want to hear it, my mother would nod and smile at me and tell me to eat saltines whenever I’d try to talk to her about it, the doctor was hopelessly indifferent, and you were a couple of thousand miles away.”

  Annie paused for a moment and shot a glance at Thea. “I didn’t tell you much because I knew you would worry, and there was nothing you could do.”

  He
r eyes glazed over again in that haunted, thousand-yard stare, and she went back to her story. “I began to hope that maybe I’d have a miscarriage. I also thought about going in to Chicago one day, telling Dan that I was going on a shopping trip, but actually finding an abortion clinic. I figured I could tell Dan and my family that I slipped on some ice and lost the baby. But I couldn’t do it. I lost my nerve. And besides, I was pretty certain that my doctor would know, and I was just as certain that he would probably tell Dan.

  “So I stuck it out. But I wasn’t like other mothers with their first baby, all so excited, waiting for the baby, counting down the days to their due date. Me, I dreaded it. As much as I was miserable during that pregnancy, I knew it was going to get worse once the baby was born.

  “And then she was here. I was amazed. She was healthy, there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with her. She was physically perfect, and yet I couldn’t shake that feeling that something was not quite right with her. Everyone said she was such a beautiful baby, but I couldn’t see it. Dan fell in love with her right away. He picked her name, Heather. It didn’t matter to me. When the nurse put her in my arms, she always cried. I couldn’t breastfeed her, she would turn away. I tried to make myself have motherly feelings for her, but they just weren’t there.” Her voice rose. “I felt like some kind of monster. Why couldn’t I love my baby?”

  Thea cringed. Annie had told her none of this at the time. It pained her to think that her friend had chosen to keep this awful secret to herself for all these years.

  Annie paused and then added, “I don’t know if anybody else noticed this, but when Dan would come into the room, Heather’s face would break out in a smile. With me, she would burst into tears.”

  Thea could see a film of moisture building in Annie’s eyes. She longed to reach across the table and pat her hand or stroke her arm, some gesture to show that she was sympathetic. But she held back. Now was not the time for sympathy. Now was the time to listen.

  Annie cleared her throat and wiped at her eyes before she went on. “Somehow I got through those first few months after she was born. Dan was so crazy about her that he’d get up with her at night, and he’d come home for lunch or leave work early. My mother was around a lot, too, and so was Dan’s mother. And they all seemed to be eager to make excuses for why I didn’t interact with the baby much. My mother told me everybody thought it was postpartum depression.”

  She sighed. “And maybe some of it was, but you’re supposed to get over that. I never did.” She put a hand up to her forehead and rubbed it for a couple of seconds, then continued. “Before she was born, Dan and I agreed that I would stay home with her until she started kindergarten, then I would go back to work teaching art. But after that first year, I knew I could never make it that long. I talked Dan into letting me go back to work as soon as possible. We used the excuse that we needed the extra money, even though that wasn’t actually true. Dan’s car dealership was growing bigtime; he was doing business with a lot of the local politicians.”

  She added bitterly, “In his world things were great, but I was never so happy to get back to work, to get out of the house, to get away from Heather. And she was turning into a little terror with everyone except Dan. Even Dan’s mother started to beg off her babysitting duties. She never said anything to me, but she told my mother that she just couldn’t take Heather’s tantrums anymore. My mother saw them, too, but you know how my mother was, everything just rolled off her back.”

  Thea nodded. “So true. Nothing ever got to your mother.”

  A faint smile crossed Annie’s lips, then quickly disappeared. “She made it a lot easier for me to get through those next few years. Dan and I had already started growing apart…” She gave Thea a pointed glance. “I know you thought he was that way from the very beginning of our marriage, but he wasn’t. We were actually happy before Heather was born. She changed everything.”

  Thea did her best to keep her face a blank, but inside she was thinking that Annie was kidding herself about the state of her early marriage. It was certainly not the time to comment on that.

  Annie shifted her weight on her chair and leaned forward on her elbows. “So I managed to turn a blind eye to a lot of things while Heather was growing up. Dan would buy her pets, you know, little turtles or goldfish, things like that. But they always died within a few days. I’d find the turtles flopped helplessly on their backs or the goldfish would be lying dead on the carpet underneath their bowls. Dan acted as if he thought I was killing the animals just to annoy him.” She shook her head. “After a while, he gave up on the pets, thank God.”

  Thea said nothing, but the fear she had felt in her belly previously was now like a lump, just sitting there, but growing larger with pretty much every word Annie said.

  “Somehow I managed to sweep things under the rug until I got pregnant with Joe. Heather was ten then, eleven when he was born, and it was very clear that she thought a new baby would usurp her position in the family. I just ignored that because I didn’t care. I was so happy to be pregnant again. You’d think I would have hated it, but it was such a different pregnancy. I had practically no morning sickness for one thing, but the best part about it was that I felt so in tune with this new baby. I somehow knew it was a boy, and I always thought of him as Joe.”

  “After your favorite uncle,” Thea interjected. “I remember.”

  Annie nodded. “I was really upset when Uncle Joe died. He left such a void in my life, and then a few months later I got pregnant…” A gentle smile touched her lips.

  “You told me you thought that maybe the new baby was stepping into his shoes.”

  The smile lingered. “At the time it seemed like such a crazy notion, so I didn’t tell anyone but you about that. I knew it was crazy or wishful thinking.” A pensive quality tinged her words. “But the older Joe gets, the more he’s like my uncle.”

  She paused, and her face hardened. Her eyes filled with an unreadable emotion. Pain was a part of it, but there was something else. Something that made the swollen lump of fear in Thea’s gut begin to smolder.

  “When Joe was born,” Annie said, her voice low and quivering, “that’s when I really started to worry about Heather.”

  CHAPTER 39

  For several long moments Annie used her fingertips to press on her right eyelid where a tic had appeared. “Damn thing,” she muttered. “It drives me crazy.”

  Thea leaned back in her chair and slid her gaze over to the window. Her mother’s face was only inches away from the sketchpad, and she could see streaks of chalk on her cheeks. But she saw something else that warmed her heart: a look of total absorption and concentration, along with the trace of a smile.

  When her eyes came back to Annie, the tic seemed to have abated. “Art therapy,” her friend said. “Works wonders. I’m living proof.”

  Thea held Annie’s gaze, feeling once again that they were on a precipice. But this time she hoped her friend realized that they could survive anything together. Even a headlong fall. “Tell me about Joe,” she said finally. “About what happened after he was born.”

  The green eyes seemed to retreat behind a wall of memory. “Heaven and hell,” Annie sighed. “Heaven and hell.”

  “I do recall the ‘heaven’ part,” Thea said. “I saw him for the first time when he was only five days old. He was the happiest baby I’d ever seen. An absolute angel.”

  “He still is,” Annie said. “Sometimes I think he’s my reward…” Her voice broke as it trailed off.

  For what? Thea longed to ask. She’d always thought it was for putting up with Dan, but she was beginning to get the idea that Annie’s wandering husband was only the beginning of the penance that she thought she had to pay. Now Annie seemed to be telling her that the major part of it was Heather.

  “What was the ‘hell’?” Thea asked instead.

  “The nights,” Annie answered immediately. “When Joe had only been home a few days, I found Heather in the nursery in the middle of th
e night. She said she’d heard Joe whimper. I knew right away it wasn’t true because I had a baby monitor right next to my bed, and you know I’m a light sleeper.” The focus of her eyes changed, as if she were looking into the past. Her voice also changed, its timbre turning tight and raw. “I thought about all those dead turtles and goldfish, and then I thought about crib death, and how easy it would be to fake it. So I moved a settee into the room and began spending my nights there.”

  Thea sat frozen in horror. She felt as if Annie had just delivered a body blow, and all her senses had gone numb. Had Annie said what Thea thought she had said?

  No, it wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be. But at the same time Thea realized that this was what Annie had been so afraid of. This was her terrible secret.

  When it had first come up, Thea had thought this was an absurd possibility. Now, she didn’t want to take this in, to go there in her mind. She wished Annie had not told her this. It was too big a burden.

  But Annie has carried it all these years.

  Thea stared helplessly into her friend’s dull, unseeing eyes, certain that Annie was rerunning chilling images from the past, images to torture a mother’s soul.

  Her own images from that same time period flashed into her mental movies: Annie Madonna, she had called her then. It seemed she always had Joe in her arms; her face aglow with love and happiness. But whenever someone else would want to hold Joe, Annie’s eyes would turn watchful, protective. Thea also remembered the dark, bruised circles from lack of sleep under those eyes that were only apparent when she wasn’t holding Joe.

  And then another, older memory popped into her head: Heather as a baby. She was always in Dan’s arms or one of her grandmothers, friends, or other relatives. Never Annie’s. At the time, Thea had not registered that as being significant, but now she knew it was.

  Annie had started talking again, and Thea scrambled to catch up. “What was that?” she asked. “What did you say about Dan?”