“Careful!” said Amanda, sharply. She didn’t look me in the eye. She wore a trim black suit and pulled on her overcoat and leather dress gloves as she told me she was about to miss the train. “Thanks,” she said, without meaning it. Or maybe she meant it, but I’d expected something else, some warmth to explain what happened, to soften it. Something to bridge us as I carried her daughter back to my home.
“Mama!” yelled Iris. She flopped dramatically on the ground and rested her chin on the brick.
“Jitterbug, let’s go,” I said.
“I should be back by seven,” yelled Amanda.
I dropped two bottles on my way home, and a packet of formula, and a long list of instructions, which Iris chased until it blew into the street and I told her to stop. After all, I had all the instructions I needed.
That afternoon I was sorting mail—cooking magazines I’d stopped reading, a gardening catalogue I wanted to moon over—when I spotted something from Outward Bound. I hadn’t forgotten; I still needed to get out, but the thought was overwhelming and I tossed the brochure into the recycling. Malena napped in her basket by the couch; Iris unraveled an ancient knitting project I’d abandoned almost a decade ago. She brushed the yarn, a bright blue cotton-silk mix I’d intended to make into a light summer sweater, with her baby doll’s brush. She said to it, “Your hair is messy!” Then, “Mama, I want more.”
“More what, baby?”
“I’m not a baby!” She walked over to Malena with an extended finger, pointing. Her pointing became poking too quickly for me to stop her. Malena startled, getting ready to protest, though Iris didn’t poke hard enough to leave a mark on her forehead.
“You don’t do that, Iris,” I said, trying to be firm while I lifted Malena from her basket and sighed.
“Mine,” said Iris transparently, gripping my leg like a little tick.
We drove to the grocery store, only I couldn’t find a parking space, and I didn’t really need much. I had mainly wanted a drive to have the girls contained, to take a break. We looped back out the exit. On the drive home I hit a squirrel, something I’d only done once before and which had made me sob. This time I cursed the squirrel, then shushed myself for uttering the expletive. Iris was singing, and Malena had fallen back to sleep. The squirrel had been very fat and I could see it smeared and twitching on the slush-stained street in my rearview mirror, repulsive and pitiful. It was my fault, but it was a stupid squirrel. As soon as I parked the car Iris started whining. As I lifted Malena’s seat from the back, Iris rubbed her hands along the filthy bumper.
“No, baby,” I said, though I couldn’t bring myself to be too urgent about it.
“Yes,” said Iris, and she reached her finger toward the tailpipe.
“No,” I said, gripping her arm. “That’s dangerous!”
“No yelling! I’m not a baby!” yelled Iris. She cried, Malena cried. I herded them in, an inept shepherd. I scrubbed Iris’s hands with antibacterial soap and kissed her arm where she said it hurt because I pulled her. I had, I had pulled her, and I felt pathetic for ruining so many things: an afternoon, a trip in the car, a squirrel, her unblemished arm, her sleeve, which was soaked now with soapy water.
“Now I get a present,” said Iris. I looked at her sweet and self-important face, and thought probably I should say something, explain about good listening, explain about consequences, but Malena started to cry.
I handed Iris a wad of stickers from the kitchen drawer, and a small plastic dollhouse Carra had been given as a first birthday gift and which had housed a thousand dramas and domestic scenes in miniature.
“You can put stickers on that,” I said, and she looked at me with delight and vague confusion. Usually I insisted that stickers were only for paper, but usually I didn’t feel like I had to have more than a minute’s peace or my head would explode. No, I did feel that way sometimes, I just bucked myself up and endured.
“Present,” she whispered to herself with glee.
I put Malena back in her basket with a bottle, which was bad nanny form, as lying down to drink could be bad for the ears. So guilt perched on my shoulder like a monkey as I sat down at the laptop at my little desk. I could hear them both, though my back was to them. Malena made sucking noises. Iris sang to herself.
“I’m not afraid of storms, for I am learning to sail my ship” was the quote on the Outward Bound Web page. Louisa May Alcott.
I am not afraid of storms, I thought. But I was. This was exactly what was wrong with me, I was afraid of any storm outside the tiny snow globe of my domestic life. I opened a new Word document and typed: I am afraid I’m going to have to give notice at this point. Malena is darling, but I am unable to provide the level of service you need and…And what? And maintain my sanity? And not want your daughter to become mine? No, not really. I turned. Both girls were happy: Malena batting at a toy bee, Iris crumpling and uncrumpling a shiny Mickey Mouse sticker.
I would have to do it in person. I would have to tell her I was quitting. It was time to stop feeling lonely inside my own family—time to prune these extra limbs of work that sapped my strength, time to grow green again. Three weeks, she could have that long to find someone new. Someone who would work at her house and wash the bottles to her satisfaction and who wouldn’t prop the baby in a basket with a bottle.
I closed my document without saving it and opened the Web page again. Maybe recycling the Outward Bound application had been hasty.
Twenty-one-day excursions. Or two weeks. Too long. I could never get away for that long. Who was I kidding? I couldn’t get away for a weekend. I could tell Caius he should take vacation time. I could tell Caius I needed to go away or else I might quit. I laughed out loud. Quit my nanny job and my mommy job all at once. I could run away to California. The part of me that actually wanted to do that was small but painful, like a bee sting. Like a burn. Like a tumor. Southwest canyoneering. Dog sledding in the north woods of Minnesota. It looked hard, it looked exhilarating. There were trips for young women, for mothers and daughters, and for a minute I thought about taking Carra. Next time. This fantasy was for me. I typed in dates and looked at all the possibilities in winter. No, summer. Caius’s office would be quieter then, and with effort, I could convince him. Or fall, better yet, when the kids were in school. When I wouldn’t be leaving Iris all day. And best of all, I could hoard the plan to go for all these months. I could get back into shape, jogging with the all-terrain stroller; I’d take a class at the Y. I thought of the women I saw jogging every day as I drove the kids to their thousand engagements, how their faces looked lean and hard. But I didn’t want to be hardened, I wanted to be opened.
My mother would not have approved. My mother never would have gone away for something so selfish—she never went away alone, never went away at all until she got sick. My devoted, adoring, lap-of-home mother had left me, though, had left us all, after Oren died. It was as if, since she couldn’t have us all safe, she had covered herself in a cloak of failure. Not mourning, no. She’d pared herself from us neatly as she pared peel from a pear. The spring that came almost a year after Oren’s funeral, soon before I went to the White Mountains, I’d found her in the kitchen, making lasagna with homemade tomato sauce, only she’d bought tomatoes instead of growing them. It was Oren’s favorite.
“Can you put some meat in?” I asked, as I often had in childhood, loving her bolognese enough to eat it from the CorningWear in the fridge with a spoon.
“No,” she said. “Because Oren likes it better without,” she might as well have added. I was the only one there for dinner—Mom and me. Dad was at a conference and it was May and the evening light was already lingering too long.
“He’s dead, Mom,” I said, then touched my own mouth, surprised it had emitted those words.
My mother, my neat mother, always calm and organized and always kind (“If you can’t say something nice,” she’d singsong, and we knew to finish, “don’t say anything at all” without her completion), lifted the big boiling sauce p
ot and turned it upside down on the stove, bloodying the gas burners with food-milled tomato, sautéed onions, garlic, perfect rounds of carrot, flecks of rosemary. The gas flame stung the sauce, then expired. And even though I wanted to go after her into the too-light evening garden, I’d stayed inside. I waited for her to come back to me and cleaned up the sauce, digging in the cracks around the igniter, sopping towels and sponges, trying to forgive myself for being among the living.
I downloaded and printed out the application for a trip the second week of September, western Maine backpacking, women only. I would resurrect my gear from the basement. I would tell Caius. No, I would ask Caius. No, I would tell Caius. He could shuttle the kids back and forth, he could manage dinners and diapers—or the potty—and bedtimes and waking. By then, Iris would go to preschool, and by then, he would understand why I needed this gift.
The girls were quiet. I started to fill out the paper longhand, though there was hardly anything to fill out, just the dates, my information. My credit card number. I could pay for it with the money I’d made as a nanny. Not that our money wasn’t mutual, but somehow, if I needed this so selfishly, I felt I ought to be the one paying. I signed it and put it in an envelope, and Malena started coughing.
I didn’t panic, exactly, but it was like being woken from a sleep you shouldn’t have taken. Like discovering you were stealing something, though you hadn’t meant to, you’d just crammed it in your pocket because you needed both hands for your baby and then you forgot to fish it out at the register and the shoplifting alarm went off—this hadn’t ever happened to me, I’d just imagined it, often. Nor had this: Malena coughed and I picked her up, afraid she might be choking. She coughed three times, hard, and dislodged a tiny clot of unmelted formula powder. Not enough to choke. Possibly enough to choke. But she was breathing, she was okay. I wouldn’t have to tell Amanda. I was honest; I’d tell her. She might fire me. Then Malena started to cry, and I looked up for Iris, and Iris was not there.
First, I called around the house, trying not to sound afraid, for myself, for anyone who might hear. Why should she be in trouble? Just because she was no longer adhering foil hearts to the miniature kitchen didn’t mean something terrible had happened. But my lapse, my moments of not looking—how long had it been? Ten minutes? Fifteen? It had felt like five, or less, but the sticker sheets were empty, her shoes were by the door. My lapse felt wrong, punishable. I had been dreaming of leaving them. Malena snuffled against my shoulder, looking for milk, or comfort, still helpless. I tried my best to support her head, though she hardly still needed that much support, as I rushed up the stairs calling, “Iris. Iris, honey. Iris, where are you? Iris, it isn’t funny!”
She wasn’t in the bathroom, she wasn’t in her room. I knelt to check under my own bed, thinking perhaps she was playing a game. Not in the closets. I almost tripped on the stairs down to the basement, but caught myself, my big, irresponsible baby-holding self, by grabbing the wobbly rail.
Iris wasn’t in the house.
Now I felt panic inching its way up my shoulders, around my throat, the windpipe clench of it, the clutch of fear, a squeeze, a giant muscle, an ache. It was like feeling pain and looking for the wound. I looked upstairs again, then laid the baby in the portacrib close to the door and ran outside.
It was warm for February, the gloaming was early, and the heat from the weak sun dissipated quickly. Both my older children would be home from their after-school business soon, and they would help me forget if I found her; they would help me search if I didn’t. I didn’t want to leave Malena, but I could run faster without her. I called out to the empty yard, to the few dead stalks of iris plants, to the yew bushes with their fat poisonous red berries.
“Iris,” I called across the yard. “Iris!” I was almost screaming but not quite.
I ran now into the woods, because the back of our yard spilled me into them, because I could only think of the water and the stones of the river, of my daughter slipping down the banks with her careless enthusiasm for something, a stone, a stick letting go of its ice.
“Iris!” I called along the riverbank.
Now came the darkness, nagging at the last vestiges of day like a neighborhood crank, filling up the woods with its powdery damp.
I circled to the end of the right-of-way, ran up through the field where the high school band practiced in the fall, thumping the oaks and houses with sound, brass like birdcalls.
There were no birdcalls, just my voice too loud in the empty street as I walked across my neighbors’ yards with the abandon of my emergency.
“Iris!”
I was back at my own house, with nothing to show but a stick I’d snapped off an elm in frustration and my voice growing raw.
“Iris!”
“Thea?” asked someone behind a hedge. “Is everything okay?”
“I can’t find Iris!” It was Amanda—what the hell was she doing at home? Why hadn’t she picked up Malena? It was her fault, I thought, feeling irrational—I didn’t care that she knew, didn’t care that I’d lost my own daughter in front of her.
“Just a minute,” she said, her voice even. “I think I heard her in my backyard. Something about the groundhogs. Don’t they hibernate?”
I pushed my way through the bushes, though I could’ve walked around in just a minute. There was no propriety in losing a child. A branch snapped back and scratched my cheek, but then I was in her yard. Amanda was walking across, a shadowy form in a long dark coat. She knelt down to the small person digging a hole in her cold-burned grass with a spade.
“Hi, Iris,” I heard her say. “Are you digging for buried treasure?”
My daughter was fine, but adrenaline still gripped my limbs, making me one great muscle of anxious prey.
“Hi, Mama,” said Iris, and the power of fear fell from me like a cloth, swept away into the sudden chill of the evening. I sat down on the grass and she ambled over to me. A foil heart dangled from her sweater’s sleeve. She had no coat against the cold. I shivered.
“Saw a fog,” she said. “Over there.” She pointed to her dent in the earth. I kissed her soiled fingers.
“Thank you,” I said to Amanda. She lifted a briefcase from her car.
“How was Malena today?” she asked without looking at me, without accusing me of anything.
I thought of her daughter, whom I’d abandoned in a portacrib by the door, and felt pathetic. By now, Oliver and Carra would both be home; perhaps one of them had taken her out to hold, to look out the window for the missing persons of the house. Perhaps they’d simply walked past the cot on their way to their own pursuits. She wasn’t their job. She was mine.
“Don’t do that, lovey,” Amanda said, as Iris pulled away from me and started smearing soil on the white picket of her fence. It gave me an odd satisfaction, Iris’s innocent defacement.
“She was fine,” I said. “A little fussy, probably teething.” I kissed the top of Iris’s head. “Don’t reprimand my daughter. And I quit,” I said. I stood up and took my daughter’s hand. Something bothered me about Amanda’s endearment. Iris wasn’t her lovey. “You can come pick Malena up. And her things. I quit.” I said it again to convince myself.
Perhaps she had something to say, but I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t feel respectful, or mournful, or wronged, only wrong myself, out of balance. I picked up Iris as if she were a baby, breathing in her safety, and walked her back home before anything could change my mind.
When I got back to my house, Malena was in Carra’s arms, looking around with her perfect extrospection. My arms shook slightly with the departure of adrenaline. I told Carra to wait for Amanda, kissed baby Malena’s cheeks good-bye, and took Iris upstairs. My chest hurt, and my heart; my heart hurt for my own mistakes—for God not cashing in on them. For luck and fear, for saying good-bye to my temporary baby. I did love her. I was a terrible coward, but mostly it was the baby I couldn’t face when Amanda came; I started the bathwater running so I wouldn’t hear her come a
nd go.
16
Amanda
Whenever I thought of kissing her, I remembered how I’d been frantic—I wasn’t myself. I’d seen a dead man on the train track, and I had been so desperate to get home to my baby. It didn’t mean anything, that kiss. Then the Monday after it happened, she’d been in such a rush when she picked up Malena; she’d run off down the walkway before I could even explain about the new vitamin drops or ask about her weekend. I’d worried then that we’d crossed a line, that we couldn’t make it work anymore. It was always such a delicate balance, making things work with a caregiver, especially one who was a neighbor and sort of a friend. Half of me had wondered, that day, whether I should just pitch it all in and stay home. Forever. But I hadn’t.
I wondered whether she quit because we kissed. Whether the enormority of our momentary attraction was enough to send her fleeing. It had actually been nice, after all. She was afraid she was a lesbian, maybe; she was afraid of lesbians. Not that I was judging her—or maybe I was, because I felt as if she’d judged me all along, except in that one moment of confidence in her kitchen. It wasn’t that I made a habit of kissing women—or anyone other than Aaron for that matter—but other people did, and I didn’t think there was anything wrong with it. I had been exhausted, I had wanted comfort, and Aaron wasn’t there. I hadn’t thought it through or planned it. An accident of proximity.
Then the following Monday everything had happened at once: I had come home early because there was a leak in the plumbing and some problem with a fused circuit and the gas was off and Jeb the contractor, a smarmy guy hired by the insurance company and the last person I wanted to come home early for, told me we had no power, no heat, and no water. In February. But it was all under control.
“Under control” were his words, said with a sort of a hiss through his cracked front tooth. I abhorred that tooth, the way the hairline crack wasn’t enough to split the enamel, to break the rock of his horrible cell matter into two pieces, to tear out his ability to bite into the ubiquitous meatball subs—with extra onions, extra peppers, and extra cheese—he left half-consumed and wrapped in greasy paper in my living room, in my one operational bathroom, on the windowsill.
The Other Mother Page 17