The Perfect Mother: A Novel

by Nina Darnton

  A PLUME BOOK

  THE PERFECT MOTHER

  Photo by Lev Gorn

  NINA DARNTON is a former staff writer for Newsweek and a former frequent contributor to the New York Times. As a freelancer, she has written for several news outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Travel and Leisure, More, and Elle. She has also contributed on-air essays for the PBS NewsHour and covered the Polish Solidarity movement for National Public Radio. She published An African Affair in 2011. This is her second novel. She lives with her husband in New York City.

  Also by Nina Darnton

  An African Affair

  PLUME

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China

  penguin.com

  A Penguin Random House Company

  First published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2014

  Copyright © 2014 by Itzy

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  CIP data is available.

  ISBN 978-1-101-60938-5

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  Contents

  About the Aythor

  Also by Nina Darnton

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  Acknowledgments

  To my children, Kyra, Liza, and Jamie, from their imperfect but loving mother

  CHAPTER 1

  It was midnight and, lying next to her husband in their Philadelphia home, Jennifer Lewis was fast asleep. It had been a good day. Lily, their sixteen-year-old, had just found out she had made both the soccer team and the honor roll. Eight-year-old Eric was fast asleep after a day at the circus. And Emma, their twenty-year-old college girl, was having the time of her life in Spain for her junior year abroad. Life seemed so perfect that when the phone rang, Jennifer didn’t even have the usual flare of panic engendered by an unexpected middle-of-the-night interruption. Her husband, Mark, woke first.

  “Get it, will you, honey?” he mumbled, still half-asleep.

  She reached over to pick up the phone.

  “Hello?”

  It was Emma’s voice, shaken and vulnerable, through torrents of tears.

  “Mom,” she sobbed. “You told me not to do anything stupid, and I did.”

  Now Jennifer was wide-awake and very anxious. She was aware of a lot of background noise, a jumble of voices, some shouting.

  “That’s okay, sweetheart,” she said, controlling her voice. “Tell me what happened.

  “I went to a bar. I drank too much. I felt funny. There was cake and stuff. I think the brownies were laced with hash.”

  “What happened, Emma?”

  “Someone was killed, Mama.”

  “Someone you knew?” She was horrified.

  “They think I did it. They think I killed him. Tell Daddy. I need a lawyer. Please come.”

  “Why do they think you did it? Where are you?”

  “I’m at the police station, Mom. I can’t talk. Please just come.”

  There was another sound of people yelling, and then the call was cut off.

  At first, Jennifer was so stunned she didn’t even put down the telephone receiver.

  Mark had turned on the light and was sitting up next to her. “Jennifer,” he prodded. “Honey, what happened?”

  She slowly hung up the phone and turned to him. Her voice was shaky, confused. “I don’t understand what happened.”

  “Tell me what she said.”

  She repeated the conversation, and as she spoke, her confusion turned to panic. She reached for his hand and held it tight. “We have to go there right away, Mark. I’ll check the plane schedules. Can you find a lawyer? I mean, not a corporate lawyer like you—a criminal lawyer and the best one in Spain. Can you do that?”

  She left the bed before he could answer and headed for the bathroom. She tore through the crammed shelves of her medicine cabinet, wildly displacing bottles of aspirin and Advil and sweeping aside soaps and makeup until she found what she was looking for: a small bottle of Valium that had been prescribed more than a year ago for a back spasm—she hoped taking one would calm her down. Mark followed her and put his arm around her.

  “Shh, honey. Hold on. She’ll be okay. We’ll take care of this. Please, Jen, you have to be calm if you’re going to help her.”

  She turned to him and buried her head in his chest, fighting back tears. “We watched Midnight Express the night before she left. Remember? She just watched it to humor me, but I was trying to warn her about how dangerous it is to take drugs in a foreign country. But she said the brownies at some party were laced with hash. That’s not her fault. They’re accusing her of murder, for God’s sake. It’s totally crazy.”

  She wrapped her arms around him as he stroked her hair.

  “I know it is, and that’s why it’s going to go away. And she’s in Spain, not Turkey thirty-five years ago. This is Europe, not the third world. I’ll line up a lawyer and find out what we need to do. And whatever it is, Jen, anything at all, we’ll do it. But she needs you right away. There’s probably a plane tonight. You’ll have to fly to Madrid and then catch another plane to Seville. I’ll join you as soon as I can.”

  “No, Mark—she needs us both. And I need you too. You have to come with me.”

  “I can’t, honey. We have to make arrangements for Lily and Eric,” he said.

  “I’ll call my parents.”

  “They have to get here. It all takes time. And I’m in the middle of a case. I have to work some things out at the office before I can leave.”

  He saw her frown and knew she was about to object. “We’re going to need a lot of money for this, Jen,” he said quickly. “We have to make some hard decisions. You go first. You’ll get her out on bail right away. You can start talking to the lawyer and find out what our next step is. I’ll come next weekend.”

  She nodded, accepting his logic. She knew she had a lot to do before she got on the plane, but she didn’t seem able to get started. Not yet.

  “She sounded so frig
htened, Mark,” she said in a small voice.

  “Of course she did,” he answered. “She must be scared out of her mind. That’s why we have to hurry up and get her out.”

  “She can’t even really speak Spanish that well; she must seem like some rich, spoiled American to them. God knows what they’ll do to her.” She popped the Valium into her mouth and swallowed it with a gulp of water.

  “I just don’t understand how a mistake this big could happen. There must be something we can do even before I get there. Can’t we call the State Department? Don’t you have some friends in Washington?”

  “I’m going to work on all of that, honey. Don’t worry. You just get packed and get ready to go.”

  “What should we tell everyone?” she asked.

  “Maybe we should tell them the truth. It’s insane, but we’re going over to straighten it out.”

  “Are you serious? We can’t tell them our daughter has been accused of murder. We can’t tell our kids that. We can’t tell my parents that.”

  He sighed. “Okay, okay. You’re right. We’ll have to think of something.”

  She tried to organize her thoughts. She had to get the kids up for school in a few more hours and tell them some fiction as to why she was rushing off to Spain that night. She had to call her parents and get them to come and stay, using the same fiction. She had to examine the plane schedule, buy her ticket, figure out how to get to Seville from Madrid, and cancel everything she had planned for the next few weeks. And she had to pack. She dragged her traveling bag out of the closet and opened it, throwing some underwear, socks, panty hose, and her makeup kit inside. Then she paused, looked hard at the clothes hanging in her closet, and burst into tears. Just exactly what do you wear when your daughter has been accused of murder and you are bailing her out of jail?

  She dried her eyes with the back of her hand. She threw pants, shirts, and a few dresses on the bed and took stock. A former actress who had picked up extra money in her college years as a model, Jennifer understood dressing for a part. She knew she would need to go to the jail, and if they couldn’t get the case dismissed, she might even have to appear next to her daughter in court. She was also aware that she was a very attractive woman, a quality she had found helpful throughout her life. She took pride in her striking blue eyes and thick, lustrous brown hair and spent three mornings a week at the gym to maintain her toned, elegant body, still firm and youthful although she had celebrated her forty-sixth birthday a month earlier. She calculated that the dress code in Spain would be more formal than it was in the States. She needed something conservative and respectable—and so did Emma, she reasoned, but she could pick that up when she got there. At the last minute, she also threw in her favorite dress, a simple sleeveless black sheath that showed off her slim figure and long legs. Concentrating on her wardrobe occupied her mind as the Valium kicked in, so she began to feel a little calmer. She would tell everyone that Emma had suffered a minor injury in a car accident and she was going to make sure she got the proper treatment. Luckily Eric and Lily adored their grandparents and would be thrilled they were coming to stay.

  Her mind drifted back to Emma’s plight. Oh, dear God, don’t let this scar her. Jennifer had spent all the years of her children’s lives protecting them from potential wounds, consciously building positive self-images, and working tirelessly on their creative and intellectual development. She’d hung mobiles of the planets moving around the sun, covered the walls and ceiling with star stickers that twinkled in the dark, lain in bed with them telling them stories or reading books until they fell asleep. She’d ferried them to lessons and playdates and children’s museums. As they grew older, she’d helped them with term papers and, with Mark, who joined her whenever he could, attended all their soccer games, concerts, and theater productions.

  The girls treated her as their confidante, told her everything, and although of course she knew they weren’t perfect, she trusted them implicitly. They worked hard, made honors grades each year, were active in school organizations and lauded by their teachers. She’d hear about friends whose kids took drugs or got involved with a bad crowd, or were rebellious and hateful to their parents, and she would discuss each case with her daughters. She never said so, not even to Mark, but she couldn’t help believing that the secret of their apparent success was simply that she had been a stay-at-home mom who was always there for them, alert to potential minefields and keeping lines of communication open. She was proud of them and proud of herself.

  Her eyes were growing heavy, and although she was sure she couldn’t sleep, she thought she might lie down and close her eyes for a few minutes. She awoke with a start when her alarm went off at 6:30, time to wake Eric and Lily. Lily, she discovered, was already up and in the shower, but Eric was sprawled on his back on top of his covers, Spider-Man staring up at her from his pajamas. She bent down to kiss him awake. He reached up his arms to hug her and she snuggled into him, inhaling the sweet scent of the shampoo he’d used last night. She made pancakes, and as they all ate breakfast, she calmly told them that Emma had been in a minor car accident and broken her leg and she needed to go to Spain to sort things out. Her cover story seemed to work. Neither the kids, nor her parents when she reached them, suspected anything terrible had happened. All that expensive acting training and hard-won experience had served some practical purpose in her life after all, she thought.

  She made herself a cup of coffee and went into Mark’s study to see what progress he had made. The time difference—it was six hours later in Spain—had worked in their favor, and he had already made her plane reservations, located the best criminal lawyer in Spain, and arranged for the lawyer to travel from his home in Madrid to Seville to meet Jennifer when she arrived the next afternoon. It was too early to reach any of Mark’s contacts in the State Department, but he assured her he would at the start of business hours.

  She stepped into the shower. For some reason she began to think about her pregnancy with Emma. It was to be her first child, and she had worried about the problems people discussed in those days: the specter of postpartum blues or not bonding with the baby. And then there were the big decisions: day care or nanny, full-time motherhood or continuing her promising acting career. She was also afraid of the pain of childbirth, which she had nonetheless insisted on doing naturally, without an epidural or any medication. And she did feel pain. She remembered squeezing Mark’s hand as she pushed and pushed and finally gasping, “Give me some gas,” and hearing the doctor say, “Too late,” as, with what felt like an explosion, Emma burst into the world. But her concerns disappeared as soon as the nurse placed her baby in her arms. She had looked at her, counted her fingers and toes, marveled at the miracle of perfection she had produced, felt that surge of fierce love and protectiveness, that rush of hormones, that tie of blood and pain, and she knew she would never leave this child. It took a little time for it to play out, but really that was the moment her old life ended and her new one began.

  It was hard not excluding Mark, she recalled. Suddenly her only concern was for the baby. She wanted everything to be perfect, and she wanted to control every aspect of the baby’s life. She was reluctant to let him do anything—she had to pick the clothes, soothe the crying, rock her to sleep, yet she knew that relegating Mark to this secondary role was bad for him, bad for their relationship, bad for his own bonding with the baby, and it also made it hard for him to give her the help and support she needed. She tried to include him, to share some of the care and the decisions, but in the end, he went back to work and she stayed home and became the center of their family life. It was the same when the other children arrived—even more so, because by then there was a pattern they all fit into. He was so busy trying to make partner in the law firm, traveling often and staying late at the office, someone needed to assume the central family role, and she thought he was grateful she chose to step in. He played with the children, consulted on decisions when asked, accompanied them on excursions that Jennifer
planned, and attended the birthday parties she organized. They loved him, she thought with satisfaction. He provided a glow as comforting and dependable as the moon’s. But in that small family universe, she, Jennifer, was the sun.

  She dressed quickly and had just finished packing when the phone rang. She could see from the caller ID that the call came from Spain, and she answered it quickly.

  “Hello,” came a woman’s distant voice that sounded American. “May I please speak to Mr. or Mrs. Lewis?”

  “This is Mrs. Lewis.” Her voice was tight and she felt short-winded.

  “My name is Julia Zimmerman. I’m a friend of Emma’s on the Princeton program in Spain.” The voice stopped, as though hesitant to go on.

  “Yes,” Jennifer prodded.

  “I don’t know if Emma was able to get through to you, but she’s in trouble and I wanted to be sure you knew.”

  Jennifer took a deep breath. “Yes, we know. She called early this morning from jail.”

  “Oh, good,” Julia Zimmerman said. “The thing is, she really needs you to come right away and to get her a good lawyer. The police are interviewing everyone, and people are saying terrible things about her. I know she couldn’t have done this. I just wish Paco hadn’t disappeared.”

  “Paco?”

  “Her boyfriend. She was with him earlier last night, before this all happened. I know he could clear her, but no one knows where he is.”

  “Her boyfriend?”

  Julia paused, confused. “I’m sorry. I thought you knew. They lived together. Well, some of the time.”

  Jennifer bit her upper lip.

  “I really have to go, Mrs. Lewis. I’m sorry, but the police told me not to talk to anyone and I could get in trouble.”

  “Wait—please, Julia. What terrible things are they saying about Emma? Who is saying these things? Who was killed? How is Emma connected to all this?”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t tell you on the phone. Maybe we can talk when you come.”