The Perfect Mother: A Novel

by Nina Darnton

  “This is extremely unusual here, Mrs. Lewis. Because of our unique population, most of the prisoners abide by the rules.”

  Jennifer was beginning to feel angry. “What are the rules? You mean a prisoner has to give in to all advances since you seem unable to protect them from them? Or is it just Americans who don’t learn the rules and are not told what they are?”

  José tried to placate her again, but she wriggled away from his hand and glared angrily at the director.

  The director continued as if she hadn’t been interrupted, ignoring Jennifer’s outburst. “There is an old woman, a Gypsy, who has been here for many years for murdering her husband and his girlfriend. She sits in the lounge all day—she’s been here so long she has special privileges and she is a very easy prisoner. The young Gypsy women respect her and she has become the person to whom they go for advice. She acts as the unofficial head of the clan here, and her word settles disputes, mediates claims, and is usually followed. If Emma had gone to her, the advances would have stopped.”

  “Did anyone bother to tell Emma that?” Jennifer shot back.

  José now joined in as well. “When Emma came to you and complained and you punished her roommate, did you not think it more prudent to tell Emma to pretend she hadn’t spoken to you and to go directly to this old woman?”

  The director turned her attention to José. “Yes. Of course we thought of it. But once she came to us, we were obligated to write down her visit and the reason for it. Once that was done, there is a protocol that must be followed.”

  “I don’t understand,” Jennifer said. “And anyway, it’s too late. I want to see my daughter.” She turned to José. “I want you to make an official complaint. I want to take this as far as we can. I think and believe it could have been avoided and I’m not at all sure that it wasn’t part of some plan to break her.”

  The director pushed back her chair and rose. “I understand how you feel, senora. But your daughter is in a prison, not a boarding school, and sometimes no matter how hard we try to avoid it, these things happen. It is true that she is not doing all she can to free herself and to bring an easier confinement with the privileges that go with being a cooperative prisoner. But we did not deliberately allow this to happen.”

  “I just want to see her,” Jennifer said, looking pleadingly at the director and speaking softly. “And not through glass. I want to hold her and comfort her and show her that her mother is here with her in her trouble. Please allow this.”

  José said something in Spanish and the director seemed to consider it for a few seconds. “You are a mother,” he continued. “Surely you can feel for this mother’s pain.”

  The director frowned, and spoke as though thinking out loud. “It is true that by now she might have earned a private visit,” she began. “She hasn’t earned this the easy way, but perhaps I can grant the privilege, given the circumstances. But not today. It takes some administrative work to arrange. I will have to change her status, which is complicated.” She turned to Jennifer. “You can see her the usual way today and come back next week for a private visit.”

  Jennifer started to object, but José interrupted her.

  “Gracias,” he said. “I’m sure Senora Lewis is very grateful.”

  He put his hand under Jennifer’s elbow and gently led her from the room.

  CHAPTER 23

  Clutching José’s arm, Jennifer walked into the visiting room. She took a seat in front of the plexiglass partition and sat erect, leaning forward, straining to see if Emma had already entered. José put his hand on her shoulder, gave her a reassuring squeeze, and departed. There were only a few other visitors and they were busily engaged in conversation with the prisoners they had come to see. An elderly woman in a black dress, her gray hair done up in a bun from which stray strands had escaped, sat talking to a young dark-haired prisoner who might have been her granddaughter. On Jennifer’s other side, a man and a boy who looked to be about ten years old were talking to a heavyset dark-skinned woman with jet-black hair and a noticeable dark fuzz over her upper lip. The woman glanced up when Jennifer sat down and then, quickly losing interest, turned back to her visitors. Were these women who had joined in hurting Emma? Jennifer wondered, trying not to stare.

  Emma entered from the back of the prisoners’ room. She was limping slightly, and when she sat in the designated chair, she eased herself into it as though it hurt to bend her body. One eye was swollen with reddish-purple lines radiating out in a circle like a child’s drawing of the sun. Her hair was dirty and clung to her bruised face. She was wearing jeans and a long-sleeved shirt that buttoned in the front, so Jennifer couldn’t see if there were bruises on her arms or chest, but what she saw was enough.

  “Emma, what have they done to you?” Tears were streaming down her face and her voice was overflowing with love and sympathy.

  Emma rolled her eyes and looked around furtively to be sure no one else had heard. “Please, Mom, don’t be so overdramatic. It is what it is. Did you see that bitch of a director? Did she tell you this was all my fault?”

  Jennifer wiped her eyes and tried hard to stem the flow of tears. She was in a constant push and pull between her natural maternal reactions, the ones that had served her and her children well for twenty years, and the new restraint and distance her daughter seemed to need. It confused her because she didn’t know what was expected of her or why, although it seemed that anything natural to her was wrong. She wanted to help Emma and not react selfishly, not give in to the feelings of hurt, rejection, and even anger she’d so often experienced since she’d arrived, but sometimes she just felt bruised.

  She lowered her voice and tried to even her tone. “Of course it wasn’t your fault. No one thinks it was your fault. Emma, please, I know this has been horrible, the worst possible thing, worse than anything any of us ever imagined would happen in our lives. But you’re strong, you’ll get through it, and we’ll go home, and you’ll go back to school and put this behind you.”

  Emma laughed with her voice but not her eyes. “Go back to Princeton? Right. Not likely.”

  Jennifer sighed. “You can go wherever you want. You can go to school or stay home, or get a job and move out, if that’s what you want, and we’ll help you whatever you do. But you have to get out of here first and that still depends on you.”

  Emma looked up belligerently, ready for a fight, but Jennifer continued.

  “I see in your face that you’re ready to argue about this. But there’s new information you might want to consider first. Roberto has been to Paco’s home village, the one he tells everyone he is helping by giving money to sustain all those poor people who are unemployed.” She paused to see Emma’s reaction, but Emma didn’t oblige. She didn’t look up, though her mother, who watched her intently, could see her body stiffen and her mouth tighten as she bit her upper lip and waited.

  “He doesn’t come from that village, Emma. No one has heard of him. No one has gotten any money from him. It’s all a complete invention.”

  Emma looked at her mother with contempt. She spewed out her response in a stream of verbal bile.

  “Of course you’d think that. You’d believe that. Did you and Roberto have a good laugh over that? Well, sorry, but you’re dead wrong. Did it ever occur to you that he might be using a different name? That he wanted to remain anonymous?”

  “Emma, listen. What will it take to convince you? It’s a beautiful dream, this wonderful self-sacrificing boyfriend who wants to help the poor and doesn’t even want to be thanked for it. He’s done a great job convincing you of his virtue. But you are too intelligent to hang on to that, as much as you want to, in the face of the facts. I don’t want to believe anything bad of anyone you love, Emma. But I want you to make your decisions based on truth, not fantasy. It’s okay to be taken in. You’re young and you fell in love. You made a mistake, but you can correct it and you can be free to go on with the rest of your life.”

  Emma looked down at the shelf run
ning along the edge of the plexiglass as if something very interesting were on it. She didn’t respond for a few minutes and Jennifer hoped she was seriously considering what had been said. Finally, she looked up.

  “How’s Dad, Mom?” Her voice was bitter, hard, insinuating.

  Jennifer responded cautiously, not sure where this was headed. “He’s fine. He’s working very hard on your behalf in the States, dealing with the press, working with the company we’ve hired to get everyone as much as possible on your side.”

  “So he hasn’t been here for a few days. But I guess you’ve found other things to keep you busy, right?”

  “Emma, I spend all my time trying to find ways to prove your innocence and get you out of here. What has this got to do with anything?”

  “I saw how you spend your time on the front page of the newspaper today, Mom. Maybe Lily and Eric saw it too. Maybe Dad saw it; did you think of that?”

  “I want to explain that. I didn’t think you would’ve seen it yet.”

  “I’m not completely cut off here, you know. We get the papers. There’s a computer in the library. Everyone here is laughing about it.”

  Jennifer stiffened. “That picture and that story implied something completely false, Emma. Roberto was out of town trying to find information that we hoped would help you. He was delayed and didn’t get in touch with me. I worried, because I knew we needed him to get you out of here. When he returned, I was so happy to see him, I hugged him. That’s all.”

  Emma smirked with knowing disdain, an expression her mother had not seen since she was fifteen. “You kissed him, actually,” she said. “Unless you’re saying they doctored the picture.”

  Jennifer raised her voice in exasperation—too much, apparently, because the few other visitors turned toward her and Emma cringed, but her patience was at an end and she couldn’t control herself. “On the cheek, Emma. I tried to kiss him on the cheek.” She lowered her voice and leaned forward confidentially. “The picture made it look more intimate than it was.” She noticed Emma’s look of disbelief and raised her voice again in exasperation. “With your experience here, even after everything they say about you that you deny, do you find it hard to believe that they would distort and lie and do anything to rile people up and sell papers?”

  Emma looked around nervously and spoke in a whisper, through her teeth. “Stop, Mom. Calm down. Everyone is looking at you. This doesn’t help me.”

  “It helps me,” Jennifer said.

  “Yeah. Of course, that’s all that matters, isn’t it? That’s all that’s ever mattered.”

  The anger that had roiled inside Jennifer but that up until then had been mostly stanched, only leaking out from time to time, now threatened to explode. She could feel it in her throat, taste it in her mouth, but she spoke softly, with all the self-control she could muster.

  “What’s always all that mattered, Emma?”

  Emma was not equally in control. “You,” she spit out. “It was always about what made you feel good about yourself. About maintaining your perfect, privileged life.”

  It came then—her self-control collapsed like floodgates battered down by an onrushing torrent. “My privileged life?” Jennifer shouted. “How about yours? You had everything—everything. Lessons in anything you wanted, every toy that ever interested you, the best schools, the best camps. And you didn’t get all that out of guilt like some mothers do because they’re working and not spending enough time with their kids. Because I gave up acting; I gave up my career. I was always there when you came home from school with treats and cupcakes and conversation. We talked all the time.” She was trying to control her voice and fight back tears at the same time, but Emma appeared unmoved.

  “We talked, but you never really listened,” Emma flung back in an angry but low voice, with a calm delivery that made its message even more hurtful. “You never were interested in whether I was happy, only in some new accomplishment I did so you could brag about it to your friends. You gave up your career for me? I don’t think so. You did it for you. It was easier to live through us. You pressured us to be ‘perfect’ so you could see yourself as the perfect mother, in order to justify your own sacrifices and make up for your sense of failure in the world outside our family.”

  Jennifer was speechless. At some point during Emma’s harangue, she had stopped hearing her. Or she had heard her, but stopped being wounded by her words, as though she were a sponge so full of liquid it could no longer absorb the continuing stream. She stared at her. She took a deep, steadying breath. After what felt to both like a very long silence, she spoke.

  “Do you know what the police think you did, Emma?”

  “What has that got to do with this?”

  “They think there was no Algerian. In fact, they think there was no attempted rape. They believe that you were sleeping with this Spanish boy. Maybe you knew him or maybe you picked him up that night at the bar. You’d had a fight with Paco earlier, so you didn’t expect him to come home, but he did, and he found you in bed together. He flew into a jealous rage and killed him. Then, to protect Paco, you concocted this absurd story to cover everything up.”

  She was looking at Emma while she spoke. Her tone was straightforward and she surprised herself by how emotionally removed, even cold, she suddenly felt. It was a relief, but it was not to last.

  Now it was Emma’s turn to be stunned. “Is that what you think too, Mom?”

  “I don’t know what I think anymore. I think it’s not impossible.”

  Emma blinked a few times. She opened her mouth wider and then covered it with her right hand. “You are my mother and you believe I could do that?” she said incredulously. She was choked up, hardly able to spit out the words. “I didn’t know that Spanish kid. I’d never seen him before. He followed me and tried to rape me. But you, you take this high moral ground while you are fucking the guy who’s supposed to clear me. How dare you?”

  She turned away and stood up, then turned back slowly. “Go away. Don’t come back. I don’t want to see you again. I don’t want your help or anything else from you ever.”

  Jennifer’s sense of distance evaporated. This was her daughter. How could this be happening? She noticed everyone looking and saw one of the guards approaching and she begged Emma to calm down, to sit again so they could work this out, but Emma had started to weep, sucking in her breath between loud racking sobs. Jennifer wanted to comfort her, wanted to take back everything she’d said, to take her in her arms and hold her, but she couldn’t touch her through the yellowed plexiglass. “I’m sorry, Emma; I didn’t mean it. I was just striking back. I was wrong. Please sit down. Please forgive me.”

  But Emma remained standing, her back to her mother. Still sobbing, she collapsed into the arms of the guard who had come to investigate the commotion and who led her away. She didn’t look back as she left the room. Jennifer remained at the partition long after Emma had disappeared, frozen with grief and regret.

  CHAPTER 24

  She called Mark as soon as she got back to her apartment. It was early morning in Philadelphia and he was still groggy but was jolted awake by her urgent tone. She told him, despondently, what had happened and begged him to come right away. She needed him. She had failed Emma, and now Emma wouldn’t speak to her. He was their only hope.

  He promised to clean up a few things, make some necessary arrangements, and come by the end of the week. He tried to console her, but she didn’t think he sounded completely sincere. He wanted to put Lily and Eric on the phone to say hello, but it was clear that she wasn’t up to it. Once again, he urged her to come home, at least for a visit, to help their two younger children and to derive some comfort and sustenance from the normalcy of their lives and their eager love for their missing mother. She would, she said, very soon, and she’d call them later when she had regained some equanimity. She was convinced, she said, that although they missed her it was good for them to see that when one of them was in trouble, she was there for her and w
ould retain that commitment no matter what happened for however long it took. They would know that they too would receive that kind of dedication if anything bad happened to them, and in the long run, that would make them feel secure. His voice sounded skeptical—she remembered sadly how in the past her word on child-rearing psychology was taken without question, as if she were the acknowledged expert—but after a small pause, he said he understood. Still, he reminded her again to call them later. There was a slight uncomfortable silence and then, repeating that he would be there in a few days and mechanically urging her to hang on until then, he signed off.

  When she hung up, she felt relieved that he was coming, but the churning anxiety didn’t abate and even seemed to increase, now augmented by worry and guilt about her other children as well as the awkwardness between her and Mark. His response was dutiful, she acknowledged, but not loving. Mark used to always be able to calm her, she thought. Now she was alone.

  She hung up by holding the phone’s disconnect button down with her finger, and without pausing long enough to make a decision, she punched in Roberto’s cell phone number. He picked up on the first ring and, having seen that the call came from her, started talking in an uncharacteristically exuberant voice before saying hello.

  “Jennifer,” he said. “I was just going to call you. I have some news for you that I think will help us.”

  She could hear his excitement and felt a slight smile begin to cross her lips in spite of herself. She took a deep breath and exhaled. “I could use some good news. Can you tell me on the phone?”

  He laughed. “How suspicious you are becoming. And yes, I can, but I won’t. I think this is something I will show as well as tell. I’m on my way back. I should be there by around nine. Meet me for dinner?”

  She agreed, and he said he’d pick her up at her apartment. She took her time getting ready, choosing a dress that she knew flattered her, fixing her hair and her makeup. She told herself she just needed to feel attractive again, to think of herself as an independent person and not just an unhappy mother. But the truth was deeper. Her guilt was turning to anger. She was attracted to Roberto. He was closer to her now than anyone else in her life. But she hadn’t acted on it for many reasons—her attachment to Mark, for one thing; her sense of propriety, for another; but especially because it would complicate Emma’s case and her ability to help her. But Emma had become so hard, so estranged from her, that when she saw a picture that looked suspicious—that might, if there had been enough goodwill, have caused her simply to ask for an explanation—she leapt immediately to the most damning conclusion. It felt so unfair, so unloving, so opposite of what Jennifer had been trying to do in support of her daughter, which was to reject any evidence that differed from Emma’s story, to stick by her at all costs. Part of her thought she might as well have done what Emma had accused her of, since Emma believed it anyway. But that thought, born of anger and hurt, wasn’t long lasting. She knew that would be the worst thing she could do right now.