“Bets—are you there? Everything OK?”
“I found the paper.” She could barely force the words.
“Christ. Shit. Where are you?”
“At Dr. Kerr’s.”
“Elizabeth Davis?” A young nurse in purple scrubs with a long dark ponytail stuck her head out from behind the office door, holding Betsy’s chart in her hand. Betsy felt the baby kick and a tight pull in her left side.
“I’m so sorry, Betsy, I was going to show you at lunch. I just wanted you to get through this appointment first.”
“I can’t fucking breathe, Gavin. Gavin, please, I can’t breathe . . .”
The nanny glared at her, pulling the boy tight to her chest.
“Ms. Davis? Everything alright?” The nurse was standing in front of her now. “Ms. Davis, just try to breathe.”
“I’m on my way, Bets,” said Gavin. “Just hold on.”
CHAPTER 21
OUT OF THE GAME
September 9, 2010
Each morning in the Davis household played out in roughly the same way: awake by 6:45, stirred by the soft pounding of Remi’s feet on the hardwood floor, followed by a couple of perfect minutes in bed. It wasn’t the way it used to be, the blank staring at the ceiling and gradual reentry into the land of the living. Now Betsy relished that handful of blissed-out, uncomplicated minutes under the covers with a tiny four-year-old body pressed against her chest. It was taking Betsy an unusually long time to get used to the idea that her daughter was growing, not just growing up, but growing longer and leaner, with expanding hands that were strong and callused from the monkey bars at the park and cheekbones emerging from a once-round face. She’d sprung up like a sunflower that summer, bright, happy, and sturdy in the wind. Betsy could hardly believe that the girl who was sprinting down the beach, the one with the squealing laugh that carried in the breeze for what seemed like miles, belonged to her.
In the beginning, in those first few hours of her daughter’s life, Betsy wasn’t even sure the baby would live to see her first birthday. When the doctor first held up their tiny daughter, in the briefest minute before she was whisked away to the NICU, Betsy was in such shock that she’d had a baby at all, and so much sooner than she’d expected, that all she could do was marvel at her tiny fingernails and perfect, miniature lips in the way that people admire a scale model of a tall ship.
“How did we make you so small?” Betsy whispered, not understanding enough about what lay before her to cry just yet. The scale read four pounds, three ounces.
“She’s going to make it,” said Dr. Kerr, or Sara, as Betsy had come to know her obstetrician during the intense hours she spent in the hospital fighting to keep her daughter safe inside her womb a little longer. Sara was sitting on the edge of the hospital bed, where Betsy was propped up, glassy-eyed, trying to grasp what her doctor was saying through the Dilaudid. “But you’ve got a rough patch ahead. Rest if you can. Remi is in good hands now. She’s going to need you to be strong.”
Sara had explained that what had happened was called placental abruption.
“Essentially the baby’s food source detaches from the uterus, which triggers pre-term labor. The baby’s only chance for survival is outside of you,” she said. It was rare, and Sara explained that stress and anxiety weren’t known risk factors, but no one could say for sure. Betsy had been complaining of abdominal pain, which was the reason she was in Sara’s office when the worst of it began, but she avoided any mention of the newspaper article. It wasn’t something she talked about. After the contractions started in earnest, there was nothing they could do to stave off labor. So Betsy and Gavin’s Christmas present became their Halloween surprise, destined for a lifetime of jack-o’-lantern carving costume parties, birthday cake taking a backseat to sacks full of candy.
While Betsy rested and Remi slept in the NICU, Gavin did the only thing he could think to do: He made a playlist. He started with “I Found a Reason,” from the Velvet Underground, Brian Eno’s “I’ll Come Running,” “Little Fat Baby” by Sparklehorse, Radiohead’s “Sail to the Moon,” Calexico and Iron & Wine’s “History of Lovers,” Bright Eyes’s “First Day of My Life.” When they weren’t snatching moments of sleep between limited, sterilized visits with their child, Betsy kept her headphones on to drown out the hospital noises and mask the sound of her racing pulse in her ears. After a week passed, Remi’s lungs were stronger and things looked less dire, Gavin would slip in a song sung by a female badass, but only terrible ones, as a rallying cry. It made Betsy laugh.
“Thanks to you I have ‘Warrior’ by Scandal stuck in my head,” she said one weary morning, when she was leaving the hospital to go home to shower and he was arriving for the day shift. “I’ve been shooting at the walls of heartache all night.”
Gavin navigated through the sea of insurance paperwork. He made sure Betsy ate a few bites of something. He kept things in order at home, called Betsy’s office to inform them of the latest news and asked for their discretion and patience. He did a scathing and dead-on impersonation of the sternest of the NICU nurses, which made Betsy laugh in a deranged, sleep-deprived way. It was hardest in the middle of the night, usually 3:00 or 4:00 a.m., which was when they weighed their tiny girl to see if she managed to eek out a few more ounces. Betsy’s body was just catching on to the idea that it had given birth, and nursing her was all but impossible. Gavin was her rock.
“I’m your three a.m. guy, right?” he said, forcing a smile. “That’s how this all started, sort of, right? We drove away into the unknown in the middle of the night.”
“And lived happily ever after?” she added, delirious from endorphins. “Sort of?”
“Sort of. I promise.” He kissed her forehead. “You’re still cute when you’re crazy.”
NEARLY FOUR YEARS later, that promise was proving difficult to keep, and their new morning routine, with Betsy struggling at preschool drop-off, was the latest of many issues. Her obsessive, oppressive impulses would override any hope they had of peace, and it would subvert even the easiest of parenting tasks, like packing their daughter’s lunch.
“Gav,” Betsy called from the bathroom, “I sliced up some fruit for Remi’s lunchbox. It’s in the fridge.”
On the second shelf, there were two rows of BPA-free containers with organic apples, diced into tiny shards to prevent choking, pears sliced razor-thin and sprinkled with lemon juice. There were carrots, julienned and blanched (uncooked carrots, another silent killer), pan-fried tofu cubes, a viscous dip made with avocado and honey. Remi sat in her Tripp Trapp chair, licking her pointer finger and pressing it onto her Hello Kitty placemat to pick up the last of her toast crumbs. She was funny, too, and rebellious, like Betsy used to be. At the park, ever since she could walk, she’d spin in wild circles, as fast as she could, until she fell down. Then she’d squeal with laughter, her green eyes sparkling.
“Dizzy, it’s the gateway drug,” Betsy would overhear Gavin say to another father on the bench, shaking his head in mock disgust. “At least she has a designated driver.”
Every once in a while, when Betsy would have a second martini, or order nachos instead of the harvest vegetable plate, or when she’d come back from a long, head-clearing run along the Hudson River, she noticed that the clouds parted for a moment, and she would be embarrassed by how Gavin would look at her anew and smile, as though he recognized a long-lost friend. Then the darkness would close in again.
“I found it,” he said, pulling out a jar of sunflower seed butter to smear on a hunk of baguette, which he then stuffed in a Ziploc, another item of contraband he picked up on late-night runs to the corner market.
This was how Betsy managed their lives. At work, her hyper-vigilance made her credible, if a bit feared. She was known for her exceedingly thorough research and attention to detail. At home, it wound everything around her as tight as a tourniquet. Betsy’s determination not to fuck up her daughter went beyond the typical limits on TV and sugar and battery-operated toys. Be
tsy was happiest when Remi was inside the house, under the watchful eye of Flavia, their mildly paranoid nanny. Betsy had instantly recognized Flavia’s tendencies to anticipate the worst during her first interview, before the police background check, and listed this quality in the “pro” column in the thorough notes she took on everyone who applied for the job.
All this streamed through Betsy’s head during her first cup of coffee at home, and again in the shower, as she scrubbed at her aging elbows, and later examined the soft pouches of flesh that were forming below the corners of her mouth in the foggy bathroom mirror. She wondered if her high cheekbones would save her aging face in the end.
Still in her robe, she wandered into her daughter’s room, which was pale, sunny, and spare, save for a few pops of muted color and handmade toys, in a studied imitation of the chic Scandinavian nurseries Betsy would ogle online. She shored herself up against the struggles that would play out in front of Remi’s closet, as they did most mornings. Would she want to wear a costume again, so their walk to school would be punctuated with glances that implied she was one of those kinds of parents? Was she one of the mothers who never brushed her daughter’s hair for fear of tears and let her exercise control over her own destiny by wearing a bedazzled Ramones T-shirt over a tattered yellow Snow White dress? Or would she reach for the tidy, tasteful French cotton top with the smocking detail and the Aster Mary Janes, inspiring equally loathsome judgments from passersby convinced of Betsy’s need to project good taste and order into the world through her hyper-managed child? She remembered her own delight over clothes as a child, the tidy brown paper packages, shakily addressed to Miss Elizabeth Young that would arrive from her paternal grandmother. She’d met her a handful of times before her father left, before her mother cut off all contact beyond a holiday card. Every year on her birthday, when she was very young, a package arrived that contained a perfectly pressed cotton dress. Betsy remembered being about Remi’s age when she opened the box to find a dress adorned with fabric cherries so round and red that her hands shook with excitement as she reached out to touch them. Betsy would sit quietly by while Remi chose her outfit, swallowing all of her memories and opinions and worry, trying to let go.
Remi wasn’t as forgiving in front of her mother’s closet. Betsy and Gavin were the proud parents of a kale-eating preschooler who chided her mother mercilessly about her chronic under-accessorizing.
“That’s red,” said Remi, fed and dressed in a Breton striped T-shirt and yellow leggings, topped with a shredded tulle tutu that was snug around her middle. She sat on the bathroom counter watching Betsy get ready for work as she stuffed her index finger into a lipstick cap. “Red red. What makes it red?”
Betsy knew there’d come a time when her daughter would start asking questions she’d struggle to answer. Betsy kept a picture of her and Ginny, laughing, jaws agape, dangling from a branch of the kumquat tree in Key West that was close to snapping under the stress of their weight, in a frame on her dresser. When Remi asked about the person who was in the picture, Betsy said, “An old friend,” and then changed the subject. She didn’t know what to say. She thought she’d have more time to figure it out.
“It’s called pigment. It comes from minerals, like rocks, or sometimes plants and flowers,” said Betsy, carefully curling her eyelashes, avoiding her daughter’s pale blonde head bobbing beneath her elbow. “It’s how they make paint, too.”
“But, Mommy, rocks are dirty,” Remi said, pausing a minute to scowl and imagine the process of turning rocks into makeup.
“They clean them, I think. Then they smash them to bits,” she explained, twisting her face into a grimace with hopes to raise an eyebrow or induce a giggle. Instead, she was on the other end of that long, steady stare.
“Mommy, why do you wear makeup?”
Betsy wanted to say Because I feel like death without it. Because worry has carved deep lines all over my face. Because I am the oldest forty-year-old in the world.
But instead she smiled at her daughter and said, in the studied tone of nonchalance she was trying to perfect, “Sometimes it just makes me feel pretty.” She paused. Was it working? “It’s one of the things grown-up women do to make themselves feel good.”
“Are you wearing that shirt because it makes you look pretty?” asked Remi, studying the shimmering bronzer she’d smeared on the back of her hand and the vaguely boxy, abstract floral Marni top that her mother slid over her head. Remi looked up at Betsy, looking her straight in the eyes.
“I guess so. Do you like it?” Betsy asked.
Remi lay on the floor and kicked her fleshy legs out in front of her. “Umm, not exactly.”
How this pattern was established, a mother’s attempt to preserve a daughter’s ego, protect her innocence, only to have the daughter snap back with a crushing blow to her own, was a mystery. Was this how mean girls were made? Or was it just childhood innocence? Whatever it was, Betsy fell for it every time, fighting the urge to retreat to the closet to change her shirt. “Let’s go say bye-bye to Daddy, OK?” Ending sentences with an approval-seeking “OK?” was another habit Betsy found almost impossible to break. Betsy was learning what it meant to be a parent, that even if you want something, desperately, for your child, you can’t will it into being. They can’t be coerced or molded, only occasionally persuaded—and protected, of course, but Betsy’s focus on guarding her daughter from the evils of the world was as hot and precise as a laser. Children are born who they are. The challenge for Betsy was to learn how to get out of Remi’s way.
It had been three days since Gavin busted her lurking on the stoop. Out on the street, tiny backpack and lunch in hand, they tromped down the sidewalk, Betsy and her girl—in ladybug galoshes on one of those perfect, blue-sky September mornings—ready to face the world. Just choosing a route for the morning walk to the Montessori school in their neighborhood had been a challenge for Betsy. They’d tried a few paths, sampling them for distance, horn noise, exhaust from idling cars, and the number of street crossings, and Betsy had decided on a slightly longer, less direct path that she timed at seventeen minutes.
She was determined to walk her daughter to school. For starters, if she subtracted the walk to school from their time together, she was spending only three waking hours with her child every day. She also didn’t want to give the other mothers at school another reason to criticize her. She had to go.
The division of parental duties was an illusion, Betsy was convinced, which existed so working fathers and mothers could feel like they were pulling equal weight in the contemporary American family. Trading off the rituals of meal preparation, bath time, and dish duty was fine. But the other hidden tasks, including decoding the subtle signals at school, tipped heavily to the maternal side. Gavin had offered to do drop-off, but he was so oblivious to his surroundings, the dynamics between the kids and the school director, the dreaded Elodie, that she knew he’d return with no pertinent information and decided to take on the task herself until she was satisfied that she’d gathered sufficient intel. During her early years in town, Betsy had fought (and lost, mostly) her own social battles before she gave up on the idea of meeting new people. Then she had a baby, and it all started again. When would she be free of the tyranny of the alpha female? The pattern that began in grade school repeated itself again and again, in high school, college, at work, and now in the well-lit hallways of her daughter’s preschool, decorated with construction paper cutouts.
BETSY WAS SURE the other parents had heard about her lurking and crying in front of the school. She was so humiliated by Elodie’s admonishing leer out of the window, the way she’d been chastised for stalking the school and had to have Gavin swoop in to save her from herself, that she had decided that going back for a college reunion, a hastily organized gathering around a few of her pledge-sisters’ fortieth birthdays, might not be a terrible idea. Or it might, in fact, be a terrible idea, but it was her only idea. She was surprised that she had even been invited. Betsy picture
d the women she went to college with riffling through old photos and memorabilia and thinking, with blurry and faded memories, “I wonder what ever happened to Betsy Young?” Betsy’s memories, on the other hand, were permanently etched, and they stuck to her skin like wax. Going back to Gainesville to reconcile with her past, to see how tiny the buildings looked, how small the town felt, and how hundreds and thousands of students had shuffled sleepily through that campus since she left, might be her only way forward. In the meantime, she repositioned herself on a different stoop, a few doors down and out of Elodie’s sight, set her timer for twenty minutes, and accepted that those tortured moments in front of the school were part of her morning routine until she could sort herself out.
By the time she made it to midtown, an hour late to work, and into the austere white marble lobby, she was fully aware of all of the people she was disappointing. When she breezed past the front counter, past the latest crop of fresh-faced Client Services and Catalogue girls, she envied their youth, their utter lack of real responsibility. The more academic of the specialists liked nothing more than to poke fun at them, wondering what kind of “special” client services they really offered behind closed doors. But Betsy remembered enough about being that age to understand that they had more on their minds than waiting to pounce on the next eligible bachelor to walk through the door. Life was never as simple as it seemed. She caught her own distorted reflection on the polished brass doorframe, which looked as twisted and tortured as she felt.
Betsy remembered how she worried at that age, and how she was always concerned about the type of mother she’d become. Back in college, Teddy had given her his dog-eared copy of Geek Love, the Katherine Dunn book about circus freaks that college kids flocked to in the early 1990s for its combination of gore and commentary about the damage parents inflict on their children in order to better their lives. When one of the characters, a dwarf-like creature, becomes pregnant in the book, she gives up her daughter to be raised by nuns and watches her blossom into adulthood while posing as a strange but kindhearted neighbor. She didn’t want her child to grow up thinking she was a monster, or even the daughter of a monster. At the time, Betsy thought it was pure, twisted fantasy. Now she knew better.
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