The Other Mother

by Carol Goodman

  “She only started when she heard your voice,” said the girl, a wide-eyed naïf who looked all of sixteen, looking nervously between me and her employer.

  “Figures,” my new friend said. Then she swooped the baby up in the air, surprising her mid-cry into silence, and making my stomach drop as she held the wiggling baby at arm’s length over the hard pavement. “I’m Laurel, by the way, and this little imp”—she gave the startled baby a playful little shake—“is Chloë.”

  “That’s so funny,” I said, “my baby’s Chloe too.”

  “Really,” she said, arching one perfectly plucked eyebrow (who has the time to pluck her eyebrows!), “I guess we’re fated to be friends then.”

  Chapter Two

  You must be exhausted,” Schuyler Bennett says.

  “I’m really sorry we’re so late,” I say. “Some last-minute things came up . . .” Like driving to Laurel’s that last time. I hadn’t planned on that. “I didn’t know you’d wait up.”

  She waves a crooked hand (Arthritis, she’d told me on the phone, can’t so much as lift a pen these days) in the air. “When you get to my age, you don’t need much sleep. Billie would have been here to greet you too but it’s her grandson’s birthday so I gave her the night off.”

  “Billie?” I echo, wondering if this is someone I’m supposed to have heard of.

  “Mrs. Williams, my housekeeper. The one I suggested could watch Chloe for you?”

  “Oh!” I say. “That’s so generous. But I’m sure I can find daycare in the village—”

  “Nonsense. Billie used to be a nurse, plus she’s raised five children and fourteen grandkids. She was over the moon when I told her there was a baby coming to stay.” She looks toward the rear seat, where, miraculously, Chloe is still sleeping. “And such an angel.”

  “Thank you. She is . . . at least while she’s asleep—” I bite my lip to make myself shut up and then remember that normal mothers complain about their children. It’s not like I called her a bitch the way Laurel would.

  Schuyler Bennett doesn’t seem to have made anything of my criticism of my baby. “Well, you’d better get her inside before she wakes up.” She turns to lead the way back and I shoulder my handbag and the baby bag and unhook the car seat. The stroller attachment is in the trunk, but it wouldn’t be easy to push it over this gravel. Besides, I don’t want Schuyler Bennett to see how little luggage I have and think it’s strange that I’ve arrived for a six-month stay with only one suitcase. Better I get it later.

  Before I close the door I grab the baby blanket lying next to the car seat. It’s soaking wet. For a moment I stand holding it, trying to figure out how this happened. Did I spill that second bottle on it? Did Chloe’s diaper leak on it? But when I touch her diaper it’s dry. I leave the blanket on the car seat to deal with later and turn to join my new boss. She’s waiting at a different door from the one she came out of. “The tower has its own entrance, so you’ll have your privacy,” she says, unlocking the door and limping into a narrow foyer. “This door”—she points to a door on the right—“leads into the main house. You’re welcome to come through anytime, use the kitchen, sit in the parlors. Of course you’ll have full access to the library on the second floor, but please make yourself at home in the rest of the house as well. It’s just me and Billie rambling around like a couple of dried-out peas in a pod.”

  “Thank you, that’s so generous . . .” I’m repeating myself. But what else can I say? You’ve saved my life. I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t taken me and my baby in?

  She waves away my thanks. “Save your thanks until you see the library. When the university offered to buy my papers I knew I’d have to get someone I could trust to sort through it all.” She turns around in the doorway and fixes me with a hawklike gaze. Now that we’re in the light I can see how sharp the bones of her face are under her thin, papery skin. Her short silver hair barely covers her skull. She had mentioned something about being ill and now I wonder if she was in such a rush to hire me because she doesn’t have much time to get her papers in order. “And I’m really thrilled to have gotten someone with your credentials.”

  Laurel’s credentials, I think, my face going hot.

  “And I’m thrilled to get a chance to work with my favorite author, Ms. Bennett.” At least that part is true.

  A hectic blotch appears on her face. Have I embarrassed her? She turns away to open the door. “Please, call me Sky—everyone does—and come on in. You’ll see I didn’t lie about the apartment being small.”

  The apartment is small, and oddly shaped since it’s the bottom floor of the octagonal tower. There’s a sitting area with a flowered couch and coffee table, a tiny kitchen, a bathroom, and a bedroom with a double bed. In the middle of the space is a spiral staircase that coils up to the next floor, its smooth wooden planks suspended on a skeletal iron frame that makes me feel uneasy just looking at it.

  “My father saw patients here when I was a girl,” Schuyler—Sky—says, as if that explained the apartment’s size or its odd shape.

  “He was a doctor at the hospital, right?” I ask, more to show that I remember what she told me on the phone than because I want to think about mental patients in my new home.

  “The director,” she says, as someone else might say king or president. “I’m afraid you’ll have to wade through a good deal of his papers. They’re all mixed up with mine and some of the records will have to go to Crantham . . . actually, I have an idea about that, but we can discuss all that tomorrow.” She must see how overwhelmed I am. She never mentioned her father’s papers in our conversations. The idea of going through the files of a psychiatrist makes me queasy; I’ve had enough of madness in the last few months to last a lifetime.

  She’s gone on to describe the layout of the house. “The study on the second floor of the tower connects directly to the library, which I can reach by elevator in the main house. Shall we meet there tomorrow at, say, ten? Will that give you enough time to settle in?”

  I’m not sure that I’ll ever “settle in” here, but I manage to say “That will be fine” in a voice that doesn’t sound like my own. It must be the right voice, though, because Schuyler—Sky—smiles and says, “Yes, I think it will be.”

  It’s only after she’s left—hobbling out of my door and crossing the foyer to the door to the main house—that I realize why the voice hadn’t sounded like my own. It’s because it sounded like Laurel’s voice, which I’ve apparently appropriated along with her credentials and name.

  AFTER SCHUYLER BENNETT leaves I carry the car seat into the bedroom and put it down on the floor. Chloe stirs but stays asleep. I’m tempted to leave her in the car seat but I know that’s not good for her growing limbs (Excessive time in a car seat can put a strain on your baby’s developing spine, one parenting blog had cautioned. Straps on car seats may cause strangulation, another had warned). Which means I’ll have to deal with the bed.

  I’d told Schuyler Bennett I didn’t need a crib because Chloe slept with me. I’d braced myself for a lecture on the dangers of co-sleeping, which Peter had been adamantly against, but instead got “That sounds like an eminently sane arrangement.” What I hadn’t told her was that the arrangement I’d come up with in my home had involved stripping the bed of pillows, putting the mattress on the floor, and shoving it up against a wall. That won’t be possible here. The bed’s on a heavy cast-iron frame with peeling (no doubt lead-based) paint that I can already imagine Chloe eating. It sits squarely in the middle of the room. Even if I could budge it I’m not sure it would fit against the angled walls.

  She won’t fall off the bed this one night. It’s the same reasonable voice I’d heard before. Laurel’s voice. It scares me a little to be hearing voices again, but if I have to have a voice inside my head, Laurel’s wryly sensible tone is the one I’d choose. But then, I hear Laurel say, all the voices sound sensible at the time.

  I LAY CHLOE down in the middle of the bed, put a couch c
ushion on one side of her (after checking that it’s firm enough that she can’t suffocate against it), and position myself like a human parenthesis on the other. I dump the half dozen ruffled and embroidered pillows on the floor so she won’t suffocate on those either. She wakes briefly and stares at me, her eyes strangely wide in the dim light of the yellow duckie night light I’d brought with us.

  Like an alien, I’d thought when she first came home from the hospital, as if she’d just arrived here from another planet. Eventually I had grown used to her. I hadn’t thought of her like that for weeks, but now, perhaps because we’re in this strange place, she looks new to me again. Even the strawberry mark on her nose has gone. The pediatrician said it would fade away, but seeing it gone gives me a pang. How long has it been gone? What other changes have I missed? How well do I know my own baby?

  But then she reaches out a chubby hand and grabs a lock of my hair while she sucks her thumb and I feel my heart contract.

  That’ll ruin her teeth, some of the other mothers would say, but I’d never had the heart to deny her such an easy means of self-comfort. If it worked for me, I’d try it myself. She drifts off to sleep after a few minutes and I try to follow her. Sleep when the baby sleeps, all the books tell you, but what the books don’t tell you is how the silence of the long nights fills with sounds imagined and real. At home it would be the stealthy footstep of a burglar, the window latch opening, the crackle of electrical wires spreading fire through the walls. I’d made poor Peter get up countless times to check for burglars and loose wires. Aural hallucinations, Esta told us, are a common postpartum phenomenon and not necessarily a sign of postpartum psychosis. Here there’s the whisper of all those pine trees, the hoot of an owl—and a step on the spiral staircase.

  I freeze, hold my breath, tell myself it’s just the wood settling in an old house—and hear it again. I imagine those stairs coiling like a snake up to . . . what had Schuyler Bennett said was up there? A study connected to the library. I imagine the length of the old stone house stretching out. Was there a locked door between the upstairs tower floors and the rest of the house? The thought that someone could wander from the house down into my apartment was disturbing. But who could it be? Schuyler Bennett said it was just her and the housekeeper in the house and the housekeeper was away visiting grandchildren.

  Then I remember the proximity of the mental hospital and hear Sky’s voice. You don’t have to worry that an escaped serial killer will get out and make their way over. Why is it that sentences that begin You don’t have to worry are always the ones especially designed to produce exactly that effect? I can vividly picture an escaped lunatic—a woman with a gaunt face, unkempt hair, wild eyes, and an inflamed hatred of babies—prowling on the floor above.

  Leave it, I tell myself. It was just Schuyler Bennett come to the library to get a book—

  A creak, sharp as breaking glass, strafes through my nerves. No, it can’t be Schuyler Bennett. She might be in the library, but she couldn’t manage those stairs with her limp. I hold my breath to listen, tensing my whole body. The reason some women experience aural hallucinations, Esta had gone on to explain, is that Mother Nature has made our hearing extra-acute so we can hear our babies’ cries in the night.

  Mother Nature is a bitch, Laurel had whispered conspiratorially to me. Why didn’t she give new mothers something useful, like larger bladders or husbands who might actually change a diaper?

  I hadn’t wanted to admit to her that Peter did change Chloe’s diapers or that I found Esta’s explanation reassuring. Maybe it meant I wasn’t going crazy after all. Maybe—

  I hear the creak again. There’s definitely someone on the stairs. I get up, careful not to disturb Chloe, and pad barefoot into the sitting room. Light spills down the spiral stairs like water cascading over flat stones. The stairs are empty but now I hear another sound coming from the floor above—a ruffling sound, like wings. Maybe there’s a bird trapped in the room above.

  Once when Chloe was only a few weeks old a sparrow got into the house. I’d taken the screen off a window to get a wasp out—several wasps, actually. They’d made a nest under the roof and were getting into Chloe’s nursery somehow. I was terrified one would sting Chloe and she’d turn out to be allergic and go into anaphylactic shock.

  Call the exterminator, Peter told me. But I was afraid they would use chemicals that would hurt Chloe, so I’d devised a system of waiting till the wasps, drawn by the light, landed on the windowpane, at which point I’d whisk them out with a dust mop.

  Then one day I forgot to close the window and a sparrow flew in. Once in the enclosed space it panicked and flew wildly back and forth, slamming into closed windows and walls. I tried to use the mop to guide it out but that just increased its panic—and mine. Every time it hit a wall or window I felt my own heart slam up against my rib cage, as frightened as that stupid bird. It didn’t help that Chloe was shrieking. The sound of her crying, that damned bird flying around, it had all made me feel . . . trapped.

  But I wasn’t trapped, I remind myself as I start up the stairs, gripping the narrow iron banister, placing each foot carefully on the smooth, slippery wood; I’d gotten out. As I come up onto the second floor I see that the room is a windowless octagon, lined floor to ceiling with books. The only furniture is a circular table with two heavy carved chairs pulled up to it. There’s a lamp on the table but it’s not lit. The light and the sound are coming from the next floor.

  The stairs leading up to the top of the tower are narrower and made of iron instead of wood. The spiral is so tight I feel like a snail squeezing my body into a new shell. By the time I ooze through this corkscrew I’ll be contorted into its shape, molded into something new.

  What I am, when I get to the top, is dizzy from going round and round. The room spins like a top—an eight-sided glass top. This is where the light was coming from. A full moon shines through the open skylight and wide plate-glass windows. When the room stops spinning I see that the view stretches for miles over hundreds of wooded acres. That sea of green on my phone has been transformed into a silver forest. I might be Rapunzel up in her high tower with only my own hair as an escape plan. It takes my breath away seeing how far I’ve come.

  This is what you wanted, a voice says. Laurel? Myself? I can no longer tell the difference. But somehow I can finally breathe. I’ve done it. I’ve gotten away. I’ve escaped. And that sound—

  I cross to a rough wood table under one of the windows. It’s just a ledge really, but someone has used it for a writing desk. There’s a notebook lying open, pages white in the moonlight, turning in the breeze from the open window. That’s what was making the ruffling sound. Not a bird, just these pages.

  Still, as I approach the book, I half expect it to dart out from under my fingertips like that damned sparrow that had finally bashed itself to death against the bars of Chloe’s crib. Peter had come home to find me sitting on the floor with the dead bird in my lap, Chloe screaming in her car seat.

  The image is so disturbing I look away from the book—out the window—and notice that the woods below are not unbroken. I can make out some buildings below, a stately brick Victorian structure with two wings and a clock tower at its center, the clock face glowing like a second moon. It sits in a network of meandering paths and smaller buildings. It looks like a college campus or a country club, but it must be the hospital. I stare at it for several minutes, looking for the escaped lunatic of my imagination, but the grounds are so quiet I would think it was deserted if not for the smattering of lit windows and pathway lamps. Celebrity rehabs, anorexic teenagers, overworked CEOs, I repeat to myself. All as harmless-sounding as “postpartum depression.” Nothing to worry about.

  I look down at the book and read the spidery script.

  . . . and when she came out of the woods she found that what she carried was a senseless lump of wood . . .

  It’s a handwritten draft of the changeling story. Schuyler Bennett must have written it here, looking out
over all these acres of woods, like the woods the girl in the story has to walk through. Like the woods I’ve driven through with Chloe—

  Chloe. The name intrudes as insistent as a baby’s cry. Suddenly I have that terrible feeling I had in the car that I have left her behind. Did I put a cushion on the other side of her before I left the room? I can’t remember. What if she’s rolled over and fallen off? What was I thinking, leaving her alone on a bed?

  I rush down the two flights of stairs, the iron staircase shaking under my weight, the wood one groaning like a bereaved mother. I trip over the last step and go sprawling across the floor, crashing so loudly that Chloe will surely wake up.

  But she doesn’t.

  Because she’s fallen to the floor and cracked her head open.

  I crawl the last few feet to the bedroom, seeing it: her dazed, lifeless eyes staring up, her fragile skull cracked open like an egg, blood matting her fine, dandelion-fluff hair—

  She’s there. On the floor. Unmoving. I lunge for her, a scream rising in my throat, and clutch—

  —a frilly boudoir pillow. Chloe is lying on the bed, thumb in her mouth, her other hand splayed out like a pale starfish against the dark sheets. Her eyes flick open as I land too abruptly on the bed and she lets out a frightened wail. I cradle her in my arms, rocking her and crooning, “It’s all right, baby, Mama’s here. It’s all right. It’s all right.”

  I say it over and over again until I’m not sure who I’m trying to convince, her or me.

  Daphne’s Journal, June 18, 20—

  This day has been like a roller coaster!

  I felt much better at support group today. Esta talked about how it’s normal not to bond immediately with our babies and we shouldn’t feel like it made us any less of a mother. That made me feel better because to tell the truth I’ve been feeling guilty that Peter seems so much more attached to Chloe than I am. I mean, it was hard because she was born early and had to stay in the NICU for three weeks, and it was so scary, seeing her in that incubator with all those tubes attached to her. So I felt a lot better talking about that.