The Other Mother

by Carol Goodman

  “No need. I’ve got some here for when my granddaughter’s visiting. I just took the bag to check they were the same size and to see if you had another baby blanket. The one in the car was sopping wet.”

  “Oh,” I say embarrassed that I’d left the wet blanket in the car. “I’m sorry you had to bother.”

  “No bother. It’s hanging up in your bathroom.”

  “Thank you,” I say. “I’ll go into town to pick up some more diapers.”

  But once again Billie waves me off, telling me she’s already put it on the house shopping list. I leave, feeling a little useless. Back in my apartment I go into the bathroom and find the blanket hanging over the towel rack. Billie must have bleached it, because all Chloe’s blankets were pink and this one is white. Then I look closer and see that where her name is embroidered there’s an umlaut over the e. This is one of Laurel’s blankets. She must have left it at my house . . . or we got them mixed up during one of our playdates. Just like I accidentally took her diaper bag, which I open now.

  I dig out the packet that contains my own ID and the envelope I’d taken from Peter’s desk. They’re just where I left them, hidden in the folds of the bottom diaper, only hadn’t the IDs been on top of the envelope? I stare at my driver’s license. The four-year-old picture doesn’t look much like me now, and it feels like a relic of another life. Daphne Marist’s life. Daphne Marist was weak. When her husband threatened to take her child away from her she ran away instead of defending herself. Laurel wouldn’t have run away; she would have stayed and fought. Far better to be Laurel Hobbes than Daphne Marist from now on.

  I pick up the envelope I’d found in Peter’s desk. It’s thick, ivory-colored, the kind of envelope that would have held a wedding invitation, discolored where tape had held it to the underside of his desk drawer. I found it because when I opened the drawer to find a stapler the drawer had stuck. Which had seemed odd because Peter never tolerated anything broken. If a faucet leaked he tightened it. If a lock stuck he oiled it. If a door dragged over the carpet he took it off its hinges and sanded it. You’re lucky, another mother in group told me, I have to nag my husband to fix anything. I had thought I was lucky too, until Peter started eyeing me as if I had a few screws loose.

  So I took out the drawer to find out why it stuck.

  I slide out the two items now to look at them again. One is a photograph of a little boy, maybe three or four years old. His hair is cut badly and he’s not smiling. It looks like a school picture, only more institutional. The boy is glaring at the camera, square chin clenched, head tilted slightly to the side so that he’s eyeing the photographer sideways. That would have sealed the likeness if I needed anything else to convince me that the picture is of Peter, but I hadn’t needed anything else. The square jaw, the mole just below his left eye, the expression of distrust. Yes, this was my husband as a boy. Although I’d never seen a childhood picture of him I knew him immediately.

  When I turned it over I’d found the words Thomas Pitt, age 3 written in precise handwriting. Why had my husband, Peter Marist, been called Thomas Pitt?

  The photograph is as much a mystery as the other document: the last will and testament of Laurel Hobbes, naming Stan as trustee of all Laurel’s money left in trust to Chloë. I have no idea why Peter has a copy of Laurel’s will, but I know from the fact that he has hidden it that he wouldn’t want anyone to know he has it. Nor, I am guessing, would he want anyone to know about Thomas Pitt. The note I left for Peter said: “I have the picture and the will. I’ll show them to the police if you come after me.” They’re my insurance policy.

  But I need a better hiding place.

  I look around the apartment. I could duplicate Peter’s method and tape the envelope to the underside of a drawer, but I don’t trust meticulous and efficient Billie not to poke around my stuff. So I tuck it in my back pocket and head up the spiral stairs. Surely there’s someplace in the study, with its boxes of papers and files, where I can secure one slim envelope.

  As I climb the stairs I think of Billie’s story about the deranged mother come to rescue her baby. What kind of a story was that to tell a new mother? But then I remember that the nurses in the NICU could be a bit sadistic. When Chloe was five days old, an IV clamped to her skull, blue veins pulsing in the blue bilirubin lights, a masked and gowned nurse force fed her because, she told me, she was too frail to expend the energy it would take to breastfeed.

  And yet she was not too frail to scream and fight the tube going down her throat. Her face was red, her tiny fists clenched. Surely she was expending more energy like this than if she were in my arms and at my breast. I suspected the nurse was doing it to punish me because the last time I’d fed Chloe she’d taken too long to finish her allotted formula. It was my fault. My fault my baby was crying. My fault she was in pain. My fault her life was at risk.

  I’m standing in the study now, tears pricking my eyes, but I’m not myself anymore. I’m the lunatic mother searching for her lost baby. Where would she look? There’s no place here to hide a baby.

  I climb to the next floor, to the top of the tower. In the daylight the room is ringed by blue sky and floating clouds. It’s like being in a hot-air balloon, floating untethered to the ground. I wonder if that’s what that mother felt when she stood here, clutching a broken doll she thought was her child. Did she think the only way she could be free was to leap into that endless blue?

  Peter told me a news story once about a woman who jumped out of a high window, her baby strapped to her chest. She had developed the obsession that she’d harmed her baby, that he was hopelessly impaired, and that it was all her fault. She couldn’t live with the guilt—or leave her child to lead a damaged life. So she decided to take both their lives. When she landed, though, her body absorbed the blow. She died; her baby survived and went on to live a normal life. The idea that her baby was damaged had been a delusion. Peter wanted me to see what could come of always fretting about Chloe, but after I heard that story I’d become terrified of standing near windows, afraid that I’d take it into my head that Chloe was damaged and I’d leap to my death.

  When I shared the story with my group, Esta took me aside. “It may be better if you don’t tell stories like that,” she said. “Some women who may be suffering from postpartum OCD are very . . . suggestible. They may hear a story about another mother with delusions and begin to think that they are suffering from those very same delusions.”

  “You mean,” I’d said, “that delusions may be contagious?”

  “Well,” Esta had said, looking flustered, “I wouldn’t have put it like that, but basically, yes. I would recommend that you stay away from reading accounts of other mothers with postpartum psychosis and perhaps . . .” She had hesitated, looking uncharacteristically unsure of herself. “Perhaps this group’s not the right place for you.”

  “You’re kicking me out of the group?” I exclaimed. “But it’s the only thing holding me together!”

  She’d looked a little alarmed and then her face had softened. “I guess I could just try to monitor what you’re exposed to. I’ll bring it up in next week’s group—without naming any names—that we should all refrain from lurid horror stories about women with postpartum psychosis.”

  “Like the one I just told,” I’d said.

  “Exactly,” she’d replied.

  I step closer to the window to see if I’ve gotten better, and hear a floorboard creak beneath my foot. I stop and test it with the toe of my shoe. It rocks a little. I kneel down and run my hands over the old worn planks. They’re wide and weathered, worn in the center of the room as if someone had paced over them. The one I stepped on is definitely loose. I dig my fingernails in between two boards and pull up the loose one. Dust motes fly up into the air, catching the light. I cautiously reach my hand down into a shoebox-sized space, a perfect hiding spot. A silverfish scuttles away, sliding through a crack at the bottom. Clearly it hasn’t been used in years—if it ever was.

  I
put the extra set of car keys with my monogram on the fob into the hiding space. Then I take the envelope out of my back pocket and lay it next to the keys. I keep my hand on it for a moment, picturing the little boy in the photograph. I feel a pang at leaving him here. Even though I know the boy is Peter, there’s something in his expression that expects just this—being abandoned.

  “It’s only temporary,” I say out loud.

  When I take my hand out I brush something loose from the rough wood, something silky that sticks to my sweaty skin. I flinch, thinking it’s another silverfish, but it’s not. It’s a pale-pink ribbon, frayed and faded with age. Like something that might have belonged to a baby doll.

  Or to a baby.

  Daphne’s Journal, July 8, 20—

  Sometimes I wonder if it’s only mothers’ hormones that change when a couple has a baby. Peter’s been really nervous and touchy lately too, like he’s on super-high alert like I am. Take what just happened tonight. It all started with my new haircut. I was nervous he wouldn’t like it or he’d guess how expensive the highlights were, but he loved it! He said it made me look ten years younger.

  I should have just said thank you and left it at that but something about how he said it—like I must have been looking old and haggard before the haircut—made me say, “Like a college girl? Too young for you.”

  Right away I knew I’d said the wrong thing. His jaw tightened and he gave me one of his sideways looks. Sometimes I forget how touchy Peter is about his age. When we first met at the gym I thought he was in his early thirties. I was surprised when I saw on his driver’s license that he was in his forties. I’d made a joke about it later and he’d gotten angry that I’d looked at his license. He was right, of course, I shouldn’t have been snooping in his things, so I apologized and we made up.

  I couldn’t help noticing afterward, though, how he never makes any reference to his childhood. Nothing that would clue you into how old he is, like the TV shows he watched or where he was on 9/11 or the sports teams he grew up rooting for. I’d known him a year before I found out he’d gone to a state college way upstate. He says he doesn’t like to mention it because the people he works with all went to fancy boarding schools and Ivy League colleges. He’s proud he’s a self-made man and that he started his fund with seed money that his landlady gave him to manage. And he should be proud of it! He traded a tiny fund up to a small but respectably sized one in only ten years and he did it all on his own. He says, though, in the finance world it’s better to look like you’ve always had money, not like you’ve had to scrape and claw your way into it.

  So he was probably just feeling a bit testy when he told me that maybe I was too young for all of this. He had his arms open wide as if he meant our nice Westchester house, the living-room furniture I’d picked out of Pottery Barn and the curtains from Country Curtains. I thought it was all the height of suburban luxury until I saw Laurel’s white carpeting and Roche-Bobois sectional and custom-fitted window treatments. Now I think our house looks like a child’s playhouse version of adulthood, like the dream house a teenager would design by cutting pictures out of a magazine—like I did as a teenager when my mother was working nights at the Ramada Inn bar. It even looks like a teenager lives in it: couch cushions askew, mugs on the tables, dust coating everything. When Peter and I decided I would stay home, we’d agreed to do without a house cleaner. After all, if I’m home all day I can theoretically do the housecleaning. Only I never seem to get around to it.

  I told him I could do better with the house, but he shook his head.

  “I don’t mean the house, Daph,” he said with that tired, patient look he gets when he’s explaining something—like how our taxes work—that he thinks I should already understand. “I mean Chloe. I mean being a mother. Maybe you’re too young for all the responsibility. Maybe I rushed you into having a baby because I wanted one. Maybe that’s why you keep forgetting things and leaving your stuff everywhere. You’re acting out your resentment.”

  “I don’t resent Chloe!” I said. I’m afraid I might have shrieked, because Peter winced. Or maybe he winced because it was so obviously a lie. I do resent Chloe—her constant crying, her tantrums, her demands. But that doesn’t mean I don’t love her. Does it?

  “It doesn’t matter,” I told Peter. “She’s here now and I’m managing just fine . . .” But my voice wobbled on fine and that made it sound like I was anything but fine, so I added: “And you’re here.”

  He looked away and didn’t say anything. I got a terrible feeling in my chest that was so bad that I wondered for a moment if I was having a heart attack. For a minute I was certain Peter was planning to leave me. And what would I do if he did, if he’s had enough of my tears and forgetting things and the house always being a mess and me being fat? How could I manage on my own?

  But that was just me freaking out. When he looked back at me his face was softer. “Yes, thank God for that. You’d never manage on your own.”

  “I feel terrible for the single mothers in the group,” I told him, feeling relieved.

  “I’d never let that happen,” Peter said. He held out his arms and I stepped into them. I could feel how tense he was. The argument had scared him too. He was probably just as afraid of me leaving him as I was of him leaving me.

  “I really am doing better,” I murmured into his chest. “It helps to have the group—and Laurel as a friend.”

  “I’m glad you’ve found a friend your own age. Maybe we should invite Laurel and her husband to dinner.”

  I immediately felt like all the breath had gone out of my chest. Laurel? Here? Meeting Peter? I’m not sure what scared me worse—her seeing where I live because our house is nowhere near as nice as hers or her meeting Peter because, well, I’ve said some things about Peter to her, just venting really, but what if she let something slip and Peter guessed what I’ve told her?

  But of course I couldn’t say any of that to Peter. He was trying to make up for the argument. And this would be a way to show that I really was mature enough to handle being a wife and a mother. “I guess,” I said, “but what would I cook? I haven’t made anything more ambitious than mac and cheese in months!”

  Peter said he’d get steaks for the grill and we could hire Vanessa to come watch Chloe and help. So what could I say but yes? I texted Laurel to see if she and Stan can make it this weekend. I made it sound really casual and added an emoji of a cocktail glass and a hamburger.

  She texted back a yes and three cocktail glasses.

  I texted back four and then she sent back five and the blotto smiley face. So I think it will probably all go fine. Peter’s been so sweet since our fight. He even gave Chloe her bath. I could hear him talking to her while I was texting Laurel. I’m really lucky to have a husband who’s so involved. I have nothing to worry about. He’d never be able to bear being parted from Chloe.

  Chapter Six

  I spend the rest of the afternoon looking for the woman who jumped out of the tower in Dr. Bennett’s journals. I know it’s not really a part of my job, but I can’t help it; I have to know what happened. Billie said that she had been a patient in the early seventies, so I put the earlier journals aside and skimmed through the journals from that time period. I found her in the spring of 1971.

  Admitted today, E.S., 19 year old woman, of above-average intelligence, sound constitution, and good family, with puerperal delusions and impulsive behavior. Claims not to have known she was pregnant. Gave birth in college dorm room and abandoned infant in a dumpster, but believes baby has been stolen from her for purposes of medical experimentation. Sedative administered, bed rest and hydro-therapy recommended.

  The poor girl. How could she not have known she was pregnant? But I remember that in college there were stories about girls who didn’t realize they were pregnant, who thought they’d just gained the freshman fifteen and then gave birth in the dormitory bathroom. The idea had haunted me through my freshman year when my periods were irregular and I’d put on tw
enty pounds (I’d never had access to so much food!). But when I got pregnant with Chloe I wondered how anyone could be pregnant and not know it. How deluded would a person have to be?

  But then, there were things I’d turned a blind eye to that seemed awfully obvious now.

  I comb through the rest of the journal looking for any entries regarding E.S. There’s one at least every week, but they aren’t particularly illuminating. Or hopeful.

  E.S. refuses to talk during sessions. Her behavior becoming more erratic: hair-tearing, self-mutilation, weeping. Convinced that baby was taken from her because there was something wrong with it—

  I feel a weird tingle in my veins reading this. It sounds so much like the woman who jumped from her NYC apartment—or like the fretting of the mothers in the support group. Her head is shaped funny. He’s not smiling. Is it normal to cry this much? She hasn’t rolled over yet. He’s got a rash. All the baby books with their developmental charts and milestones and what-to-expects made it sound like there was one normal, but babies were as maddeningly different as grown-ups. And what must a newborn baby have looked like to a scared teenager alone in a dorm room? She must have thought she’d given birth to a monster. No wonder she’d abandoned it—and no wonder she was haunted by the specter of what had become of it.

  I go back and read through all the notes Dr. Bennett’s made on E.S., trying to glean more of her history, but his notes are curiously opaque. But then, I realize, this journal is meant only for himself. He would have kept a file on E.S. at the hospital. I wonder if I could ask for it.

  But why? I hear a voice say in my head. Laurel’s voice. I don’t really have an answer, only that I can’t stop thinking about E.S. and wondering how her story must have affected Sky. E.S.’s story is so much like the “Changeling” story that Sky must have known about it. In fact, I may have found the origins of the changeling story.