“Then why not just leave her dead?” Dr. Hancock says gently. It’s this gentleness that makes me hate him the most.
“Maybe it’s got something to do with the will,” I say. “I’ll go get it and you’ll see.” This time I’m too fast for him and I dodge past Dr. Hancock. Neither Peter nor Stan tries to stop me but the guards block my way through the door, presenting a wall of flesh and muscle I can’t get through. “Get out of my way,” I tell them. “I’m not a patient here. You can’t keep me from leaving.”
“Your husband has admitted you,” Dr. Hancock says.
“He can’t do that!” I cry, looking at Peter. He stares back at me blankly, like I’m a stranger. He’s the one who’s the stranger. Have I ever really known him? It suddenly seems more likely that I’m Laurel Hobbes than that I am married to this man. And Chloe—hadn’t she seemed like a stranger too? They’re saying she’s Daphne’s baby, so if I’m Daphne she shouldn’t feel like a stranger. And she’s not a stranger now. She’s my baby and I have to get to her.
Dr. Hancock is saying something about a power of attorney and medical proxy and a writ of incompetence and past mental history. Stan is saying something about Peter dropping kidnapping charges if I’m admitted.
“After all,” Peter says, “you saved Chloe’s life. I’m willing to drop charges but I have to know that you’ll never get near her again.”
It’s the hint of a smile on Peter’s face that unravels whatever thread was holding me together. This is what he’s wanted all along. To get Chloe, his perfect daughter, to himself, his imperfect wife out of the picture. I fling myself at him, nails aimed at those cold eyes, that smug smile. He sidesteps out of my reach, letting the guards take over. They meet my flailing arms with a wall of impassive muscle. My hands are caught and trapped as easily as tiny birds, but still I struggle, throwing myself against the hard wall of their bodies like that poor trapped sparrow had flung itself against the walls of Chloe’s nursery. I can’t stop myself. They’re standing between me and Chloe. I’d rather die than let them keep me from her.
I feel a sting on my arm and then ice water floods my veins. Maybe Laurel did kill herself, I think as I feel myself sinking beneath cold water, a film of red washing over my eyes. Maybe Stan threatened to take Chloë from her and she chose to die with Chloë rather than live without her.
She was just trying to keep her safe, I want to say, but instead the words that slur out of my mouth are, “I was just trying to keep her safe . . .”
And then I drown. Again.
Laurel’s Journal, June 18, 20—
Another day at the support group for lactating loonies. Estrogena went on and on about how we shouldn’t feel guilty about not bonding with our babies like normal mothers when it was clear that what she was saying was that we’re not normal. I’d like to know what’s normal about any of this. What’s normal about an alien growing in your body for nine months and then spending nine hours pushing it out? What’s normal about being handed a shriveled sea monkey and being expected to love it immediately, especially when it proceeds to keep you awake 24/7 for the next three months? Who is supposed to be normal after that? Poor Doormat Daphne, though, was eating it up. Even after that ridiculous woman Estrogena mocked her last week as if it was a crime to worry about how things are supposed to be when everyone knows that’s all that really matters in this world.
So I’m supposed to look at little Sea Monkey and feel a tug in my uterus when all I feel is those goddamned episiotomy stitches.
But that’s how Doormat Daphne looks at her sea monkey. She trailed me out to the parking lot again. I could tell she wanted me to invite her home with me, but then that wouldn’t really be fair to Simone who’d have to watch both babies, so I gave Daphne the name of the babysitter I used before I got a proper live-in au pair. While I was writing down the number she was cooing to her Chloe like she was God’s gift, even though her Chloe isn’t half as attractive as mine. So if she can act like a mother’s supposed to, I don’t see why I can’t. Maybe I can learn it from her. And maybe I can teach her to grow a backbone.
She just texted me to say that skinflint hubby is willing to spring for a babysitter next week. I texted her back a few emojis. I think she may have wet herself. Just what I need. Another baby.
Chapter Thirteen
This is what it’s like to drown.
Each time I rise to the surface a room swims into view, painted the same sea green as my dreams, and I gasp for breath. I try to stay afloat by stroking my arms against the surface, but I can’t. My arms are held down. How can I stay afloat without my arms? Didn’t I learn that once in a swimming class? I try to hold on to the memory—the smell of chlorine, the tight elastic hug of a swimsuit, the rough concrete scrape against my legs—but I am sinking before I can find myself in the memory. Who am I? Daphne or Laurel? The question is like a weight, like rocks in my pockets. Maybe I’ll walk into the Hudson with rocks in my pockets like Virginia Woolf. Laurel said that. Or did I? Laurel’s voice has been in my head so long I can’t tell them apart. As Laurel said, All the voices sound sensible at the time.
SOMETIMES WHEN I surface I see a face hovering over me like a balloon. Women in bathing caps, men in white coats. Their mouths open and close like fish’s, the sounds they make as echoing and hollow as sonar bleeps heard underwater. I try to reach for them, to hold on to something that will keep me afloat, but my arms are pinned. I try to cry out but my lips are parched and cracked, my throat burning as if I have swallowed gallons of seawater. Chloe, I croak.
“Your baby’s fine, Mrs. Hobbes. Your husband, Stan, is taking care of her.”
Not that Chloë, I try to say, but I’ve swallowed too much water. You fool, a voice says—Laurel’s? Mine?—you’re supposed to put the rocks in your pockets, not swallow them!
THE DEAD-MAN’S FLOAT. That’s what they taught us in swim class. That’s what you do to conserve energy. Stop struggling. Let yourself go limp. Fill your lungs with air to keep afloat. A suitable exercise for someone who has already died. The next time I surface I try it. I relax my legs and arms, I take a deep breath, I open my eyes.
Laurel’s face is hovering over mine, bloated and distorted. I scream and scream until I’ve used up all the air and I sink to the bottom of the sea, where crabs pick at my flesh and gnaw my bones.
WITHOUT FLESH I am lighter. My bones have turned into coral, porous and buoyant. I can float longer at the surface. I listen to the nurses with the dispassion of the drowned.
“How are we doing today, Mrs. Hobbes?”
We? Is that the answer? Laurel and I are both here—or is it Daphne and I? What does it matter? Only Chloe matters. My Chloe.
Define “my,” Laurel’s voice challenges. It’s a sensible point. She always was more sensible than me. Laurel would know what to do here. Laurel would know how to answer the nurses’ questions so they would stop drowning us over and over again.
“We . . .” I begin.
Not we, you idiot, do you want them to think you’re schizoid?
“I—I’m feeling a little better.”
Not quite the Gettysburg Address, but a respectable start. The goal here is to get them to ease back on the medication a little. Try asking a normal question.
“Can I see my baby?”
Good! Way to play the concerned-mother card!
“You’re not allowed visitors until you’re doing a little better, but I’m sure once you are, Mr. Hobbes will bring in little Chloë.”
“Not that Chloë,” I say.
Careful, Laurel’s voice warns, but I don’t listen.
“I need to see my Chloe. I need to know I didn’t drown her. I—” I taste salt. The sea is taking me again. I struggle to make the nurse understand. “I don’t care that I’ve drowned, but I need to know she is all right.”
The nurse gives me a puzzled smile and writes something down on her clipboard.
Patient exhibits delusion that she’s dead. Up medication by a gazillion percent
, Laurel snarks.
“I’m sure your baby’s perfectly fine, Mrs. Hobbes. I’ve just written a note for Dr. Hancock to check in with you.”
Then the nurse adjusts something on the balloon that floats over my bed and I’m sinking again. But this time I’m not alone.
AT THE BOTTOM of the sea Laurel whispers in my ear, her voice the echo of my own bloodstream held in a conch shell.
They think you’re me. You’ll never convince them otherwise as long as you’re doped up and lying around in unflattering PJs. You have to make them think you know you’re Laurel Hobbes. So you had a teensy break with reality when you found your bestie floating in a pool of blood—
I didn’t! I wouldn’t!
Sure, if you say so. It’s much, much more likely that rich, beautiful Laurel Hobbes offed herself than poor, pathetic Daphne Marist. Hey! No more tears now. We’ll never get out of here if you can’t turn off the waterworks. Of course, I didn’t kill myself either. Someone killed me. Stan is my guess. But how are we going to prove that with you stuck in here? And the only way you get out is if you start acting sane—and to do that you have to pretend to be me.
But I don’t know how.
My head fills with the sound of Laurel’s laughter. Excuse me? What have you been doing at Schuyler Bennett’s house other than pretending to be me? Do you think these doctors and nurses are any smarter than Schuyler Bennett?
No, but—
No buts! Shape up! Grow a backbone! Here, they’re coming, you’re on!
But—
I try to call her back, but her voice is lost in the roar of the surf. I open my eyes. Dr. Hancock’s face floats over me, bobbing like a buoy. I swallow back the bile in my throat. He moves his mouth but I can’t hear him. My ears are full of water. I shake my head to clear them and he frowns. He thinks I’m saying no to whatever he just said. He’s turning away, motioning to the floating jellyfish, telling the nurse something.
“Please,” I manage, “what did you say?”
He turns back, looks down at me, and this time I can make out his words. “I said, ‘Good morning, Laurel. It’s good to have you back with us.’”
I swallow back a gallon of saltwater and try to smile, but it must look like a grimace. I try speaking instead. “Good morning, Dr. Hancock,” I say. The words echo in my head. I hear another voice far below me, calling to me, begging not to leave her at the bottom of the ocean, drowned.
I’m sorry, I tell Daphne, letting her go, watching her sink to the bottom of the sea. I lick the salt off my lips. “It’s good to be back,” I tell Dr. Hancock.
Laurel’s Journal, June 25, 20—
If I hadn’t already known that motherhood turns women into nut cases, I’d have the proof today. What a bunch of wackjobs! They all sat around sharing their stories of losing their minds as if having a baby was an excuse for slovenliness. One woman confessed to walking around with her shirt unbuttoned. Another thought it was really funny that she had poured breast milk into her husband’s coffee. They tell these stories pretending they’re embarrassed while really they’re reveling in their dysfunction. I saw the same thing in group therapy at MacLean. The crazies egg each other on, trying to top one another.
I noticed, though, that Doormat Daphne wasn’t sharing. Instead, every time someone spoke she glanced over at me, as if wanting to see what I thought of it. I decided to try a little experiment. I told my own little story—I made up one about leaving the car keys in the refrigerator—and quelle surprise! DD let loose with an entire saga of coming to last week’s meeting with the bottles she’d made up to leave home with her husband. Which only confirmed again what a sad sack she is.
But then she surprised me. One of the women said she heard voices and I thought, Oh good, at least now we’ll get something a little juicy, but even the voices were boring, reminding her to buy orange juice and iron hubby’s shirts. Estrogena said something soothing like the voices were at least sensible and Daphne whispered to me: Sure, all the voices sound sensible at the time. Ha! Maybe she has potential.
I invited her back here and gave her some wine, hoping she’d loosen up and let go of her nice-girl act, but instead she tells me her whole life story. And what a pathetic little life it is! Her mom was a drunk who killed herself driving home drunk from a bar. Daphne put herself through state school working, like, three jobs, got a library degree and a job in a dinky suburban library. Then she snags a hedge-fund manager, but the one hedge-fund manager in the world who isn’t rich. And clearly he bullies her terribly. When I pointed that out, she wept all over my linen upholstery. I told her some crap about us both needing to find order in our lives and she cheered up a little. I thought she’d never leave! Finally I had to nudge Vanessa to remind her she needed to get going.
Stan came home when she was getting ready to leave. He put on his Old World banker manners for Daphne and you could tell she was lapping it all up. Her husband must really be a brute. It made me feel a little sorry for her.
I took a little nap while Stan gave Chloë her bath. After all, I’d been with her all day and all Stan does all day is golf and sit around thinking of ways to invest my money. He woke me up after she was asleep and brought me a protein shake “to keep my strength up.” He’s still worried about all the weight I lost after Chloë was born.
“Do you want me to plump up like Daphne?” I asked.
He actually pretended not to know who I was talking about for a minute, which told me he’d noticed her just fine.
“Oh, your little protégée,” he said at last. “I predict she won’t be plump for long.”
I asked him what he meant by that, and he gave me his raised-eyebrow look. “C’mon, Laurel, you know what you do. You befriend some poor mouse of a girl who follows you around like a besotted cocker spaniel and then when you tire of her you drop her off at the pound.”
“That’s totally untrue,” I told him, but not with a lot of energy.
“Your college roommate, that girl in Scotland, Roisin, your yoga instructor . . .”
“So I’m not good at girlfriends,” I said. “I hadn’t even thought of Daphne as a real friend. I’m just doing the mommy-bonding thing. Isn’t that why you sent me to this group?”
“I didn’t send you anywhere, Laurel,” he said. “We both agreed it was for the best. And I only mention those other girls because you so often get . . . disappointed and I know you’re a little fragile right now.”
I hate it when Stan treats me like an invalid, but I felt too tired to argue. Daphne isn’t anything like Carrie or Roisin or Monique. They’d all turned out to be phonies. Daphne, for all her simpering, isn’t a phony. She’s real. She might be the realest person I’ve ever met. She just needs a little tweaking.
Chapter Fourteen
Once I stop fighting being Laurel Hobbes my life gets easier.
Quelle surprise! I can hear Laurel say, It’s easier being a rich heiress than trailer-park trash.
I could point out that I did not grow up in a trailer park, but I’m trying not to argue with my voices. With all the meds I’m still on, I never know when I might blurt something out and talking to invisible people is just the kind of behavior to get you sent back to the Green Room. I still have bedsores from my three weeks there—three weeks of my life I’ll never get back.
“We had to sedate you to keep you from harming yourself,” Dr. Hancock explained in our first session together. I responded by throwing a chair at him. Turns out, that’s another way to get sent back to the Green Room. I was there another week—at least, that’s what I’m told.
The next time he brings up my sedation I channel Laurel’s sangfroid. “I can see why that was necessary,” I say, biting the inside of my mouth. And voilà! I was transferred to my own private room (courtesy, no doubt, of Laurel’s trust fund) with a window. True, it has bars on it, but at least I can see the sky and a patch of grass and even a view of the tower. When I first saw that, I thought it must be a punishment of some sort, a taunt of what
I’ve lost. And then I realized it was a test.
“Do you like your new room?” Dr. Hancock asks me at our next session.
“I’m happy to be in a room with a window,” I say cautiously. “I missed being able to tell if it was day or night.”
“I thought you might like a view of the tower,” he says, “to remind you of your old life and work.”
Asshole, Laurel says inside my head.
“It’s something to work toward,” I say. “Is . . . is . . . Chloe still there?”
“Which Chloe?” he asks.
Careful, Laurel warns.
I can feel the pull of the undercurrent tugging me down. “Daphne’s baby. The one I brought with me. Did Peter take her home?”
“Yes,” he says. And then, after a pause, “Don’t you want to know about your Chloë?”
Caught you! Laurel crows.
But I’m ready for this. “I know Stan will be taking good care of her. That must have been why I was able to leave her behind.”
“Do you remember deciding to take Daphne’s Chloe?”
“No,” I tell him honestly—and that one word of truth feels like a cut in my skin, exposing me to infection. Maybe this isn’t the best topic, Laurel advises, but I need to know. “I have . . . images of going up a flight of stairs. The carpet is wet. At the top of the stairs is a bathroom . . .” My bathroom, I want to say, but I catch myself. “Where was she—Daphne—found?”
“In her bathtub,” he answers. “Where else?”
“It’s just . . . our houses look alike.” All those ticky-tacky houses. “In my memory I’m in Lau—my house.”
“I see,” he says in that annoying way psychiatrists have of acting like they know you better than you know yourself. “But why would Daphne kill herself in your bathtub?”
The Other Mother Page 15