The Other Mother

by Carol Goodman

Good question, Laurel says. An even better one would be how did I wind up dead in your bathtub?

  It is a good question, but I don’t have time to think about it before Dr. Hancock asks what else I remember. “Red,” I say. “Red everywhere. When I walked into the bathroom, the floor was covered with red water . . .”

  The water threatens to rise up and take me as I describe it, but Dr. Hancock urges me to go on. I can tell it’s one of the steps I’m supposed to take on my “road to recovery.” Reliving the trauma, Laurel supplies helpfully. This is when you supposedly split and became me. Shrinks love this sort of thing.

  So I give him what he wants. I trace my steps through that bloody water to the tub and look down—

  Into a woman’s face floating below red water. A baby is crying—

  “I picked up the baby,” I say.

  “From where?” Dr. Hancock asks. “Was she in the tub?”

  I try to think. I see the red water and then I’m holding the baby wrapped in a blanket that’s sopping wet. “I-I’m not sure,” I admit.

  “What did you do next?” Dr. Hancock asks.

  “I walked downstairs. There was a suitcase by the door . . .”

  A suitcase? Laurel asks.

  I see myself walking out the door with a baby in my arms and a suitcase. “I had brought it over to Daphne’s . . .”

  Why? Laurel asks inside my head. Why would I have brought my suitcase to your house?

  Don’t you know? I want to shout at Laurel, but instead I say, “I was leaving. I’d come to say goodbye to Daphne, but when I found her . . .”

  Something snapped.

  “Something snapped. I took Daphne’s baby and I started to think I was Daphne. Daphne pretending to be Laurel.”

  Dr. Hancock sighs with satisfaction. “You experienced a dissociative break with reality brought on by the trauma of finding your friend dead by her own hand—her baby almost dead. The shock was particularly bad because of how much you identified with Daphne. You had to keep the baby safe so you had to become Daphne in your own head.”

  “I guess. It seems . . .”

  Preposterous? Laurel suggests.

  “Sensible,” I say.

  Dr. Hancock grins. “Exactly. You just did what you had to do.”

  “Yes,” I agree, another moment of honesty that makes me feel dangerously exposed. “Now what do I have to do to . . .”—I stop myself from saying get out of here and say instead—“get better?”

  “We keep talking,” he says. “We figure out how you got here and then we find a path back.”

  “You mean we talk about Lau—my history?”

  “Exactly.”

  Oh honey, Laurel says, good luck with that.

  THE ONLY TIME I leave my room is to shuffle down a long hall to the bare, windowless room where I meet with Dr. Hancock once a day. I’m not allowed out into the “general population” yet. When I ask why not, Dr. Hancock tells me I’m still in a very impressionable state. “I want to limit your outside influences until you’ve established firm boundaries again.”

  It makes me sound like an orphaned duckling that will imprint on whatever it sees first. Or a blob of clay waiting for the potter’s wheel. I feel like a blob. The medication they’ve got me on makes my mouth gummy, my hands and feet clumsy, my head full of cotton. I need to think clearly. There has to be some reason that Peter and Stan want people to believe I’m Laurel. But why? If they killed her for her inheritance why bring her back to life?

  Good question, Laurel says.

  “The money was tied up in a trust,” I say, forgetting not to answer out loud, “so Stan won’t have access to it whether you’re dead or not.”

  He would have access to it as Chloë’s guardian. But in that case, why do they need me to be alive? Why do they need you?

  I’m about to answer when Dr. Hancock enters my room. “Laurel?” he asks. “Who are you talking to?”

  They must have hidden cameras in the rooms. I’ll have to remember that from now on.

  “Myself,” I answer.

  THE NURSE BRINGS me three pills instead of the usual two with my dinner tray that night. That’s what I get for talking to myself. I remember Ben Marcus saying that some of the patients “tongued” their medication, but I’m not sure how to do that. The nurse always makes me stick out my tongue after I swallow. But tonight, after I empty the paper cup of pills into my mouth, I kick the dinner tray off its stand. When she looks toward it, I spit the pills out into my lap and cover them in a fold of my pajamas. Then I quickly lift the water cup to my mouth and pretend to swallow the pills. The nurse is too angry at having to clean up the mess to bother checking my mouth. “Baby Killer,” she mutters under her breath.

  I’m shocked. It’s not true! I want to scream. It was Laurel who tried to drown her baby.

  You don’t know that for sure.

  The blanket was wet, I answer in my head while peeling the damp, grainy pills off my pajamas. I hide them under my mattress.

  Why are we hiding them? Laurel asks. But I don’t answer her.

  WITHOUT THE PILLS I stay up half the night. The hospital is different at night, full of sounds that are masked during the day by the voices of orderlies and nurses, the wheels of carts squeaking up and down the hall, the screams and shrieks of patients. At night I can hear a rhythmic thumping, like a giant heart powering the life of the building. I can hear, too, the wind moving through the pine forest. I remember the expanse of woods I saw from the tower. If I could get out of here I could hide in those woods.

  I sit and watch out the window until it happens. What I’ve been waiting for. The light comes on in the tower. It flashes once. I flick my own light in answer. I don’t know whom I’m signaling. In the stillness and quiet of the night hospital it feels as if I have slipped out of time and I am signaling myself weeks ago, sending a warning to myself.

  Laurel’s Journal, July 8, 20—

  Project Doormat has been progressing quite well. I think I missed my calling. Organizing books and papers is not half as gratifying as organizing people. It’s amazing what a little practical thinking can do for a person.

  First I got Daphne to stand up to her husband and get some child care so we’d have some free time together. College student Vanessa is not as thorough as French Simone (which is why I didn’t mind passing her on to Daphne—although I did make Vanessa promise she’d always babysit for me first if we needed her), but she’s energetic and cheap once I explained to Daphne that she could tell Vanessa she could list the job as a child-care internship.

  Then, with the money she saved on Vanessa’s fees, I got Daphne to join a decent gym, one where you wouldn’t get a fungal infection in the shower and that served an edible kale salad in the café. We’ve been going three days a week and you should see the change in Daphne! And it’s not because I’m so shallow that I think looks matter more than anything else (although God knows they don’t hurt), but anyone could see that poor squirrelly Daphne just needed to get some endorphins pumping into her system and stop obsessing over her baby 24/7 to feel better about herself. That brute of a husband told her he was “disappointed” that she gained weight during her pregnancy. I suggested she tell him she was disappointed he hadn’t managed to grow a pair during the same time. I mean, what kind of man says that to the woman who’s carried his baby? And what kind of woman puts up with it?

  I guess it’s a question of where you’re from. Even though I lost Mommy and Daddy when I was young, I was brought up to think I was someone. Mommy always said that only weak women allowed men to bully them and that if you acted as if you expected people to treat you well, they would.

  I remember once we were leaving for the summer on Cape Cod and my nanny was ironing some clothes that needed to be packed and she burnt one of my dresses. Mommy was so angry that she fired her on the spot and I cried because she’d been my nanny since I could remember. But then Mommy explained that burning the dress hadn’t been an accident; it had been “an act of aggres
sion against us” and we couldn’t let people treat us that way. “Besides,” she said, “won’t it be fun for it to just be the two of us together this summer? We don’t need fussy old Nanny with all her rules about bedtimes and meal times during our summer vacation.”

  Funny. I haven’t thought about that for a long time. I guess Estrogena was right; writing in this journal is helping me get in touch with my feelings.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Fortunately, the part of Laurel’s history Dr. Hancock is most interested in is her recent past—since Chloë was born, the postpartum depression, and her friendship with Daphne Marist—and I should, I think, be able to fill him in on all of that. Laurel and I talked endlessly about our pregnancies and childbirths. And the rest—well, I was there, after all.

  “I had a difficult pregnancy,” I begin, recalling what Laurel had told me. “I had morning sickness the first trimester and then preeclampsia and had to be on bed rest.”

  Dr. Hancock looks down at his notes and nods. I’ve gotten that right. After trying to convince everyone I’m Daphne, I find I’m doing much better pretending to be Laurel. “That must have been hard for you,” he says.

  “Yes,” I agree, “because I . . .” We both wanted to put the world in order after it had fallen to pieces. “I like to have control and suddenly I felt like I had none. I have an unstable sense of identity.”

  “Oh?” Dr. Hancock looks up, interested. “Why do you say that?”

  Because the Internet told you so, Laurel quips in my head. Do you really think that trawling the Internet for a couple of hours and reading about a bunch of pathetic losers who like to broadcast their crazy to the world has given you a handle on me?

  “I guess it’s what doctors have told me,” I say, tossing my hair over my shoulder the way Laurel would have.

  He smiles indulgently. “Let’s leave your diagnosis to me. You just stick to your own experiences.”

  I blush, feeling chastened. Like when Esta told me not to share morbid stories. “Okay,” I say, “but isn’t that part of the problem? I mean, all my life I’ve been told who I am—by my parents, by the men I dated, by doctors. How can I help feeling that my identity is slippery?”

  Whoa! Laurel says. Where did that come from?

  I go on, ignoring her. “And it was worse during pregnancy—all those books telling me ‘what to expect’ and strangers coming up to me on the street telling me what I should and shouldn’t do. Don’t drink that coffee, God forbid I have a glass of wine, even touching me.”

  “You felt out of control.”

  “Yes! Wouldn’t you? And of course gaining all that weight, my body changing. It felt like I was becoming a different person.” I pause for breath, trying to remember what else Laurel had told me. “Oh—and then they had to induce labor! Like the little bitch didn’t even want to leave!”

  Does Dr. Hancock flinch when I say “bitch”? Have I gone too far? But he only keeps writing notes, so I may have imagined it.

  “And then suddenly I have this crying, puking, pooping baby—this stranger—to look after and I’m supposed to love her and not care if she throws up all over me or pees on me.” I realize I’m crying. I’d do anything to have Chloe here spitting up on me. How could I have been so ungrateful as to mind?

  I thought we were talking about me.

  I’m not sure who I’m talking about anymore, but I go on, because my experience here is close enough to Laurel’s to serve. “Having a baby, it . . . it strips you down. Takes away who you were. I guess I wasn’t handling it all that well, so Stan suggested I try the mothers’ support group.”

  “And did that help?”

  I remember how dismissive of the group Laurel had been. And I remember the story she’d told—my story about Esta. “I think the problem for me was that hearing all those other women’s stories when I was in such a fragile state made me . . . I guess . . . be influenced by those stories. I started getting confused.”

  Dr. Hancock makes a noncommittal sound. “Tell me about Daphne.”

  I relax, relieved to be on firmer ground. “Well, the thing about Daphne is we had so much in common.”

  “Such as?” Dr. Hancock asks, his face impassive.

  “Well, we had both lost our parents when we were young and we both went to library school.”

  “Aren’t you being a bit self-effacing?” Dr. Hancock asks. “I’d hardly equate a degree in archival studies from the University of Edinburgh with being a school librarian.”

  Stung, I remember what Laurel had said when I pointed out the same thing. “We both needed to put order to the world. Besides, Daphne was thinking of going back to school for an archival degree.”

  Were you? Laurel asks but I ignore her.

  “Really? That doesn’t sound like someone planning to kill herself.”

  “No, it doesn’t.” Then it occurs to me that this might be an opportunity to find out more about “Daphne’s” death. “Are they sure that she did kill herself? I mean, have the police ruled out—”

  Murder? Laurel says. The word you’re looking for is murder.

  “—any other explanation?”

  “There was a note,” Dr. Hancock says, keeping his eyes on me.

  I want to scream that this is impossible. I never wrote a suicide note. But I only nod. “Well, I guess I didn’t know her as well as I thought I did. She seemed . . . sweet. Maybe a little stressed, coping with a new baby. And, as I said, we had a lot in common. We even looked alike.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Don’t you have a picture of her?” Why haven’t I thought of this before? If Dr. Hancock would just look at a picture of Daphne Marist, he’d know it was me. “I mean, wasn’t there a picture of her in the paper when she . . . died?”

  “I don’t think so. Peter Marist wanted to keep it very quiet, especially with his daughter still missing. There were a couple of lines in the local paper.”

  That’s all I warranted? There would have been more if it had been Laurel.

  It was me, Laurel points out.

  You know what I mean, I snap back.

  To Dr. Hancock I say, “Poor Daphne. But yes, we did look alike. Especially after she dyed her hair and lost a few pounds.”

  “She dyed her hair to look like yours?”

  “No . . . I mean, she—I—took her to my colorist, who thought it was a good color for her.”

  “And you didn’t mind that she was imitating you?”

  “It wasn’t like that,” I said. Was it? I ask Laurel, but she’s gone quiet. “I mean, I encouraged her. I guess it was like a compliment to me that she wanted to be like me. And it wasn’t all one-way. There were things about her I admired and wanted to emulate.”

  Such as? Laurel asks.

  “Such as?” Dr. Hancock asks at the same time.

  I search my brain. There were things Laurel had told me she admired—that I’d done so well on so little, that I’d put myself through school—but those weren’t things she’d have wanted to emulate. Had there been any change in Laurel over the two months we knew each other that I could attribute to my influence? I thought of the last time I’d seen Laurel: pasty-faced, in baggy sweats, couch-bound. While I had gotten fitter, started dressing better, and applied for a new job, Laurel had sunk into despondency.

  “No, I don’t suppose she was a very good influence,” I say, “but that wasn’t really her fault.”

  Dr. Hancock clucks his tongue. “I know you must feel badly that Daphne killed herself, Laurel, but unless you’re honest with yourself we won’t get anywhere.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” I say cautiously. “What part of what I’ve said hasn’t been honest?”

  “Your attitude toward Mrs. Marist, for one thing.”

  “What do you mean?” I say, genuinely surprised. “She was my friend!”

  “Was she? Your journal tells a different story.”

  “My journal?”

  “You don’t recall keeping a journal?”
/>   “No . . . I mean . . . yes. We were all supposed to in the support group. . . .” I want to say that Laurel had mocked the idea and I hadn’t thought she had bothered, but Dr. Hancock is pulling a sheaf of printed pages from his folder. My heart beats harder.

  “Is that Lau—my journal? I only kept it because Esta said we had to. I don’t really remember what I wrote.”

  “Well,” Dr. Hancock says, handing me the pages, “why don’t you refresh your memory?”

  DR. HANCOCK ALLOWS ME to bring the pages back to my room. It’s the first time I’ve been allowed any reading material and it makes me realize how much I miss books. Maybe I can ask for books now—and to go outside. From my window I’ve seen patients sitting on benches reading. This place would be bearable if I could just go outside and read—and see Chloe. My Chloe. All I have to do is stay calm, keep playing the game that I’m Laurel, and eventually I will get out of here. Then I’ll prove that I’m Daphne Marist. There must be a way—fingerprints on record, a DNA test comparing my DNA to Chloe’s—and then I’ll get her back. I just have to go through these steps that Dr. Hancock has laid out as my “road to recovery.” Apparently one of them is reading Laurel’s journal.

  I move the pile of papers an inch to the right and then half an inch back to the left. Why am I so reluctant to read it?

  Because it’s an invasion of privacy? Laurel suggests. Because it’s ghoulish to read a dead woman’s diary?

  No, I tell her, it’s because I’m afraid to find out what you thought of me.

  But I’m right here, she points out. You could just ask me.

  You’re not real. You’re just a part of me. This is the real Laurel. What if she doesn’t match . . . you?

  Then don’t read it, Laurel-in-my-head suggests, and say you did.

  Dr. Hancock will ask me questions about the specifics. He’ll test me on them. And besides, part of me is very, very curious—

  I touch the first page.

  Pretend it’s a bit of archival record you’re evaluating, Laurel suggests.

  I turn the first page and note the date: June 11, the first day of our group. Like me, Laurel had gone home and begun the journal that Esta had asked us to write. From the first line I learn that Stan made her go just as Peter had made me. Also that the alternative for Laurel had been going back to a mental hospital, something I hadn’t known. Poor Laurel. I can understand how scared she’d been to end up someplace like here. And then I realize that Laurel must have been in multiple hospitals, and all of that is part of my record now. No wonder Dr. Hancock is so ready to see me as a mental case; I have the history of one.