The Other Mother

by Carol Goodman

  I read on and laugh at Laurel’s name for Esta: Estrogena. But then I find her name for me. Doormat Daphne.

  I’d only just met you, Laurel-in-my-head wheedles. And you’ve got to admit, you were acting like a wuss, letting Peter push you around. And I was kind of a bitch. I’m even mean to Kate Spade!

  She’s right—I’m right—I can’t fault Laurel for thinking I was a doormat. Surely she must have felt differently about me as we started spending time together. I turn to the second journal entry. She still calls me Doormat Daphne but at least she thought Esta’s shame-chant was as awful as I did. And though it still stings to read her say she thought her Chloë was prettier than mine—

  What mother doesn’t think her child is the most beautiful?

  —I am surprised and touched that she envied how I looked at my Chloe. Of course I looked at her with love! I loved her even before I knew I did! I can feel that tug in my uterus now, just thinking about her. I feel bad for Laurel that she didn’t feel that way and forgive her for that catty comment about wetting myself—

  Gee, thanks!

  —and turn the page to journal entry number three.

  At first I’m heartened that she’d found something I’d said in group interesting, but then I’m startled to see that it was actually something she had said: All the voices sound sensible at the time—

  Are you sure you didn’t say it?

  —and then I read her description of our first playdate. I had a pathetic little life, she couldn’t wait for me to leave, I was “plump.” Even Stan called me a mouse.

  I say at the end that you’re “the realest person I’ve ever met.”

  When I turn to the fourth installment (the last entry Dr. Hancock has given me) I find that it doesn’t get any better. I was a “project” for her, a hobby to amuse herself with because she was bored in Westfuckingchester—

  Maybe pretending not to care is my defense system.

  —and she needed to look normal. Well, she wasn’t. I see that now. All the time that I thought we were becoming friends—best friends—she was using me and making fun of me behind my back—

  I was sick!

  —and amusing herself by making me cut my hair like her and wear the same clothes.

  No one made you do that.

  The worst of it is that I was so invested in the friendship that I wanted to help her. I applied to the job with Schuyler Bennett to show Laurel her options.

  Really? Are you sure you didn’t apply for yourself?

  And then she goes and kills herself in my bathtub! Why would she have done it in my house except to say one last fuck-you to Doormat Daphne? She must have known how devastating it would be for me to come home and find her in my tub, dripping bloody water all over my ticky-tacky house—

  I thought we’d decided I was murdered.

  —because she was a selfish, entitled, monster!

  I throw the pages of Laurel’s journal into the air and get up so quickly the chair falls back to the floor with a loud bang. As the pages flutter down I grab them and tear them into pieces, tossing the bits into the air so that they rain down like confetti. Ripping feels so good I decide to keep going with my sheets and pillowcase, which are so thin and threadbare they tear easily. Where are your gazillion-thread-count pima sateen sheets now, Laurel?

  I stop at the mirror, which is metal, unbreakable. It reflects back a distorted picture of a bloated face. The face of someone who has drowned. A monster. “Look at what you’ve turned me into!” I scream.

  It wasn’t me—

  “Shut up!” I shout, covering my ears with my hands. “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

  I’m still screaming it when the orderlies come in to restrain me. They have to wrench my hands away from my ears. Hanks of hair come with them. Blood and bits of flesh. I don’t care. I will rip my ears off before I listen to any more of that bitch’s lies. But when I’m finally pinned and lying on the floor, one cheek pressed to the cold tile, the other under an orderly’s knee, all I hear is the roar of the ocean as the tide comes in to claim me. Laurel is gone.

  Laurel’s Journal, July 9, 20—

  I’ve been thinking a lot about that summer on the Cape, the one when Mommy fired my nanny and we were supposed to have all this mother-daughter time together. Only I don’t remember spending that much time with Mommy. She slept late in the morning, so I would get up and go down to the beach myself. The morning was the best time for shell collecting. I would walk for miles, looking at each shell that had washed up overnight, squatting beside it, deciding whether or not to pick it up. Some shells would look perfect until you dislodged them from the sand and you’d see they were broken. I didn’t want any broken ones. There were pebbles that looked shiny when they were wet but which turned dull when you took them away from the water. I liked the long dark-blue shells, but they smelled. My favorites were the curved conch shells that you could hold up to your ear and hear the ocean, but I hardly ever found any of those that weren’t broken. I liked the idea that I was becoming a collector the way Daddy collected antique cars and Mommy collected matchbooks from fancy restaurants that she kept in a big brandy snifter in the foyer.

  By the time I got back to the house, Mommy would be up and reading the New York Times, which she had delivered from the local grocery store. There’d be coffee but not much else because Mommy was on a diet and only drank special shakes she mixed up, so I would bicycle into town and buy doughnuts at the grocery store and eat them all in the parking lot because if I brought them home Mommy would tell me I was going to get fat.

  Only that was the summer I got really thin. All that walking on the beach and bicycling to town, I suppose.

  When I got back Mommy would be napping so I’d go down to the beach for a swim. I had an inflatable raft that I’d take out. It was always a challenge to get it out beyond the breakers and sometimes I’d get hit by a wave and suddenly I’d be under the water, turning over and over again like a shirt in the washing machine. Later I’d find bruises and scratches on my arms and legs and a gallon of sand in the crotch of my suit.

  Once I was past the breakers I would belly flop on the raft and ride the waves in. I became really good at judging just the right moment to catch the wave, but sometimes I misjudged and got pummeled in the surf. One time I was just lying on the raft daydreaming about something—I used to make up stories in my head about wild horses or living in the woods and how I could survive on my own in a tree house in the Adirondacks where Grandma and Grandpa had a “camp”—and suddenly I noticed that I’d drifted far away from the shore. I could barely see the lifeguard station. Usually the lifeguard would have blown his whistle if I went out too far but he must have been talking to one of the leggy girls who hung around the lifeguard station all day and not noticed me.

  At first I wasn’t scared. It was kind of peaceful drifting on the water with the sound of the surf like the sound I heard inside the conch shells and the people on the beach looking soft and blurry like old pictures. I figured eventually the lifeguard would notice how far out I was and come get me and then I’d be that girl who was rescued and Mommy would come running down from the house and make a fuss and she’d feel bad for leaving me alone so much.

  But the people on the beach got smaller and smaller, the sound of the surf fainter and fainter, and still no one blew a whistle or came swimming for me and I realized that I’d better start paddling in. It was harder than I thought it would be. There was a current pulling me out to sea that I had to fight against and if I let up for a second I drifted backward. Every time I looked up the shore looked just as far away and the people on it just as small and blurry. Finally, I just gave up. I lay back on the raft and looked up at the sky and watched the clouds and thought about what Mommy would think when I didn’t come back and how she would cry and feel bad and wish she’d spent more time with me . . . and then all of a sudden the surf was loud again and I was being pulled under the water and thrown around like a piece of trash.

 
; I finally dragged myself onto the beach and up to the house and when my mother saw me she screeched. I thought she was upset because I’d almost drowned. But it was because my hair was so tangled. “Look at her,” she cried, waving her glass at me. “That’s what comes from giving her a Jamaican nanny; she’s got dreadlocks!”

  The truth was Nanny was the one who always brushed my hair. I didn’t know how to. When Mommy tried she pulled my hair so hard I screamed, which only made her slap my leg with the brush.

  I learned to stay in the shadows during cocktail hour when Mommy had her friends over. They’d sit on the deck, drinking G&Ts and rum & Cokes and pitchers of margaritas the hired girl made up. I’d sit under the deck in the sand, drinking plain Coke and eating the raw vegetables—crudités, Mommy called them—and potato chips that the guests sometimes brought. I’d listen to the swells of conversation and laughter drifting across the sand and out to sea. Sometimes the hired girl would slip out to smoke a joint with her boyfriend and I’d watch them from my hiding place, pretending to be a spy. I was reading Harriet the Spy that summer and I liked the idea of being a spy, of watching people to figure out how to speak and act and dress.

  It’s funny thinking about that now because it’s kind of what I’ve been doing with Daphne. I like to watch her with Chloe because when I see her acting so natural with her baby I think that I could be like that too. It even helps, I think, that she looks a little like me—even more now that she’s gotten her hair cut like mine, lost some weight, and started wearing better clothes. At first it kind of annoyed me, but now it makes me happy, like we’re both helping each other become better people.

  Which I know sounds really sappy. It must be the postpartum hormones or all this thinking about the past, I guess. I haven’t thought about that summer for years, because it was always painful to think about after Mommy and Daddy died. It was the last summer on the Cape before the accident, and I feel like I should have better memories of them. What I remember most about that summer, besides almost drowning, is throwing all those seashells back into the sea at the end and that when I got back to the city Mommy had to take me to Vidal Sassoon and have all my hair cut off. When I try to picture Mommy and Daddy they’re small and blurry like those people on the beach when I was drifting out to sea.

  Which is strange because they’re the ones who died, not me.

  But sometimes I feel like it was me who died that summer. That I floated farther and farther out on the tide until a wave took me down to the bottom of the ocean and I drowned.

  Sometimes I wish I had.

  Chapter Sixteen

  It’s quiet in the Green Room without Laurel’s voice but I’m not there long before I have another visitor. At first I mistake the man in pressed khakis and golf shirt for the crazy golfer, but then one of the nurses says, “Your husband’s here to see you, Mrs. Hobbes,” and I realize it’s Stan.

  He looks older than I remember, his skin sallow under the fluorescent lights, the flesh around his jaw looser. There’s a patch of gray hairs on his chin and a dab of shaving cream on his earlobe. He’s really gone to seed since Laurel’s death. For a moment I feel sorry for him, but then I remember he’s the reason I’m here.

  And a potential ticket out. I remember that there are hidden cameras in the rooms. While Stan thinks no one is listening I have to make him say something that reveals he knows I’m not Laurel.

  “Stan,” I say, or try to. What comes out sounds more like Thaarrggh. The drugs they’ve given me have numbed my lips and swollen my tongue.

  Stan stares at me as if I’m a piece of dog shit he’s just noticed on his Tod’s loafers. Surely the nurses must notice that he’s not looking at me with the loving indulgence of a husband.

  I lick my lips, swallow, and try again. “Thstan,” I manage this time. “I’m sorry about Laurel.”

  His eyes widen and he looks around nervously for the nurse, but she’s left the room.

  “I should have realized she might kill herself,” I continue carefully, my speech starting to come more easily. “You warned me that she’d tried before.”

  Stan clears his throat. “Did Daphne tell you that I told her that?” he asks, adding a rather loud and stagey, “Laurel.” Surely anyone listening can hear how fake he sounds.

  “No, Stan. I’m Daphne. You know that. The woman in the tub was Laurel.”

  He leans forward and touches my manacled hand. I’m sure he’s going to confess the truth. I only hope he’s loud enough for the sound equipment to pick it up.

  “Dr. Hancock explained to me that when you saw Daphne in the tub you had a dissociative psychotic break. You recognized your own ‘death wish’ and saw yourself in the tub, like looking into a mirror. That’s why you think you’re Daphne.”

  I almost laugh. All this psychobabble coming out of Stan’s mouth! He must have spent hours memorizing it. I decide to switch tactics. “How’s Chloë?” I ask.

  To his credit he doesn’t ask “Which Chloe?” “She’s fine. I hired a new nanny.”

  “What happened to Simone?”

  “Don’t you remember? You fired her. She went back to France.”

  I shake my head. “Laurel would never have fired Simone. What happened, Stan? Were you afraid she’d identify the body in the bathtub as Laurel? Who did identify her?”

  “My God, Laurel, it was Peter, of course. It was his wife, in his home. Thank God it wasn’t you. You have a child to think about. I can’t imagine what could have driven a mother to do such a selfish thing. Or what possessed you to take her baby and drive to the middle of nowhere—” He breaks off, breathless, looking around him as if remembering where we are.

  I search in my head for something to say that will make him slip up. “I suppose if it had been Laurel, you would have inherited all her money.”

  “My God, Laurel, what a terrible thing to say. As if I’d care about that. Besides, you know your money’s all in trust for Chloë.”

  Something about this tickles at my brain. Something Laurel said to me the last time I saw her about the money being all in trust—

  “So it wouldn’t have actually been convenient for you if Laurel had killed herself?” I ask. A muscle pulses in Stan’s jaw and I think I may have stumbled on something. “Is that why you had to pretend the body was me, not Laurel? Because you still need to have Laurel alive?”

  “I can’t do this, Laurel,” he says, getting up.

  And then I remember what Laurel told me. “You’re her mental-health conservator. That’s why you can keep me in here. You have more control over Laurel alive than dead. Is that what happened? Did Laurel kill herself and you realized you’d lose control of her money? Is that why you had to pretend the body in the tub was Daphne? I should have believed Laurel when she said you were trying to poison her. When I get out of here I’ll tell the police.”

  He looks down at me with an expression almost like pity. “I’m afraid that won’t be happening anytime soon, darling. I couldn’t take the risk of you hurting yourself—or Chloë. I’d never forgive myself if anything happened to her.”

  I believe this last part. “Then who put her in that tub, Stan? Who risked your baby’s life?”

  He looks unsure for a moment, then says, “Perhaps you imagined that part. Perhaps poor Daphne’s baby was in her car seat all along. At least, that’s what I’d like to believe of Daphne.”

  He turns away. I struggle against the straps holding my arms and legs. “Please,” I say, all bravado evaporating at the thought of being left alone in here, “if you let me out of here I won’t tell anyone I’m Daphne. I—I’ll go away with Chloe—”

  “Oh, I don’t think Peter would like that,” Stan says. Then he walks to the door. As he opens it I see Dr. Hancock standing in the hall. Of course he’s been listening—and watching on the hidden cameras, I hope. Did he hear anything to make him suspect I am really Daphne Marist?

  “I’m sorry,” Stan says, a tremor in his voice. “She insists she’s Daphne Marist. She even
made threats against our child. I—I can’t trust her home with Chloë.”

  “No,” Dr. Hancock agrees. “She needs to stay here as long as she thinks she’s Daphne Marist.”

  “What about shock treatment? It helped the last time.”

  “ECT? It’s a possibility . . .” Their voices grow fainter as they step out of the room. I strain to hear what they’re saying. Are they really considering giving me shock treatment? But whatever they’re saying is drowned out by the sound of someone pushing a cart—the meds trolley, I realize—down the hall. As the sound of the trolley grows closer, though, the two men step back into the doorway to my room, apparently less worried about me overhearing them than that the nurse in the hallway will. I catch Stan saying, “But I’m her conservator. I can give consent.”

  “That’s true, but I still need to get two psychiatrists to sign off.”

  “Then get them. Anyone looking at her will see she needs help.”

  “Most likely, but there are the side effects to consider.”

  “Such as?” Stan asks.

  “Long-term memory loss, retrograde amnesia.” Dr. Hancock lists these side effects as if they’re of no more concern than the minor effects listed on a bottle of aspirin. “Most patients lose at least several weeks before the procedure, sometimes months.”

  “So she might not remember these last few weeks?”

  “Yes, it’s likely she’ll lose her most recently formed memories.”

  “So she might forget all about Daphne Marist,” Stan asks.