The Other Mother

by Carol Goodman

  He looks at me and I wish I were wearing anything other than pajamas. I look down at my hands, at the chipped polish on my nails and the ragged cuticles. Those days at the salon seem a lifetime away.

  “You’re all right,” he says. “No one looks very shiny at Crantham.”

  “Laurel didn’t look very shiny the last time I saw her,” I say. “She looked like all the light had been sucked out of her.”

  “She sounds like someone with bipolar disorder,” Ben Marcus says. “You say she thought her husband was poisoning her?”

  As I describe Laurel’s theories I can feel Ben Marcus’s gaze on me. They sound paranoid and delusional, like something a woman in a mental institution would come up with. Even I had thought they were crazy. But they don’t sound half as crazy as the situation I find myself in now.

  “I suppose she could have killed herself, but why do it in my house?” I finish.

  “Maybe she wanted you to save her,” he suggests.

  “Then I let her down,” I say, thinking of the time I wasted sitting in my car writing in my journal while Laurel was bleeding out in my bathtub.

  For the first time I realize that it’s my fault that Laurel is dead. I can’t say anything for a few moments. Ben Marcus lets me be quiet as if he knew what I was thinking. Then he says, gently, “But you did save Chloë—her Chloë.”

  As he says it I realize that he believes me. I have to stop for a minute to keep myself from crying. “But I might not have,” I say at last. “And I can’t believe Laurel would have risked killing her.”

  “Even if she thought she was somehow saving her from something worse?”

  I consider that, remembering the woman who jumped from her window with her baby strapped to her chest because she thought it was better if he died than lived life broken. Would Laurel—perfectionist, high-strung Laurel—have done such a thing? Would I?

  “I have to tell you something,” I say. “Right after Chloe was born I-I wasn’t doing so well. I took too many pills and wound up almost drowning in the bathtub. I would have drowned if Peter hadn’t found me. I don’t remember planning to kill myself, but that must have been what I was trying to do.”

  “Or at least that’s what your husband says.”

  “You don’t sound surprised,” I say. Does Ben Marcus think I’m so crazy that nothing is impossible?

  “It was in the paper,” he says, pity on his face. He reaches into his pocket, takes out his phone, and taps in a few words, then hands the phone to me. My heart pounds at the sight of my face on the screen and I quickly scroll down past the photo to the headline: WESTCHESTER MOM SUICIDE. The print swims in front of me, random phrases surfacing like bloated fish rising to the top of toxic water . . . history of mental illness . . . treated for postpartum depression . . . previous suicide attempt . . .

  I scroll back to the picture, hoping at least for proof that I am Daphne Marist. The picture is an unflattering one taken in my third trimester of pregnancy. My face is round and bloated, my hair growing out from an ill-advised pixie cut, my eyes squinting against the sun. Even after weeks in a mental hospital I think I look better now. For a minute I’m angry at Peter for choosing such an awful picture, but then I realize that’s the point; he gave the newspaper a picture that no one would connect with how I look now.

  “I know this doesn’t look like me,” I say.

  “Not much. And I couldn’t find any other pictures online. Not one for Facebook, eh?”

  I laugh. “Peter said it was tacky and a lure for pedophiles so I took it down—Oh!” Our eyes meet.

  “He was either planning this for a while or he’s just a controlling prick,” Ben Marcus says.

  I should be glad he’s taking my side but hearing him call Peter that stings. It’s true that Peter was controlling but I’d always thought that was because his parents were so strict. But if he really has planned this, he’s not just controlling, he’s a monster. And what does that make me, a woman who married a monster? How could I have been so stupid? So spineless? Laurel was right. I was a doormat.

  “Or both,” I say finally, looking into the narrowed eyes of the pregnant woman in the picture. She looks like such a stranger that for a dizzying moment it seems more likely that I am Laurel Hobbes than her.

  “Daphne?” It’s the first time Ben Marcus has called me that, and it brings me to my senses. It brings me to myself.

  “Yes?”

  “Is there anyone who could identify you? Someone I can bring here?”

  I try to think. Friends from college and library school appear in my mind, but I’d only been close to a few people and I’ve been out of touch with them for years. Peter had never been interested in socializing with my old friends.

  I shake my head and a tear comes loose. “Laurel was the first real friend I’d made in years.” How did I end up like this? How did I end up so alone?

  “What about the other women in the group?”

  I try to imagine Alexa Hartshorn driving upstate to stare at a bedraggled woman in a mental institution. . . . “Esta,” I say. “The group leader. She’ll know I’m Daphne.”

  “Okay,” Marcus says with a nod. “What’s her last name?”

  For a moment I can’t remember, and it makes me doubt everything. Isn’t it more likely that Laurel would forget our group leader’s name than I would? But then I hear Laurel’s voice—for the first time since I read her journal and got angry at her.

  Esta Greenberg, sweetie. And just for the record, I never forget a name.

  “Greenberg,” I tell Ben.

  He taps the name into a notes app on his phone. Then he turns the phone around and takes a picture of me. “To show Esta Greenberg,” he says. When he turns the phone back around so I can see the picture I wish he hadn’t. I don’t recognize the woman on the screen at all.

  Laurel’s Journal, July 23, 20—

  I’m worried about Chloë. Ever since that night at Daphne’s house she hasn’t seemed herself. She cries all night long. Simone says it’s just teething, but I’m afraid she might have caught something from Daphne’s Chloe. I made Stan get up last night and take us to the emergency room. They couldn’t find anything wrong with her, but what can you expect from a little podunk suburban hospital? I told Stan that we need to take her into the city to see a specialist. He told me I was projecting my fears about my own health onto our daughter and that he wasn’t going to let me turn her into a guinea pig. I told him I was glad to see he’d gotten a medical degree so now maybe he could get an actual job. He asked me what I thought managing my money and me was if not a job? Then I threw a baby bottle at him and he left, saying he’d be back when I calmed down.

  He slammed the door going out and it woke up Chloë. The sound of her crying felt like sandpaper rubbing at the inside of my eyeballs. I went in and picked her up but she just screamed louder. What kind of baby screams more when her mother picks her up? It’s like she doesn’t recognize me. I jostled her up and down, the way I’d seen Daphne do with her Chloe but she just screamed harder. It felt like she was screaming inside my head, like the sound had gotten inside and was scraping out my brains like a serrated spoon scooping melon out of its rind. I thought that if it went on any longer I wouldn’t have any brain left, so I gave her a shake—just a little one—and screamed, “Stop it!”

  And she did! But just for a second. Her eyes got really wide and surprised. And then she started crying again only it sounded different, weaker and thinner. Like I had broken something inside of her. Which made me cry. That’s how Simone found us when she came in: sitting on the nursery floor, both of us crying.

  SIMONE SAID I needed to go out and take care of myself, so I made appointments for mani-pedis at the spa for me and Daphne. I thought it would make me feel better, doing something for someone else, but as my mother used to say, No good deed goes unpunished. I was telling Daphne about how much Chloë’s been crying and that I’m afraid something is wrong with her. I said she had rolled off the bed because
I was too embarrassed to admit I’d shaken her, but Daphne looked at me funny as if she knew I was lying. Then she gave me this really patronizing look and told me I ought to have Chloë checked out. Which was practically like saying I’m a horrible mother and I’ve ruined my baby’s life.

  Daphne’s just like all the other mothers at the support group with their whining about how sensitive they are. They’re all just looking for someone to pat them on the head and tell them that whatever they do is normal and that their baby is the smartest, prettiest, best-behaved baby in the world. I’m glad that Peter said that Daphne and I don’t need to go to the group anymore (not that I need his permission!). But at least now I don’t have to see backstabbing Daphne anymore. Stan didn’t even argue when I told him I wasn’t going to keep going. He said that maybe hearing all those women talking about their problems wasn’t good for me, that I’ve always been “suggestible.” Then he finally agreed to take Chloë to a specialist in the city.

  So, we went to this fancy suite in Sutton Place, all neutral grays with modern abstract statues of mothers and children and fertility goddesses—that sort of crap. Stan told me that the doctor wanted to talk to me while he took Chloë for some tests, so I told the doctor everything I’ve noticed about Chloë’s behavior and my theory that she got something from Daphne’s Chloe. He started writing down a lot of notes and asking me questions about Daphne, like what we talked about, and whether I started acting differently after we became friends, and did I often compare myself to other mothers? It was only when he asked if I hadn’t done the same thing in college with my roommate that I realized we weren’t there for Chloë; we were there for me. This was my psych evaluation to determine if Stan should still be my mental-health and financial conservator.

  I was so mad that I started yelling at him that I’d been brought in on false pretenses and what kind of doctor went along with that kind of ruse? and he just sat there, cool as a cucumber, writing down everything I said and asking questions like did I often think people were plotting against me? Did I sometimes think I was someone else? Had I been experiencing any blackouts? Lost time?

  “Like the forty-five minutes I’ve just spent in here?” I asked.

  Needless to say, I didn’t score high on the psych evaluation and Stan’s conservatorship has been renewed. When I accused Stan of tricking me he said I’d asked for a psychiatric evaluation.

  I was so upset that I had to take two Valiums when we got home. Then of course Stan gave me a lecture about taking too many pills and not taking care of myself. He even made up this vitamin drink that tastes like shit but I’ve been drinking it just to shut him up.

  That was yesterday. Today Daphne came over and I tried to explain to her what I was up against but she’s so naïve that she compared the conservatorship to her officious husband getting her to sign a power of attorney. Like they’re the same thing! Then she started acting condescending to me again, pulling that passive-aggressive bullshit, pretending to be concerned for me but really implying that I’m nuts and can’t take care of myself or Chloë.

  So I asked her to leave.

  But when she left I realized how alone I am. There’s really no one I can turn to. When Mommy and Daddy died, they didn’t even have anyone to leave me to, except their stodgy old lawyer, Ronald “Call me JB” Jones-Barrett, who doles out my allowance and pays the bills for boarding school, college, and mental hospitals. Even then they didn’t trust me to take care of my own money.

  It’s bad enough that it’s all in trust, but at least I had control over my own allowance before Stan got the conservatorship. If I die, Stan will have complete control of the money because he’s Chloë’s guardian.

  Unless I do something about that.

  So I just called JB and asked if I could change Chloë’s guardianship. After a lot of gobbledygook, which I was paying, like, a gazillion dollars an hour for, he finally told me how I could do it. I’m meeting him in the city next week to go over the details. For the first time since Chloë was born I feel like I’m in control. I feel like myself again.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Knowing that Ben Marcus has gone to find Esta should make my days at Crantham easier. All I have to do is behave myself, swallow my pills (or at least appear to; I continue to stockpile them instead), and busy myself with some harmless pursuit in the recreation lounge.

  Since our sketching session on the terrace Edith has decided to switch her major from art history to studio art. “My roommate, Libby, says why should I study what a bunch of dead white men painted when I can make my own art?” she explains.

  Libby sounds like a bit of a tool, I think, remembering from Edith’s files that it was her roommate who turned her into the administration when she had the baby. But I can’t argue against sitting outside on the terrace drawing side by side, wrapped in afghans against the cooler weather.

  My own attempts are clumsy, but Edith clearly has—or had—talent. She captures the contours of the landscaped grounds, the meandering paths, gently rolling lawns, dark woods, and the tower rising on the ridge above it all. She draws the tower again and again. “Libby says I need to work on perspective,” she says, “and an octagonal structure is perfect. It’s like the temple in Raphael’s Marriage of the Virgin.” I remember that was one of the pictures in her stack of art cards. She’s put away the cards now that she’s changed majors, but she keeps the piece of red ribbon tied around her wrist.

  “You like your roommate?” I ask.

  “Oh, Libby’s the best!” Edith gushes in a girlish voice totally at odds with her lined face and white hair. “She’s actually been to all the places we study in art history. She’s so . . . worldly. She gets all her clothes at B. Altman’s in the city and has her hair done at Helena Rubinstein’s. She’s going to take me the next time she goes in.” She gives me an uncertain look. “I could ask if you could come too.”

  “Thanks,” I say, “but I wouldn’t want to intrude.”

  Edith looks relieved. “Well, maybe that’s best. Libby can be a little finicky, if you know what I mean. She might not like a change of plan.”

  I’m so taken up in Edith’s fantasy world that the next time we meet on the terrace I ask her how her trip to the city went.

  “Oh!” she says, her face lighting up, “it was wonderful! We had lunch at the Lotus Club and went to the Metropolitan Museum. Libby bought me a book on perspective at the Met and I drew this. It’s modeled on Raphael’s Marriage of the Virgin.”

  She takes out a piece of paper and hands it to me, as if to prove that the excursion really happened. It’s a sketch depicting two figures in classical garb, a man and a woman, standing in front of a round temple. It actually looks very much like the picture from the card. Mary’s face is tilted, her eyes cast modestly down at her hand as Joseph puts the ring on her finger. A perfectly proportional classical temple stands behind them, giving the scene a sense of order and balance.

  I look up from the drawing into Edith’s wide green eyes. “It’s very good, Edith. You’re very talented.”

  A shy smile tugs at her mouth. “Thank you. Libby says I should do my junior year abroad in Italy and go to the Slade after college.” Her eyes are so full of hope that for a second I am seduced into imagining Edith studying art in Rome and London. Then I remember that that will never happen. She will give birth alone in a dorm room and throw the child into a trash bin. She will be expelled from college and go crazy, tortured by that irrevocable act. She will be locked away in this place, her youth and talent burned out of her by drugs and shock treatments, her mind so haunted by the memory of that lost child that she’ll climb to the top of the tower and throw herself over.

  This is what will happen to me if Ben doesn’t find anyone to prove I’m Daphne Marist. They’ll give me shock treatment and I’ll forget what’s happened in the last few months. I’ll forget Chloe. I’ll forget myself. I’ll become an empty hull, a shadow.

  I wipe away a tear and Edith’s sketch, which I’ve been blind
ly staring at, swims in front of me, the pencil shading of the temple blurring into shadows. There seems to be something in one of the windows.

  I look closer. Yes, there’s a figure in the center window of the temple, a shadow of a shawled woman, one hand lifted in a wave. It’s only the briefest of sketches but Edith really is talented: I could swear the woman is signaling for help.

  Laurel’s Journal, August 1, 20—

  I went to the city to see JB today. It had been so long since I’d gone down to Manhattan. When we moved here Stan said I could go in every day if I wanted, lots of people commute. I did go in at first but then when I was pregnant I hated the crowded trains, so many bodies pressing in around me.

  At first I was excited to be making the trip. I put on a new dress and heels. I’d have lunch at a nice restaurant after the meeting, do some shopping. I thought I’d walk along Fifth Avenue for a bit, look in the shop windows, but it was so hot that by the time I got to the law firm I felt wilted and tired. Then JB kept me waiting for half an hour in an overly air-conditioned waiting room, listening to the receptionist making wedding plans on the phone.

  When JB finally saw me he made a big fuss and apologized for the wait—he’d had to squeeze me in on such short notice, he hoped nothing was wrong? Then before I could answer he called to his secretary to bring us coffee and he had to go out to handle something and I had to sit there in his office, looking at all the silver-framed photographs of JB’s grandkids and his sailboat and the house on Martha’s Vineyard and it all made me want to cry. If Mommy and Daddy hadn’t died on that plane I’d have all this: I could talk to my family about what was happening with Stan, Chloë’s picture would be on Daddy’s desk, and I’d be on the Cape right now instead of in sweltering, dirty Manhattan.

  When JB came back he perched on the edge of the desk and gave me a cup of coffee, which I let sit on the table beside me because I was afraid my hands would shake too hard if I picked it up. I told him I wanted to change the terms of the trust to protect Chloë’s interests.