The Other Mother

by Carol Goodman

  “You want a new trustee? Is there anything wrong between you and Stan? Should I call Arnie in from Matrimonial?” He said all this in his lockjaw patrician drawl. His white hair and tanned skin reminded me of Stan. But then, that was because JB looked like what I imagined my father would look like now and I’d married someone who reminded me of my father.

  That thing I said to Daphne, about us wanting to put the world back together, was bullshit. You can’t put together something that’s broken. It’s like trying to glue together a priceless Ming vase. In the end it’s just a piece of broken trash.

  “No,” I told him, “I don’t need Arnie—at least not yet. I just want to make sure that Chloë’s money is protected.”

  When I told him what I wanted to do, he made a face. He tried to talk me out of it, to get me to at least wait and think about it, but I did what Mommy would do when one of the servants made excuses. I just smiled and repeated what I wanted.

  “Of course,” he said. “I’ll have the papers drawn up right away and send them to you.” Then there were a lot of details about notaries and witnesses. I started to feel jittery from the coffee and as soon as we were done I went to use the ladies’ room and threw up. When I came out of the stall the receptionist was standing at the sink. She asked if I was okay and I told her I was fine and that she was picking the wrong colors for the tablecloths at her wedding. Salmon would make everyone look sallow. She should go with peach.

  I fixed my hair and makeup. I looked awful but I figured it was just the bad lighting. For what JB charges an hour you’d think the firm could afford better lighting.

  I didn’t feel like sitting alone in a restaurant or trying on clothes so I took a cab back to Grand Central. I got sick again on the train. Maybe I’ve got the flu. Probably something I picked up from Chloë. Babies are like germ factories.

  All I wanted to do was sit quietly on the train and stop thinking about how crappy I felt when of course this woman shoves her face right up in front of me and screeches, “Laurie, is that you?” And would you believe, it’s Esta, with a bunch of Eileen Fisher and Saks bags, wearing one of her tent dresses and big macramé earrings. Last person on Earth I wanted to see. She sits down across from me and starts braying away: why’d I quit the group, I was doing so well, she’d been worried about me, blah, blah, blah. Then she sticks out her waddled neck and peers closer at me and says, “You really don’t look so well.”

  “Just a summer cold,” I told her.

  “Oh, those are the worst!” Then she sits back with a smug look on her face and says, “Is that what was wrong with Chloë?”

  “What?” I asked her.

  “Daphne called me to say she was worried about you because you’ve been fretting about Chloë.”

  I couldn’t believe it! After all the times we had made fun of Esta together and I defended Daphne when Esta was mean to her, Daphne goes and rats me out to Esta! I was so mad, I could barely pay attention to anything Esta was saying. She was going on about Daphne and how she was afraid she had that postpartum OCD thing where she over-identifies with other women’s stories so I asked her if she wasn’t betraying patient-therapist confidentiality by talking to me about Daphne. That shut her up.

  When I got home I was so chilled that I changed into Stan’s sweatpants and crawled onto the couch. Stan mixed up a drink with electrolytes and I was so dehydrated that I drank two big bottles of it. I was just feeling a little better when Daphne showed up, basically to tell me that I looked like shit. Then she started going on about these jobs I could apply for—as if that was the answer to my problems!—and about how I had lost myself. I took a good look at her then and I saw how much she’s copied about me: my hair, my clothes—she’s even got the same fucking Kate Spade bag that Stan gave me—and I realized she’s been making herself into a little mini me. Which is so pathetic it made me feel even sicker.

  But the worst thing was Daphne got this saccharine sweet I’m-so-worried-about-you look on her face and asked me if I was thinking about killing myself. She said Stan told her I’d tried when I was pregnant. She was blubbering about how she’d tried to kill herself too, like it made us blood sisters or something and I suddenly understood what’s going on. I’ve been such an idiot.

  Stan’s been telling everyone that I’m crazy and suicidal. So if I really did kill myself everyone would think, “Oh, poor Laurel, we should have seen it coming.”

  When what we all should have seen coming is that Stan is planning to kill me and make it look like I killed myself.

  Chapter Nineteen

  A week goes by and there’s no sign of Ben. I begin to wonder if he ever believed me at all.

  Or maybe I imagined the whole conversation. I remember Ben Marcus saying that this place could drive a sane person insane. Take those watercolors on the walls in the lounge. From a distance they looked like ordinary landscapes—the kind of thing you’d see in a country inn—but I’ve been looking at them more closely and they’re not so ordinary. They’re all of the same view, for one thing, of that bench where I sat with Ben Marcus with the hill and the tower in the distance. In some of the paintings the bench is empty and then in some there’s a young woman sitting on it, and in a few there’s a man and a woman. It’s in the paintings with both figures that the landscape gets a little odd. The trees seem to be moving, like there’s a wind thrashing them about, but when you look closer you can make out figures in the trees, writhing men and women who look like they’re in the throes of passion . . . or madness. I doubt the staff has ever looked at them closely enough to notice or they wouldn’t keep them on the walls. There’s something weird about the tower too. It grows taller in the later pictures and emits a weird light. In one of the pictures there’s a giant eye on top of the tower as if the tower itself is watching the couple on the bench. The most disturbing picture is the one in which only the man remains on the bench. But the woman isn’t gone. If you look closely you can find her body parts littered among the foliage.

  I wonder if the painter—“C.S.,” he signs himself—was crazy to begin with or if he became crazier as he stayed here. Being surrounded by crazy people makes you feel like there’s no solid ground, no baseline of sanity to balance your own thoughts against. It’s like trying to hang a shelf on a wall that’s crooked. Nothing lines up.

  I can see the frantic desire to make things line up in Edith’s increasingly chaotic sketches. She has become obsessed with drawing The Marriage of the Virgin over and over again, seeking to find balance in the classical proportions of the Renaissance master. At first she satisfies herself by drawing diagonal perspective lines from the figures in the foreground across the paving squares to the round temple. “See,” she says, “they’re all connected.”

  Then she decides that the temple should be taller and the people smaller. As the temple grows into a tower the woman in the window becomes more distinct. I can see now that she’s holding something in her arms. “She needs to be connected too,” Edith says, drawing lines from the central window in the tower to the figures in the foreground. She still calls them perspective lines but I think she means to represent the sight lines of the woman in the window. They look, though, like rays of light emanating from the tower. As if the tower had become a lighthouse and the woman in the window its beacon. Perhaps she’s gotten the idea from the watercolor of the tower with an eye atop it.

  The scene in the foreground changes too. The crowd of suitors and handmaids disappears, leaving only two figures, who are no longer Joseph and Mary, but are instead two women. One holds a baby; she is offering it to the other woman, who is wearing an outfit that looks like an old-fashioned nurse’s uniform.

  “Who’s that?” I ask, pointing to the nurse.

  “Nurse Landry,” she says. “She’s nice.”

  I haven’t met a nurse named Landry here, or any that are particularly nice. I point to the man who stands in between them. He is a bearded old man, like the priest in the original painting, but now he brandishes a meat
cleaver in his hand.

  “Who’s this?” I ask.

  “Solomon,” Edith tells me, plucking at the red ribbon on her wrist. “He’s telling the women that he’ll cut the baby in two if they can’t agree who’s the mother.” I shiver. It’s getting far too cold to be out on the terrace.

  “Of course, it’s only a trick to find out who the real mother is,” I say.

  Edith looks up, her green eyes so piercing on this gray, overcast day that I can almost see rays of light shooting out from them like in the picture. “Is it?” she asks.

  The next day it snows and I’m relieved to have an excuse not to go out on the terrace to sketch with Edith. Instead Edith sits at a card table, covering page after page with pictures of women and babies and men with cleaving knives. She steals glue from the arts-and-crafts table and hangs the pages up on the windows. Then she steals red yarn from the knitting circle and strings yarn from picture to picture, creating an intricate spider web. She strings yarn from the landscapes on the wall to her pictures too.

  “Don’t you see,” she says, when I try to lead her away, “they’re all connected—the tower, the baby, the man . . . here, hold this—” She hands me a ball of yarn and walks around me in a circle. When she’s wrapped me up she goes on to one of the other patients and when he tries to stop her, she darts around the room, trailing red yarn behind her in bright lassos, until orderlies, patients, and nurses are all bound in her web. Finally, one of the orderlies restrains her and drags her out of the lounge, and we all unwrap ourselves.

  I’m picking yarn fuzz off my arms when Dr. Hancock comes to tell me that the doctors are here to do my psych evaluation.

  “What about Ben Marcus?” I ask as Dr. Hancock leads me down the hall to the elevator.

  “What about him?” Dr. Hancock asks without turning around.

  “He—he was getting something for me. Something that I need to show the doctors.”

  Dr. Hancock stops abruptly and turns on me. “Guards are not allowed to bring presents to patients,” he says. “Marcus’s behavior was completely inappropriate. He’s been fired.”

  “Oh,” I say as Dr. Hancock gives me a slight push onto the elevator. I can feel tears welling in my eyes. Ben Marcus was my last hope. How will I convince these doctors I’m Daphne Marist without any proof? I catch a glimpse of myself in the convex mirror in the corner of the elevator, my face elongated like the figure of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. My hair is tangled with yarn, my face smudged with glue, my pajamas covered with fuzz. I look like I should be institutionalized.

  The elevator lets us off on the floor of Dr. Hancock’s office. It’s strange being in this hall again after so long and I wonder why the evaluation is here. “Can I use the restroom?” I ask.

  “I don’t have a female matron to supervise you,” he says. “You’d have to go back downstairs, and the doctors have been waiting already.”

  I want to object that they can wait but Dr. Hancock strides on ahead. As I walk behind him I glance at the pictures on the wall. I notice that they’re signed “C.S.” They’re by the same artist who did the landscapes in the lounge. Here is where the body parts of the woman on the bench have ended up. It’s not a particularly cheerful thought to have as I make my way to Dr. Hancock’s office. It makes me feel as though parts of my own body are coming loose.

  Inside Dr. Hancock’s office are a man and a woman. The woman is dressed in a smart knit suit that instantly makes me feel slovenly in my fuzzy pajamas. The man is wearing baggy corduroys and a plaid shirt. The lines of his shirt remind me of Edith’s perspective lines. He’s got a stray thread on his sleeve that I have to keep myself from plucking off.

  They introduce themselves but I forget their names immediately and I’m afraid if I ask again they’ll think I’m scatterbrained. I sit in an upholstered chair that’s so soft I sink into it. They sit in hardback chairs lined up across from me. I imagine perspective lines stretching from me to them. I am clearly the focus. The vanishing point.

  “Do you understand what the purpose of this meeting is?” the man asks in a voice that manages to be kindly and terrifying at the same time.

  “To determine if I’m competent enough to refuse electroconvulsive treatment,” I say, proud that I’ve remembered the correct term for the procedure. “I am competent, and I do not want the ECT.”

  “Why not?” the woman asks, opening a file. “I see here that you had ECT six months ago and that it lessened the symptoms of postpartum depression.”

  “That’s not me,” I say. After days of indecision I’ve decided on the spur of the moment to tell them I’m Daphne Marist. It may be reckless, but I am beginning to see how easy it is here to fall into delusions, like Edith’s delusion that she is a college student in 1971. I am afraid that if I tell these doctors that I am Laurel Hobbes I will begin to believe it myself. If I’m going to fight for my life, I want to do it in my own name.

  “You’re saying you don’t recall having the ECT?” the woman doctor says.

  “No, I’m saying I didn’t have it. Laurel Hobbes had it and I’m not Laurel Hobbes. I’m Daphne Marist.”

  There’s a moment of silence, followed by a quick whispered consultation. I hear “mirroring,” “dissociative break,” and “schizoaffective disorder.” I will myself to stay calm and wait for them to return their attention to me. When they turn back to me I begin talking before they can ask any questions. I need to get ahead of the story that I am Laurel Hobbes. “I’m asking that you consider for a moment that I am Daphne Marist and not a deluded Laurel Hobbes. Consider that you have no real proof that I’m Laurel. No DNA test, no fingerprints. You have only the word of two men, Stan Hobbes and Peter Marist, both of whom profit financially by my being Laurel. Stan because he’s Laurel’s conservator and has control of her money as long as Laurel is deemed incompetent, and Peter because I believe Stan is investing that money in his fund.”

  I take a deep breath, pleased at how reasonable the argument sounds. The doctors’ faces are impassive, but at least they haven’t interrupted me. I go on.

  “I don’t know whether Laurel killed herself or someone killed her or why she ended up in my house, but I think whatever happened, Stan and Peter realized they needed Laurel to be alive to use her money. Laurel said something to me a few days before she died about changing the terms of Chloë’s trust. I think that would have kept Stan from controlling her money after her death. But if Laurel was alive and incompetent, he could access her money. So they needed me to become Laurel.”

  The woman doctor tilts her head and starts to say something, but I talk over her. I feel like I’m running a race and I have to get this all out before they trip me up. “Unwittingly, I played into their hands. I assumed Laurel’s identity to take the job with Schuyler Bennett. I didn’t plan to at first; I applied to the job for Laurel, but when I accidentally switched bags with her I got the idea of using it to go away myself. At least, that’s what I told myself.” I pause, feeling the tension of the lines I’ve drawn sag and fray.

  Seeing my uncertainty the woman doctor probes. “You see it differently now?”

  “Yes,” I say, glad that she is at least following the story. “I think I was jealous of Laurel. I wanted to be her—or at least like her. I also think I was afraid. I must have sensed what was going on with Peter and Stan and when I came home and found Laurel . . .”

  I stop. This is the part I can’t really explain. The part that makes me sound crazy. The part I still don’t really remember. When I try to think of it, my vision goes red, as if a red veil has been dropped over my eyes.

  “That must have been traumatic,” the woman doctor says.

  “Yes!” I agree gratefully. I’ve decided I like her. “All I can remember is going up the stairs. The carpet is wet. It reminds me . . .” I hesitate, realizing I’ve entered a trap.

  “Of what?” Woman Doctor asks.

  Do I tell her about the bathtub incident? For the first time it occurs to me that even if I conv
ince them I’m Daphne Marist I may not be let out of here if they decide that Daphne Marist is crazy. But I’ve come too far. I’m convinced that Woman Doctor will know if I don’t tell her the truth.

  “A couple of weeks after I gave birth I was very depressed. I took some pills and got in the tub. I don’t think I meant to kill myself, but I was so . . . tired. I think I just wanted to sleep. My husband found me . . .”

  I recall Peter’s hands on my shoulders, pulling me to the surface, but now it occurs to me that if he were really pulling me up to the surface his hands would be on my arms, not on my shoulders. He wasn’t pulling me out; he was pushing me down.

  Woman Doctor is still watching me, waiting patiently.

  “I think my husband, Peter, tried to kill me,” I say, tears rising to my eyes. “He said I tried to drown myself, but I wouldn’t have done that. I think he wanted me gone and when he had the chance to say I was the woman in the bathtub he took it. That way he and Stan got control over Laurel’s money and he got me out of the way.”

  “Why would your husband want you out of the way?” she asks. “Daphne Marist didn’t have a big inheritance too, did she?”

  I almost laugh. “No, I don’t have any money. I—I don’t know why. Peter’s very . . . particular. Maybe it was too difficult having a wife with postpartum depression. But I think that’s why I don’t remember finding Laurel in the tub. I was going up the stairs, remembering when Peter found me in the tub and then when I got to the bathroom . . .”

  The red veil descends. I can’t see anything else.

  “When you looked into the tub, who did you see?” the male doctor asks. His voice is deep and persuasive.

  I keep my eyes closed. I watch myself crossing the bathroom floor. The tiles are wet and stained red. Red water is dripping down the sides of the tub. I look down. I see—“Me,” I say, opening my eyes. “I saw myself. That’s why I ran.”