The Other Mother

by Carol Goodman

  I left the outside light off and padded softly to the stall door. I knocked and called her name. I heard a grunt that sounded more like an animal than a person and I was suddenly very afraid. I wanted to turn around and run back to my room but the stall door had cracked open a bit because it wasn’t locked and I saw Libby crouched in the tub, a washcloth stuffed inside her mouth, her face purple. At first I was afraid she was dying, that she’d had some kind of fit or attack or that she’d been attacked. When I got closer to the tub I saw the blood, gallons of it. So then I thought this must be some kind of stunt, someone had tied Libby up and poured pig’s blood over her. I took the gag out of her mouth and grabbed her shoulders and shook her. When she looked at me she didn’t seem to recognize me. Then she let out a moan and her body shook and there was more blood. It was coming from between her legs. I reached there—not even thinking about being embarrassed to touch her there, just wanting to stop the blood—and my hand touched something round and hard.

  My first thought was that Libby had somehow found a way to have the baby for me.

  And then it was like I’d floated up out of my body and I was looking down. I could see two girls, one in the tub, one crouched over the tub, and I couldn’t tell who was who. The girl outside the tub was helping the girl in the tub to have a baby. They were both covered in blood. When the girl outside pulled the baby out of the inside girl they were connected by a long bloody rope. They will be connected by that red string forever. What difference does it make who is who?

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  It was your baby,” I say to Sky. And then, looking at Peter, “It was you.”

  Peter smiles. I haven’t seen him look so pleased with me since the minutes after I gave birth to Chloe. “You see the resemblance, don’t you? I saw it the minute I saw Sky’s picture on the back of your copy of her book.”

  “You never even told me you were adopted,” I say.

  He shrugs. “I stopped telling people years ago. They treated me differently, like there must have been something wrong with me for my mother to abandon me.” Sky makes a sound and Peter reaches over to touch her hand. “I don’t blame you,” he says. “I understand now that you didn’t have a choice.”

  “My father made me give the baby away,” Sky says. “He was very strict and I was only nineteen.”

  “What about Peter’s father?” I ask.

  Sky turns pale. “He was dead.”

  “But you let people think it was Edith’s!” I look down at Edith, who is playing peekaboo with Chloe, apparently oblivious to our conversation.

  “Edith thought it was hers,” Sky says softly. “She took him from me after he was born. I think she meant to take him someplace safe, but she must have gotten confused and left him in the dumpster. Luckily a nurse at the clinic saw Edith leaving the baby. She realized that it wasn’t Edith’s baby and so she went to the dorm to make sure the real mother was all right. I might have bled to death if she hadn’t.”

  “That was some nurse . . .” I catch Billie’s eyes and she smiles. “It was you, wasn’t it? The nurse who found the baby . . . but her name was something else.”

  “Landry, my maiden name. That was my first job. Dr. Bennett helped me get it. He wanted me to keep an eye on Sky. When I saw Sky’s roommate with a newborn baby, I had a feeling it was really Sky’s. I went back to the dorm and found Sky bleeding to death. I brought Edith and Sky and the baby to Vassar Brothers Hospital, where Dr. Bennett was on call. He took care of Sky and Edith. He was able to sign off on Edith’s mental state—”

  “He lied! He said Edith was the mother.”

  “She thought she was the mother,” Sky says. “Confronting her with reality would have just made her more upset. He took care of her.” Sky lifts her chin defiantly. “She’s never had to pay a dime for her care at Crantham. My only regret is that I let him convince me that my baby would be taken care of as well.” She looks at Peter and that defiant chin wobbles. “If I’d known . . .”

  “I should have been adopted right away,” Peter says, “a white male baby. But there were complications because I was premature. I was hospitalized for several months and then by the time I was ready for adoption, I was older than what people wanted. So I was in an orphanage for two years. Then the people who adopted me—the Pitts—weren’t well suited for parenthood, and they gave me back. You can imagine how things went for me after that.”

  I’m picturing the boy in the photograph. The unsmiling face. The vacant eyes. “I’m sorry, Peter,” I say. “I wish I had known.”

  “You would have thought there was something wrong with me. When you started talking about taking Chloe—” He breaks off, looks away. I see a tear well in his eye and remember how he cried when Chloe was born. I understand now; it was the first time he’d ever seen someone he was related to.

  “It’s all right, darling.” This time it’s Sky who reaches across to squeeze his hand. “I think Daphne understands now. After all, Daphne, you’re a mother who’s just been reunited with her child. Imagine how I felt when Peter found me. How could I refuse his pleas for help?”

  “Even if it meant locking me up under a false name?” I ask.

  Sky frowns. “You came here under that false name.”

  “After my friend died,” I say. “Is that okay with you? That a woman died in my house and Peter told the police she was me? Don’t you think that seems . . . suspicious?”

  “I think he was confused and upset. He didn’t know where you and your friend’s baby were.”

  “Until I arrived here and you could tell him I was safe. Why not clear it all up then? Why would Peter let me go on as Laurel unless it was because he and Stan needed Laurel’s money?”

  “Peter doesn’t need anybody else’s money now,” Sky says. “He’s my heir.”

  “Then tell the police I’m Daphne Marist. Tell them you made a mistake.”

  Peter laughs. “Right. So I can go to jail and you can take Chloe from me.”

  “No one’s sending you to jail, Peter,” Sky says, touching Peter’s hand again. This time I see him flinch. “I have excellent lawyers. You found a dead woman in your own bathtub. Of course you thought she was your wife. You barely saw Daphne at Crantham. It will be on Stan that she was identified as Laurel.”

  “But why do any of that?” Peter snaps irritably. “Why not let things stay as they are? She’s clearly unhinged. She belongs in a mental hospital.”

  Even though I thought I’d faced the worst about Peter—that he tried to kill me, that he was content for me to spend the rest of my life at Crantham—the anger in his voice shocks me. It must surprise Sky too. She looks at him as if she’s seeing him for the first time. The adoration in her eyes falters. I can’t imagine what it’s been like finding her long-lost child after all these years, seeing her own features in his face. I can hardly blame her for wanting to help him. What wouldn’t I do for Chloe in the same situation?

  “Darling,” she says gently, “I think we can leave that assessment for Dr. Hancock. But he should have all the facts—”

  “Like he’s had all the facts about her?” He jabs his finger at Edith so violently that Edith cowers and whimpers. Chloe, who has been happily engaged in peekaboo with Edith, begins to cry.

  “As a matter of fact,” Sky says, the doubt in her eyes hardening into ice, “he knows all about Edith. I told him everything when he took over, after my father died. If there were any way Edith could live outside, I would have her here with me. If there were any way I could go back and undo what I did forty-five years ago, I would. But remember, I was all alone. Your father was dead.”

  “So you said. A tragic car accident. Still you could have fought harder to keep me.”

  I notice that Sky looks away from Peter when he says “car accident” and then looks at him sideways the way Peter looks when he’s lying. That single eye reminds me of something—

  I look in through the window to the parlor, where I can see the portrait hanging over the mantel.
The bright primary colors look familiar. I picture the landscapes in the lounge at Crantham, those two figures on the bench, then that disembodied eye outside of Hancock’s office—

  “Peter’s father was a painter, wasn’t he?” I ask Sky. She gives me a warning look but I go on. “And a patient at Crantham.”

  Peter whips his head around to stare at Sky. “You told me that you met him in France.”

  “I was sent to France after we fell in love,” Sky says gently. “My father wanted to separate us.”

  “He was a mental patient?” Peter asks, aghast.

  “He was a talented painter,” Sky says reprovingly. “A misunderstood genius. His paintings still hang at the hospital.”

  “They do,” I say, thinking of the landscapes in the lounge and then what the paintings turned into when the woman disappeared. “He put all his sorrow at losing you into his paintings.”

  Sky gives me a grateful look. “Yes, you understand. When I came back from France I saw how much he loved me. He painted that portrait of me.” She looks through the window into the parlor at the painting over the mantel.

  “And then you went away again,” I say.

  A shadow passes over Sky’s face. Edith reaches up to stroke her cheek, as if to banish her sadness. “You were so sad those first months at college,” Edith says. “I didn’t understand at first. You had been broken apart.”

  “That’s how he painted you,” I say, “broken into pieces. And then . . .”—I remember what Dr. Hancock said the first time I commented on the paintings—“he killed himself.”

  A tear rolls down Sky’s weathered cheek. She looks toward Peter. “I didn’t want you to know.”

  “My father was a suicide,” he says, his voice curiously flat. I remember what he said to me after I almost drowned in the tub: What kind of a mother kills herself, leaving a child behind? Even after all he’s done I recognize the anguish of being left and want to spare him.

  “He must not have known you were pregnant,” I say to Sky.

  “I never had a chance to tell him,” Sky says. “By the time I knew, he had killed himself. I’ve always regretted that I let my father send me away and that I let him convince me to give you up. That’s why I don’t want you to saddle yourself to one wrong decision. Believe me, son, you don’t want to live with that kind of regret.”

  I think she has used the word son deliberately, but what she doesn’t know is that Peter once told me he hated when his father (his adopted father, I realize now) called him that. He did it to make me feel small, he’d said, and my heart had bled for the boy who had grown up feeling so unloved. Now I see his jaw stiffen. “What do you suggest we do?” he asks in a tight voice. He’s taken the pain and shame of learning that his father was a suicide and turned it into anger against Sky.

  “I suggest we sleep on it,” Sky says with an easy smile that tells me she has not heard the threat in his voice.

  “Under the same roof as two lunatics?” he asks.

  Sky frowns. “Edith is harmless, and as for Daphne . . . if you thought she was dangerous, why did you send her to me?”

  A vein pulses at Peter’s temple. He doesn’t like to have people question him. He is going to explode. For a moment I am hopeful. Then Sky will know he is the crazy one. But before he can get out a word, another man announces himself on the terrace.

  “I see you’ve found them.” Dr. Hancock says, two orderlies in tow. My heart sinks. “I’ll take them back to the hospital now.”

  “There,” Sky says. “Problem solved. We’ll discuss the matter tonight. And we’ll talk about your father. Perhaps tomorrow we can go look at his paintings together.” She pats Peter on the knee, then turns to me. “Don’t worry, dear, just one more night and it’ll all come right if I know my boy.”

  But she doesn’t, I think, she doesn’t know him at all.

  Edith’s Journal, December 10, 1971 (cont.)

  I think I lost a little time after the baby came. The next thing I knew, I was holding the baby wrapped in the college blanket I’d bought from the bookstore my first week. A pair of bloody scissors lay on the floor. I didn’t remember getting them or the blanket from the room. Had Libby gone for them?

  “You have to get rid of it,” Libby said.

  She was sitting next to me on the bathroom floor. There was blood on her nightgown and mine. Blood on the baby’s face. Everything was red except for the blue of the baby’s eyes, which were staring up at me. I understood then why the Virgin was always dressed in red and blue; those are the colors of a newborn baby.

  “You have to get rid of it!” Libby screamed so loud that I was afraid she’d wake up the other girls.

  “But where should I take him?” I asked.

  “I don’t care! Someplace no one will see you. You have to go now, while it’s still night. Go out the back door, past the laundry and the power station, to the lake. No one will see you there.”

  “And just . . . leave him?”

  Libby looked like she was going to yell again but instead she put her hand on my arm and spoke softly. “It would be the kindest thing. You can see he’s not . . . right, can’t you? He came too early. He won’t live—or if he does he’ll be stunted and ugly.”

  I looked down at the baby. He was very small, his face pinched and wrinkled, his skin nearly transparent, as if it hadn’t quite finished forming. He had come too soon. It was only seven months since I had been with Cal . . .

  “Are you sure?” I asked Libby.

  “Yes,” she said. She squeezed my arm. “Go. Take it down to the lake. Leave him . . . someplace pretty. And then everything will be the way it was. We’ll go to Europe. We’ll lay a wreath for him on Keats’s grave in Rome and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s in Florence. You’ll paint pictures for him and I’ll write for him. Whatever we make will be for him. But if you don’t go now, there will be no paintings and no books.”

  I didn’t know what to do. Find someone who will know, a voice said inside my head. The voice sounded like Libby, even though Libby was sitting right in front of me and she wasn’t saying anything like that. But maybe it was what she really wanted. Once she had said to me that a true friend helped you when you didn’t even know you needed help.

  And then I knew what I had to do.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Run, Laurel told me. Fight.

  But how could I do either with Chloe in my lap? Where could I run and take Chloe with me?

  Edith buries her head in Sky’s lap. Sky strokes her hair. “It will be all right,” she tells her. “Dr. Hancock will take care of you and you can come visit again.”

  “But what about the baby?” Edith wails.

  “The baby will be fine,” Sky says. “I’ll make sure.”

  Edith nods, appeased, but I’m not. I can’t hand Chloe over to Peter. Billie stands, waiting to take her just as she must have taken Peter from Sky all those years ago. How easy she made it for Sky to give up her own baby!

  I get up. Both of the orderlies take a step toward me. Do they think I am going to dash my baby’s brains out on the flagstone? What kind of monster do they think I am?

  One who abandoned her baby, Laurel provides helpfully.

  I ignore her and walk toward Sky. I don’t want it to be easy for her this time. I want her to know what it feels like to give up a baby. I look down at Chloe, hold her blue gaze for a moment, and then hand her to Sky. Sky stiffens and presses herself back in her chair, recoiling from Chloe’s touch, but then Edith takes both of Sky’s arms and pulls them around Chloe. Sky resists a moment longer and then softens, shaping herself to Chloe—her grandchild.

  “I’m holding you responsible for her care until I can come back for her,” I say. “And I’m holding you responsible for telling the truth.”

  Sky looks up at me, her eyes wide and vulnerable. This is a Sky I haven’t seen before. For the first time I think she really understands what it feels like to give up a child. She nods once and before I can change my mind—be
fore I melt into a puddle of blubbering goo on the flagstone—I turn and let the orderlies lead me from the terrace.

  THE ORDERLIES LOAD Edith and me into the back of a van that has a Plexiglas divider, so we can’t jump the driver, and a locked back door. One of the orderlies sits with us; the other drives. Dr. Hancock sits in the passenger seat. For all her acquiescence on the terrace, Edith is trembling now. “Let me sit next to her,” I ask the orderly. He shrugs his consent and I move next to Edith and take her hand. “It’s okay,” I tell her.

  Edith pats my hand, as if I’m the one in need of reassurance. “I’m just glad we found your baby. That’s what matters. Libby will look after her. Only . . .” A flicker of doubt crosses her face. “Only I didn’t like that man. He reminded me of Solomon.”

  “Peter?” I ask, wondering what Peter could possibly have in common with the bearded Old Testament judge. “I’m not sure I like him much anymore either, but he does love Chloe. You can tell by the way he looks at her.”

  Edith nods. “Yes,” she says, but she still looks uncertain. “But some kinds of love are as dangerous as hate.”

  The words chill me and we ride the rest of the way in silence. I think about kinds of love that are dangerous: sexual passions that lead to envy, possessiveness, and jealousy. Protective love that leads to blindness. Sky’s father thinking it was better for her to be sent away. Peter’s father painting his beloved in pieces because she had left him. Loving a child so much you can’t bear the thought of anything happening to her so you wall off your heart from loving her. Hadn’t I done that with Chloe? I was so afraid of the things that could happen to her, of all the horrible pictures that popped into my head, that I had closed my eyes to her. Yes, it’s scary to love someone that much, and dangerous, like wearing your heart on the outside of your body.