The Other Mother

by Carol Goodman

“What does he mean?” I ask.

  “I believe he’s referring to my leg, an injury I incurred jumping from the very window he’s perched on now.”

  “You were the one who jumped from the window? But I thought it was Edith. Wasn’t it Edith your father saw in the tower?”

  “Yes, but one day she escaped from Crantham and came up here looking for the baby. She’d gotten it into her head we were keeping him from her. I saw her from my window and followed her up here. I tried to stop her and we both fell. I landed first and saved her from the worst damage. I broke my leg—so badly that it never really healed right—but something inside me had healed. I was better after that.”

  So it was Sky Billie had been talking about. No wonder she hadn’t wanted me repeating the story in front of her.

  “How nice for you,” Peter says bitterly. “Did you think of going to find your son then?”

  “I thought you’d been adopted. That’s what my father told me.”

  “That’s what you wanted to believe so you could go off to Europe and write your books. You abandoned me like you’d have me abandon Chloe. But I won’t let her grow up without a father the way I had to.”

  “She won’t have to grow up without you,” I say. “I’ll pretend to be Laurel. I’ll go back to the hospital. I’ll never say a word. Neither will Sky.” I risk a second’s glance back at Sky. Her face is so drawn she looks like a skeleton of herself, but she nods stiffly. Then she steps a few inches to the right. Why? I wonder, where is she going? Then she silently mouths something to me. Take . . . I can’t make out the next word but I realize now that she’s moved so that I am blocking Peter’s view of her. She’s trying to tell me something. Take . . .

  A sharp crack makes me pivot back to Peter. He’s half-turned on the ledge and is holding Chloe up to the open window with one arm while he points with the other. “Look at the pretty lights,” he says.

  But Chloe isn’t having it. She’s in full-on tantrum mode, stiffening her arms and legs, making of herself an unholdable weight. I’ve nearly dropped her a half dozen times when she does this and she didn’t weigh as much then as she does now. The trick is not to fight her, but to sit on the floor with her and let her have it out. But Peter doesn’t know this—or he’s unable to give in. His face is taut with anger, the loving expression he had a few minutes ago wiped clean. The look he’s giving her now is how he looks at me when I’ve disappointed him. When I’ve crossed him. Love changed to anger as easy as flipping a switch.

  “Stop it!” he yells at Chloe, shaking her. She goes still for a second and then suddenly flails her whole body, arms and legs out, head back. Peter loses his grip. She’s slithering out of his hands, falling out the window—

  I am there to catch her without knowing I have moved. And as soon as my hands are on her, Sky rushes past me, bumping my shoulder. I make myself fall backward instead of forward, landing hard on my rump, keeping my arms around Chloe. Take Chloe, that’s what Sky had said, when I rush him.

  As I watch, she throws herself at Peter, her arms open wide, as if she means to embrace him. He is surprised into opening his arms. On his face is an expression I’ve never seen. How often, I wonder, had he dreamed of this as a child: his mother returned to him to take him in her arms? Maybe it’s not too late, I want to tell Sky. For either of them. For any of us.

  But the force of her embrace tips Peter over the ledge. I lay Chloe on the floor and lunge at Sky’s leg, but it slips out of my grasp. They are falling, out the open window, propelled by Sky’s headlong rush. I glimpse her face against Peter’s cheek, her arms cradling him as if she meant to lay him down softly in his bed—

  And then they are gone. I gather up Chloe in my arms and stand, holding her tightly as I inch closer to the window, hating to go so near the drop, needing to see—

  In the light of the fire I can see Peter splayed out on the pavement, Sky curled by his side, her arms still holding him. A fireman comes rushing around the house, sees the bodies, then looks up at the tower and sees me. He shouts something at me, but I can’t make out what. Come down? Stay put?

  I turn around—

  And see smoke rising from the stairwell. While I’ve been up here the fire has jumped from the main house to the tower. I hear voices below me—shouts, roars—no, the roar is the fire. Holding Chloe to me, I take a few steps toward the stairwell, peer over, and see flames leaping up, seeking the open air of the window behind me. The firemen can’t make it up here on the stairs.

  The floor is hot beneath my feet. The air is thickening with smoke. Chloe begins to cry. I step backward to the window and look down. There are several firemen now. One points a bullhorn at me and shouts: Go to the other side! We’re getting a ladder.

  I move to the other side, to the window facing the driveway, and try to wrench it open. It’s painted shut and I can’t get it open while holding Chloe and I’m not willing to put her down. She could crawl to the open stairwell. I could lose her in the smoke, which is thicker on this side of the tower with all the windows closed.

  I look down at the truck backing up to the tower. If I wait, they’ll break through the glass, but how long do I have to wait? Chloe is coughing, gagging on the smoke. I can feel it filling up my lungs. If I lose consciousness, I’ll drop her.

  I cross back to the other side of the tower, to the open window. The emptiness that yawned so threateningly before now beckons. Is this how it felt for the woman who jumped from a window with her baby strapped to her chest? Like the only choice left to her?

  But she was deluded. Crazy.

  And yet . . . her baby lived.

  She had a baby carrier, though. I look around the room, hoping for a Snugli to materialize, but there’s nothing but smoke here now. But that’s okay. I can make a Snugli. I take off my pajama top and button Chloe into it, knotting off the bottom and tying the sleeves around my chest. Then I take off my pants and wrap them around us, securing Chloe tight to my body. Then I look down.

  Three stories. Sky and Peter are lying motionless on the flagstone. The fall killed both of them, but then, they both landed on the pavement. If I go straight backward, Chloe won’t hit the pavement because she’s tied to me.

  You’ll die. It’s Laurel, her voice flat, unjudging.

  But she may live, I answer back.

  There’s no reply. I don’t need one. I know what to do. I’ve always known.

  I look across to the other window. If the firemen break through now . . .

  I count to ten but no rescuing fireman breaks through the glass. I can barely see the window. Is it the smoke or am I blacking out? Chloe has gone still against me, her breath rattling against my bare skin.

  I sit on the windowsill. I check the knots on my makeshift Snugli. I wrap my arms around Chloe and tuck my chin down and draw my knees up, making myself into a human egg crate.

  Then I fall back.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  When I wake up I think I am back in the Green Room. Not that the room is green. It’s white and blindingly bright—near-death-experience bright.

  Dead is my next hypothesis, but then the pain kicks in and I decide death can’t hurt this much. Every cell in my body is crying out like a million screaming babies who haven’t been held or fed or changed in days.

  Chloe. What happened to Chloe?

  “Chloe,” I manage to croak out and someone, a man, says, “She’s all right. She wasn’t hurt . . .” Something catches in the man’s throat. “You took all the damage.”

  I feel my face turn wet and my body convulses, which turns up the volume on all those other babies. What about us? What about us? they cry. I can’t possibly help them all, so I slip away, out of that blinding light, into the dark.

  THE NEXT TIME I wake the light is a little more bearable and I can turn my head a little. Not paralyzed then, a voice says in my head, at least, not from the waist up.

  “Shut up,” I murmur.

  The man sitting by my bed startles awake. “Was I snoring?”
he asks.

  I laugh and every cell in my body cries out in pain. “No, sorry, I wasn’t talking to you.”

  Way to get yourself recommitted.

  The man seems unalarmed. He leans forward so I can see his face. It’s Ben Marcus, only Ben Marcus with stubble and dark rings under his eyes. “Your daughter is okay,” he tells me. “You’ve been calling her name.”

  “Where is she?” I ask.

  “Billie Williams has been looking after her.”

  I nod—realize that’s not a good idea—and lick my lips. I trust Billie to take care of Chloe, but the thought that I may never be able to take care of her myself terrifies me. “Am I . . . paralyzed?”

  His eyes widen. “No! The firemen got an inflatable cushion in place before you jumped. You still broke three vertebrae, your right leg, and your shoulder. You’ll be in here for a while but you will recover. When you can sit up I’ll ask Billie to bring Chloe to see you.”

  My face is wet again. Each sob sets off a ripple of pain and some beeping from a machine. A nurse comes in and adjusts something on my IV. I can feel myself sinking, but before I do I need to ask. “Sky? Peter?”

  “Both dead. I’m sorry.” He squeezes my hand. The pressure of warm flesh sets off a mini quake in all my injured cells.

  So, not paralyzed from the waist down either, I hear Laurel quip before I slip away again.

  IT’S LIKE THAT for a spell of time that I later learn is three weeks: waking and sleeping, drifting on a sea of pain and drugs to curb the pain. Slowly I stay awake longer and make incremental progress. I sit up, I drink from a sippy cup, I form new words. I’ve become my own baby. Soon I’ll have to learn to walk.

  Ben Marcus is there every day, his devotion a mystery I can’t begin to parse.

  “We hardly know each other,” I say one day when he brings me grapes and a newspaper.

  “You don’t know me but I know the woman who broke her own back to save her child. That’s enough to make me want to stick around and learn more, but if I’m being a pest . . .”

  “You believed me when no one else did,” I say. “That’s enough for me to want to stick around and get to know you better.”

  “Not that you have much choice,” he says.

  We both laugh at the same time.

  “Exactly,” I say.

  TO DISTRACT ME as I begin physical therapy, Ben brings me news from the outside world. Stan Hobbes and Esta Greenberg have been arrested for aiding and abetting the murder of Laurel Hobbes. Although she was cremated, DNA has proven that I’m Daphne Marist so the police are going on the assumption that the woman found drowned in my bathtub was Laurel. They’ve also found Laurel’s journal on her laptop, which reveals she was planning to confront Peter at my house.

  “Peter hated to be confronted,” I say.

  “Apparently,” Ben answers. “What I don’t understand is why Laurel would take a drink from him.”

  “Stan was already drugging her,” I say. “She must not have been thinking clearly—”

  That’s sweet, Laurel says, but when are you going to start saying what you really think?

  “—and she was kind of arrogant. She’d never suspect Peter would drug her, let alone kill her.”

  Who would? Nerdy Peter Marist in his Izod golf shirts and Dockers? Besides, I thought I’d taken care of that.

  “She changed her will,” I say, “so that Stan wouldn’t inherit when she died. She thought . . . she must have thought that would keep her safe. But maybe she didn’t get a chance to tell Peter that she’d changed it. He thought killing her was the best way of getting to her money. And then when he and Stan found out that she’d changed her will they realized they’d messed up.” I imagine how angry Stan would have been at Peter and how poorly Peter would have handled that. “The only way they could still access her money was if she were alive and crazy. And I played into their hands by running away to a mental institution.”

  “Thank God you ran away,” Ben says. “Who knows what Peter would have done to you if he had found you there. The man’s clearly—”

  But before he can finish what he’s saying, the nurse comes in to say it’s time for my PT. The exercises I do feel like I’m stabbing myself over and over again with steak knives, but right now that’s preferable to contemplating how stupid I’d been not to know I was living with a sociopath.

  TRUE TO BEN’S promise, once I am well enough to sit up, Billie Williams brings Chloe to visit. She’s so big I barely recognize her, but she recognizes me. She greets me with an angry howl and then turns her head away from me, refusing to look at me.

  “She’s angry that you’ve been gone, but don’t worry,” Billie says consolingly as she bounces Chloe on her knee, “once you’re back on your feet and able to take care of her she’ll come back to you.”

  “Thank you,” I say, although I’m not sure I believe her, “and thank you for taking care of Chloe.”

  Billie turns red. “It’s the least I could do after . . . well, after going along with Sky’s plan.”

  I had wondered about that. “So you knew all along I wasn’t Laurel Hobbes?”

  Billie nods and busies herself wiping some drool off Chloe’s chin. “She told me she’d found her lost baby and that he needed her help. I’ve always felt bad about the part I played in Sky losing her baby. If I hadn’t gone to Dr. Bennett that morning, Sky would have had a chance to decide for herself whether she wanted to keep the baby. Then when Peter came back into her life so many years later she seemed so thrilled that I didn’t want to say no when she asked me to help her. She said you weren’t in your right mind and that you were trying to steal Chloe away from her son. We were to keep you and the baby safe until he could make sure you were better. I knew it wasn’t lawful, exactly, but I’ve seen women go a little crazy after they gave birth.”

  “Like Edith?” I ask.

  Billie looks up at me. “Edith hadn’t had a baby,” she reminds me. “Her problems were different. But Sky . . . after the doctor brought her back from Poughkeepsie, she was in an awful state. He hired me to watch her—just as he’d hired my mother to watch Sky’s mother after she gave birth. I guess postpartum depression must run in their family. Dr. Bennett thought it would be better for Sky if the baby was taken away from her, but I think that it only made it worse. When she saw Edith going up into the tower she thought she was hiding her baby from her. She ran up into the tower and attacked Edith. They both fell out the window.”

  “That’s not what Sky told me,” I say.

  “It’s not the way she remembered it afterward,” Billie says, “which I thought was a blessing.”

  “That’s why you didn’t want me to talk about E.S. jumping from the window in front of her.”

  Billie looks embarrassed. “I only told you about it to let you know it was possible to get better from postpartum depression. But now I wonder if she was ever truly herself again. Losing a child like that . . . even if she thought she didn’t want it . . . you’re never the same. She coped by writing, though she really just told the same story—her story—over and over again. When Peter found her, she thought she could make up for what she’d done, to both him and Edith. And I thought . . . well, if we were only keeping you until you were better, what harm was there?”

  “I can see that,” I say, willing to forgive her because of how well she’s taken care of Chloe. But Billie isn’t ready to forgive herself. “But then she asked me to move Chloe to the bathtub during the night.”

  “You did that?” I ask, both relieved it wasn’t me and horrified that she’d crept into my room at night.

  Billie nods, biting her lip. “Sky said we needed you to see you were unwell, but I didn’t feel right about it, playing a trick like that. Of course I made sure Chloe was safe. I stayed right by the door to hear if she cried. I heard when you got up to get her. That’s when I realized that you were a perfectly good mother.”

  “It wasn’t even my own baby,” I say, looking regretfully at Chloe. Pe
rhaps she should be angry with me. She’s not even a year old and I’ve already abandoned her twice—once for another baby.

  Billie shakes her head. “Oh, but that’s what being a good mother really means. That you have so much love for your own it spreads out to all the other children in the world who need you.” Billie looks down at Chloe with such a clear expression of love that I feel a pull inside me, like that red thread Edith wears on her wrist.

  “How is Edith?” I ask.

  “Sky left a trust for her care and . . .”—Billie’s voice wobbles—“she split the rest of her estate between me and Peter, which means that half will go to you. Of course, the house is gone but the land is still quite valuable and there’s plenty of money to take care of Edith. I’ve been taking care of her at my house . . . I hope you don’t mind that she’s staying with me while I watch Chloe.”

  “Why would I mind?”

  “Some mothers might worry if their children were living with a former mental patient.”

  I start to object, but then I realize that this is exactly the kind of thing that would have thrown me into a paroxysm of dread a few months ago. But when I think about Edith, I find I don’t have the least anxiety about her being near Chloe. “I can’t think of anyone less likely to hurt Chloe,” I say, feeling a swell of gladness at the thought of Edith free of Crantham. If loving our children connects us to other children, it also connects us to all who love them, shouldn’t it? And for a moment I don’t just forgive Billie, I forgive Sky for doing what she thought she had to for her long-lost child and, picturing that little boy in the photograph, I forgive little Thomas Pitt, my husband.

  AFTER BILLIE LEAVES, I ask Ben the question I’ve been dreading. “Where’s Chloë? Laurel’s Chloë. Laurel didn’t have any family . . . or many friends.”

  Way to make me sound pathetic.

  “I believe the Department of Social Services has taken custody of her,” Ben says. “But a lawyer has been wanting to talk to you, a pretentious prick from Scarsdale who talks like he’s got a hockey puck in his mouth. Nurse Goodnough and I have been fending him off.”