The Other Mother Read online

  I’m so lost thinking about E.S. and the changeling story that Sky has to come tell me it’s time for dinner. “I’m glad you’re engaging with the material, but I don’t expect you to live up here.” She smiles so I know she’s teasing. “Or never eat or see your baby again.”

  “Oh! I suppose Billie must want to go home.”

  “Only if she could take Chloe with her. She’s smitten. You’ll have to tear your baby out of her arms.”

  I laugh the way you’re supposed to laugh when people make jokes about stealing your baby. You are not supposed to shriek or call a cop or tell them, Fine, take her. I busy myself stacking the journals so Sky won’t see these thoughts flitting across my face.

  “It looks like you’ve made good progress,” she says.

  “Your father’s journals are fascinating—and I can see ties to your writing in them. In fact, I was thinking . . .”

  “What?” she asks when I hesitate.

  “Well, you did say you wanted to tell a different story about your father, so I wondered, if you were planning to do that maybe you’d like for me to pick out some sections from the journals that I think relate to your writing.”

  Sky takes so long to answer that I’m sure I’ve overstepped my bounds. After all, she’d hired me as an archivist. I was supposed to put order to her personal papers, not speculate on the origins of her writing. What possessed me to make such a suggestion?

  Not what. Who. It’s just the kind of thing Laurel would come up with. And Laurel wouldn’t back down even with Schuyler Bennett staring at her as if she were sprouting horns.

  “Actually,” Sky says, “I think that’s an excellent idea. Have you found anything along those lines?” Her voice shakes on the last words and I realize how personally charged this material must be for her. Why would she let me poke around in the secrets of her past?

  Because she hired you to do exactly that, a voice says in my head. Laurel’s voice.

  She hired me to put her papers in order, I counter.

  This is how you bring order to chaos, by tracing it back to its source.

  “Yes,” I tell Schuyler Bennett, “I came across this one patient that your father treated in the early seventies—a young woman suffering from postpartum psychosis who’d developed the delusion that her child had been stolen from her.” I don’t mention the story Billie told me or that I’d spent the afternoon searching all of Dr. Bennett’s notes on the case. “It reminded me of your changeling story and I wondered . . .”

  “Wondered what?” Sky asks, eyebrow arched.

  “I wondered if your father ever talked about this case to you.”

  “I was abroad in the late sixties at a boarding school in the French Alps, and then I went straight on to college. I don’t remember my father talking about that case.”

  “Oh,” I say, crestfallen. “I guess I went off track . . .”

  “But then, maybe I’ve just forgotten. It was a long time ago. You should keep looking at his notes on that case. Type them up for me and I’ll have a look. Except . . .”

  “Except what?” I ask.

  “Well, that’s not really the job of an archivist.”

  Here it is. I have overstepped my bounds. She must realize now that I’m not really an archivist. I’m not even Laurel Hobbes. I prepare myself to apologize, but before I can she says, “But that’s not really what you are, is it?”

  All the breath goes out of my lungs. She knows. “I can explain . . .” I begin.

  She holds up an authoritative hand. “There’s no need. I saw it as soon as I met you. After all, it takes one to know one.”

  “One what?” I ask.

  “A writer, of course. You have the instincts of a writer. I could tell right away. And the way you’ve put together this story . . . well, to tell you the truth I have been thinking of writing a memoir, but I wasn’t sure I was up to it . . . but if I had someone to help me . . .”

  “You mean you’d like me to help you with your memoir?” I ask, incredulous.

  “Yes, if you wouldn’t mind. Of course, I’ll adjust your salary accordingly.”

  I resist telling her that I would do it for free. “I’d like that very much,” I say.

  “Good.” She raps her knuckles on the table and then starts to stand up. “I’ll make an appointment for you with Dr. Hancock at Crantham.”

  “An appointment with a doctor?” I ask, my voice high-pitched, all my scholarly calm gone. “But why?”

  “For background on the hospital,” she says. “You’ll need it if you’re going to help me with my memoir.”

  WE EAT DINNER on the terrace watching the sun set over a long ridge of mountains to the west. The mountains look unreal, like pieces of tissue paper layered over one another in deepening shades of green and blue.

  The terrace is artfully situated so that it gives the best view of the mountains while obscuring the view of the hospital. I imagine Sky’s mother landscaping the terrace to conceal her husband’s line of work. I imagine dinner parties where the conversation centered around the lovely view—as it does now. Sky, her face rosy in the reflected light of the sunset, waves her gin and tonic shakily at the mountains, naming peaks and the number of times she and her father climbed them. She’d been a 3500er by the time she was nineteen, “although my father always contested my claim to Peekamoose, because I’d become so enraged at something he said I stormed down the mountain before we reached the peak.”

  “Do you remember what you were arguing about?” I ask as I struggle to debone the brook trout Billie produced for our dinner. This is something I imagine an assistant memoir writer would ask and I’m hoping it will distract Sky and Billie, who have both skillfully deboned their fish, from my clumsiness.

  “Ha!” Sky barks the one syllable laugh I’m becoming accustomed to. “What didn’t we argue about? The Vietnam War. Civil rights. Women’s liberation. Mostly the latter. My father expected me to do everything a boy would—shoot, climb mountains, go to medical school—but he was convinced that most women were ‘congenitally unfit for the full responsibilities of the workplace.’”

  “I suppose that wasn’t unusual for the time,” I say, finally freeing the trout’s spine from its flesh. “He saw women at their worst in his line of work. In fact . . .” I hesitate, not sure I want to go down this road. But then, how long could I avoid it? “. . . he seems to have specialized in women with mood disorders, especially postpartum mood disorders.” I glance at Chloe, who’s sleeping peacefully in her stroller. She’ll be up all night after such a late nap, but it’s so nice to be able to eat dinner in peace that I don’t have the heart to wake her.

  “Does that bother you?” Sky asks. I look toward her and see she has transferred her attention from the faraway mountains to me. The sun has slipped below the ridgeline, turning the papery mountains into a singular black cutout. Sky looks like another cutout, dark against the smoldering sky.

  “No,” I say quickly. Too quickly. “Why should it?”

  “I just thought, being a new mother yourself. It can’t have been easy these last few months . . . especially being a single mother.”

  I have to remind myself that is what I’d told her in the emails we’d exchanged. It hadn’t even felt like a lie. We might as well be single mothers for all the help our husbands give us, Laurel had said. I’d thought that Stan was actually quite helpful, and I’d felt a little guilty eradicating him from Laurel’s curriculum vitae.

  My husband and I have separated, I had written, and I’m looking for a place where I can work and live with my six-month-old daughter.

  “Oh,” I say now, spearing a morsel of white-boned flesh and imaging what Laurel would say. “Do men ever really help out with babies all that much?”

  But Sky doesn’t take the bait. “So you didn’t experience any postpartum depression?”

  I think about the days after Chloe was born, while she was in the NICU, in a plastic incubator, attached to tubes and wires like a science experiment. Wh
at would “depression” have looked like? I’d felt an aching sadness and guilt. But then I remember that was me—not Laurel.

  “No,” I say with a certainty born of Laurel’s confidence. “I think I just felt . . .” What had Laurel said that first meeting? Not the part about feeling homicidal, but later. “. . . like I lost track of who I really was. That my identity had been swallowed up by the idea of Motherhood with a capital M.” Motherfuckinghood, Laurel sometimes called it. “That’s why I felt it was so important to apply for this job. When I saw your ad, I thought, This is perfect.” I pause because I can feel myself tearing up. I don’t have to fake this part; seeing that ad on the library job site had felt like someone had tossed me a lifeline when I was drowning. “I knew that getting back to doing what I was good at would be my way back to myself again.”

  I look up. Sky holds my gaze and then gives me a curt nod. On anyone else it would be a dismissal but on her it’s an affirmation. “Well, then, it’s a good thing I placed that ad.”

  AFTER DINNER CHLOE wakes up fretful, so I take her for a walk around the garden. The Orbit stroller handles the gravel like a BMW hugging the Autobahn (it really was worth the ridiculous price), and the gravelly sound soothes Chloe. It’s nearly dark but the garden holds the last light like a jar holding fireflies. The glow lingers in the orange flowers shaped like Chinese lanterns, and in the real Chinese lanterns suspended from glossy-leaved trees, and soaks into the marble statues of mournful women with bowed heads. The path curves through a shrubbery, emerges at a marble fountain where a woman perpetually pours water from a vase, and then plunges back into a hedge maze.

  The path turns back on itself so often I lose all sense of direction. I stop at a particularly lugubrious statue of a veiled woman, her features smeared by her stone cloak, and look around for the house, but the shrubbery is too high and the sky has faded to the uniform violet of twilight. I have the ridiculous notion that the rest of the world has vanished while I looped around the garden, but then a light appears high above me and the tower springs into view like a lighthouse. I am a sailor lost at sea glimpsing shore. My breath evens and, looking down at Chloe, I see that she is also transfixed by the light in the sky.

  “Home,” I say experimentally, and she gurgles back at me as if agreeing.

  I follow the path, which soon comes out at the front of the house. Billie is kneeling in the perennial border, deadheading chrysanthemums, a basketful of withered blooms beside her muddied knees.

  “Just thought I’d get these before I left for the night,” she says. “How’s our little miss?”

  I peer around to the front of the stroller to see that Chloe has fallen asleep again. “She’ll be up all night,” I say.

  “Maybe not, the air up here is good for sleeping. I bet she sleeps straight through.”

  “Has Sky gone to bed?” I ask.

  “Gone to bed, but she’ll be up all night writing. That’s when she gets her best work done.”

  “I hadn’t realized she was still writing.” I look up at the tower room and notice that the light has gone out. “Does she work up there?”

  Billie, who has gotten to her feet slowly and is brushing dirt from her knees, stares at me. “She hasn’t been able to get up those stairs in years.”

  “Of course, I wasn’t thinking,” I say hastily. Billie gives me a look like she agrees with me. She doesn’t think much of you, I think, only it’s Laurel’s voice saying it. She thinks you’re a bad mother for letting someone else watch your baby.

  But then Billie smiles and says, “You weren’t to know.” She straightens Chloe’s blanket. “You’d better get her inside before she catches a chill from the damp.”

  As soon as she says it I feel the chill in the air. I shiver and turn to go inside, but then I look up at the tower again. If Sky couldn’t get to the top, and Billie has been down here working in the garden, who turned on the light?

  AFTER CHLOE IS settled in bed with sturdy couch cushions on either side of her, I search downstairs for a switch that would turn on the light in the tower. I can’t find one, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a remote switch in the main house. Sky Bennett has the air of someone who is used to being in control. Maybe it’s being the daughter of a doctor. I imagine Morris Bennett wielding his power over the fiefdom of Crantham. It was like a little kingdom, the way Sky described it, with its dairy farm and workshops, complete with the feudal manor on the hill and a watchtower to guard against invading barbarians.

  Except one of those barbarians had made it past the blockade all the way into the keep. The thought of that madwoman creeping up the spiral stairs in search of her lost baby makes my skin prickle. Even though it was forty-five years ago, somehow now it is paired in my mind with the light going on in the tower. I know I won’t sleep tonight unless I go up there myself to make sure there’s no one there.

  I climb the stairs barefoot, trying to make as little noise as possible. I think of what Billie said about the wind playing the stairs like a xylophone. It does feel like I am inside an instrument. I’d felt like this during my pregnancy too, as if my body had been taken over in service of something bigger.

  Like demonic possession, Laurel had said, or having that thing from Alien inside of you. Only to me it had felt more like being swept up in a riptide, being carried farther and farther from shore.

  When I reach the top I find the room as I left it earlier today. The book is still on the desk, still open to the changeling story. The overhead light has a string suspended from the fixture. It’s not impossible that it’s wired to a switch elsewhere, but that seems unlikely. I pull the string, flooding the room with such bright light that I am momentarily blinded. When I turn it off again it takes several minutes for my eyes to adjust to the darkness and even then a ghostly afterimage of the light blinks in the darkness.

  Only it’s not an afterimage. I step closer to the window to make sure and see it again. Down below, somewhere on the grounds of the Crantham Psychiatric Center, a light goes on and then off again. Someone is signaling back.

  Daphne’s Journal, July 10, 20—

  I should be cleaning up from the dinner party but I have to write this down to figure out what happened.

  It all started out really well. I made these fancy cheese sticks from a recipe I got off the Internet and put out candles and the new throw pillows I bought last week with Laurel at Home Goods (funny how even though Laurel is rich she still likes shopping for bargains) so it all looked really nice. Vanessa came early so I could take care of all that while Peter got the grill going. He was in a really good mood. He told me how nice everything looked and I realized that all the tension between us is just from the stress of having a new baby and Peter being worried about money, which is only natural for a man who’s just had a baby. I could tell from how relaxed he’s been about spending money lately that the fund must be doing better, and now that I’ve got Vanessa to help and Laurel to talk to I’m more relaxed too. I think we were just going through a rough patch and that things are going to be all right now.

  Vanessa watched the babies so we could just sit and have our drinks and enjoy ourselves. I felt like we were two couples in Mad Men. Laurel wore these really cute capris and a Tory Burch top and sandals that made her look like Betty Draper and for once I didn’t look drab next to her because I was wearing the Comme des Garçons shift I got at Barneys last weekend. It was on sale and I never would have gotten into it a month ago before I lost so much weight.

  We started out with Expat cocktails, which Laurel said is what she drank at school in Edinburgh, but then the boys wanted beer and I opened a bottle of Prosecco for Laurel and me.

  “Better Prosecco than Prozac!” Laurel said as her toast. Which made Peter laugh even though he used to glare at me every time I took a drink because I’m not supposed to mix alcohol with the medication I’m on. But Laurel says it’s okay to have a drink with the pills she takes, so since I’m taking hers now I decided I could have a few drinks. Besides,
Peter was having such a good time he never batted an eyelash. He and Stan really got along. They talked about sports (I had no idea that Peter knew so much about football!) and then work stuff. I thought Laurel would tune out and we’d talk about something else, but it turns out Laurel knows a lot about finance. She was right in there with the boys talking about IRAs and annuities and where to get the highest yield. I guess it makes sense because she has so much money, although she said something about it being all tied up in trusts.

  “Laurel’s parents were rather conservative fiscally,” Stan said, and I thought he looked a little unhappy. It made me remember that he was a lot older than the rest of us—at least ten years older than Peter, I think—and I felt bad for him and went to get him another beer. When I came back Laurel was telling a story that had both men laughing.

  “. . . and then she said that delusions could be catching and maybe this group wasn’t right for you.”

  My face got hot and I felt a little dizzy because she was obviously telling the story about what Esta said to me, which I’d told Laurel, but in confidence. I really didn’t like her telling it to Stan and Peter—especially Peter, who would be worried about me if he thought I was telling morbid stories at group. But then Peter asked, “And what did you say back to her?” and I realized that Laurel was telling the story as if it had happened to her.

  Laurel said, “I told her that I’d never heard anything so ridiculous and if she ever said anything like that to me again I’d contact the APA and have her license revoked.”

  “Good for you,” Peter said. “You can’t let these people push you around. They think a couple of initials after their names makes them better than the rest of us.”

  I knew Peter didn’t think much of psychologists. I’d asked him once if he’d go to one and he said it wouldn’t do any good because he could too easily fool any psychologist into thinking whatever he wanted them to believe. But I was afraid that Stan and Laurel might think this was a strange way of looking at things. Laurel was grinning but Stan looked concerned. “Maybe this woman’s really not helping,” he said.