The Perfect Mother Read online

  Dedication

  To Mark

  Epigraph

  Three blind mice, three blind mice,

  See how they run, see how they run!

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  Mother’s Day

  May 14

  Joshua.

  I wake, feverish. The skylight above me pulses with rain, and I spider my fingers across the sheets, remembering I’m alone. I close my eyes and find my way back to sleep, until I’m woken again, engulfed by a deep, sudden pain. I’ve been waking with a sick feeling every morning since he left, but I know right away this is different.

  Something’s wrong.

  It hurts to walk, and I crawl from the bed, across the floor, which is gritty with sand and dust. I find my phone in the living room but I don’t know who to call. He’s the only one I want to speak to. I need to tell him what’s happening and hear him say that everything will be fine. I need to remind him, just one more time, how much I love him.

  But he won’t answer. Or worse, he will, and he’ll seethe into the phone, telling me he won’t continue to put up with this, warning me that if I ever call him again, he’ll—

  The pain grips my back so hard I can’t breathe. I wait for it to pass, for the moment of reprieve I’ve been promised, but it doesn’t come. This isn’t what the books said would happen, nothing like what the doctor told me to expect. They said it’ll be gradual. That I’ll know what to do. I’ll time things. I’ll sit on the stoop-sale yoga ball I bought. I’ll stay home as long as possible, to avoid the machines, the drugs, all the things they do at the hospital to make a baby come before a body is ready.

  I’m not ready. It’s two weeks before my due date, and I’m not ready.

  I focus on the phone. It’s not his number I dial, but hers, the doula—a pierced woman named Albany I’ve met just twice.

  I’m attending to a birth and cannot take your call. If you are—

  I crawl with my laptop to the bathroom and sit on the chilly tiles, a damp washcloth on my neck, the slim computer resting on the bulging outline of my son. I open my e-mail and begin a new message to them, the May Mothers.

  I’m wondering if this is normal. My hands tremble as I type. I feel nauseous. The pain is intense. It’s happening too quickly.

  They won’t respond. They’re out to dinner, eating something spicy to hasten their own labor, stealing sips from their husbands’ beer, enjoying a quiet evening together, something experienced mothers have warned us never to expect again. They won’t see my e-mail until morning.

  My e-mail chimes right away. Sweet Francie. It’s starting! she writes. Time the contractions and have your husband keep steady pressure on your lower back.

  How’s it going? Nell writes. Twenty minutes have passed. Still feeling it?

  I’m on my side. I have trouble typing. Yes.

  The room goes black, and when the light comes—ten minutes later, an hour later, I have no idea—I feel a gray ache blooming from a bump on my forehead. I crawl back to the living room, hearing a noise, an animal howling, before I realize the sound is coming from me. Joshua.

  I make it to the couch and rest my back against the cushions. I reach down between my legs. Blood.

  I pull a thin rain jacket over my nightgown. Somehow, I make my way down the stairs.

  Why haven’t I packed the bag? The May Mothers have all written so much about what to pack in the bag, and yet mine is still in the bedroom closet, empty. No iPod with relaxing music inside, no coconut water, no peppermint oil for the nausea. Not even one printed copy of my birth plan. I cradle my stomach under a misty streetlight until the car service arrives and I climb into the clammy back seat, trying not to notice the troubled look on the driver’s face.

  I forgot the going-home outfit I bought for the baby.

  At the hospital, someone directs me to the sixth floor, where I’m told to wait in the triage room. “Please,” I finally say to the woman behind the desk. “I feel very cold and dizzy. Can you call my doctor?”

  It’s not my doctor’s night. It’s another woman from the practice, one I’ve never met. I’m overcome with fear as I take a seat, where I begin to leak liquid that smells like earth, like the backyard mud my mother and I used to comb for worms when I was six, onto the green plastic chair.

  I go into the hallway, determined to keep moving, to stay upright, picturing his face when I told him. He was angry, insisting I’d tricked him. Demanding I get rid of the baby. This will ruin everything, he said. My marriage. My reputation. You can’t do this to me.

  I won’t let you.

  I didn’t tell him I’d already seen the blinking green light of the heartbeat, that I’d heard the rhythm, a quickly spinning jump rope, emanating from the speakers in the ceiling. I didn’t tell him I’ve never wanted anything as much as I want this baby.

  Sturdy wrists lift me from the floor. Grace. That’s what it says on her name tag. Grace leads me to a room, her hands around my waist, and tells me to lie down on the bed. I fight. I don’t want to lie on the bed. I want to know the baby is all right. I want the pain to subside.

  “I want the epidural,” I say.

  “I’m sorry,” says Grace. “It’s too late.”

  I seize her hands, roughed by too much soap and hospital water. “No, please. Too late?”

  “For the epidural.” I think I hear footsteps in the hallway, rushing toward my room.

  I think I hear him calling for me.

  I give in and lie down. It’s him. It’s Joshua, calling to me through the darkness. The doctor’s here. She’s speaking to me, and they’re wrapping something around my bicep, sticking a needle smoothly under my skin, at the bend of my arm, like the blades of skates over ice. They’re asking who’s come with me, where my husband is. The room spins around me, and I can smell it. The liquid seeping from me. Like earth and mud. My bones are splitting. I’m on fire. It can’t be right.

  I feel the pressure. I feel the fire. I feel my body, my baby, breaking in two.

  I close my eyes.

  I push.

  Chapter One

  Fourteen Months Later

  To: May Mothers

  From: Your friends at The Village

  Date: July 4

  Subject: Today’s advice

  Your toddler: Fourteen months

  In honor of the holiday, today’s advice is about independence. Do you notice that your formerly fearless little guy is suddenly afraid of everything when you’re out of sight? The neighbor’s adorable dog is now a terrifying predator. The shadow on the ceiling has become an armless ghoul. It’s normal for your toddler to begin to sense danger in his world, and it’s now your job to help him navigate these fears, letting him know he’s safe, and that even if you’re out of sight, Mommy will always be there to protect him, no matter what.

  Ho
w fast the time goes.

  That’s what people were always telling us, at least; the strangers’ hands on our bellies, saying how careful we must be to enjoy the time. How it’ll all be over in a blink of an eye. How before we know it, they’ll be walking, talking, leaving us.

  It’s been four hundred and eleven days, and time hasn’t gone fast at all. I’ve been trying to imagine what Dr. H would say. Sometimes I close my eyes and picture myself in his office, my time almost up, the next patient eagerly tapping a toe in the waiting room. You have a tendency to ruminate on things, he’d say. But, interestingly, never the positive aspects of your life. Let’s think about those.

  The positive things.

  My mother’s face, how peaceful she looked at times, when it was just the two of us, in the car running errands; on our way to the lake.

  The light in the mornings. The feel of the rain.

  Those lazy spring afternoons, sitting in the park, the baby somersaulting inside me, my swollen feet bursting from my sandals like bruised peaches. Back before all the trouble started, when Midas hadn’t yet become Baby Midas, everyone’s latest cause, when he was just another newborn boy in Brooklyn, one among a million, no more or less extraordinary than the dozen or so other babies with bright futures and peculiar names asleep in the inner circle of a May Mothers meeting.

  The May Mothers. My mommy group. I’ve never liked that term. Mommy. It’s so fraught, so political. We weren’t mommies. We were mothers. People. Women who just happened to ovulate on the same schedule and then give birth the same month. Strangers who chose—for the good of the babies, for the sake of our sanity—to become friends.

  We signed up through The Village website—“Brooklyn parents’ most precious resource™”—getting to know one another over e-mail months before we met, long before we gave birth, dissecting our new lot in life in a level of detail our real friends would never tolerate. About finding out we were pregnant. Our clever way of telling our mothers. Trading ideas for baby names and concerns about our pelvic floors. It was Francie who suggested we get together in person, on the first day of spring, and we all carried ourselves to the park that March morning, under the weight of our third-trimester bellies. Sitting in the shade, the smell of newly awakened grass in the air, we were happy to be together, to finally put faces to the names. We continued to meet, registering for the same birthing classes, the same CPR course, cat-cowing next to one another at the same yoga studio. Then, in May, the babies began to arrive, just as expected, just in time for Brooklyn’s hottest summer in recorded history.

  You did it! we wrote, responding to the latest birth announcement, cooing like seasoned grandmothers over the attached photo of a tiny infant wrapped in a blue-and-pink hospital blanket.

  Those cheeks!

  Welcome to the world, little one!

  Some in our group wouldn’t feel safe leaving the house for weeks, while others couldn’t wait to come together, to show off the baby. (They were all so new to us still that we didn’t refer to them by their names—not as Midas, Will, Poppy, but simply as “the baby.”) Freed for a few months from our jobs, if not concerns about our careers, we got together twice a week, always in the park, usually under the willow tree near the baseball diamonds, if someone was lucky enough to get there first and claim the coveted spot. The group changed a lot in the beginning. New people came, while others I’d grown used to seeing went—the mommy-group skeptics, the older mothers who couldn’t stomach the collective anxiety, those already departing to the expensive suburbs of Maplewood and Westchester. But I could always count on the three regulars to be there.

  First, there was Francie. If our group had a mascot, someone to glue themselves in feathers and lead our team in three cheers for motherhood, it was her. Miss Eager-to-Be-Liked, to not screw anything up, so plump with hope and rich Southern carbs.

  And then Colette, everyone’s girl crush, our trusted friend. One of the pretty ones, with her auburn shampoo-commercial hair, her Colorado-bred effortlessness and unmedicated home birth—the perfect female, topped in powdered sugar.

  And finally Nell: British, cool, eschewing the books and the expert advice. So trust-your-instincts. So I-really-shouldn’t. (I really shouldn’t have that chocolate-chip muffin. Those chips. That third gin and tonic.) But there was something else about Nell, something below the salty exterior I spotted from day one: she, like me, was a woman with a secret.

  I was never going to be a regular, but I went as often as I could bear to, trudging first my pregnant body and then my stroller down the hill to the park. I’d sit on my blanket, the stroller parked near the others in the triangular patches of shade under the willow tree, feeling myself grow numb as I listened to their ideas on parenting, on the very specific way certain things needed to be done. Exclusive breastfeeding. Keen attention to sleep cues. Wearing the baby at every opportunity, like he was a statement piece splurged for at Bloomingdale’s.

  It’s no wonder I eventually started loathing them. Really, who can stand to listen to that level of certainty? To sit through the judgment?

  What if you can’t keep up with it all? What if you’re not breastfeeding? What if, for instance, your milk has practically dried up, no matter how many Chinese herbs you ingest, or all the hours you spend attached to a pump in the middle of the night? What if you’ve been worn down by the exhaustion, and all the time and money you’ve spent learning to decipher sleep cues? What if you simply don’t have the energy to bring a snack to share?

  Colette brought the muffins. Every single time—twenty-four mini muffins from the expensive bakery that had recently opened where the tapas place had been. She’d unfasten the paper box and pass them around, over the bodies of the babies. “Winnie, Nell, Scarlett, help yourselves,” she’d say. “They’re out of this world.”

  So many around the circle politely declined, citing the weight they still had to lose, pulling out their carrot sticks and apple slices, but not me. My own stomach was already as flat and taut as it had been before I got pregnant. I can thank my mother for that. Good genes—that’s what people have always said about me. They’re talking about the fact that I am tall and thin, that I have a nearly symmetrical face. What they are not talking about are the other genes I’ve inherited. The ones bestowed to me not by my equally symmetrical mother, but from my exceptionally bipolar dad.

  Joshua’s genes are no better. I would talk to him about this sometimes, asking if it worried him, the DNA he has to work hard to outsmart. His own crazy father: the brilliant doctor, so warm and charming with patients. The violent alcoholic behind closed doors.

  Joshua didn’t like it when I spoke about his dad, though, and I learned to keep quiet about him. Of course I didn’t mention any of this—my genes, Joshua, his dad—to the May Mothers. I didn’t tell them how hard everything was without Joshua. How much I loved him. How I would have given up everything—everything—to be with him again. Even for just one night.

  I couldn’t tell them that. I couldn’t tell anyone that. Not even Dr. H, shrink extraordinaire, who’d shuttered his office just when I needed him most, heading to the West Coast with his wife and three kids. I didn’t have anyone else, and so yes, in the beginning I went to their meetings, hoping to find something in common with them; something in our shared experience of motherhood that might help lift the darkness of those first few months, which everyone always said were the hardest. It’ll get easier, the health experts wrote. Give it time.

  Well, things didn’t get easier. I’ve been blamed for what happened that Fourth of July night. But not a day goes by that I don’t remind myself of the truth.

  It’s not my fault. It’s theirs.

  It’s because of them that Midas went missing, and I lost everything. Even now, a year later, I sit alone in this prison cell, fingering the hard, jagged scar at my abdomen, thinking how differently everything might have turned out if it weren’t for them.

  If I hadn’t signed up for their group. If they’d chosen another date
, or another bar, or someone other than Alma to babysit that night. If the thing with the phone hadn’t occurred.

  If only the words Nell spoke that day—her head tilted toward the sky, her features swallowed by the sun—hadn’t been so prescient: Bad things happen in heat like this.

  Chapter Two

  One Year Earlier

  To: May Mothers

  From: Your friends at The Village

  Date: June 30

  Subject: Today’s advice

  Your baby: Day 47

  Most of you should have gotten into the swing of breastfeeding during the last six weeks, but for those still struggling—don’t give up! Breast milk is by far the best thing you can give your baby. If you’re experiencing any difficulty, pay attention to your diet. Dairy, gluten, and caffeine can decrease your supply. And if you have pain or discomfort, consider hiring a lactation consultant to help work through the issues. It could be the best money you’ll ever spend.

  “What is that supposed to mean, bad things happen in heat like this?” Francie asks, her curls frizzy around her neck, her face troubled.

  Nell swats away a fly with the newspaper she’s using to fan herself. “It’s eighty-seven degrees,” she says. “In Brooklyn. In June. At ten in the morning.”

  “So?”

  “So maybe that’s normal in Texas—”

  “I’m from Tennessee.”

  “—but it’s not normal here.”

  A hot wind blows the edge of the blanket, covering Francie’s son’s face. “Well, you shouldn’t say things like that,” Francie says, lifting the baby to her shoulder. “I’m superstitious.”

  Nell puts down the newspaper and unzips her diaper bag. “It’s something Sebastian says. He grew up in Haiti. They’re more accustomed than us Americans to paying attention to the planet, you could say.”

  Francie raises her eyebrows. “But you’re British.”