The Second Mother

by Jenny Milchman

  “We experience the same thing in the district where I work,” Julie said. “It can be tough to hold on to talent in out-of-the-way locales. But I’m used to out-of-the-way.”

  “That’s what we were thinking when we read your application,” Laura said. “The Adirondacks, correct?”

  “That’s right.” Julie felt a tremor of excitement. She opened the bathroom door and walked into the bedroom.

  “We’re using the phone calls to make sure that candidates are able to commit to at least one year of placement, and have no impediments to leaving home right away.”

  “Yes to both,” Julie said instantly.

  Another longish pause. “May I be honest?”

  Julie felt a few dots of sweat break out on her skin, a faint sense of strangeness rising up from within. “Please.”

  “Your application impressed me—us—particularly. I think it was your little essay that really jumped out. How self-revelatory your response was to the question at the end.”

  Julie switched hands, her phone slick with perspiration. She recalled the feeling of pieces sliding into place. Exactly what Opportunity.com promised: a unique and ideal fit.

  “We appreciated how forthcoming you were,” Laura Hutchins continued. “This position—life on Mercy Island—is very special, but comes with some challenges, as you suggested. The right teacher will be able to adapt to those challenges.”

  Julie bunched the towel around her, and sank down on the smooth, unwrinkled bed. “In my life I’ve had to approach challenge as a positive thing, not a negative.”

  “I hope you’re as impressive in person as you are on paper.”

  The calendar icon on Julie’s phone beamed up at her, a hopeful grid of tomorrows. “Does that mean…?”

  “It means we would like you to come in for an interview.”

  Chapter Seven

  Julie needed to procure a new outfit—her professional clothes were all suited to cooler weather, worn during the school year—but first she had to get her dog back. It was daytime now, working hours, which meant David should be in his office.

  Julie got dressed and, after a hunt, located her purse, not in her closet but at the foot of the bed beneath a tumble of clean, unfolded laundry. The bag felt overlarge and floppy in her grip; she hadn’t carried the thing in over a year, when its size permitted a cram of diapers, wipes, toys, Cheerios in baggies, and teething rings.

  Julie stopped momentarily, shutting her eyes. Just one day. For just one day, she needed not to think about Hedley, not be consumed by her baby’s absence, her memory.

  Is that all right, Lilypad?

  Hedley Lillian Mason.

  Her daughter’s first name had been chosen in honor of her grandmother: it was Julie’s mother’s maiden name. Her middle name was for the summer flower, which grew in such wild abundance along Wedeskyull’s roadsides.

  Is that okay?

  No voice answered back, ghostly or otherwise. Julie took this as permission.

  Depot wouldn’t be allowed into stores, and it was too warm out to leave him in the car, so Julie decided to go shopping first. She didn’t dare approach The Everything Store again, but a drive on the Thruway where the anonymous big-box options had infiltrated felt doable. At Target, Julie found a striped dress, along with a pair of sandals that looked professional yet beachy. Were there beaches on Mercy Island? Julie had never been to Maine, but her image was of a rockier sea. Oh well. The sandals were cheap, and super cute.

  On her way through the automatic doors, hot air hit her like a wall, and she collided with a man who seemed to be studying the shopping carts.

  Julie teetered on her feet, and he steadied her with a tentative hand. “Yikes,” she exclaimed. She hadn’t eaten in a day and a half. No wonder a heat wave, plus a little shopping, had brought her to a state of near collapse.

  The man instantly dropped his hand, apologizing even though she had walked into him. He gave her a probing look of concern, and Julie waved him off, embarrassed. She headed past the expanse of stadium-size stores, blacktop tacky beneath her feet, before coming to a Five Guys where she gobbled an entire cheeseburger and downed a shake. The most food she’d eaten in months. Before departing, she bought two Littles for Depot.

  * * *

  David rented a room on the third floor of a building on Water Street that had been threatened with razing before a local arts council amassed the funds to purchase it. They held events—poetry slams and open mics and stand-up comedy—on the first level, while the second had been made into a living gallery of frequently rotating displays. As Julie entered the building and climbed the stairs, she heard the bark Depot reserved just for her.

  David’s voice also carried clearly. “Hush. We’ll go out in a few minutes.”

  Her husband had never been able to tell the difference between Depot’s barks, Julie thought with a mental sniff. He had no right to take custody of their dog.

  Depot closed the distance between them when Julie opened the unlocked door.

  “Hiya, Deep,” she murmured, crouching to ruffle the fur at the dog’s neck. She pulled the burgers, just the way he liked them, from the grease-blotched bag. Depot wolfed everything down in a few gulps, administering a slather with his long, red tongue to clean his muzzle or, more likely, scour up the drips.

  David hadn’t yet said a word, hadn’t even greeted her.

  She took a look around. A sleeping bag formed a makeshift mattress on the floor, and it looked as if David had spent the night in his clothes. On David, normally so neat and pressed, the sight was shocking, like seeing someone become demented.

  Julie didn’t feel as angry anymore; she wanted to heal things between her and her husband. Thanks to Laura Hutchins, they just might have a chance at a new start.

  “How was your night?” she asked softly.

  David straightened a stack of printouts on his desk until their edges were aligned. “It was fine,” he answered curtly. “I won’t be here long.”

  “Because you’ll be coming home?” Julie asked.

  David’s expression changed. “No, I’m not coming back. I told you that. In fact, I don’t think I’m going to stay in Wedeskyull at all. I’m going to move home.”

  “To…North Carolina?” The announcement bore proof that there’d be no last-minute reprieve. She and David had met online, and her husband’s southern background always felt a bit surreal to Julie, even though she’d made a trip down once to meet his parents.

  “Correct,” David said. “I can hardly wait. The winters up here are brutal.”

  Depot let out a whine, curling his body into an enormous hump on the floor.

  Julie crossed the room to their dog. “I agree, Deep,” she said soothingly. “Snow rocks.”

  David ignored them, his next words clipped. “We have to come to terms on a few things. Then it doesn’t really matter where I go, does it?”

  “I found a job listing,” Julie said.

  David lifted his eyebrows into two precise points.

  “I realized something,” she went on. For a long time now she had maintained that she could never go back to teaching. “I do want to return to work. I love it, you know I do, and I miss working with kids. I want to teach. I just don’t want to do it here.”

  Her husband folded his arms across his chest.

  Julie continued in a rush. “Maybe I feel more like you do than I’ve let on. Maybe we’re both actually feeling the same things. And we just haven’t shared them.”

  David gave a single nod. Terse, but a nod was a sign of agreement, wasn’t it?

  “That’s what my therapist said,” he told her.

  “She did?” Julie said. Relief began to infuse her.

  David stayed silent, though he offered another nod.

  “So, there’s this position,” Julie went on. “On a small island in Ma
ine. Really tiny. It’ll be a whole other way of life.” When David didn’t say anything, she tried a smile. “I don’t think it snows much near the sea.”

  David sat forward in his desk chair, bracing his forearms on his knees. “Julie,” he said in a gentler voice. “This isn’t about where we live.”

  “No, of course not,” she said. “This move, it means something deeper than that—”

  “Our marriage isn’t working,” David said, still clearly trying to defang his tone. “Hedley—what happened to her made it obvious. But I don’t think we were in a very good place even before we lost her. Maybe not even before she was born.”

  The finality in his voice made the ramifications of his decision come clear to Julie. “But—they’re expecting two of us,” she said. “I filled in ‘married’ on the application. I can’t look like I’m having a personal crisis, David. Who would want such a person to teach their children?” That’s assuming you get the job. The voice was back, taunting and cruel, as if it’d just been waiting around for a chance to deliver the perfect, Achilles-slicing slur.

  David sat back in his chair, regarding her impassively. After a considered pause, he swiveled around and began striking keys with staccato precision.

  “I’d better get back to work,” he said. “Deadlines, you know.”

  Julie’s shoulders sagged. She hadn’t convinced David to give Maine a try, or their marriage another chance, because she’d never changed his mind about anything once he’d made it up. His move north notwithstanding, it’d been her husband who took control of their lives when they married, and Julie hadn’t resisted. In fact, she’d welcomed handing over reins she’d had to take hold of at too young an age. David decided how much they drank, who governed Depot’s days, what constituted a reasonable amount of time to mourn.

  Depot.

  The sound of loud, lapping splashes from the water bowl filled Julie with despair. Leave her dog behind? Move to a new place without him? The very idea was impossible.

  The grasshopper clack of typing ceased, and silence filled the room.

  Depot even stopped slurping.

  “Julie?”

  She turned at the door.

  David spoke without rotating his seat. “I think Depot might do well on an island.”

  Chapter Eight

  Three days later, just before the interview was scheduled to take place, Julie’s phone rang and woke her while she was tossing and turning in scotch-soaked dreams.

  She scrabbled around on the nightstand, checking the number, but the call had already gone to voicemail. She couldn’t believe it had been ringing that long, how difficult she must have been to rouse. Scotch. Elixir of the gods, the glum, the guilty.

  The number was unknown, and the caller hadn’t left a message.

  It was just after 2:00 a.m.

  Julie lay back, slicking strands of hair away from her face. The room spun as she lay there, and her stomach felt like gelatin. She needed to be clear and on point for the morning, but wasn’t confident she could breath-mint away the smell of alcohol, scrub it out of her pores.

  The phone rang again, its musical beat sudden and jarring in the still room.

  Julie grabbed it blindly.

  She just had time to register the number—unknown, and not from an area code she recognized—before swiping her thumb across the screen. “Hello?”

  Silence on the other end.

  Someone had butt-dialed, or sleep-dialed, rolling over on their phone in bed, or maybe a robo service had gone haywire, making calls in the middle of the night. Julie tapped the screen to end the call.

  It rang again, and this time Julie’s agitated hello was sufficient to summon Depot. He walked over to her bed, snuffling as if still partially asleep.

  No reply from the other end.

  Depot stood with his gaze fixed on her, eyes aglow in the dark.

  “It’s okay, Deep,” Julie whispered. “I won’t pick up again.”

  But now she was disturbed. The night felt too quiet. Where were the normal sounds, the buck of the motor as the fridge started up, a summer breeze whispering outside? Julie pushed the covers aside, aware that she had pulled up the quilt for the first time in weeks, then swung her feet out of bed. Depot accompanied her as she walked over to the window and lifted the curtain out of the way. She placed her face against the glass. No car beside hers in the driveway. No imprints in the dewy grass.

  The hallway was dim, but from the top of the stairs she could see the front door, snugly shut. Depot stood panting at her hip, and with his bulk beside her, Julie walked down to the first floor, checking the kitchen and the deck. She entered the half bath, Depot squeezing in alongside her. Empty.

  She went back upstairs, her hand on Depot’s broad back.

  As soon as she got back in the bedroom, her phone started to trill.

  Julie’s heart slammed a gong beat. It was as if someone knew that she’d left the room, and when she returned.

  Depot let out a high whine.

  Julie stared down at the phone on her bed. Unknown number. The musical beat finally ended, before starting right up again.

  Julie snatched for the device. “Hello?” she demanded.

  Silence.

  Stupidly, not knowing if she was attempting to summon her husband, as if he might still reside in this house, or thinking that it might be him on the other end, using somebody else’s phone, she cried, “David?”

  No answer. The call remained live for some time, though, for Julie could detect the moment it finally cut out, the whoosh of emptiness like a vortex, a wormhole.

  She waited, poised on the edge of her bed, ready to pounce on the phone the first time it sounded, and do something—she didn’t know what—to determine the identity of the caller.

  But it didn’t ring again.

  After a long while, Julie set her phone to silent, then threw back the covers so that Depot could jump up and crawl in beside her.

  At some point, the two of them slept.

  * * *

  The interview was to be held at an office park on the outskirts of Albany, not far from the Thruway, which made the three-hour ride south convenient for Julie—and signaled that they must be fairly enthusiastic about her, too, unless she was reading things wrong. But someone had come all the way from Maine to another state’s capital based on her location. Julie tried to let the arrangement give her a boost of confidence.

  It had cooled down substantially overnight, the way it did in the Adirondacks, like a tide being sucked back. Outside, everything looked dreary and gray, the sky one enormous swath of cloud.

  The chill in the air served to dispel the final remnants of scotch from Julie’s brain, and any lingering eeriness from the series of silent calls. As she left the house, grabbing a jacket to pair with her new dress, she felt a faint flicker of something that could almost be called eagerness. For the first time in a long while, time was passing too slowly because something seemed to be waiting on the other end of it. The sodden, overcast day did nothing to alter Julie’s mood, and the highway drive was calming.

  She made sure Depot got in a good long run at a rest area—the sky threatening rain the whole time—before leaving him to curl up in the car in the office park lot with a window rolled down. No one would dare bother Depot.

  Julie brushed off the dark hairs that clung to her dress. Depot’s coat was a mixture of cream, rust, and black, and somehow the color that stood out most against whatever she was wearing always seemed to shed. Julie turned and headed toward the building, an anonymous, soulless site, all glassy walls and eyeless windows. She had just raised her hand to rap on suite 103 when the door was pulled open from the inside.

  * * *

  Laura Hutchins was a slim woman, her skin lined like tracing paper with the evidence of an outdoor life. She was perhaps ten years older than Julie, in
her mid-forties, unless the effects of the sun were misleading. At the last minute, it had occurred to Julie to worry that she had made a poor choice of outfit, demonstrated her lack of fit for life on an island. Maybe the other woman would be clad in different clothes entirely, a slicker and Wellies perhaps. But Laura wore a skirt and low heels, and Julie relaxed a little after the two exchanged greetings, Laura leading her inside.

  She gestured Julie to a chair, then sat down herself, arrow straight behind a cheap, flimsy desk. She compressed her hands, interlacing her fingers on the laminate surface, while regarding Julie from the other side of the desk. Julie smiled, blinked, then finally broke eye contact, taking a look around. This office was rent-a-space all the way—Mercy clearly didn’t boast some august, private school with a hiring search conducted in hallowed halls—and Julie wondered for a moment about the conditions on the island. Rough and spare, she assumed. Which was fine. Julie’s family had lived in the Adirondacks for generations. They were used to a lack of luxuries.

  “As I said on the phone,” Laura began stiffly, “this is a very special position. It would be hard to overestimate the challenges and rigors of coming to teach on Mercy when compared to modern-day life.”

  It seemed an abrupt way to open; then again, Julie hadn’t had to interview for a job in over a decade. Maybe people cut right to the chase now.

  “I feel up for challenges, as I hope my essay made clear.” Laura had said she liked that answer; a reminder couldn’t hurt. “But can you tell me a little more?” There, Julie thought with satisfaction. Take that, yearlong hiatus.

  “Long winters,” Laura said, unlocking her fingers and beginning to tick off items, as if from a list. “You’ll be used to those. Wi-Fi that often goes out—the year-rounders call it No-Fi due to the frequent power outages—which means no cell signal even through a hot spot.” Another tick, another glance at Julie. “Ditto in terms of your experience.”

  The woman must’ve done some research into Wedeskyull.

  Julie offered an unfazed nod. Who needed connectivity? Not she, not anymore.

  “Are the children in your district given devices? iPads, Chromebooks, the like?”