by Laura Hankin
Claire looked up at them all, saving her, and seemed to make a decision. She finished the song, took a deep breath, and switched on a smile again. There she was, the normal Claire. “Oh, I’ve got a great surprise. It’s parachute time,” she said, and unwrapped the large billowing cloth. The older kids came running back, laughing, and the adults lifted the multicolored fabric up and down, up and down.
Chapter 22
When Claire finished her set, having won back the approval of the children and the adults who didn’t know her, she set down her guitar in a corner and disappeared out the door to Gwen’s back deck. Amara handed Charlie off to Daniel and followed.
She found Claire leaning against the railing, staring into the glorious, sunny May sky. It was sweater weather still, and Amara shivered a bit, having forgotten hers inside. Claire wore nothing over her black V-neck T-shirt, and her arms were prickled with gooseflesh, but she didn’t rub them or stamp her feet or shake herself to keep warm. She stood still, as if listening very hard in a private conversation with God.
“What happened back there?” Amara asked. “Are you all right? Or are you having a bit of a breakdown?”
Claire turned around. All the strange tremulousness she’d shown during that off moment in her set was gone. Instead, she seemed lit from within by a sense of purpose that Amara didn’t understand, far more mature than ever before. “I know this isn’t my place,” she said. “And if you guys need to fire me for saying this, that’s okay, but I can’t sit around while you all dig yourselves into the ground in some misguided quest for perfection. So I’m just going to say it. I think it really sucks that you’re taking speed.”
“Um. What?” Amara said, Claire’s words knocking the breath out of her like a sucker punch.
“You don’t need it,” Claire continued. “Or maybe right now you feel like you do—I know addiction is a hell of a monster. Like, I don’t think I’m an alcoholic, but sometimes I feel like I’m going to kill someone if I don’t get a drink, so I can only imagine how much harder it would be to stop popping pills all the time. But I’m sure you can do it. You’re strong and amazing, and ultimately, you’d be much better off without it, and—”
“Wait,” Amara said. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“You don’t have to pretend,” Claire said. “I tried your TrueMommy.”
“You . . . ,” Amara began, having trouble finding the words to continue. A terrible awareness started to dawn inside of her. No. It couldn’t be true. But also, of course it was.
“I’m sorry,” Claire said. “I know it was a total invasion of privacy, but when I was babysitting, I was playing around and I popped one into my mouth, and almost immediately, my heart started racing.”
“Oh, no,” Amara said, her legs going weak beneath her. She grabbed the railing and sank down so that she was sitting on the top step leading down to Gwen’s yard, a picture-perfect postage stamp with a rosebush and a flagstone path, a homemade bird feeder swamped with sparrows, a little metal slide on one side for the children, and a patio table with a couple of chairs for the adults on the other. Objectively, those things were there in her line of vision, but all she could see was Charlie’s little face, staring balefully up at her. “Oh, shit. Oh, motherfucking holy bloody hell.”
“It’s okay,” Claire said, sinking down with her and grabbing her hand. “I’m not going to tell anyone.”
“Wait. No. Are you sure it was speed?” Amara asked, giving Claire’s hand the same death grip she’d given Daniel in the delivery room, staring straight into Claire’s eyes as if by looking hard enough, she could open up a portal and return them to the proper reality they’d somehow gotten detached from. “Not just a bit of caffeine or something?”
“Um . . . no, I’m pretty sure it was some kind of amphetamine. A relatively low dose, but still,” Claire said. “We used to take Adderall on the road sometimes, and this felt exactly the same.” She peered at Amara. “Hold on—you didn’t know?” Amara shook her head. “Oh, my God. But how could you not know?”
“There were no fucking side effects when they started! They were just normal vitamins!” Amara said, then gasped. “Oh! That’s why the trial month had the packets separated week by week. Not because they were ‘curating’ them! Those sociopaths at TrueMommy must’ve upped the level of the drug in them bit by bit. I will murder those snakes. I will chop them up with a pickax and feed them to the subway rats.” Was it possible that Charlie had felt her heart racing too fast whenever she’d held him to her breast and tried to comfort him? That maybe part of the reason he’d been so difficult to calm was because he knew that something was wrong? It sounded mental, but babies could sense things. They could be shaped forever by the smallest mistake. She took a shuddering breath and began to cry. “Oh, forget Joan Crawford. I am the worst mother in the world.”
Claire put her arms around Amara, rocking her back and forth right there on the landing as, inside the brownstone, the laughter and chatter of the party guests carried on as normal. “Hey, no, you’re not,” Claire said. “You didn’t know.”
“But I did,” Amara said. “I mean, not all the way, but I thought maybe— No, I knew. I knew something was weird ever since that day in Whitney’s office when you walked in on me.”
She hadn’t been trying to find soap. Whitney kept her bathroom fully stocked. Claire probably thought she’d been looking for money, jewelry maybe, but that hadn’t been it at all. Charlie had been so ornery and difficult that day, crying from the moment he woke up at six A.M. till the moment they left the house to go to Whitney’s, that she’d completely forgotten to take her TrueMommy. Oops, she’d thought when she’d realized. But then midway through Gwen’s lecture on how to get Charlie to pull himself up, the pounding headache had started, and it had taken every ounce of her self-control to keep herself from screaming at Gwen to shut her big judgmental mouth. All throughout music, it had just gotten worse and worse, like a hippopotamus tap-dancing on her brain, even though Claire’s voice had been lovely, so warm and honeyed. It wasn’t so strange. People got headaches all the time. Her own mother suffered from migraines. Maybe it was a family curse finally coming to claim her.
She’d excused herself to go to the bathroom, thinking maybe she’d find some Tylenol in Whitney’s medicine cabinet. But then the door to Whitney’s office had been open, and Amara had remembered their first meeting in the coffee shop, when Whitney said that she planned to stash the Xanax that her doctor had given her away in some desk drawer. Why settle for Tylenol when she could have Xanax? The impulse seized her, and suddenly she was tearing through the desk, looking for pills, fingers scrabbling against receipts and gift bag materials. Then that noise from the doorway, Claire staring at her like a scared little deer, and she realized how crazy and out of control she was. She was stealing from her friend, stealing something that her friend was ashamed to even have in the first place, and this outsider had caught her doing it. What a fucking nightmare.
And sure, it was a little odd that this terrible headache happened on the day she forgot her TrueMommy. But if that meant anything beyond sheer coincidence, then everything was so much worse than it already was. So when all of Dr. Clark’s science sounded so reasonable, and all the other mothers were so enthusiastic, it was easy to believe that nothing was wrong with TrueMommy besides the price tag. All the times since, when she’d contemplated giving up the vitamins only to feel a sense of dread at the prospect, she’d ignored and explained away those too.
“I just couldn’t fucking admit it,” she said. “The closest I got was thinking that maybe they had a bit of caffeine in them or something, and that’s why I’d gotten a headache. But of course that wasn’t it. Of course.” She pounded her fist against the wood of the deck and then winced as a splinter embedded itself in her knuckle. She deserved it. She deserved to be hunted down by a pitchfork-wielding mob like the monster she was.
“Amara,”
Claire said as Amara tried to pick the shard of wood out of her skin. “I am so, so sorry.” The strains of “Happy Birthday” began to float out from the house behind them.
“Thank you,” Amara said, giving up on the splinter removal and standing up. “Well, obviously, I’m going to stop taking them. And we’ve got to let the others know.”
“Now?” Claire said. “I am ready for action. Whatever you need.”
“No,” Amara said as the song wound down. Inside, they’d be cutting the cake and posing for pictures that Gwen was probably planning on putting into a beautifully designed album and decorating with a bunch of stickers and treasuring forever. “Gwen has been putting all of her energy into planning this party for months now. We can’t ruin it. Tonight.”
So she wiped her eyes, squeezed Claire’s hand one more time, and went back inside. In a corner, Daniel was trying to feed Charlie bites of cake without getting frosting all over the place. He was not succeeding. “Uh-oh,” Amara said, and scooped up a smear of frosting from Charlie’s cheek. “That’s one delicious baby.”
“There you are!” Daniel said, putting an arm around her. She nestled into him, put her nose against his neck, and breathed in his comforting aftershave. She wouldn’t tell him just yet either. She had to talk to the other mothers first, all those blissfully unaware women bustling around their own children and husbands. In the center of the room, a photographer snapped his fingers over his camera, trying to get Reagan to look his way for a picture. Gwen had put a ridiculous birthday headband on her daughter, with a golden cloth crown at a jaunty angle on the top, and Reagan kept trying to tear it off while Gwen kept putting it back on. Gwen looked up and met Amara’s eyes, then wrinkled her forehead in concern. Amara flashed back a smile and gave a thumbs-up.
When they got home and Daniel went to change Charlie’s diaper, she typed up a text to them all.
EMERGENCY PLAYGROUP MEETING, it read. Can you all do tomorrow afternoon? In the meantime, stop taking your TrueMommy.
Chapter 23
When Claire walked into Whitney’s the next day, everything was different.
No welcoming hostess swirled around to offer her water or wine or whatever she wanted. No calming eucalyptus scent wafted through the hallway. Instead, Claire caught a whiff of sweat, stinging and rotten.
Amara answered the door, her under-eye circles like purplish bruises. “Thanks for coming,” she said, her voice hollow. “I just told them.”
“How the hell did this happen?” Ellie shrieked from the living room, setting off a cacophony of baby crying, like car alarms.
“To put it mildly,” Amara continued, “things are not going well.”
“I brought you guys withdrawal supplies,” Claire said, holding up a plastic bag. “Some comfort food and plenty of legal painkillers.”
“You are an angel,” Amara said, grabbing a bottle of Tylenol from the top of the bag, spilling two capsules into her hand, and swallowing them with a grim determination, no water needed. “Come on in.”
In the living room, the furniture was all the same, everything still white and sleek, but it had gone askew, an upside-down version of what Claire had grown used to. Couch pillows and shoes littered the ground. The plates of carefully selected, healthful snacks that Whitney always set out were nowhere to be seen. Instead, Ellie and Meredith crouched over an open package of Oreos on the floor like vultures over roadkill, crumbs on their faces and speckling the rug around them. Gwen trembled in the corner, her eyes red and on the verge of spilling over with tears. Vicki rocked her baby by the window, calm and distant as always. In the center of it all, Whitney sat ramrod straight on her couch, extremely still and covered with a dull sheen of perspiration, staring inward as if she were willing herself not to vomit or scream.
Some of them had gotten halfway through drying their hair in the morning. Some had never even started at all, their normally shiny hair frizzing and waving. Same with makeup—Claire noticed all sorts of new wrinkles and dark spots that she’d never seen before. They all wore either workout clothes or sweatpants, except Vicki, who was in a cottony sundress, and Whitney, who had clearly tried to keep up her put-together look, wearing white cigarette pants and a button-down cerulean blouse. She’d forgotten to fasten a couple of the buttons, though, or they’d come undone and she hadn’t noticed.
And all around them were the babies, seeming to sense that something had gone horribly wrong, wailing and sniffling and toddling around, leaving destruction in their wake. Little Lexington pulled herself up on the coffee table and started grabbing at a silver vase with a succulent inside. Claire ran and scooped her up before it all crashed to the ground, returning her to Meredith, who gave her a groggy nod of thanks before plopping Lexington into a nearby jumper, where she couldn’t move around.
“Wait. Why is Claire here?” Ellie said, mascara puddling on her cheeks and Oreo dust in between her teeth. “Ugh, don’t look at me, Claire! I’m a bloated, ugly monster.”
“I invited her. She’s the one who figured the whole thing out,” Amara said. “She’s part of it now. And it’s good to have someone here who’s actually thinking straight as we try to figure out what the fuck to do about this.”
“How did you know, Claire?” Gwen asked. Her voice caught, and she buried her face in her hands. “God, I should have known. I feel like such a fool.”
“You’re not a fool,” Claire said, a little glow of pride rising up in her alongside the tenderness she felt for them all. She put her hand on Gwen’s shoulder. She had saved them. If not for her, who knows how long they’d have carried on, oblivious? “I tried one of Amara’s, and I guess because I wasn’t weaned onto it slowly, it was pretty clear that something was wrong. Are you guys okay?”
“Obviously not!” Ellie snapped.
“Ellie,” Amara said, glaring at her before turning to Claire. “But no. Imagine the worst hangover of your life, coupled with the realization that you’ve actually been drunk for months and ruining everything in your life accordingly.”
“Screw this. I’m taking one,” Ellie said. She lunged over toward her purse and began to root around for the TrueMommy container inside.
“Ellie, no!” Meredith said, and pulled her hand away from the purse. Ellie snatched her hand back and went back to rooting around until, unexpectedly and out of nowhere, Meredith full-body-tackled her, dragging her down to the ground.
“Stop it!” Ellie shouted as Meredith held her down. “What is wrong with you? Like Claire said—we were weaned on slowly, so I’m going to wean myself off slowly!” She managed to shove Meredith off for a second and made her way back to her purse, pulling out the TrueMommy. “My little brother was on Adderall when we were teenagers. That’s what you’re supposed to do!”
“So, what?” Meredith grabbed that beautiful suede box out of Ellie’s hand and held it out of reach as Ellie clawed at her. “How are you planning on doing it slowly? Are you going to pay them for more pills?” Ellie elbowed her in the stomach. “Ow! I’m doing this because I love you.”
“Guys!” Amara said, trying to get in between them. “Calm down. Let’s all stop acting like insane people and talk this out for a minute.” Ellie’s flailing arm whacked Amara across the face, and she let out a cry of pain. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
Gwen ran over and hovered, her arms flapping useless at her sides like she was a baby bird attempting her first flight out of the nest. “Everyone,” she said ineffectually, “we need to sit and have a reasonable conversation. We need to figure out what to do.”
“Please, stop,” Whitney said from the couch in a low voice. “Please, please, stop.” It was the first time she’d spoken in all that mess. Claire, who was in the midst of trying to corral and calm all the fussing babies, looked over at Whitney in surprise, realizing how often, in previous playgroups, Whitney had defused situations with her light, teasing comments, how easily and skillfully she act
ed as the peacemaker, and how quickly things could escalate when she didn’t play her part.
Over by the window, Vicki’s son began to cry from all the commotion. Vicki pulled down the collar of her dress to expose her breast and latched him onto it.
“Wait, Vicki,” Claire said, approaching her tentatively, remembering what she’d read online the night before when looking up amphetamines and side effects. “I don’t know if you should be breastfeeding if it’s still in your system.”
Vicki looked up with her languid eyes, her fluttery light brown lashes. “But I feel fine,” she said.
Claire had never heard Vicki’s voice before. It was surprisingly deep and clarion, ringing like a bell at dinnertime. At her unexpected words, everyone stopped what they were doing and turned to stare at her.
She did look fine. Just like normal, dreamy, sunflower Vicki always looked as she floated through life. No makeup, but then, Claire had never actually noticed Vicki wearing makeup at all.
“Vicki,” Amara said, “did you take your TrueMommy this morning?”
“No,” Vicki said.
“Did you take your TrueMommy ever?” Amara asked.
“Hmm, about half the time,” Vicki said. “When I thought of it. I think I would’ve known if there was speed in mine. I’ve done every drug in the world.”
