by Laura Hankin
“I don’t know if we can do that anymore,” Amara said.
“If I go down,” Gwen said, narrowing her eyes, “you all go down too. Everything comes out.” She shot a look at Ellie, who shifted uncomfortably. “Every fault or secret you ever told me in confidence.” She lasered in on Whitney, spitting the words at her. “Every sordid detail of the affair. Grant will divorce you so fast your head will spin, and then you’ll have nothing.” She turned to Amara now. “How will Daniel ever love you in the same way again? And, Claire, you wanted to be one of us so badly, following us around and trying our pills? Well, I’m sure there are magazines out there that would love to do an article on your whole story.” Even if she had to say goodbye to the Connecticut house, there were other options. One of the shoeboxes she’d taken down earlier, which was on the floor farther back in the dark of the closet, had thousands of dollars in cash from this month’s latest deliveries. She had plenty in an offshore account too. She could take the girls and get away, hide out with Teddy for a little while, then go to Mexico. She’d studied Spanish all throughout college, even spent a semester in Barcelona, and it would be good for the girls to be bilingual from an early age. “Maybe your ex-boyfriend with the cancer scare will have some choice quotes.”
“I think I’ll just have to deal with that,” Claire said.
Gwen stuck her finger down her throat and forced herself to vomit all over the carpet.
Chapter 41
Amara understood logically that her former friend–turned–drug kingpin (queenpin?) was coughing up waves of vomit on the floor of a walk-in closet. But her heart kept insisting that it wasn’t real, that she’d actually stepped through a portal to an alternate universe in which anything could happen. She half expected a parade of talking flamingos to come pedaling by on unicycles. A long string of amber-colored phlegm dangled out of Gwen’s mouth, and Amara thought that talking flamingos would be a welcome bit of sanity.
The other women had stepped back as Gwen, still in that ridiculous fur coat, heaved and shuddered and then grew still, multicolored chunks on the rug around her, the particular wretched smell of vomit rising up in the close closet air. Ellie and Meredith put their hands over their mouths and looked away.
When Gwen looked up at them again, her face was bare, stripped of the sweetness or judgment or embarrassed sadness it so often alternated between.
“Please,” Gwen said. “Think of my children.”
“What?” Whitney asked.
“You turn me in, you’re dooming them to grow up without a mother.” Her voice grew so quiet that the other women had to lean in to hear. “I just want to protect them.”
The others glanced at one another. Amara couldn’t stop a short, sharp laugh from coming out of her mouth.
“We’re all so obsessed with protecting our children, aren’t we?” Amara said. “That’s how we got into this mess in the first place. We want to paint a lovely picture that we hang over their window to block out how the world really works, to give them these perfect lives. And to do that, we think we need to keep ourselves perfect too. But no mother in the history of the world has been able to protect her child forever. The world barges in through the front door eventually. Or sometimes,” she said, glaring at Gwen, “you invite it in, because it knows exactly what lies you want to hear.” Gwen coughed again, drawing back farther into the closet as if she didn’t want them to see what she had become, bracing herself on another shoebox. Amara shook her head. “I wish so badly that I could be the perfect mother for Charlie. But since I’m not, I think I’d rather he know that, when I fucked up big-time, I tried to do the right thing, instead of lying to him that everything is all puppies and rainbows. I have to believe that the people who matter to me will understand that.”
She looked at Gwen, who had made Amara feel terrible in ways big and small. “I don’t want your children to grow up without a mother, Gwen,” she said. “That’s why I’m not going full Mama Bear on your ass right now, though I’d dearly love to rip your throat out with my teeth. But you also can’t pull ‘Motherhood’ as a literal ‘Get out of Jail Free’ card. You’re a psycho, and you sold out your own, and you have to pay for that.”
The other women shifted around her, and Amara looked them in the eye one by one. “The rest of you can go, if you need to, and try to distance yourself from this as much as possible,” she said. “But—I can’t believe I’m saying this—I’m calling the police.”
Chapter 42
For a moment, no one spoke. Whitney looked at Amara, standing straight and still with her new certainty, and didn’t know what to do. Gwen was right. If they all came forward, Grant would divorce her. He was used to getting what he wanted, so he wasn’t the type to try to work through such a huge betrayal. Even though she’d put so much distance between them, she thought now of losing all the beautiful little routines they’d built up over the years, of never again catching a glimpse of his face when he woke up in the morning (for a moment, with sleep clouding his eyes, she could see the vulnerable little boy he once had been), of knowing that he’d never look at her again like he had that night he met her parents. Whitney didn’t want to stop being a marvel, to go from being a precious thing to a ruined woman.
And more than that, if she stepped forward, Hope’s lucky life would come crashing down. She didn’t want Hope to lose a single opportunity, her chance at the best education, an ounce of her happiness. Oh, God, she realized, she was so desperate not to cede any of Hope’s privilege that she’d let other women’s children pay the price. Maybe Hope would hate Whitney for failing her, in the same way that Whitney had hated her own parents. Or maybe Whitney could impress upon her daughter the thing that she was only beginning to learn—that women didn’t have to be perfect to be worthy.
If she chose to stand with Amara, the entire narrative she’d built up around herself would disappear. She didn’t know who she’d be anymore. The problem with precious things was that they weren’t supposed to change, and people inevitably did. Blindly, trusting, entirely terrified, she stepped forward. “I’m there with you,” she said.
Meredith and Ellie looked at each other, then clasped hands and planted their feet.
“Let’s do it,” Vicki said.
“Call the police, then,” Gwen said in a dull voice. She stood up. “I’m going to wash the vomit off my face before they get here. At least allow me that dignity.” Shaking all over, she drew the bulky coat close around her and staggered past them all to the closet door.
“Is she actually going to wash her face?” Ellie asked.
“Of course not,” Amara said. “Vicki, dial nine-one-one.” They all ran to the bedroom door just in time to see Gwen flying down the stairs, her fur coat flapping open around her to reveal a shoebox in her hand. “Lord, if I didn’t hate her so much, I’d almost admire her persistence.”
“Gwen, stop!” Ellie called uselessly while Vicki began explaining the situation to a 911 dispatcher who seemed to have a lot of questions.
“Where does she think she’s going?” Whitney asked as Gwen stuffed the shoebox in the lower compartment of the stroller that Christopher had left by the front door in his rush to get Reagan and Rosie away from whatever strange situation was going to happen in his house.
“She’s got a lot of speed in her system right now, probably,” Claire said. “I don’t know if she’s making the most rational decisions.”
Amara waved her hand. “The police will catch up with her eventually.”
“Unless she tries something crazy and gets herself killed,” Whitney said.
“Let her run into traffic, for all I care,” Amara said as Gwen stuffed her feet into a pair of heels by the door. Gwen pulled the door open and tugged the stroller out after her too hard so that it rolled past her and skidded down the steps. The door slammed behind her, cutting off the view from the others.
“Unless she tries something crazy
and gets Reagan killed,” Whitney said softly.
“Call Christopher and tell him not to let her take the kids from him,” Amara said.
“I don’t have his phone number,” Whitney said. “We always just wrote to each other through my Instagram.”
Amara stared at her for a moment. “I will never understand,” she said, and sighed. “Dammit, let’s go.” Then, as one, the women began to run.
Chapter 43
The women reentered the muggy August air just as Gwen turned the corner at the end of the block, heading toward the playground in the park. Sweat began trickling down Claire’s back as they sprinted, Amara huffing away beside her.
The pedestrians around them stopped what they were doing to stare at the chase, their expressions changing almost in slow motion as they struggled to register what was going on. Was some kind of danger approaching? Did they need to run too? Soon enough, though, they dismissed that possibility. One man held up his phone and started to take a video. Claire gave him the finger. “Where’s the fire?” someone shouted, laughing.
There was no pretense of perfection now, no hope that the mothers would ever be Momstagram worthy again or that Claire would be able to show Vagabond that she was doing great without them. After all this time striving and striving to get famous, she would get her dream in the worst possible way. This particular moment of public humiliation was just the beginning of a long, brutal slog. She caught Amara’s eye and knew she was thinking the same thing.
“Well,” Amara said, out of breath. Improbably, that hint of mischief that Claire loved came into her expression. “I suppose we should really give them something to talk about.” And then Amara threw back her head and howled, her voice crackling with frustration and rage but also with a kind of liberation, a gigantic wordless “fuck you” to the expectations she’d worked so hard to meet.
When Amara stopped for a moment to take a breath, Claire let her own yell fill the silence, her throat arcing up and back. The other playgroup women paused to look at them. Then, one by one, they joined in too, one woman’s voice picking up where another’s left off to gasp for air so that the sound seemed endless, a pack of wolves tearing down the city pavement, ravenous and wild and not at all inspirational to anyone but one another.
Claire didn’t know exactly what would come next. But she felt achingly, thrillingly alive and glad that she’d have these women at her side to weather the storm.
As their screams gathered force and flew down the block, Gwen looked back at them in confusion. She glanced their way for only a second as she stepped into the intersection, but that was long enough. She didn’t see the taxicab coming.
Chapter 44
The media coverage afterward was fierce, as Whitney had predicted. The photo of the mangled baby stroller, the cash littering the intersection, was everywhere—websites, newspapers, cable news broadcasts. It was just New York news at first, but before long, it made its way across the country. Smirking TV hosts in LA made jokes about “The Poison Playgroup of Park Avenue.” (A ridiculous name, especially since Ellie was the only one of them who actually lived on Park.) One website, geared toward millennial moms, wrote clickbait content about it for weeks on end, their writers churning out article after article with SEO-geared headlines like “Who Is Claire Martin? You Won’t Believe What She Did Before the Poison Playgroup.”
It all got twisted into something else. The women had been chasing Gwen because they wanted to kill her, shrieking the whole time, tottering in their expensive high heels. They had pushed Gwen into the road. The überwealthy could be just as badly behaved, just as governed by base desires, as anyone else.
It was only by the grace of God that Gwen hadn’t died, that the stroller had taken most of the impact while she’d merely suffered a badly broken leg. Half a foot forward, and she would’ve been scattered all over the intersection with her cash. Instead, outfitted with an enormous cast, her body blooming with bruises, she told the police and the press everything she had threatened to reveal.
The reaction arrived in waves. First came the hatred, the searing e-mails calling them all cunts who deserved to die, the strangers on the street who approached them with cutting comments about their terrible parenting and how they’d chosen their waistlines over the health of their children, the people they actually knew who stopped talking to them. Then came a bit of a sympathy backlash as other women reached out privately to say that they’d been tricked by TrueMommy too, and the scope of the scam came to light. That clickbait website ran an article with the headline “The One Important Reason You Should Leave the Poison Playgroup Moms Alone.” Finally, and a bit surprisingly, came the offers. A publisher approached Whitney with a tell-all-book deal, but she turned it down. She didn’t want to tell all anymore, even though the money would have allowed her to stay in the city instead of heading to Jersey as her divorce was being finalized. (Grant had his pick of the women now that he was unexpectedly single again. Ladies were falling all over themselves to prove to the rich, handsome husband that not all women were as heartless as Whitney.) A producer even pitched them a reality show, claiming that they had the potential to be bigger than the Real Housewives. Meredith and Ellie were tempted by that at first, until all the others made it clear that there was no way in hell they’d participate. Still, Ellie and Meredith talked about it in secret for a few days more—maybe the producer would be interested in a “BFF duo conquering the world” type of deal?—until Ellie realized that she was pregnant with Baby #2, and everything became about that.
By the time October rolled around, the frenzy had died down somewhat. When Gwen’s and Teddy’s trials began, all the cameras would surely come out again, but for now, Amara and Claire could walk down the street in the late afternoon, largely ignored, to pick up Charlie and Reagan at day care.
The women all took turns pitching in with Reagan now. A beleaguered Christopher hadn’t wanted them anywhere near him and the girls at first. But after the nanny he’d hired leaked baby photos to the paparazzi, he warily agreed to let the women help out. Now they were determined that Reagan would get six bonus aunts in exchange for one fully present mom. A shit bargain, for sure, but better than nothing. They tried very hard not to judge if, say, Amara gave Reagan too much sugar or if Vicki failed to discipline a tantrum. They didn’t always succeed in supporting one another in all their flawed glory, but they were getting better.
As Claire and Amara walked into the neighborhood day care center, Charlie toddled over to Amara, tears streaming down his face, and she swooped him up into her arms. “The second day was a wild success, I see,” she said to the teacher, who gave her a patient smile in return.
“Hey, a little better than yesterday,” the teacher said. “Progress!”
Progress. Yes, there had been some of that, day by day, with Charlie, and with Daniel. That steamy, terrible August afternoon, she’d given the police a statement and then run all the way home to tell Daniel everything before he could hear about it on the news or from someone else. He’d thought she was joking at first, her kind and trusting husband, and she’d had to convince him that it was true, even as her quick-beating heart threatened to burst out of her chest and zoom around the kitchen because she was so terrified she’d lose him over this.
“Please, don’t divorce me,” she said when he finally took her word that she was telling the truth and grew still.
“Jesus, Mari,” he said. Then he stood up from his seat at the kitchen table and took her in his arms. “I’m not going to divorce you. I love you more than anything.” She started to cry with relief and with something else, an almost physical shock from her sudden sense of how lucky she was to have found him. He stroked her hair as she shuddered against his chest, the heat of his skin coming through his T-shirt. “But we’re starting marriage counseling, stat.”
Now, at the day care, another mother coming to pick up her kid shot Amara and the screaming child in her arms a l
ook of empathy, just like Amara was any other mom with a difficult kid. Then, of course, the woman registered who she was and began to whisper to her friend. “Hi,” Amara called over to them. “Lovely weather, isn’t it?” The moms turned a little red and nodded.
Claire popped up from the nap-time corner with a sleepy Reagan in her arms. “Okay, let’s go,” Claire said.
Outside, in the autumn air, they buckled the children into their strollers. Claire still didn’t know if she ever wanted kids, but she was getting to be a natural at this whole stroller thing. And now that Reagan was starting to have a personality, Claire enjoyed spending time with her. She made a funny face at Reagan while she adjusted a blanket around her, and Reagan laughed a hiccupy laugh. Then Claire took a deep breath and reached into her bag, pulling out a CD.
Getting proper credit on “Idaho Eyes” had been easier than Claire had anticipated. Canny, publicity-smart Marlena had realized that the whole story was going to come out anyway, so she gave a long interview to New York magazine about how she was going to make sure the guys did right by Claire. Women had to have one another’s backs, she said, and promptly received a slew of think pieces calling her a feminist hero. While it may have been a PR stunt, it did translate into actual cash. Claire wasn’t exactly swimming in riches, but she had enough to pay her rent for a little while, look into getting some much-needed therapy, and hire some background musicians to help record a high-quality demo.
“I wanted to give you something,” Claire said to Amara, handing her the demo. “I know it feels like years ago that you made this offer, but I finished recording those songs, and I thought, if you liked them, you could pass my information along to that old bandleader you mentioned.”
