Somebody Else's Daughter

by Elizabeth Brundage

  The teapot whistled. Regina made three cups of instant cocoa and put the cups out on a tray. “Now where’d my marshmallow girl go?” She pretended she couldn’t find Gracie, who was hiding behind her broad back, and said to Willa, “Have you seen my marshmallow girl?”

  And Willa shrugged, playing along. “No, I haven’t seen her.”

  Gracie jumped up and down, up and down, clapping her hands. “I’m right here!”

  “Thank goodness!” Regina handed the child a bag of marshmallows. The child pushed open the swinging door and held it open with her back, grinning importantly. Then they all sat down at the table with their cocoa and Gracie plopped a marshmallow in each cup. “Well, isn’t this nice,” Regina said. “I love to have a little cocoa party in the afternoon, don’t you?”

  Gracie nodded.

  The swinging door to the kitchen opened and the woman from outside poked her head in. “Regina, can I talk to you a minute?”

  Regina got up and went into the kitchen. Willa sipped the cocoa and watched the little girl color some flowers. She had put a big fat sun up in the right-hand corner and Willa remembered how she’d do the same thing when she was little. All her pictures always had a sun, with long yellow lines reaching down like rays. She heard a car pulling up outside. Through the window, she saw a young woman get out of a taxi, yanking a little boy behind her. The taxi drove off. The woman stood there for a minute, looking at the house. The boy started to squirm and she yanked his arm, walking toward the door. The little boy’s lip was trembling, and Willa knew he was trying not to cry. She rang the bell.

  Willa waited a moment, expecting Regina to appear, but she did not. Willa got up and glanced into the kitchen, which was empty now, and she could see that Regina was outside with the woman. The bell rang again.

  Willa went to the door and unlocked it and let the woman in. “What in hell took you so long,” she said, marching into the room. She was young, about Willa’s age. She carried a big plastic Wal-Mart bag full of clothes. “Where’s Regina at?”

  “Outside. Hold on, I’ll get her.”

  “I’ll get her myself,” the woman snapped. “Stay here, Tyrell.” She dropped her bag on the floor and left the boy and disappeared through the kitchen door.

  “Hi,” Willa said to the boy.

  “Hi.”

  “This is Gracie. And I’m Willa.”

  “That’s a funny name.”

  “I know it is. Do you want to color?”

  The boy shrugged.

  “Come over here with us,” Willa said, taking his small hand in her own. She led him over to the table and he climbed onto the chair. She put a piece of paper in front of him and gave him some crayons. “What do you want to draw?”

  The boy shrugged and wiped his eyes. Willa guessed that he was about four years old. She hadn’t spent much time with small children and she worried that she would upset him in some way. The boy’s nose was running, making a slippery yellow film on his upper lip. Before she could find him a Kleenex, he wiped it on his sleeve.

  Gracie finished her drawing and folded it up like a paper fan and fanned herself with it. Then she fanned the boy and the boy smiled. Willa could hear the women coming inside. Willa felt a little frightened of the boy’s mother and avoided her eyes as they came into the room. She was crying and Regina had her arm around her. “Go on upstairs and lie down, Darlene,” Regina told her.

  Tyrell’s mother grabbed her Wal-Mart bag in the same way she had yanked the boy’s arm when they’d gotten out of the taxi, and went upstairs. The boy stood up, as if to follow her. “You stay with us, Lovely One,” Regina said to him, and sat down at the table next to Willa. The boy climbed up on Regina’s lap and leaned against her ample bosom and sucked his finger. They sat there for a few minutes, listening to the floorboards creak overhead as Darlene paced the room like a trapped animal. At last it was quiet. Regina said, “Why don’t you take them outside for a little while, before it gets dark.”

  “Okay.” Willa took each child by the hand. Walking gingerly, as though the floor had been scattered with glass, she took them out the back door into the muddy yard. The older children were sitting at a picnic table having snacks. It was getting late and the sky was beginning to darken. A stripe of orange ran across the rooftops. She could hear the caw of a crow. Gracie and Tyrell ran to the swings. “Push me! Push me!”

  “I’m coming!” Willa said, helping the little boy onto the swing. His jacket was too big. “Hold on now.”

  She started to push and then she traded off and pushed Gracie too. “It’s nice on the swing, isn’t it?”

  “Look at my party shoes.” Gracie held up her feet, but she had on dirty sneakers with Velcro straps. Willa could see a little picture of Cinderella on the side.

  “I wish I had a pair like those,” she told the child. “You think they’d fit me?”

  This made Gracie laugh.

  “Can I try them on?”

  Gracie shook her head. “Push me!”

  Willa could remember when she was little and her mother would take her to the playground and push her on the swings, singing: He flies through the air with the greatest of ease, that daring young man on the flying trapeze! Her mother was a good mother, Willa thought a little mournfully, My mommy! Then she thought of her other mother, her biological mother—sometimes people said real mother, which always hurt her feelings. Once, in grade school, a girl had come up to her and said, “You’re adopted, right?” and Willa had told her that she was and the girl, who was large and mean said, “It’s nothing to be proud of! Your real mother didn’t want you!” When Willa had finally gotten home that afternoon, she’d cried in her mother’s arms. Candace Golding was the only mother she knew, and if that wasn’t real she didn’t know what was. When she imagined her biological mother giving her up, she felt a hollow pain in her chest. It must have been very hard for her. She couldn’t imagine anything in this world harder than that. But she also sensed it had been the best thing for her. And she loved her parents. She couldn’t imagine life without them.

  “Push us, push us!” the children sang. They were holding hands so they could go at the same time. “Push us, Willa!”

  “Okay, okay! Hold on!”

  With one hand on each child’s back, she pushed them into the sky. The sound of their laughter was like the best kind of music. She felt incredibly happy and she felt proud too that she had made the children happy. She decided that she would adopt when she grew up. She looked at the heads of the two children and confirmed the idea in her own mind. Yes, she would have lots of babies in her house, babies that she made in her body and babies that had been made in other people’s bodies, and she would be an excellent mother. Yes, she thought, she would be the best mother of all.

  14

  It didn’t take long for news to spread at Pioneer. Like any formidable institution, idle gossip pulsed through its corridors with the teeth-grinding candor of The National Enquirer. In the faculty lounge that afternoon, Maggie overheard Greer Harding telling Lloyd Jernigan that Willa Golding had won the Sunrise Internship. Greer had her back turned and couldn’t see Maggie, and Maggie detected the subtlest degree of relish in her voice. Lloyd looked up abruptly and caught Maggie’s eyes, and excused himself, muttering a greeting as he made his escape. Greer looked at her, dispassionately. “Didn’t Jack tell you?”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  Greer raised her eyebrows. “Surprise, surprise.”

  It occurred to Maggie that she didn’t really like Greer Harding— she was cynical and negative—in fact, she’d never liked her.

  The back of her throat began to prickle.

  After school, she went into town and bought pork chops then went home and put potatoes in the oven and made a salad. She sat at the kitchen table correcting papers. Ada came in around five, red and sweaty from field hockey practice. “I’m not upset if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “No?”

  “I’m glad Willa got it.” She untie
d her shoes. “Anyway, she’s going to need all the help she can get next year. God only knows where she’ll get in.”

  “She’ll have to work very hard,” Maggie agreed.

  “Daddy favors her. It’s weird. I’m not even kidding.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  Ada looked away, suddenly embarrassed. “I can tell. You should see the way he looks at her.”

  “Ada, you’re imagining it.”

  “Maybe.” Ada shrugged. “I’m going up.” She went up the stairs and shut her door. Maggie heard the bark of her stereo, then silence, indicating that her daughter had put on her headphones. She would spend the next several hours barricaded in her room like a soldier on the front lines, singing out some deranged musician’s heartache until she could almost believe it was her own.

  Maggie poured a drink. She took it into the living room and sat on the couch. The late sunlight poured through the picture window. It washed the room in a red tint, glinting sharply off the silver frame of her wedding picture. Her mother had bought her the frame and she could remember how awkward she’d felt putting it out for people to see—for strangers—to convince them, perhaps, of her happiness. The silver frame was too ornate for her taste, but it was the only frame she owned that fit the picture, an eight by ten. In the picture, their faces looked pale and tired and their smiles looked false. In her own eyes she detected the slightest glimmer of fear—ah, but perhaps she was reading into it. Jack was so much taller than her, and was clutching her behind her back with one arm, like a ventriloquist. Her wedding dress looked like a nightgown, with a single satin ribbon running around the bodice. A schoolteacher’s wife, she could hear her mother mock.

  Maggie drank the gin and sat there, letting the darkness coat her skin. She felt invisible, numb. The first time he’d hurt her, she’d been pregnant with Ada. It occurred to her that she’d blocked it out, but now she could remember precisely the way he’d held her down, his hand over her mouth, the things he’d said to her, the menace of his voice, and she could remember her reaction, what at first had seemed like play—rough play perhaps, yes, but still—and then swiftly transformed into violence—her mounting panic over the reality that this was her husband, a man she knew and loved and not a total stranger—how the hand over her mouth had made it difficult to breathe, how, at first, she’d fought him, using her fists, her nails, and then her ultimate defeat as his strength overtook her. For reasons she could not understand at the time, and had since intellectualized, she had let the incident pass. Out of love perhaps—for she did love him. His behavior had seemed an anomaly to her, a rude expression of frustration, she’d thought, over her changing shape. But that wasn’t true.

  Because it continued. When he drank, he could do despicable things, although she could never admit it to anyone. No one knew; not even Ada. It wasn’t the type of information she dared to share; it could ruin their lives. It was private, it embarrassed her. She couldn’t possibly understand it. He’d leave marks in places no one could see. She didn’t know why she couldn’t seem to stop him. Perhaps it was her guilt that allowed it. Guilt for being an inferior wife—for being inferior, period. She wasn’t as pretty as some of the moms at Pioneer. They were bold, polished. When she spent time with the mothers, either at school meetings or parent/teacher conferences, she always felt inferior to them, which she knew was not the case. She knew she was smart, but they seemed so confident, so stylish. Their husbands had made money, fortunes. The women too had been successful. They had worked in the city. They rode elevators to brightly lit offices, they went out to lunch. They lived in beautiful houses that had once been the homes of struggling farm families. Most of them drove expensive cars, Range Rovers and Mercedes station wagons, and they wore expensive clothes and took expensive trips over the holidays, either to Canada to ski, or to Switzerland, or some had homes in Palm Beach or Jamaica. Jack and Maggie rarely traveled. When Ada was younger, they took her to Lake Placid and stayed over in a little inn. Ada had loved going ice skating, drinking hot chocolate afterward on wood bleachers around a fire. Sometimes they would visit Jack’s parents, who lived in Virginia, but Ada always got carsick on the way. Once they’d arrive, Jack and his father would start fighting and his mother would go hide in the kitchen. Maggie’s mother still lived in Andover, but Jack refused to stay with her and never wanted to pay for a hotel, so they would end up finding excuses not to go. Maggie’s mother had never liked Jack, and she supposed Jack knew it—he’d known it all along.

  She had learned to live with the way things were. Their intimate relationship was too complex to talk about. She wasn’t sexually adventurous. She didn’t really like sex, truth be told. Sex only happened when he wanted it to, she didn’t know the first thing about seduction—she was too terrified to do that. It seemed to be their natural way of being together, with him making all the decisions. She did whatever he told her; she tried to please him. But sometimes he’d just lie there, staring up at the ceiling, vacant, detached. Sometimes he’d even look disgusted by her. She often got the feeling that he’d been with someone else—there were subtle clues, a hint of fragrance, the way he’d come home late sometimes, looking rumpled. Maggie couldn’t imagine what he’d do with anyone else. She didn’t like to think about it. It frightened her, really. She didn’t sleep well with him; she was somewhat afraid of him. There, she said it. It was how she felt. I’m afraid of him, she whispered to the dark room.

  After the incident at Remington Pond, when Jack had gotten the job at Pioneer, he’d promised her he was going to change. And he did for a while. They’d moved to the Berkshires, into their little cottage on the lake. As the new Head, he’d organized a capital campaign, which raised enough money to restore the old buildings. He hired a savvy PR firm to revamp the school’s image, creating a glossy catalog and sophisticated Web site. Jack understood what the parents wanted and they trusted him. They liked his preppy image, the little bow ties, his Amherst pedigree. They especially liked his finesse with a golf club—he had a ten handicap. They wanted certain things for their children and Jack delivered. They wanted all the things that were promised on the pages of their catalog: excellent teachers, challenging classes, the probability of getting into a competitive college, but what Pioneer was selling went beyond that. And it was Jack’s specialty. They were selling the dream of an ideal adolescence—as if it were even possible—and the parents were buying.

  Nobody knew better than Jack that a person’s history defined their future. He’d been shuffled from one army base to another. His father had been a brutal, complex man who’d terrified his mother into submission—Maggie had never predicted how definitively her husband’s youth would determine their marriage, and it had. “Children suffer,” Jack was fond of stating the obvious. The parents who sent their kids to Pioneer didn’t want their children to suffer, not even a little bit, and they were willing to pay top dollar so they wouldn’t have to. Whether they knew it or not—and she guessed very few did— they saw Pioneer as a nearly perfect place, and she and Jack were included in the imagery. Suspension of disbelief, you might call it—a way of seeing what you needed to see, not what’s really there. And like any convincing set, all the props were in place, the teachers, the students in their neat frocks, and the enchanting campus. When problems arose, and there were few, Jack had a way of talking to the parents, easily manipulating the most disgruntled mind to see things his way—it was a talent he had, she had to admit. Everybody wanted to be near him. He made all the kids feel good—he knew all their names by heart—and, not unlike a seasoned politician, he was always ready with a greeting and a handshake. The kids looked up to him, the staff too. They trusted him. In their eyes, as corny as it sounded, they recognized the qualities of a hero.

  No one in the community would ever guess the reality of her dilemma. In her husband’s presence, Maggie felt small and meek and ashamed and in a remote corner of her brain she sensed that he wanted her to feel that way. Still, she could not change it. As mu
ch as she knew she should, she also understood that she could not. After all these years with him she no longer had the strength to challenge him; maybe she’d never had it. She had taken his hand as a young woman and let him lead her away from everything she knew. On that day she had relinquished her soul for him, and she could not say why she’d done it. She didn’t seem to know. She knew, though, that it had something to do with how she saw herself. When she’d look in the mirror, the image reflected there only disappointed her. Perhaps she felt sorry for him, that he’d gotten stuck with her. That she’d tricked him somehow, into thinking she was more interesting, smarter, than she really was.

  There were true acts of terror that had occurred throughout history, great battles fought for cause and purpose. Maggie taught them all in her classes—they’d read Beowulf and they’d read The Iliad and The Odyssey, and each tale described great battles and bloodshed, and those were the things of legends. Maggie had never been forced to endure a war. Wars were fought elsewhere, in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. But the worse form of terror had whispered its way into her own home, and the man whom she slept beside night after night had become her greatest enemy. He was transforming gradually into another being, as if he’d drunk a mind-altering potion, yet there were no claws sprouting from his fingernails and no clusters of hair growing on his hands, no fangs in his mouth. Jack was the most common species of monster, she thought: an ordinary man.

  She finished her drink. The windows were black. She heard his car, the slam of the door. His keys on the counter. The crack of the ice tray, the gush of gin. She went to greet him and he nodded dismissively. Like an actor removing his costume, he took off his blazer and tie and rolled up his shirtsleeves. He washed his hands and drank his drink and sat at the table flipping through the mail. She poured herself another and sat with him, watching him, waiting for him to notice her. When she tried very hard, she could still see the boy she’d fallen in love with at Amherst. “How’d it go?”