The Perfect Mother

by Aimee Molloy

  She feels a hand on her waist, on the thick roll of flesh above the elastic of her pajamas, and she recoils so quickly she drops the eggs, emptying the entire carton onto her feet, the yolks leaking between her toes.

  “Sorry,” Lowell says. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  The scent of Irish Spring soap rises from his skin. “I didn’t hear you get up.” Three of the eggs have broken on the counter, and Francie wonders for a moment if she can salvage them, pick out the pieces of shell and scramble them with some milk. She can’t bear the idea of the grocery store. Not today. Not the narrow, crowded aisles or the endless checkout lines, not the long walk home in this heat with a baby strapped to her chest, her thighs chafing under her last clean skirt, shopping bags swinging painfully from both forearms. Lowell goes to the closet for the mop as she wipes the threads of egg yolk from her feet with a paper towel. It’s only then she notices he’s dressed for the office. “Are you leaving right now?”

  “In a few minutes.”

  “But it’s not even seven. I thought we could have breakfast together.”

  He nudges her toes out of the way with the mop. “I’m sorry. I have to prepare for tomorrow.”

  “What’s tomorrow?”

  He raises his eyebrows. “You’re kidding.”

  Of course. The meeting. He’s been preoccupied with it for days—the final round of interviews; a renovation of a former church into a boutique hotel. How could she have forgotten? The job would be his biggest contract, more money than they’ve made since Lowell decided two years ago to quit the firm in Knoxville and move to New York—a city she had never even visited—to start a private practice with a friend from architecture school. She tried to get him to reconsider. (“They need buildings designed right here in Tennessee,” she kept telling him.) But this was his dream, he said, so of course she’d agreed to move. “Plus,” he reasoned, “the hospitals in New York are the best. Maybe the IVF thing will work better there.”

  “Sorry. Of course I remember.” She wipes her hands on her shirt—a baggy tank top she wore throughout the pregnancy, now stained with cream cheese and brittle beads of breast milk—and takes the mop from Lowell. “We really need this job. Are you ready for it?”

  He nods and steps past her to open the refrigerator. “Almost. You okay?”

  “The story’s in the paper.”

  He stops. “Already?”

  “Yeah, the New York Post.” She’d found it on her phone while nursing the baby at 3:00 a.m., behind the click of a small headline: Kidnapping Concern for Missing Brooklyn Baby. “It was a short article. The police are saying there was no sign of forced entry. They didn’t mention Winnie’s name, but of course it’s her.”

  “It’s got to be a misunderstanding. Maybe his dad came to get him.”

  “What dad? There is no dad.”

  “Really?” He makes a face. “She’s the virgin Mary?”

  “No. I mean—if that was the case, they would have written that. They’re treating it like a case of child abduction.”

  “Don’t worry, France. They’ll find him.” He touches her arm. “It’s probably a mix-up. A family member or something. It usually is.” He slides two bruised bananas from the bowl on the counter into the outer pocket of his laptop case. “Try not to think about it. I’ll be back for lunch.”

  She kisses him good-bye, trying not to betray her disappointment that he has to work. Leaving her alone, in the wake of this terrible news.

  He’s doing it for us, she reminds herself as she rinses the empty beer bottle he left on the counter the night before. He works all the time to pay the rent. Cover their health insurance. Buy the eggs she’s just wasted. Of course he has to work long hours, never mind his desire to spend more time with the baby, with the two of them. And she has to understand. After all, she was the one who convinced him to use the wedding money his parents gave them on IVF, and then, after the first round failed, begged him to ask his brother, the successful anesthesiologist in Memphis, for a loan to try again.

  The sound of the door closing behind Lowell wakes Will. She lifts his warm body from the swing before he can cry, and carries him down the hall to their bedroom, on to the makeshift changing table she’d fashioned on top of their dresser. The morning stretches interminably in front of her—at least five hours to kill before Lowell will come home for lunch. Why hasn’t she planned something? What she really wants is to e-mail the May Mothers, ask if anyone is free for an impromptu meetup. She wants to be with them, together with the babies under the willow tree, talking about Midas, processing what happened. But that’s not an option. Last night, after leaving Winnie’s, Colette convinced them that it wasn’t their place to tell the group; that they should wait for Winnie to share the news. And Francie knows that even if the others happen to have seen that New York Post article, even if they’ve read that a baby has been abducted in Brooklyn, they’ll never think for a moment that it could be their neighborhood; that it is actually one of them.

  In fact, Francie saw that while she was with Colette and Nell at Winnie’s, Yuko was at home, creating a photo album on the May Mothers Facebook page—A NIGHT OUT—inviting people to upload their photos from the Jolly Llama. Francie couldn’t bear to open it, to see the images of everyone enjoying themselves while Midas was being snatched from his crib, stolen away from his mother.

  She carries Will to the living room, stepping around a basket spilling over with dirty clothes and burp cloths. She has more than enough laundry to do to fill the morning, she decides, just as her phone rings.

  “Hello.” The word comes out too eager. She doesn’t recognize the number and thinks—hopes—that it’s Winnie calling to say Midas has been found. Lowell was right. It was just a mix-up. But it’s not Winnie.

  “Hello, Mary Frances. It’s your mother.”

  Francie freezes. “Mom. Hi.” She takes the remote and mutes the television. There’s silence on the other end of the phone. “Sorry,” she says. “I didn’t recognize your number.”

  “I got a cell phone.”

  “You did?” Francie can’t believe it. Marilyn Cletis, the woman who prohibited music in her house, sewed all of their clothes, the person who kept a cow to provide raw milk for her children—this woman now has a cell phone?

  “Yes. A friend from church convinced me it was time. I can even text on it.”

  “That’s great, Mom.”

  “I got the birth announcement you sent. Cute photo. But . . .”

  “What?”

  “Kalani?”

  “Yes. William Kalani. I told you that. We’re calling him Will.”

  “Is that a black name?”

  Francie snickers before she can stop herself. “A black name? No. It’s Hawaiian.” She heard it on their honeymoon. It means “sent from the heavens.” It’s the perfect name for her son.

  “Oh. I thought maybe it was a New York thing.” She can hear her mother putting away dishes. “I told your grandfather. I’m not sure he understood completely, but he did seem honored you chose William.”

  Francie has been unwilling to tell her the baby is not, in fact, named after Marilyn’s largely absent father, but after Lowell, whose middle name is William. Francie lays Will gently on the play mat, under the jingling band of farm animals, and stands in front of the window fan, waving her shirt away from her body. “I’m sorry I haven’t had time to call recently,” she says. “Things are a little hectic.”

  “You don’t have to tell me. I was a mother once, too.” Marilyn pauses, but Francie is unsure how to respond. “How’s the baby?”

  “Good,” Francie says. “Mostly. I’m having some trouble nursing. He doesn’t seem to be getting enough food.”

  “So give him formula. Put a little baby cereal in it.”

  “Oh. They don’t really use that anymore. And I’m trying not to—”

  “People at church have been praying for you. Cora Lee asked me how the birth went and I realized I don’t know. You never told
me.”

  “I didn’t?” Francie feels herself lighten. “It was perfect. I was able to do it naturally, without any pain medication.” It wasn’t easy. About a thousand times during the nine-hour labor she’d wanted to give up and get the epidural, but she powered through it, walking circles around the hospital room, slow dancing with Lowell through the pain. She can’t help but notice the admiring way Lowell now looks at her sometimes: not as his five-foot-three-inch average-looking wife with the thick thighs and unruly curls going prematurely gray at thirty-one, but as an unstoppable, fire-breathing warrior, giving birth to a healthy seven-pound son, and on Mother’s Day, no less.

  “Naturally? What does that mean? You didn’t have an epidural?”

  “No. Not even one Advil.”

  Silence. “On purpose?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why would you do something like that?”

  Francie closes her eyes, feeling ten years old again. She keeps her voice steady. “Because I wanted—Lowell and I wanted the most natural birth experience. Unmedicated births are now—”

  Marilyn chuckles. “Oh, Mary Frances, that’s so like you. You can’t do anything like everyone else.” Francie is surprised to feel tears burning the back of her throat. “Anyway, I’m calling because I have something for William. A christening dress.” Marilyn pauses. “And I’d like to come visit.”

  “Visit?” She didn’t think Marilyn would ever come to New York. She’s never stepped foot out of Tennessee. “You don’t have to do that, Mom. Lowell and I are saving for plane tickets home for you to meet Will.”

  “The baptism is probably soon. I could look into a flight, next weekend perhaps? You’ll need help, I imagine.”

  “I’m sorry, Mom. Next weekend doesn’t work.” She racks her brain for a plausible excuse. “Lowell has a big interview. He’s working all the time, and he’d feel bad if he couldn’t spend time with you. Plus, the May Mothers. We’re—”

  “The May Mothers?”

  “It’s a group of friends I’ve made. A mommy group.” Francie can only imagine how her mother would judge them all: Nell, with the large, garish tattoo covering her shoulder. Yuko, breastfeeding without cover in the coffee shop, in front of other women’s husbands. Token, a gay stay-at-home dad. “But this terrible thing happened—”

  “He’ll need this gown. It was yours, and before that, it was mine.” Her mother waits. She knows what she’s doing. She knows Francie won’t be baptizing him. She’s forcing her to lie. “When is the baptism?”

  “We’re not quite sure yet. Like I said, Lowell’s working a lot right now.” Despite the fan, the sweat rises on Francie’s back. She turns away from the window, glancing at Will on his mat, at the muted television set, trying to figure out what to say.

  And then her heart stops.

  It’s Winnie. On TV. Not the Winnie she knows, though. This one is much younger—a teenager. She’s standing on a stage, wearing a gold strapless gown, her hair tied back in a loose chignon, hanging on to the arm of a nearly identical older woman who must be her mother. Another image appears: Winnie in a blush-colored leotard and long tulle skirt, ballet slippers laced to her knees. Francie picks up the television remote from the counter and increases the volume.

  “—Gwendolyn Ross is best known for her role in the cult television series Bluebird, which aired in the early nineties.”

  “Mary Frances?”

  “I’m sorry, Mom. I have to go. The baby is awake.”

  She places the phone on the table. The reporter is standing on a leafy sidewalk, bright yellow police tape visible behind her. Francie moves closer to the TV. The building she’s standing in front of. It’s Winnie’s.

  “Sources within the police department are keeping information tightly guarded at this point, saying only that they are, in fact, treating this as a case of child abduction, and that all leads are being pursued. The baby has been missing now for nearly nine hours. Zara Secor, reporting live from Brooklyn.”

  “Thanks, Zara. Now, on to another bit of disheartening news. The climate change summit has come to—”

  Francie goes to her bedside table for her laptop. Bluebird. Someone, Gemma perhaps, once mentioned that Winnie was an actress, but half the people Francie has met since moving to New York claim to be actors. She didn’t know this was what Gemma meant. Winnie is famous. The star of a television show in the early 1990s about a young ballerina auditioning for an apprentice spot in the New York City Ballet. Winnie—who went by the name Gwendolyn—was the ballerina. She was the girl they called Bluebird.

  Francie had no idea. She would have been eleven years old when Bluebird aired, and it was exactly the type of show—with hints of teenage sexuality, an interracial relationship—that her mother would never have allowed in the house. She opens Wikipedia and finds Winnie’s page. Classically trained at the School of American Ballet, a summer at the Royal Ballet School. A family foundation, in her mother’s name, that provided scholarships to young dancers.

  Francie shouldn’t be surprised. She knew the moment she saw Winnie at the first May Mothers meeting four months earlier that there was something special about her. Francie can still picture it. Gemma was telling the group she’d paid to bank her son’s umbilical cord blood—a process Francie had never heard of. “It’s expensive, but it can save their life if they ever, knock on wood, have a life-threatening disease,” Gemma was saying when people began to shift their attention to a spot across the lawn, to the woman walking toward them, the bump of her pregnancy rising under her short turquoise dress, a wide silver bracelet on each wrist. Everyone scooted aside to make room for her, adjusting blankets, shifting babies, and she took the spot right next to Francie. Francie tugged at her shorts and the damp cotton that clung to her midsection as she watched Winnie settle into place, folding her long legs underneath her.

  “I’m Winnie,” she said, her fingers resting on the slope of her belly, just below her breasts. “Sorry to be so late.”

  Francie had a hard time keeping her eyes off her, taking in just how beautiful she was. The face of magazine covers and catwalks: the splatter of freckles across the bridge of her nose, the faultless olive skin that had no need for the concealer Francie has been swearing by for the last decade or so.

  And then the moment the two of them shared at the coffee shop. Francie was deeply embarrassed by Will’s sudden outburst, conscious of the judging stares of the two young men working on laptops near the window, the scowl from the girl behind the counter, waiting for Francie, too frazzled to choose her drink. Winnie seemed to appear from nowhere, unfazed by Will’s crying, lifting him from Francie’s arms and walking figure eights around the tables, patting his bottom, whispering into his ear, getting him to settle.

  “How did you do that?” Francie asked, after joining her at a table in the corner. “I feel like I’m the only one who has no idea what I’m doing.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Winnie said. “These May Mothers try very hard to make it look easy, but don’t let them fool you.” She had a sly look in her eyes, as if she and Francie were lifelong friends, sharing a secret. “This isn’t easy for any of them. Trust me.”

  It’s more than an hour later, after Will has finally fallen asleep in the cosleeper, the vacuum cleaner running nearby, upright and stationary, to calm him, that Francie comes across the obituary of Audrey Ross, Winnie’s mother. She was killed on Winnie’s eighteenth birthday, on her way to the store for ice cream. Her death was written up in several national newspapers, for not only was Audrey Ross the mother of Gwendolyn Ross, the famous young actress, she was also an heir to her father’s multimillion-dollar real estate business, one of the largest in the nation.

  It makes so much sense. Winnie’s house. Her clothes. The expensive stroller Francie envied; the same one she examined with longing at Babies “R” Us, until she saw it cost nearly as much as what Lowell and she pay in a month’s rent. She finds one photo of the funeral: Winnie and her father walking into a country church ne
ar their weekend house in upstate New York, not far from where Audrey Ross was killed. It was a freak accident. The brakes had failed, without explanation. Audrey’s car careened down a hill, through a guardrail, plunging eighty feet into a ravine below. Winnie quit Bluebird a few months later. That show was canceled soon after.

  Francie can’t believe it when she hears the distant church bells chiming the arrival of noon, rousing her from the computer. She closes the laptop, wincing at the sight of the untouched pile of laundry, and goes to the kitchen to start lunch. Drained and bleary-eyed, she knows she needs to get into the right frame of mind for Lowell’s return. He’ll be exhausted and hungry, eager to see her. But she can’t deny the heaviness in the pit of her stomach, thinking about all Winnie has lost, everything she has accomplished—a successful acting career, the star of her own show, a happy relationship with a musician, who she mentioned in the one interview she granted after her mother’s death.

  “I’ve been relying on Daniel,” she said, referring to her boyfriend, when a reporter asked how she was dealing with everything. “He’s the only thing getting me through the grief.”

  And all by seventeen.

  Francie starts the water for the macaroni and can’t help but picture what she, herself, was doing at that age: singing in the church choir, teaching Sunday school, allowing Mr. Colburn, the science teacher, to lift her skirt and put his fingers inside her in the lab during study hall. At least that was how it started. It didn’t take long before he was doing it in his car after school, parked behind the former Payless shoe store in the strip mall, and then in his house, a dingy one-bedroom the volunteer program paid for. It was some Catholic thing. Ivy Leaguers spend the year after graduation teaching at an underprivileged high school, somewhere in the sticks of America, like Our Lady of Perpetual Help, Francie’s high school in Estherville, Tennessee. It was in that apartment that she had her first taste of red wine, her first hit of marijuana. It was also there that Mr. Colburn—James, as she dared to call him when they were alone—held her down and removed her volleyball uniform despite her protests.