The Perfect Mother

by Aimee Molloy

  When Nell opens her eyes, the man at the bar is watching her. She closes her eyes again, this time seeing herself. She feels the heat and the pounding music. The crowd grows around them. She takes Winnie’s phone from Francie.

  She deletes the app.

  Why? Why did she do that? Hadn’t she learned her lesson? One impulsive decision can destroy an entire life. If anyone should know that, it’s her.

  She stands and paces the empty patio.

  Think, think, think.

  She goes inside, past the jukebox, past the bocce ball court, now dark and deserted. Up to the waitress station, where she ordered the fries. She took them to the table, eventually going with Gemma, or whoever it was, for another drink.

  Nell’s eyes flash open. The cigarette. She scans the room, spotting the door along the far wall, near the bathrooms. She sets her drink on the bar. The door to the smoking patio is unlocked, and she steps into a small gravel area filled with wobbly bar tables and stools, surrounded by a fence strung with Christmas lights. Quiet please. Respect our neighbors. She can smell the smoke in her hair, her tongue heavy with nicotine and tar. She’s talking to someone, asking for a fag, forgetting not to use the British term, hearing him laugh. That was why she felt so sick the next day, the cigarette. It had been more than a year since she’d smoked, since she and Sebastian decided to try for a baby.

  She paces, picturing a man, fuzzy at the edges, extending the pack of cigarettes, the click click of the lighter before it caught. He had dark eyes, and she’d told him why she was there. “I’m part of a mommy group,” she said, drawing out the last two words, as if she were admitting to something too outrageous to be true. “Me. In a mommy group. Can you believe that?” She feels a hand on her arm, laughter in her hair as the heat builds around her.

  “Another club soda?” the bartender asks when she goes back inside.

  “Yes,” Nell says. “And splash some vodka in this one.”

  He slides the drink toward her, and the fizz rises from the first sip, tickling her tongue.

  “Oh shit.” The bartender is looking up at the closest television, set to the local news. He reaches for the remote. “Not this again.”

  The woman on the screen is wearing a sleeveless black blouse and a bright yellow skirt, her forehead pinched in concern. Nell examines the woman’s surroundings, and then she stands and walks to the window. Across the street, she sees it—the bumblebee yellow of the woman’s clothes, the light of the camera, a news van parked nearby.

  The bartender increases the volume, and the woman’s voice jumps from the speakers near the ceiling. “The baby has been missing for four days, and with no news of a suspect, the case is looking grim. Sources tell us that this morning the nanny, Alma Romero, originally from Honduras, was brought in for additional questioning. The police are also asking anyone who may have any helpful information to call the number listed here on the screen.” The woman turns and gestures toward the entrance to the bar. “As you know, Jonah, at the time of the baby’s abduction, his mother, the former actress Gwendolyn Ross, was out at a bar with members of her mommy group. This bar, the Jolly Llama, is located—”

  The screen goes black. The bartender has thrown the remote next to the sink, knocking over a drying beer mug. “Here we go again. Every time we’re on the news, we get another round of teenagers coming in, passing me fake IDs, wanting to see the ‘famous’ Baby Midas bar someone wrote about on Facebook.” He plunges his arms back into the suds. “Those assholes don’t tip.”

  Through the window, Nell watches the reporter crossing the street with her cameraman. She digs for the ten-dollar bill in her bag, leaves it on the bar, and is hurrying through the side door to the smoking area as the reporter enters, introducing herself to the bartender. “I’m Kelly Marie Stenson with CBS local news and I’m wondering if I can ask—”

  Nell carries a bar stool to the fence. She climbs on top of it and grips the coil wire, pulling herself up, hoisting a leg over the top. Her palms are damp and she loses her grip, her sandals slipping in the wire. She falls to the other side, landing hard on the pavement of the parking lot next door. Feeling the taste of blood from where she’s bitten her lip, seeing the razor cuts on the heels of her hands and knees, she stands and hurries through the parking lot out to the sidewalk, feeling a hard shoulder of a man bump into her side. “Jackass,” she yells. “Watch where you’re walking.”

  Up the hill, back toward the park, she slows her pace. As she crosses the street, she senses someone walking close behind, shadowing her steps, and it all comes back to her. People waiting around the corner, watching her, trying to document her every move. She breaks into a tender, awkward run again, ignoring the ache in her C-section incision and the pain spreading along her inner-right thigh; across the street, down the block, and toward the day care. She has another hour before picking up Beatrice, and yet she forces herself to keep up the pace, her feet burning in her thin sandals. Within ten minutes, she’s arrived. She peers into the window between the cutout sunflowers and butterflies taped to the glass. Two women are kneeling on the floor in front of a bouncy chair, leaning toward the baby strapped into it. One of them is pressing the baby’s chest. The women—they look in distress. The baby is choking. Nell moves to get a different angle. The baby they’re kneeling in front of is Beatrice.

  Nell dashes to the door, twisting the handle, but it’s locked. She bangs on the glass, slamming her fists, imagining Beatrice inside, choking on an object carelessly left within her reach, her face turning blue. Finally the lock clicks open. Nell runs down the hall and throws open the door, meeting the startled look of a young woman in ripped jeans and a T-shirt printed with a pink cupcake and the words Happy Baby Daycare.

  “Ms. Mackey. You’re—”

  She rushes past her, dropping to the floor next to the two women. Nell reaches for her baby, hearing her phone chiming in her bag as she registers the look on her daughter’s face.

  Beatrice is beaming.

  Nell turns to the woman. The thing in her hand: it’s a phone. She was taking a photo.

  “Look at that gorgeous smile,” the woman says, grinning down at Beatrice.

  “Smile?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s not gas?”

  The woman laughs, and Nell’s phone chimes again. “Not this time. That’s a smile. You haven’t seen her do that before?”

  “No,” Nell says. “I’ve been waiting for it.” She kneels back on her heels, reaching for her phone, the tears smarting her eyes, her breath catching as she reads Francie’s message.

  They found him.

  I want my mother.

  Colette breaks into a final sprint as she reaches the top of the hill. She is too old to be having the thought, and yet she keeps imagining it: sitting with her mother at the large kitchen table at their home in Colorado, the dogs at their feet, the glass doors thrown open to the yard as her father fixes them drinks and Colette tells her mother everything. About how worried she is Midas will never be found. About taking the file from Teb’s office and making copies and showing them to Nell and Francie. About the deep regret she’s been feeling over her decision to share the information with Token, whom she barely knows. She wants to admit how embarrassingly bad her writing has been, and tell her about this morning, at the doctor’s office for her second postnatal checkup, sobbing in the room with Dr. Bereck, admitting how overwhelmed and anxious she feels, how much trouble she’s having getting to sleep.

  “What are you feeling most anxious about?” Dr. Bereck asked.

  “Everything, but Poppy mostly. I’m worried something is wrong with her.” Colette has been trying without success to ignore her concerns—that Poppy’s limbs seem weak, that she still hasn’t mastered holding her head up fully, that she sometimes struggles to make eye contact. “When I’m around the other babies in my mom group—I don’t know. They seem different. Stronger,” Colette said, finally giving herself permission to cry. “And I get these daily updates
from The Village. She’s not hitting the milestones they say she should be.”

  “First of all, stop reading those,” Dr. Bereck said. “They assume all babies are going to develop at exactly the same rate. That’s not how this works.”

  “I know, but still. I can’t stand the idea of it. Charlie says I’m crazy. That she’s fine. But I’m her mother. I can feel it. Something might be wrong.”

  Colette wants to tell her own mother these things, but she can’t. She doesn’t even know where she is. The last time they spoke, ten minutes over a staticky phone line more than two weeks ago, Rosemary was in the San Blas Islands off the coast of Panama, conducting research on one of the last remaining matriarchal societies. Colette’s father, recently retired as the chair of biology at UC Boulder, had accompanied her. (“As a member of a matriarchal family, I feel I’ll fit in well,” he said when her parents called to tell her they’d be going away for three months, leaving a week after Poppy was due.)

  Colette is breathless as Alberto, the doorman, opens the door for her, and when she gets out of the elevator on the third floor, stopping to unlace her sneakers, she can hear Charlie inside the apartment, in the kitchen, speaking to someone on the phone.

  He drops the phone from his ear when she enters. “Wow,” he mouths. “You look hot.”

  She glances in the mirror over the table in the hall. Her hair is soaked, her freckles crimson, the layer of sunscreen she applied on her way out of the doctor’s office chalks her skin. It’s the first time she’s gone for a run since giving birth, and she had to stop and walk several times. “I’m assuming you mean as in very warm,” she says to Charlie.

  “No,” he whispers. “I mean as in hot.” He kisses her hand and then speaks into the phone. “We can make that work. I just can’t let these things get in the way of finishing the new book.” He pours a cup of coffee and hands it to Colette. “And I probably shouldn’t miss any major holidays. Doubt the baby would ever forgive me for that.”

  “Nor the baby’s mother,” Colette says, assuming he’s on the phone with his publicist, discussing another invitation to speak somewhere. He finished his book tour two months earlier, but the requests for additional cities keep coming. She pours a glass of water and notices that the dining table—a vintage farm table Charlie bought them last Christmas—is set for two, with her grandmother’s dishes and their linen napkins. A handful of bright blue bodega daisies, some of the petals flaccid and wilting, are arranged in a stainless-steel travel mug in the center of the table.

  She takes a grape from the bowl at Charlie’s elbow and wraps her arms around his waist, pressing her cheek into the familiar hollow between his shoulder blades, taking in his scent—Speed Stick and roasted garlic—hearing Womb Noises floating from the monitor on the shelf. She allows herself to feel the easy joy of the moment. The warmth of Charlie’s body. Poppy asleep in the nursery. The rhythm of the apartment. If only she could stay right here, in this exact moment, forever.

  Colette unclasps herself and sees the book—Becoming a Family—on the counter beside the coffeepot. She takes her coffee and the book and slides onto a stool at the island as Charlie chops a thick bunch of parsley in quick, sure bursts, the phone pressed between his shoulder and ear. She opens to the early section on pregnancy, glancing through Charlie’s notes in the margins, the corners he’s turned back to mark certain pages.

  Nine weeks: the baby is the size of a grape.

  How to prepare your birth partner.

  Things to avoid: raw fish and undercooked meat, excessive exercise, hot baths.

  Colette feels the lump in the base of her throat as she reads the words, remembering those early weeks. The ache in her breasts as she climbed the stairs. The stomach-turning scent of strangers’ soap and perfume on the subway. Getting sick in her publisher’s restroom, in the middle of a meeting to discuss the direction of the second book.

  The devastating shock at the two pink lines on the plastic pregnancy test.

  It was a glitch in her system. An off month. She knew her body well enough to avoid birth control, which had, the few months she was on the pill, left her feeling angry and depressed. (Charlie had joked with her, saying if all women responded to the pill the way she did, he understood its effectiveness. It made women so miserable, nobody wanted to have sex with them.) She’d gone to see Dr. Bereck, needing confirmation. Bodies change, Dr. Bereck said. Cycles slow. She was almost thirty-five. Things were beginning to shift.

  Five weeks: the baby is the size of a poppy seed.

  Five weeks: the September night she told Charlie she was pregnant. They made love afterward, and he lay alongside her, his chest against her back, his hand on the slope of her waist. “You. A baby. My book,” he’d said. “This is everything I’ve ever wanted.” She just lay there, unmoving, trying to imagine it. Pregnancy. A baby. Motherhood.

  She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t imagine any of it. Her imagination was already occupied by other things. The two-month trip to Southeast Asia she and Charlie were planning to take after he finished his second book. The marathon she’d just begun training for. Finally getting out of ghostwriting and publishing another book of her own. Those things she could imagine. But this?

  She called her mother the next morning, questioning how she was going to manage, how she’d stay herself, admitting she’d had three whiskeys one night before knowing she was pregnant; that she’d gone on several punishing runs.

  “What if I’ve already hurt the baby?”

  “Colette,” her mother had said, “when abortions were illegal, women had to throw themselves down the stairs. You’re not going to kill your baby by accident.”

  The memory dissolves as Charlie hangs up and comes to kiss her forehead. She closes the book. “You’ve scrambled eggs for me?” she says. “What’s the occasion?”

  “Your doctor’s appointment.” He nods at the book. “I’ve consulted the experts, and according to them, we’re out of the woods.”

  “Out of the woods?”

  He walks to the built-in wine cooler next to the dishwasher and takes out a bottle of champagne, popping the cork in one quick twist. “Yes. The baby is going to start smiling soon. A schedule will develop as she understands the difference between night and day. Oh, and—” He pours a little champagne into a water glass and tugs her to her feet. “We can have sex again. Drink up, woman.”

  Her body tenses as Charlie wraps his arms around her lower back, his hips against hers, walking her backward, pressing her against the refrigerator. Sex? The thought repulses her. She’s exhausted and spent; her breasts and back ache. She slept fitfully last night, listening to Charlie rustling around the living room after Poppy woke up at midnight, putting on a series of jazz records to soothe her, reading to her from his novel, the chapter in which the young soldier leaves his mother, goes off to fight the war. Colette knew she should have gotten out of bed and offered to nurse Poppy, which would have instantly put her to sleep, but she was too exhausted to bring herself to do it, to drag herself up from under the weight of the blankets in the air-conditioned room, from her thoughts of Midas. Of Winnie. Of Bodhi Mogaro. Did he have Midas? Was the baby still alive?

  Colette gently nudges Charlie away. “You’re aware I have to leave soon, right? I’m meeting Teb.”

  Charlie freezes and closes his eyes before touching his forehead to hers. “You’re meeting Teb.”

  “You forgot.”

  “I forgot.”

  “Today’s your day with the baby,” Colette says. “I had her yesterday. And I told you, he had to reschedule last time—”

  “No, I know. It slipped my mind. Poppy was up three times last night. I’m exhausted.”

  “I’m sorry,” Colette says. “But tonight’s my night, and you’ll get a break from her most of tomorrow.”

  He sighs and releases his hold on her. “You have to pump more. I used the milk in the freezer.”

  “I did. This morning. It’s in there.”

  “And we
need to talk about all this.”

  “All what?”

  “This thing we’re doing, splitting child care fifty-fifty. It’s not working.”

  She feels instantly irritated. “I can’t give up any more time,” she says, trying to keep her voice steady, scooping a lump of scrambled eggs from the skillet into her mouth. “I’ve fallen a little behind on Teb’s book.” She hasn’t told him the extent of it: how sure she is that she’ll never meet the deadline, or how off her writing has been. She’s too overwhelmed to admit how hard she’s finding it, trying to manage everything, how she’s aware they’re out of laundry detergent and the showerhead is leaking, the sound of it driving her mad, and how she just made Poppy an appointment with the pediatrician tomorrow, at Dr. Bereck’s suggestion.

  “I’m not asking you to take on the child care, Colette. I’m saying we need to hire a nanny.” His expression softens. “I know you’re scared. This Midas thing is awful. But we can’t have it both ways. We can’t both try to hold down full-time work, have a newborn, and not have some help.” He takes her hands. “It’s not like we can’t afford it. We can use some of my parents’ money.”

  She pulls her hand away. “I don’t want to hire a nanny, Charlie.” She can’t bear the thought of it, leaving the baby with a stranger. She walks past him toward the bedroom, lifting her damp T-shirt over her head.

  “Well, then, what are we supposed to do?” He follows her into the bathroom. “If you won’t agree to hire a sitter, you have to pick up the slack.”

  She turns on the shower, lifting the pink plastic baby tub from the floor of the bathtub, averting her gaze from the large clump of hair in the drain she shed during yesterday’s shower. “But that’s not what we agreed to.”

  “I understand that. But having a kid is a little more difficult than either of us expected. We need to reevaluate it. My book is due in two months.”