The Perfect Mother

by Aimee Molloy

  She’s eager to see everyone again. It’s been a little over a week since the group has been together under that tree, and she’s felt the loss. The anticipation of the meetings. Her place in the circle among the other mothers, sharing advice, surrounded by the babies. She steps off the bench and trains her camera across the street, panning from a few of the journalists who linger in front of Winnie’s building, to the news van parked nearby, and then to a window a few doors down, where, inside, she can make out a series of black-and-white family portraits hanging over a sofa, and several large palm plants that stand in the corner. She turns the zoom lens, getting in closer, until she can read the titles of the books in a neat row on a shelf.

  A dog begins to bark, and Francie guides her camera to the sidewalk, to the man with thick glasses. He’s in his late forties, and she’s seen him here before, walking back and forth in front of Winnie’s building, a tiny brown dog on a leash. He’s always peering at the windows, as if he’s trying to see inside.

  Francie can’t help but wonder if it’s him: Theodore Odgard. The registered sex offender who lives somewhere on this block. She found his name late last night as she fed Will, scrolling through the sex offender registry on her phone. And perhaps he’s the same man Francie read about on a crime blog—the one spotted on a bench across from Winnie’s building, the night of July Fourth.

  Francie watches him through her viewfinder as he pulls his dog along. Just as he passes Winnie’s building, her front door opens. Francie’s heart quickens—Winnie’s there!

  She zooms in on the door and is disappointed to see it’s not her, but a man. He closes the door behind him and walks gingerly down the stairs. He’s older, in his late sixties perhaps, and wears a light-yellow golf shirt, the name Hector embroidered on the front pocket. The little dog lunges toward him when he reaches the sidewalk, exploding in a burst of shrill barks. Hector reaches to pet the dog, nodding hello to the man at the end of the leash, to the three journalists who sit nearby on a curb. He then strolls back and forth in front of Winnie’s door, his hands clasped behind his back, stopping to finger the flowering bush near the path, snapping off a few withering petals. Francie remains motionless, watching. There’s been very little written about Winnie’s father, and Francie wonders if this is him. No, she decides, with the way he paces back and forth, he must be a security guard. A retired cop, perhaps, who Winnie hired to protect her house, making sure nobody tries to enter, no journalist rings her bell; shooing along the well-intentioned strangers who’ve come to leave a bouquet of bodega roses that immediately wither in the heat, or add another Sophie the Giraffe to the long line of Sophies laid side by side on the sidewalk, stretching from one end of Winnie’s block to the other.

  She finally called Winnie. Three times. Winnie never answered, but Francie left a message each time, telling Winnie she’s been thinking of her, offering to bring her groceries, make her a few meals she can stick in the freezer. Francie also wants to tell her how much she’s been enjoying Bluebird. She found a DVD box set on eBay, all three seasons for just $60—a charge she prays Lowell won’t notice on the bank statement next month. She loves it. Winnie is so funny, so natural, such a phenomenal dancer.

  Francie is still upset about the way Lowell reacted earlier that morning when she told him about the calls to Winnie.

  “I don’t think that was smart, France.”

  “Why not?”

  “She probably wants privacy right now. And plus—”

  “Plus what?”

  “Well, you never know.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” she asked him. “Never know what?”

  He sighed, and seemed unwilling to say anything else, but Francie pressed him. “Where was she when Midas was taken? And how come there was no sign of forced entry? All I’m saying is, I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to get too close to her. And I certainly wouldn’t want Will to spend any time around her.”

  Francie was furious. “I don’t like what you’re insinuating.”

  Francie watches Hector disappear around the side of Winnie’s building, wanting to forget about that conversation. She hears the vibration of her phone in the diaper bag, and strings her camera around her neck. It’s Lowell, texting. To apologize, she assumes.

  Bad news. Didn’t get the renovation job. They went with the other guys.

  Francie tucks the phone back into her bag, flooded with worry. That job was their only promise of income. Their rent is due in three weeks. Will rustles in his stroller, and she zips her camera into its case, piloting the stroller toward the park entrance, hoping to lull Will back to sleep, dark thoughts creeping into her brain.

  She tries to block them out.

  She loves Lowell. He’s a good husband, a kind man.

  And yet. Why didn’t she choose a man more like those so many of the May Mothers ended up with? A man like Charlie, able to buy that fancy apartment on the park, always posting photos of Colette and Poppy on Facebook, alongside sweet messages about how beautiful they both are, how lucky he is. Or Scarlett’s husband, a tenured professor who can provide a big house in the suburbs, enough money for her to stay home without worry. She once mentioned that he even made sure to be home by six each night, to sit down to dinner with her, do the bath, help with bedtime. A man nothing like Lowell, who works constantly; who has never, not once, given the baby his bath; whose practice is failing, who’s begun to tell her, with increasing frequency, that she has to figure out a way to earn some money. He’s the one who came up with the idea that Francie should organize this meeting and volunteer to take photos of the May Mothers’ babies, to build a portfolio to start a baby portrait business, a passing interest she mentioned once.

  When she arrives at the willow tree fifteen minutes later, slanted under the weight of the diaper and camera bags, her curls are frizzed and damp. Colette is there already, spreading out her blanket. She wears a short light-blue dress, her hair in a fishtail braid down her back. Francie doesn’t know how Colette does it; how she always appears so rested and put together. Francie’s not even sure she brushed her teeth this morning.

  “Have you heard from Nell?” Francie asks her after parking Will’s stroller in the shade.

  “Not yet.” Colette opens the paper box of mini muffins and offers one to Francie. “She’s supposed to call me at her lunch break. I hope her first day back is okay.”

  Token walks up then. He takes off his sunglasses, and his eyes are red-rimmed.

  “You okay?” Colette asks.

  “Yes,” he says, looking away. “My allergies in this heat. It’s brutal.”

  Others begin to arrive, and Francie recognizes none of them. Women she’s never seen before, who never cared enough to attend a meeting when free baby photos weren’t involved, walk cautiously up to the tree, asking if this is where the May Mothers are meeting. Meanwhile, there’s no sign of the women Francie was hoping to see—no Yuko, Scarlett, or Gemma. She tries to tamp down her disappointment as she arranges the props she’s brought for the portraits, eventually inviting people to step up for a turn. She’s never taken photos of babies before, and she throws herself into it, eager to be distracted from her worries about money, about Lowell, about the image Antonia Framingham painted: Midas, alone, terrified, missing his mother.

  “So, I know this is morbid, but can we talk about Midas?” someone asks from the blankets behind her.

  “We were at the pediatrician this morning,” someone else says. “I waited ninety minutes to be seen and my phone died. Anything new?”

  Francie tries to shut them out, concentrating on the light, the shadows, on getting the fussy and obstinate baby in front of her to cooperate. “There was an interview this morning with that doctor from Methodist—the one they mistook for Bodhi Mogaro on July 4. He graduated top of his class from Harvard Med. He wasn’t ‘acting erratically.’ He was yelling instructions into the phone to an EMT. The young mother in critical condition? She died last night.”

  “O
h, how sad.”

  “This thing with Bodhi Mogaro is equally disturbing,” someone else says. “His wife gave an interview. They’re making it seem like they just arrived here from Yemen, but they’re US citizens. She’s from Connecticut.”

  “My mom doesn’t believe a word his wife is saying.” Whoever is talking laughs. “Granted, my mom only gets her news from The Faith Hour, so I’m not sure she should be trusted.”

  “I still can’t believe any of it.” A big sigh. “That this happened to one of us.”

  Brittle pine needles pit Francie’s knees as she kneels on the ground, holding her breath against the stench of a nearby garbage can overflowing with paper coffee cups and plastic bags of discarded takeout, feasted on by a swarm of spinning flies. She leans closer to the baby, wishing he’d stay still, the way she imagined they would, the way babies do for that one woman, whatever her name is, who gets them to sleep inside huge flower petals, their heads covered with a cabbage leaf.

  “Can you move him a little, please? He’s in a shadow.”

  “I can’t get it out of my mind—the idea of getting a call, hearing my baby is gone. My husband and I were supposed to have our first date night last night, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t leave her with a sitter. I read somewhere that the nanny, Alma, is part of a baby-selling ring.”

  Francie read the same thing yesterday, and immediately texted Nell. Alma? Part of a baby-selling ring? Is that true?

  Nell had written back one word: Yes.

  Francie called her right away. “Nell, this is awful. How did you—”

  “It was right there on her résumé,” Nell said. “‘Nanny for three years. Mother of two. Member of a baby-selling ring.’” She heard Nell tsk on the other end of the phone. “What could I do but hire her? I had to go back to work, and do you have any idea how few nannies there are in Brooklyn these days?”

  Francie is still upset that Nell could find humor in any of this. “Nothing about this is amusing, Nell.”

  “I know, Francie. But the way they’re dragging Alma into this whole mess, while breathing fear into every woman with a nanny . . . It’s infuriating. She would never do anything to hurt anyone. I have to laugh about it. Otherwise I might just go and kill someone.”

  “Nice job, buddy,” Francie says now, to the new little boy on the blanket in front of her. “That’s it. Just sit still like that for another minute.”

  “You see Us Weekly yesterday?” Francie’s back is to them, and she can’t tell who’s speaking. Their voices are running together. “An article said Patricia Faith has offered Winnie two million dollars for a sit-down interview.”

  Francie hears the chime of a new text message, and she pauses to glance at her phone, on the ground near her camera bag. It’s Lowell again.

  Really sell this business idea. Try to book something right away.

  “Well, I heard a company’s offered to pay her to do a workout video, for new mothers. Disgusting.” Francie’s phone beeps again but she ignores it—she can’t deal with Lowell right now.

  She turns toward the group, her head aching from the sun and heat. “Who’s next?” she asks, noticing Colette is staring down at her phone, her brow furrowed. Colette meets Francie’s eyes, and her expression is shadowed with concern.

  “Look at your phone,” Colette says quietly. Francie hastily drops the camera on the blanket. It’s a message from Nell.

  Turn on the Patricia Faith show. Immediately.

  Nell’s arms are raised over her head and her shirt is lifted, exposing the puckered skin of her stomach spilling over the wide elastic band of her maternity jeans. She has a drink in one hand, and the other holds on to Winnie’s wrist. Nell remembers the moment this photograph was taken. It was early in the night. They were complaining about the lack of paid maternity leave in the US. She’d stood up, singing the words to “Rebel Yell,” pulling Winnie to stand. They danced. People sang along. Everyone was laughing.

  Who would do this? Who among them would have given this photo to Patricia Faith, whose smug face has replaced Nell on the television screen? She’s wearing a sleek, sleeveless black dress and appears to have found the time to freshen her highlights. She stares into the camera so intensely, Nell feels as if Patricia Faith can see her there, sitting alone at a table at the Simon French corporate café, her palms moist, bile inching up her throat.

  “So, to recap,” she says, her chin resting on her splayed, intertwined fingers, “this morning, we were sent this disturbing photo, showing Gwendolyn Ross the night—perhaps the very moment—her baby, just seven weeks old, was taken from his crib.” The camera zooms in on the photograph, to a close-up of Winnie’s face. She’s looking directly at the camera, her eyes half closed and vacuous, a woozy expression on her face.

  “Look at that. She’s drunk,” Patricia Faith says. “And I’m sorry, but I gotta ask the question. What does a photo like this mean? Does it, and should it, change the story? I know we’ve been focused on other things. The incompetent mayor and the horrendous police work. Bodhi. Questions about the nanny. But, well, I don’t know. A new mother, just a few weeks postpartum, and she leaves her baby at home to act like this? Is this the definition of modern motherhood?”

  The camera pans to one of Patricia Faith’s guests: an older man with unblinking black eyes and a graying goatee. “I’m happy to have with me Malcolm Jeders, the head of Calgary Church and a board member of Family America. And Elliott Falk of the Post. Thank you, gentlemen, for being here. Malcolm, I want to start with you. What’s your take on this?”

  “A baby is missing, Patricia. That’s tragic. But if you ask me, the chickens are coming home to roost on this idea that women need to ‘have it all.’ What has that come to mean, exactly? That a few weeks after giving birth, they’re out at a bar, moms getting drunk, acting like they’re pledging a college sorority?”

  “The Jolly Llama,” Patricia says. “Or more like the Jolly Mama.” She smirks at the camera, a clever eyebrow raised over the frames of her bright orange reading glasses. “I agree. Nobody is going to argue that women need to be home rolling meatballs all day. But if I had a child—a newborn no less—would I leave that baby to go out to a bar? No sir. When my mother had her first child, her only priority was that baby, and it stayed that way until her youngest started kindergarten. She never would have—”

  Four young women carrying paper bowls overflowing with salad noisily take a seat at the table next to Nell, drowning out the sound of the television. Nell picks up her tray and walks to a booth in the corner, under a larger TV, the words in closed caption on the bottom of the screen. Patricia Faith turns to her other guest. “Elliott Falk, nice seeing you again. The women pictured here with Winnie Ross—let’s call them the Jolly Mamas, for the sake of convenience. What do we know about them and their role that night?”

  “Well, Patricia, so far, the names of these women have not been released. But as we know, Winnie was out with her mommy group. This is a fairly new cultural phenomenon. Let me explain. Historically speaking, women have always depended on a circle of women to help them after giving birth. Of course, they didn’t sign up to join this circle. It happened naturally. It was their mothers, aunts, sisters. This still happens in the developing world. But today—”

  “Nell?” A woman stands at the table, holding a tray of food. Her hair is held back in a sleek ponytail, and her ID badge is turned so Nell can’t read her name. Nell’s mind races. They attended the same conference, shared a bottle of wine one night over a dinner in LA. “I haven’t seen you since you returned from maternity leave. When did you get back?”

  “Today.”

  “Oh, man. And how old’s the baby?”

  “Eight weeks.” Nell looks up at the television.

  The woman grimaces. “How’s it going?”

  “Great.”

  “Really? It’s great leaving your infant so you can come to work? I don’t believe you.” She takes the seat across from Nell. “My kid is eight months. I�
�m still plagued with guilt.”

  Nell nods and swallows hard. She’s not going to cry, not in the middle of the company café, not in front of this woman. (She plans to limit that to the fifteen minutes three times a day she’ll be spending on the toilet in the handicapped stall, staring at photos of Beatrice as she pumps milk.)

  The woman notices. “Oh, Nell. I’m sorry. It’ll get better.” She shakes a bottle of thick protein drink. “They’re supposed to give us a nursing room—”

  Nell sees it then. On another screen, in a bank of televisions across the room. The face of former secretary of state Lachlan Raine. He’s taking questions from reporters outside his lake home in Vermont, his expression somber. Nell knows that look too well: the slow shake of the head, the practiced expression of remorse.

  “I have to go.” Nell picks up the tray, her lunch untouched. “I have a meeting in a few minutes.”

  “Okay. You should know, there’s a group of new moms at the company that meets—”

  Nell feels lightheaded as she slides the tray beside the others on the metal cart near the garbage cans. A small crowd is gathered at the elevator bank, holding iced coffee drinks and plastic to-go containers. She walks past them into the stairwell, taking the stairs two at a time to the sixth floor. Her cell phone rings as she shuts her office door.

  A wave of relief washes over her when she sees the number. It’s only Francie.

  “Colette and I are here,” she says. “We raced to Colette’s apartment. Hang on. I’m going to put you on speaker.”