The Perfect Mother

by Aimee Molloy

  “Everyone?” Francie says. “Or Winnie?”

  He cocks his head. “Winnie? What do you mean?”

  “I mean maybe you don’t miss her. Maybe you’ve been seeing her since that night. Maybe you know more than you’re letting on.” Francie can’t deny how exhilarated she feels, looking him in the eye, speaking the words out loud.

  He folds his arms at his chest and leans against one of the dining chairs. He seems unsure of what to say.

  “Not only that, but you seem a little obsessed with her.” She plants both feet on the ground and places her napkin and the ice pack on the coffee table. “I’m going to come out and say it. We know all about you.”

  Francie swears she sees his jaw muscles clench. “You know about me?”

  “Yes. Your arrest. Your criminal record. That ring a bell?”

  “My record?”

  “Yeah, that’s right.” She pauses. “So what did you do?”

  A slow smile spreads across his face. “You know all about me, so why don’t you tell me.”

  “Well, that part I don’t know. Nell tried to find out, but she didn’t succeed.”

  “Nell tried to find out?”

  “Yes.”

  “How’d she do that?” The panic she thought she’d seen in his face is replaced by something else. Anger.

  “I’m not exactly sure, to be honest. She knows how to hack into things. She looked you up. Got into your May Mothers profile.” As soon as the words come out, Francie questions saying them. Maybe it’s not wise to rat out Nell like that, but she’s feeling flustered by the self-righteous tone of his voice, by the way he’s looking at her. She straightens her back, prepared to demand an explanation of why he left the bar that night, where he went, what he’s hiding. But before she can, he’s walking toward her.

  “You’ve all been looking into me? Digging around, have you?”

  “Yes, but—”

  But before she can get the rest of the words out, he’s above her, reaching out, his hand gripped around her wrist, lifting her roughly from the couch.

  The baby wails in his arms, and he shushes more loudly, feeling the anger rising inside him. Autumn’s heat rash is making her extra fussy; the doctor said it’s the result of too much time in the sling in this heat—it’s been in the nineties the last three days—but it’s the only way she’ll nap, and he needs her to nap so he can have a break.

  He goes into the kitchen, dropping the entire loaf cake into the garbage can, seeing the expression on Francie’s face, how scared she looked when he led her to the door, shoving her into the hallway. He balances the baby on his shoulder and turns the faucet on, the steam rising as he rinses the plate. He miscalculated, thinking he could trust these women. That he could join their group, try to fit in with them, to think—

  He slowly inhales, trying to compose himself. He needs sleep. He was awake most of last night, thinking about Winnie, about the message she left him yesterday morning, before the news broke, telling him they’d found Hector’s body. He hasn’t been able to get in touch with her—she’s not answering his calls—and he’s unsure what to do. He turns off the water and reaches for a towel in the cabinet under the sink. As he does, he thinks he hears steps outside his apartment. He walks into the living room, listening. Someone is at the door, twisting a key into the lock.

  “Sweetheart, hi.” Dorothy drops her bag on the floor near the front door. “My god, it’s hot out today. They said it’s a record high—” She stops when she notices the expression on his face and then walks closer to him, hugging him, Autumn between them. “You okay?”

  He nods, calmed by her familiar scent, her arms around his back. “I completely forgot you were coming.”

  She pulls back and takes his face in her hands, studying his eyes. “Is today still good?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing, Mom. Don’t worry. I’m just tired.”

  “How’s Lucille’s trip going?” Dorothy asks, removing her sandals and setting them beside the door before coming to take Autumn from his arms.

  “It got extended.” He walks into the kitchen, placing the coffee mugs in the sink. “She won’t be back until tomorrow now. But it sounds like it’s going well.” He’s glad Dorothy can’t see his face. She’d know he’s lying.

  Lou had called last night from LA, saying her last meeting was postponed a day. He knows that’s not the truth, that she’s staying behind to have one more night with him. Cormac. The fucking boss. The jerk with the CrossFit membership and a personal driver. It’s been a year since he found their e-mails, scrolling through her phone while she showered, searching for the dentist’s number.

  The pet names. The meeting places.

  Lou swore it was only a fling, that she’d already ended things. That she was ready to do what he’d been after her about: start trying for a baby.

  “Is my granddaughter ready for Grandma Day?”

  Dorothy took Autumn on her first Grandma Day when she was just twenty-three days old. Lou had returned to work already. She’d been in the process of closing a major deal when her water broke two weeks before the C-section she’d scheduled, and she wasn’t happy about taking off before the account had wrapped up. She said she was going to the office for only a few hours that first day, but she didn’t come home until 9:30 p.m., and she’s been back to working sixty hours a week ever since. Or she said she was at work.

  “You think you should cut back?” he asked Lou a few weeks ago, his voice tinged with fury, letting her know he wasn’t going to keep playing along with the charade. “You know, on all of this work?”

  She bristled and walked out of the room. “And how am I supposed to do that?” she called from their bedroom. “If we didn’t have my income . . .”

  “You sure you’re okay?” his mother asks him now, walking into the living room, Autumn in her arms. She is dressed in a crisp cotton dress with yellow daisies.

  “I’m fine, Mom. Really.”

  “Okay.” She straps Autumn into the stroller.

  “Did you buy her that dress?”

  “I can’t help myself.” Dorothy walks close to touch his cheek. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m not sure yet.”

  “Sleep, I hope.”

  “Yeah, probably.” He kisses her forehead. “Thanks, Mom.”

  He closes the door and waits a few moments before walking into the bedroom, where he opens the drawer of the bedside table and pulls out the envelope. He peeks inside, making sure the papers are still there, and then slips on his sneakers at the window, confirming his mother is out of sight before leaving.

  He knows exactly where he’s headed and he walks fast, before he can second-guess himself. Fuck Nell, he thinks. Fuck Francie, following him this morning, “hiding” behind that car, watching him drink his coffee at The Spot. Fuck all of them. When he arrives at Winnie’s building ten minutes later, he sees that the number of journalists waiting outside has dwindled, many of them no doubt headed upstate to report on the progress of the search.

  He keeps his distance, standing across the street, his eyes hidden behind his sunglasses, noticing that dozens of new Sophie giraffes have been added since yesterday, reading the latest messages to Midas—Praying for Baby Midas. BRING MIDAS HOME—tacked to the silver linden tree in front of Winnie’s building. He glances up at Winnie’s windows, picturing what’s happening behind the thick silk curtains. He imagines Mark Hoyt in the kitchen, crouching on bended knees next to the island, inspecting a small spot that will turn out to be marinara sauce splashed onto the tile floor ten days earlier; the forensic experts running latex fingers across the windowpane in Midas’s room, roaming slowly through Winnie’s bedroom, checking, once again, the door to the terrace. He looks at the door, remembering the first time he entered that bedroom.

  He turns away from the building and takes the folded envelope from his pocket. It appeared in his mailbox two days earlier. He still does
n’t know who sent it, or why, and he’d planned to ignore the papers inside, sure that whoever was behind this had only bad intentions.

  He crosses the street and approaches Elliott Falk, who is leaning against the shaded hood of a maroon Subaru, smoking a cigarette.

  “You want a story?”

  Falk exhales a stream of smoke. “Probably. What’s it about?”

  “The night Midas was taken. The woman in the photograph that Patricia Faith released. The drunk one, at the Jolly Llama.”

  Falk’s eyes glimmer. “What about her?”

  “Her name is Nell Mackey.”

  “Nell Mackey?”

  “Yeah. And you need to look into her.”

  “Look into her? How come?”

  He hands the envelope to Falk. “She’s not who she says she is.”

  Falk flicks the cigarette into the street and pulls out the papers. He lets out a low whistle as he reads what’s inside. “Wow, man, thanks.”

  He tries to respond, but the words are caught in his throat as he turns and walks away, toward the park, his eyes cast toward the ground, a hard pit of shame in his chest.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Day Ten

  To: May Mothers

  From: Your friends at The Village

  Date: July 14

  Subject: Today’s advice

  Your baby: Day 61

  Not to alarm you, but you should start to pay attention to the shape of your baby’s skull. While “back is best” is the preferred method of sleeping, too much time on her back can cause your little one to develop a soft spot, known as positional plagiocephaly. You can address this by making sure she’s getting the required amount of tummy time a day. If the flat spot seems pronounced, be sure to talk to your doctor.

  “Ellen! Ellen! Give us a smile!”

  “Ellen, do you know what happened to Midas?”

  Sebastian blocks their cameras with his arm, pushing roughly through the crowd, shielding Nell.

  “Any comment on the photo of you at the Jolly Llama? How drunk were you and Winnie that night?”

  “You look great, Ellen! What do you think of Lachlan Raine’s Nobel nomination this morning?”

  Nell grasps Sebastian’s hand, stunned by the flash of the cameras and the constant whir of their shutters. She ducks into the back seat and Sebastian closes the door, waving good-bye from the sidewalk, as she gives the driver the address of her office. He glances in the rearview mirror as she holds her purse in front of the window to obstruct their view, her sunglasses cloudy with tears. “You an actress or something?”

  “No. Please go,” she pleads.

  As they pull away from the curb, the screen on the seat back springs to life, tuned in to a morning program. Three women sit at a table, coffee mugs at their elbows, their faces amused. Nell hates these asinine TVs, recently installed in the back seat of every taxi. How is it, she wonders, that people are too afraid to be alone with themselves to endure even one goddamn car ride through New York City without the distraction of inane “entertainment”? She hears her mother’s voice last night on the phone. Breathe, Nell. Everything is going to be okay.

  Nell reaches to silence the television, just as she hears her name.

  “Ellen Aberdeen is back in the news this morning,” says one of the women, her hair bleached Barbie blond, her forehead as still as glass. “Last night it was reported by Elliott Falk at the New York Post that Aberdeen, now thirty-seven, is living in Brooklyn, working at the Simon French Corporation. She’s going by the name Nell Mackey. I guess she’s gotten married.”

  One of the other women chuckles. “That must have been an awkward first date. ‘Aren’t you the one from the Aberdeen affair?’”

  “Can we hang on a minute, please,” the third woman says, raising a hand in protest. “She was a twenty-two-year-old intern. He was the sixty-six-year-old secretary of state, and a candidate for president. Why have we named this affair for her?”

  A photograph bursts onto a wide screen behind their table: the image of Nell from that night at the Jolly Llama. “There’s more,” the first woman says. “You’ll never believe this, but she’s the woman who was at the bar the night—”

  Nell hits the mute button, pressing her eyes with her fists, feeling the panic swell inside her. No, no, no. Please don’t let this be happening again.

  A photograph of Nell and Secretary of State Raine comes next—the original photograph: the two of them on the fire escape, a bottle of tequila between them, Nell’s bare feet resting on his thigh. Then others, the same photos that decorated the front pages of newspapers and magazines around the world fifteen years ago. Nell, standing beside her mother on the day she graduated from Georgetown. Alone in the back seat of a taxi, after the news of the affair broke, the hunted look in her eyes on the cover of Gossip!

  She descends into the darkness, allowing the memories to flow. The lingering regret that she’d fallen for it—for the way Lachlan spoke to her, the way he looked at her the first time they met, when he went down the line, shaking hands with the new interns. The gifts he left in the top drawer of the desk she was given down the hall from his office, beginning a few weeks after she started working for him, after being awarded the State Department internship. She’d applied for it on a whim during her last year at Georgetown, which she’d attended on scholarship. That was the only way she ever could have gotten there. With the money her mom and stepdad made, they never could have afforded the tuition.

  “You did it, Ellen,” her mother had said when Nell called to tell her she’d been chosen from more than eight thousand applicants. “There’s no limit to what you’ll do, I know it.”

  It started with a rare coin from his recent trip to India. Then it was a jewelry box, with a note attached saying he’d seen it in a store window in Paris and thought of her; that he couldn’t help but notice how the peridot jewels on the lid matched her eyes. Finally, it was a thin, gold necklace, hung with a pendant E.

  For Ellen, that card read. I’ll be at the office late tonight. Stop by around 8.

  There were plenty of reasons to say no. He was three times her age. He had a wife and four daughters, his oldest just one year younger than Nell. Kyle, her kind, devoted boyfriend of four years, had recently proposed. But Nell didn’t say no. Lachlan had recently announced that he was running for president. She was twenty-two, afraid of not following his instructions, curious about what he wanted.

  He was at his desk when she knocked, inviting her inside, telling her to close the door, that he needed help trying to figure out how to print to the new network. He was casual, charming, laughing at his embarrassing lack of technical skills; he was about to order in Indian food, did she like shrimp korma? They ate on the floor, leaning against his desk as armed men in dark suits with the Diplomatic Security Service shuffled back and forth outside the closed door. Raine gave her a taste of his rice pudding and told her stories of being on the mall for the “I Have a Dream” speech, of his recent meeting with the British prime minister, how they’d shared two bottles of wine over dinner and fallen asleep afterward in the private theater at 10 Downing Street, watching Zoolander.

  The Nose. That’s what they called her after their short affair was revealed, after a high school student sold the photograph he’d taken from his roof—Nell and Lachlan sitting on her fire escape. Kyle was away that night, and Nell said yes when Lachlan offered her a ride home in the back of an unmarked sedan. She said yes again when he invited himself inside for a few minutes. “It’s always so interesting to see how young people like you live these days,” he said as he walked through her small apartment in Dupont Circle, unwinding his tie.

  She can still see Kyle’s face, the look in his eyes when she returned home the evening the photograph appeared on the front page of the Washington Post. Kyle sat at their small dining table in the kitchen, sipping bourbon. Beside him on the floor was a suitcase. Hers.

  “You have to leave.”

  “No, please. Can we ta
lk—”

  He held up his hand. “Ellen, stop. I don’t want to hear it.” His eyes were filled with disgust when he looked at her. “Here? In our bedroom?”

  “No,” she said. “Never. It happened just once. I didn’t know how to say—”

  “I don’t want to hear it. It’s over with us.”

  She sat down across from him. “But, Kyle. The wedding invitations. They just went out.”

  “My mom has started calling people, telling them it’s off.” Kyle finished his drink, walked calmly to the sink, and washed his glass. He set it in the drying rack and then took his coat from the hook near the door. “I talked to Marcy. She said you can stay there. Be gone by the time I get back.”

  She was let go from the internship three days later, which she learned when a reporter called, asking her for a comment; one of the same reporters who’d called her a home wrecker. A slut. A chunky girl with a big nose and a daddy complex, with not an ounce of concern for this man’s wife. Priscilla Raine stood beside her husband at the press conference, stoic as she listened to him express his regret to the American public, his voice full of false contrition; as he went on to admit that he’d been weak, insinuating that Nell had seduced him—that she’d called him “handsome” and offered to work late. Raine draped his arm around Priscilla’s thin shoulders, explaining that he’d asked his family for forgiveness, that he was spending time with his minister, that he’d begun to seek treatment for alcohol, and that he would no longer pursue the presidency of the United States. They—the media, the pundits, the gossip magazines—all claimed Nell had bragged to her friends about the affair, saying Lachlan was going to leave Priscilla to be with her. Nell had never said that. She never thought that. Not an ounce of her wanted that.

  Honking interrupts her thoughts, and Nell realizes it’s coming from her taxi. The driver leans out his window, waving his fist at a young man on a bike. “Move over! What is wrong with you?” The smell of a garbage truck three cars ahead of them consumes the taxi.