by Aimee Molloy
“No,” Francie says and holds up her mug. “My tea is cold. Can I have another?”
“I suppose.” I lift Joshua to my shoulder and step over Colette and back into the kitchen.
“So, you and Joshua are moving to Westchester?” Francie asks as I light the burner. “That’ll be nice.”
“Westchester? I wouldn’t be caught dead in Westches—” But then I remember. “That was also a lie. God, I’m terrible. I’m not sure where we’re going. My mom has been dead for years and god knows I’d never stay with my dad. We were upstate for a few days, at Winnie’s house, but we can’t go back there.”
Francie’s eyes are wide. “Wait. Do you mean—”
“That Winnie knew about it? Of course not. But you can find anything on the Internet if you’re willing to look hard enough. Like Daniel’s mug shot. Or your real identity, Nell, if you have a flair for remembering faces and access to Lexus Nexus. The address of Winnie Ross’s country home upstate was right there in the police report of her mother’s death. I was sure there’d be no way she’d hide a key, but lo and behold. Under the flowerpot. The same place my mom used to hide ours.” I feel a dark wave passing over me, thinking about those four quiet days with Joshua, how peaceful they were. “We’d still be there, if it were up to me. But then Hector came to mow the lawn and screwed everything up.”
“Hector.” Francie’s expression is severe. “Scarlett, you didn’t—”
“I had to. He saw us. I couldn’t believe it when he walked into the kitchen as I was scrambling eggs for breakfast. ‘You’re supposed to be in Brooklyn,’ I said. I’d been watching him. After the journalists dragged their darkened souls back home, Hector would arrive at Winnie’s. Bring her groceries. Straighten up her house. He wasn’t supposed to go upstate—that wasn’t in my plan. But he did, and he had to pay the price, and now, so does Winnie.”
I walk to close the door to the terrace, to drown the sound of sirens splicing the air. I take Francie’s mug and return to the kitchen, pouring the boiling water over a fresh tea bag. “I’m being honest when I say this, but I really didn’t want Winnie to go to jail. That unfortunate woman has been through enough. I tried to place the blame on others. You know how many times I called that police line, offering tips? The white guy on the bench. The sex offender down the block. Alma. Poor thing. Won’t be long until she’s deported.” I place the kettle back on the stove, and then suddenly I hear a commotion behind me. Nell is sliding the boxes aside, and Francie is fumbling for the lock. Before I can make sense of what’s happening, Daniel is there, forcing the door open.
“Daniel!” I say. “I knew I heard someone knocking earlier. You’re late.”
“I’ve been texting you,” he says to Francie. “I saw her coming. I’ve been trying to get in the building, but—” He stops talking, noticing Colette on the floor. His face goes pale.
“Daniel,” Francie says, quietly. “She has Midas.”
He is studying me, a peculiar expression on his face. When he approaches, he seems so big all of a sudden. I feel the light changing around us: a grayness shadowing the room, like clouds rolling across the sun. My legs give out and I reach for the counter, cradling Joshua’s head. I haven’t felt this out of sorts since my first trimester.
“You took Midas?” Daniel says to me.
“His name is Joshua.”
“Joshua?”
“Daniel, please don’t stand so close to me,” I say. “Go sit down. There’s beans.”
Francie is beside him then. “Scarlett, we just want to help. You’ve had a long day. Just you and the baby.”
“I have,” I say. “It’s hard.”
“I know.” Francie places a hand on Joshua’s back. “It is. It’s hard.”
I look at Daniel, and despite the hardened look on his face, I feel a wave of sadness for him. “It must be so much harder for you. Trying to do this as a guy.” I manage a laugh. “I know. Educated, wealthy white guy. Boo-hoo. The burden of it. But really, being a stay-at-home dad? That can’t be easy.”
“Give me the baby,” Daniel says. He grips my arm. His skin is smooth, his fingers strong, just as I’ve imagined his hands would feel on a woman’s body.
“No, I won’t give you the baby,” I say. “You have your own.” The sirens have grown louder and my back is pressed to the wall and there are footsteps on the stairs. Maybe it’s Gemma, or Yuko, with her yoga mat, arriving late again. But then the door is knocked open and men in black shirts are rushing into the room.
Francie is saying Midas’s name, and Daniel has his hands on Joshua. There’s so much shouting, and I can’t make sense of what’s happening.
I smell rain.
I’m in the stairwell, lumbering down the steps, belly first to the sidewalk, praying for the car service to hurry up and arrive. I feel the pain gripping my back, and see the look on the taxi driver’s face. The liquid seeps from me and I’m lying on the hospital bed, wishing Dr. H was here. Grace, the nurse, tells me to breathe.
I feel the pain and the darkness, and I know that something is wrong. Something is terribly wrong. I know that I’m going to lose Joshua. Again.
“Wait!” I yell. Francie is holding my arms, and Daniel is wresting Joshua away from me. “I can’t let you take him. Let me see his face. I want to see what he looks like!”
“Hands above your head,” Grace screams. But it’s not Grace. It’s a police officer.
“Please don’t wash him off. I want to hold him. Skin-to-skin contact immediately after the birth.” I feel the pressure, squeezing my chest. “It’s critical.”
“Hands above your head!” Grace says, louder, her gun a straight line to my heart.
I put my hands on the wall and close my eyes.
Closure.
My fingers spider the wall, and I reach for the knife hanging from the magnetic strip. I feel the slick, cold metal of the blade and wind my fingers around the handle, pulling, aware of the magnetic fields splitting, breaking free from one another.
The sensation stays with me as I hear Francie scream; as I see the glint of light where the blade has caught a thin ray of sun streaming through the terrace window.
I close my eyes, and just before the knife meets my skin, I call for him one last time.
Joshua.
Epilogue
One Year Later
To: May Mothers
From: Your friends at The Village
Date: July 4
Subject: This week’s advice
Your toddler: Fourteen months
In honor of the holiday, today’s advice is about independence. Do you notice that your formerly fearless little guy is suddenly afraid of everything when you’re out of sight? The friendly dog next door is now a terrifying beast. The shadow on the ceiling has become an armless ghoul. It’s normal for your toddler to begin to sense danger in his world, and it’s now your job to help him navigate these fears, letting him know he’s safe, and that even if you’re out of sight, Mommy will always be there to protect him, no matter what.
Winnie puts on her sunglasses and stuffs her short hair under a baseball cap before stepping into the small garden. She crosses the street quickly, her head bent toward the ground against the wind.
A man in a top hat is standing in front of an amplifier at the entrance to the park, a marionette strung from each hand, a line of children sitting at attention in front of him, their faces slack with awe. A gust of wind blows the hat from his head, and Winnie turns away from the crowds, heading in the opposite direction, down the sidewalk toward the break in the stone wall. She steers the stroller over the pebbles and under the arch, and when she mounts the hill and enters the wide lawn, she slows, surveying the crowd. Two young women in bikini tops lie on their stomachs, laughing at something, iced coffees in their hands, sections of the New York Times strewn on the grass in front of them. A soccer game is under way nearby, dozens of shirtless men running in the rising dust, yelling to one another in Creole. Winnie spots them in the dis
tance, where they said they’d be—on blankets under their willow tree.
She walks across the lawn, averting her eyes from the flowering dogwood on her left, under which a dozen or so people are gathered; red, white, and blue balloons bob from strings tied to the legs of a plastic table. She sees herself under that tree—her mother’s tree—a year ago. She hasn’t returned to the park since that night when she made her way here, twenty minutes after leaving the Jolly Llama, walking aimlessly at first through the deserted streets, and then with purpose. The mosquitos circled and the oppressive heat of that July night bore down on her as she sat cross-legged, her back against the knotty trunk, writing her mother a letter.
It’s a practice she kept for years, coming here with the leather-bound notebook she found the night of Audrey’s death, wrapped in silver paper and left on the dining room table when her mom ran out to buy ice cream. The inscription on the front page, written in Audrey’s delicate script, has mostly faded: Today you may turn eighteen, but you will always be my baby. Happy birthday, Winnie.
The notebook is nearly filled, with long letters Winnie has written to her mother any time she had something she needed to share: that she’d quit Bluebird, and she and Daniel had broken up. That she’d used some of the family money to set up a foundation for young dancers. That Archie Andersen was in jail, finally, the same week her father died from a heart attack during a business trip to Spain. It was also under the dogwood that Winnie wrote Audrey two years earlier, letting her know she’d done it: she’d found the right sperm donor. She was going to have a baby.
She hadn’t initially planned to come to her mother’s tree the night Midas was taken, but as soon as Alma arrived, she knew she’d much rather be alone than at a crowded bar. After stealing into Midas’s room and kissing her sleeping son good-bye, she’d taken the notebook from the shelf. Later that night, as the sky sparkled with fireworks from the crowd across the lawn, she cried as she wrote under the light of a nearby park lamp about what an easy baby he was. About the way he smelled and how small he felt in her arms and that his eyes were just like Audrey’s, so much so that when he looked at her sometimes, Winnie thought she was looking at her mother.
A group of people nearby break into “Happy Birthday,” and Winnie sees that Nell is waving from under the willow tree. Winnie picks up her pace, trying to shut out the memory of that night, and it’s only when she approaches their blanket that she realizes she was wrong. She doesn’t know these women.
“Hi,” one says. “Can we help you?”
“Winnie!” Francie is gesturing from the next tree. “Over here.” Behind her, Colette and Nell are spreading gift-wrapped boxes on a blanket. Beatrice, Poppy, and Will dig in the dirt nearby.
“I’m sorry,” Winnie says to the women as Francie walks over, her new daughter Amelia, two weeks old, asleep inside the Moby Wrap at Francie’s chest.
“You’re here,” Francie says. Winnie detects the relief in Francie’s voice. “I’m really glad you came.”
Winnie follows her to the blankets. “We lost our tree,” Colette says, smiling up at her.
“Replaced by younger women,” says Nell. “Good thing none of us have any experience of what that feels like.” She shakes her head at Colette, who is pulling napkins and plates from a bag. “For the fifth time, would you let me do that?”
Colette waves away Nell’s hands. “I can lift napkins,” she says. “In fact, Poppy and I both had our last physical therapy appointments yesterday. She’s exactly where she should be, and”—she places her palm on her side, over the site of the wound—“I’m getting closer to feeling like myself again.”
Francie is watching Winnie. “You doing okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“Yeah? You getting out of the house?”
On the paved path beyond the trees, a couple flashes by on Rollerblades. “A little.”
Colette pops open the lid of a large cake container.
“You got a cake with an . . . orange square?” Nell asks her.
“It’s supposed to be a house.” Colette licks icing from her finger. “I made it myself.”
“You’re kidding. I never would have guessed.”
“It’s gorgeous,” Francie says. “That house is pretty much drawn to scale. Lowell keeps telling people it’s a three-bedroom we bought, but unless he thinks someone is sleeping in a closet, he’s exaggerating. It’s so nice of you guys to do this for me.” She pulls a napkin from the stack. “These hormones. I’ve forgotten how emotional everything feels with a newborn.” She blows her nose. “I’m going to miss you guys.”
Nell laughs. “Francie, you were born to move to Long Island. You’ll be the mayor of that town by Christmas. Although at the rate you’re going, you’ll probably be a mother of six by then.”
“Out, Mama.” Midas is looking up at Winnie, squirming under the restraint of the straps and pointing at the other children. Winnie unbuckles him, and he slides to the ground, running to join them in the dirt.
Colette doles out the cake, and they eat in silence for a few moments. “I don’t know if we want to talk about this,” Colette says. “But I’d rather get it out of the way. I watched the show last night.”
“I thought you would,” Nell says. “So did I.” She glances at Winnie. “Are we talking about this?”
Winnie smiles. “It’s okay.” She watched it too: Baby Midas: A Tale of Mayhem and Modern Motherhood, with Patricia Faith. A two-hour prime-time special, aired on the anniversary of Midas’s abduction.
Daniel showed up at her place late yesterday afternoon with a bag of hamburgers and a six-pack. “I don’t know if you want to watch it,” he said. “But if you do, I’ll stay and watch it with you.”
She knew most of the details already. Mark Hoyt paid a visit to her house a few days after Midas came home, and told her everything that Scarlett had admitted to. The stillbirth. How, after coming home from the hospital, she’d spend hours sitting in her darkened apartment, watching Winnie through binoculars, fantasizing that Midas was her baby. How she’d lied and told the May Mothers that Winnie had confessed to feeling depressed, and had paid a young locksmith $300 to get inside Winnie’s car, claiming it was hers, stuffing Midas’s baby blanket into the tire well.
“She interviewed Scarlett,” Colette says. “It’s heartbreaking.”
Francie stops chewing. “You’re kidding. I couldn’t bear to turn it on.”
“She visited her in prison. Scarlett’s still being held in the psychiatric ward, and yet they allowed Patricia Faith to sit her down in front of cameras for an hour. Patricia Faith, apparently, made a sizable donation to the prison.”
Nell shakes her head. “Does Scarlett not have anyone looking out for her?”
“I’m doing my best not to think about it anymore,” Francie says. “All during Amelia’s birth, I kept picturing her. Can you imagine? Lying there, not knowing what’s happening. Where they’ve taken your baby. And then being told—”
“No,” Colette says. “I can’t.”
“When they handed Amelia to me, I kept asking the nurses, Is she okay? Is she breathing? They had to tell me several times that she was fine. It was only then that I allowed myself to believe that she was real.”
“She told Patricia Faith her biggest regret is that she survived the stab wound, that day we found Midas.” Colette’s gaze is on the circle of new moms under the willow tree. “And that she used to take that doll to playgrounds and music classes, keeping it in the stroller. Nobody ever noticed.”
Winnie moves the cake around on her plate with her fork.
Do you ever feel delusional, Winnie?
Ever have any visions of hurting yourself?
We’ve looked at your medical records. You suffered from severe anxiety after your mom died. We hate to ask you this, Winnie, but have you ever thought about hurting Midas?
“I couldn’t watch the whole thing,” Nell says. “Those stories about her abusive father. And that therapist that got
her pregnant? What a horrible human being.”
They kept telling her to go out—the May Mothers, Daniel, the pediatrician—everyone arguing that it would be good for her to have a break from taking care of Midas for a few hours. But she didn’t want a break. “I found this app for your phone,” Daniel said, over sandwiches in the park the day before. “It’s called Peek-a-Boo! You can keep an eye on him. I think they’re right, Winnie. You could use a break.”
But then she left the phone on the table, her key inside. A deep swell of regret builds inside of her. She closes her eyes, seeing herself at the bar, ordering another iced tea. Lucille had called Daniel, saying Autumn wouldn’t stop crying and he needed to come home, and then that guy approached, leaning in too close, resting his hand on her waist. His rancid breath, the punch of the music, the pressing crowd of young men and women.
She needed to get out of there.
She knew. She was leaning against the tree, the notebook in her lap, watching the fireworks across the lawn, when she heard the police sirens. She knew, the same way she’d known the moment she looked in the eyes of that policeman who’d appeared at her front door twenty years earlier.
“Something’s happened.”
She searched for her phone in her purse, frantic, needing to hear from Alma that Midas was okay. She can feel the sting in her heels, her shoes chafing her skin, as she climbed the stony path, sprinting down the sidewalk, the sound of her feet on the pavement thunderous inside her head. The door was open and the police were there and Alma was sobbing, and then they were asking her questions. Where was she? Had anyone seen her leave the bar? Did anyone, as far as she knew, want to hurt Midas?
“Anyway,” Colette says, “enough of that. I brought you all something.” She takes three spiral-bound stacks of paper from her bag and hands one to each of them. “My novel.”
Nell snatches one. “You finished?”
