Goodnight Nobody

by Jennifer Weiner

  Not that the Tal-bots, as I sometimes called them, were empty-headed, muffin-baking Martha Stewart clones. Marybeth Coe, prior to Powell and his big sister Peyton, had been a bond trader. Carol Gwinnell had managed an art gallery in SoHo. Heather Leavitt had been in the arbitrage department at Goldman Sachs before retreating into the wonderful world of cloth diapers, handcrafted wooden toys, pesticide-free snacks, and scheduling every second of her children's lives for maximum enrichment. Preschoolers in Upchurch took tumbling classes and ice-skating lessons. They went to craft circles and learned tennis. They studied at least one instrument and two languages apiece. The girls went to dance class, the little boys played T-ball, and all children of both genders played soccer (with practice twice a week and games every Saturday) through the fall and the spring.

  The parents behaved as if this were perfectly natural, as if, in fact, this were the only way they could imagine raising their young. I couldn't figure out why. Maybe after they'd delivered their babies, a malevolent lactation consultant had sprinkled Super-Mommy dust onto their pillows, or had bent and whispered into each sleeping ear, From now on, the only thing you will care about is breast-feeding, toilet training, Mommy and Me Pilates mat classes, and whether the kindergarten's better at Greentown Friends or Upchurch Country Day.

  I didn't stand a chance. Even if I'd only had one child on which to lavish my energies and intellect, even if I were thin and pretty and motivated enough to do my makeup plus an hour of exercise every morning, and my idea of a really good time were arranging eensy-weensy cubes of cut-up tofu in the shape of the Cyrillic alphabet at mealtime. Even if I had the kind of kids who lent themselves naturally to such an endeavor.

  The other Upchurch toddlers had never seen so much as a minute of television. They didn't have tantrums that made us late for school, or scream for Kentucky Fried Chicken, inevitably mispronounced as Kenfucky Fried Chicken, or occasion parent-teacher conferences because of their talent-show choices. Oh, well. I smoothed my pants and opened my door just as Lexi Hagen-Holdt pulled in beside me in her SUV, a brand-new model so high off the ground, and with so many oversized windows, that it looked like a mobile greenhouse. I looked at myself in the rearview mirror--chapped lips, shiny skin, unruly wavy brown hair, and too much excitement on my face. I tried to replace it with more appropriate sorrow before I opened the door.

  "Oh my God!" Lexi said in her hoarse voice, extracting Hadley from his car seat without a single scream or struggle with a recalcitrant bucker. "Did you hear?" She settled the toddler on one slim hip, tossed her streaked, straightened hair over her shoulder, and pulled her pristine diaper bag from the snack-cracker-free carpet beneath the car seat. "I watched the news for hours last night, and I still can't believe it!"

  Lexi walked briskly into the park, and I followed her as my kids scattered, the boys in the direction of the metal-and-plastic climbing structure and Sophie for the swings. I sat down on the bench that in my post-baby suburban life had replaced the popular girls' table in the cafeteria, a bench where I'd never dared sit before, and I waited until I was sure all the mothers could hear me before I ducked my head modestly and said, with just the right tremor in my voice, "I found her."

  "Oh, no," murmured Carol Gwinnell. I saw Sukie Sutherland and Marybeth Coe hurry over to the bench. Marybeth's eyes were red, and Sukie's hair was swept into a hasty ponytail.

  "Tell us everything," Lexi said, patting my shoulder sympathetically and almost certainly leaving bruises. Lexi wore what I'd come to think of as the Upchurch mommy uniform: a snug (but not slutty) long-sleeved T-shirt topped with a cardigan or a suede jacket; pressed, boot-cut wool trousers; shoes that were styled like sneakers but were made of suede and nylon mesh and cost about three hundred bucks.

  I took a deep breath. "Kitty called me Wednesday night to ask if I could bring the kids for lunch."

  "You two were friends?" asked Carol Gwinnell, her earrings jingling.

  I shook my head, wondering why she'd asked. These women saw me in the park or the library or the school parking lot every day. They had to know that Kitty hadn't been my friend any more than they were.

  "So why was she calling you?" asked Sukie Sutherland.

  "I don't know," I said, digging the toes of my grimy sneakers into a pile of crimson leaves. "I have no idea."

  There were more questions. The ladies wanted details. She was in the kitchen? On her front or her back? Was the door unlocked? Had anything been stolen? How did she look? Had the police said anything? Were there any leads? Was this a random crime, or someone with a grudge? What were the police doing? Was the family offering a reward? And what about Kitty's daughters?

  "They're at my house," said Sukie. Sukie and I had been struggling for cordiality ever since the day we'd met, when she'd told me her kids were named Tristan and Isolde, and I'd laughed, thinking she was kidding, and she wasn't. "Philip didn't think they should spend the night in the house where...you know." She tugged at her ponytail. "Where it happened. He's taking them to his parents' house tomorrow."

  "Do you know the Cavanaughs well?" I asked.

  Sukie shrugged. "We're neighbors, and the girls are in Tristan's class at Country Day."

  "Do you have any idea who could have..." I lowered my voice as I saw that all of our kids were within earshot. "You know."

  Sukie shook her head. Her big brown eyes were shiny. "The police talked to me, but I don't think I was much help. I bet," she murmured, flicking an invisible bit of lint from her long-sleeved pink T-shirt, "that it might have something to do with her job."

  "Wait..." said Carol.

  "What?" asked Lexi.

  "Kitty had a job?" I asked. This was a shocker. As far as I knew, none of the Upchurch mommies had jobs.

  "What was it?" asked Lexi, easing her shoulders in circles, probably already planning her afternoon workout. "What'd she do?"

  "She was a writer," Sukie said. "A ghostwriter."

  "For who?" I asked.

  "Do you guys ever read Content?" Sukie asked. Everyone nodded. So did I, even though the truth was that I didn't really read Content. My husband and I subscribed, as did practically every person I knew of a certain age, class, and degree of education. Every week I'd mean to read it, but the issues full of cutting-edge postmodern fiction written by twenty-three-year-olds, cartoons that required careful deliberation before you'd get the joke--provided there was one--and political exposes about countries I couldn't find on the map would end up stacked underneath the coffee table gathering dust until, in a fit of guilt, I'd toss them into the recycling bin. "You know that column 'The Good Mother'?"

  "Laura Lynn Baird's column?" I asked.

  "Laura Lynn Baird's byline," said Sukie. "Kitty was the one who actually wrote it." She smoothed her ponytail and looked at us. "It was all over the Internet this morning."

  Like I had time to get online. Like I could even remember where in the house my laptop was located.

  "I can't believe it," Marybeth Coe exclaimed. I couldn't either. Laura Lynn Baird was a conservative bomb-chucker, a telegenic blonde with a pageant queen's smile, a sailor's vocabulary, and politics that made Pat Buchanan look like a moderate. It had been big news when the normally left-leaning Content had hired her. "We're looking for writers to shake things up," the editor in chief, one Joel Asch, had told one of the morning news shows that Ben taped religiously and made me suffer through before we went to sleep. "Laura Lynn Baird is possessed of that rare combination: a fine mind and a witty, engaging voice," he'd said. He'd sounded, I'd thought at the time, mildly surprised to discover those two qualities coexisting in a woman.

  "The Good Mother" appeared every month, but I'd only read it once or twice because it made me so angry I could feel my blood pressure rising with each word. The good mother, according to Laura Lynn, was one who gratefully retreated to "the sanctuary of hearth and home" after the birth of her children and wouldn't venture forth again until her offspring had attained the age of majority. Laura Lynn was opposed to mothe
rs who "warehoused their children in day care," critical of "affluent, educated women, so-called feminists, bored with the routines of domestic life, hiring dark-skinned immigrants to care for their babies, mouthing platitudes about sisterhood while paying them under the table." As far as I knew, she hadn't yet expressed her opinion of mothers who hired the occasional sitter for a Saturday night, but I could bet that she wasn't a fan.

  "Kitty wrote that stuff?" I asked.

  Sukie nodded.

  "Did she believe it?"

  Sukie shrugged. "She wrote it. That's all I know."

  "Did anyone else know that Laura Lynn Baird has a ghostwriter? Before it hit the Internet?"

  Sukie's face was unreadable as she fiddled with the strap of her diaper bag. "I don't know," she said. "But the police asked me the exact same thing."

  The mommies murmured uneasily, digesting this surprise. I don't know whether they were more shocked to learn that Kitty had written for someone as infamous as Laura Lynn or that one of us had worked outside the house at all.

  "How is Philip?" asked Carol Gwinnell.

  "I saw him in the police station yesterday," I said. "He seemed pretty shaken up."

  "Well, why wouldn't he be?" asked Lexi.

  "Philip's lived in Upchurch forever," Sukie said.

  "Old family," said Carol Gwinnell.

  "He was the best-looking guy in my sister's class at Upchurch High," Sukie said with a little smile. "We actually dated a little bit. A million years ago."

  Lexi squinted toward the swing set, holding baby Brierly against her chest in a brightly colored handwoven Guatemalan sling. "Hadley?" she called. Her voice had an edge, and her rosy cheeks were more flushed than normal. "Hadley?" She swung around wildly. "He was right over by the slide a minute ago..."

  All of us got to our feet, and I looked around instinctively for my own brood, exhaling when I saw Sam and Jack bobbing up and down on a seesaw and Sophie singing to herself on a swing.

  "Mommy!" Hadley waved at his mother from the other side of the picket fence. Lexi sprinted across the playground and scooped her son into her arms.

  "Don't!" she said, hugging him hard. "Don't you scare me like that!"

  Hadley, who'd probably just wandered off to pick his nose in private, stared up at his mother, then burst into tears.

  "I thought you were lost!" Lexi said as Hadley wailed. We gathered around her, patting her back, telling her it was okay, that we were all safe, that everything would be fine. I don't think any of us believed it. Ten minutes later trick or treating had officially been canceled. We'd agreed to have a party at Carol's house instead, said our goodbyes, gotten into our air bag-equipped, steel-reinforced cars, and driven our children back home.

  Four

  My cell phone rang as I was tossing two bags of instant rice into the microwave.

  "Hello?"

  "Birdie?" The voice on the other end was tentative and quiet. My father, Roger Klein, had always been more confident with his instrument than with words. When he played his oboe, his tone was the purest I'd ever heard, but his voice could have belonged to a fourteen-year-old schoolboy with a crush. He still called me by my little-girl nickname, and it always made my heart melt a little.

  "Hi, Dad." I slammed the microwave door, hit the buttons, grabbed plates from the cupboard and paper napkins from the drawer, and looked into the family room, where the kids were happily entranced by Bob the Builder, and hopefully would be for another eighteen minutes.

  "How are you doing?" he asked. "Have they caught anyone yet?"

  I ripped open a bag of Shake 'n Bake. "Not that I know of."

  "Ten-ten WINS had a story about it. Her name was Kiki?"

  "Kitty," I said, cracking eggs one-handed. "Kitty Cavanaugh. And guess what? She was a ghostwriter for Laura Lynn Baird!"

  "Who?"

  I sighed and grabbed a package of chicken. "You know, she's one of those blond conservatives who's always shouting at someone on CNN. She's got a column in Content called 'The Good Mother,' and Kitty was the one who actually wrote it."

  Roger wasn't impressed. "Are you being careful?" he asked. "Are you using your alarm and locking the doors?"

  I slid the chicken into the oven, kicked the door with my foot, pulled the rice out of the microwave, and surveyed the refrigerator for a vegetable my kids might actually eat. "We're being careful, Dad. And I'm fine."

  "Do the police have any suspects?"

  "Not as far as I know. Maybe it was someone who was after Laura Lynn. People hated her."

  After we'd gotten home from the park, I'd planted the kids in front of a DVD, swallowed my guilt, and spent ten minutes online. My first Google query had yielded no fewer than ten thousand hits for Laura Lynn Baird. Some of them were approving posts from hard-core fans. Others--many, many others--were from weblogs and online magazines whose authors had actively and publicly wished for her demise. "Or maybe Laura Lynn's the killer. Every time I saw her on TV, she looked like she was two seconds away from biting somebody's ankle. Maybe Kitty got uppity," I guessed. "Maybe she said that she thought drug dealers should actually have trials before being sent to the electric chair."

  My father laughed. I considered a bag of baby carrots in the vegetable crisper. If I dumped enough ranch dressing on them, I might get lucky.

  "Listen, Kate," said my father. "I've got a concert tonight, but I could rent a car and drive up afterwards."

  And do what? I wondered, putting the dirty dishes into the sink. Use your oboe to beat murderers back from my door? "Nah, we're fine. Ben's coming back tomorrow afternoon."

  "Daddy's coming home!" cheered Jack and Sam, racing into the kitchen, wearing jeans and striped shirts from the Old Navy clearance rack, waving plastic swords at each other.

  "You should call your mother," my father said.

  "And where might I find Reina these days?"

  He cleared his throat. "Still in Torino. I faxed her the clippings about the murder, and I know she's worried too."

  Then why hasn't she called? I thought but didn't say. Instead, I promised I'd try ringing her in Italy when I had a free moment. I said goodbye, hung up, clicked Bob the Builder into oblivion over the boys' shrieks of protest, and supervised hand washing for dinner.

  Five

  The earliest thing I remember is my parents singing together. My father would be at the piano, which was draped with a lace scarf and covered with gold-framed pictures of the divas: Callas, Tebaldi, Nellie Melba, and my mother, of course. I'd be belly-down underneath the piano on the pink and ivory fringed rug, with my coloring books and my crayons. My mother would stand behind him, one hand resting on his shoulder. She'd sing Mozart arias with her heavy eyelids half-closed, pianissimo, the kind of vocalization, she told me, that was hardest for the soprano to master. Even when Reina sang softly, her voice was bigger than I could ever be, huge and rich and thrilling, a living thing that pushed at the walls and the ceilings and took up all the space in the room.

  I could feel her voice, and my father's admiration: love and lust. I couldn't name it at four years old, or six or eight, but by the time I was ten or so, I knew enough to slip out of the living room after the first song. I'd lock the door of my bedroom, flop facedown with my book, plug my headphones into my ears, and blast Blondie and Pat Benatar, but I could still hear them: the notes vibrating in the overheated air, and then the silence, more intimate than if I'd actually caught them doing it. "Mi chiamano Mimi," she would sing--her favorite aria, one she'd never performed, a part for a lyric soprano, not a coloratura, the ones who sing the highest parts and some of the showiest ones. Still, I knew, my mother dreamed of playing Mimi, of dying beautifully every night on stage. "Il perche non so."

  My mother, Reina, was born Rachel Danhauser in Kankakee, Illinois. She renamed herself when she moved to New York City at twenty-one with nothing but two hundred dollars and every recording Maria Callas had ever made. (She also had a full scholarship to Juilliard, but that's precisely the kind of detail my mot
her tends to leave out of her life story, especially when she's telling it to reporters.)

  My parents met at Juilliard, where my father was teaching and my mother was a graduate student. I've imagined the scene many times: my father, a thirty-six-year-old bachelor, hair already thinning, glasses perpetually askew over his mild brown eyes, having achieved as much fame and fortune as any oboe player can hope for, because while there are superstar singers, virtuoso violinists, millionaire pianists who play solo performances to sold-out concert halls around the world, there has never really been a breakout oboe player, unless you stretch and count Kenny G, which my father does not. And there was Reina, her five feet nine inches enhanced by three-inch heels, her hair a tumble of dark brown curls; towering, magnificent Reina, sheet music clutched to her chest, folding pointed crimson-painted nails into a fist and knocking at his rehearsal room door, asking, sweetly, if he could accompany her. (I can even imagine them consummating their love beneath a sign reading PLEASE DO NOT EMPTY YOUR SPIT VALVE HERE, but only after I've had a few drinks.)

  I was born the summer after my parents' first wedding anniversary, and after forty-eight hours in Lenox Hill Hospital, they brought me home, to the rent-controlled prewar apartment building on Amsterdam Avenue that, since time immemorial, had been inhabited almost exclusively by musicians. Leases were handed down like heirlooms. A bassoonist leaving for the Boston Symphony would bequeath his two-bedroom to the new second-chair cellist; a tenor departing for London would hand down his studio to the new assistant concertmaster at the Met.