Mommy Tracked

by Whitney Gaskell

  “Hey,” she said. “Have you heard anything?”

  Anna shook her head. “Not yet. Louis hasn’t been out in a while.”

  “Oh.” Chloe bit her lip and glanced at Juliet, who suddenly looked, oddly enough, angry. Her blue eyes had narrowed, and her lips were pressed tightly together. Two spots of color had appeared on her thin cheeks.

  “I, um, brought flowers,” Chloe said. “I thought Grace would like to have something pretty in her room when she wakes up. But the nurse back there said ICU patients can’t have flowers.”

  “Well, aren’t you just wonderful,” Juliet said coldly. “A regular Martha fucking Stewart.”

  Chloe felt the words like a slap. She stared at Juliet, trying to fathom the naked hostility on her friend’s face.

  “Juliet!” Anna said severely. “That’s not funny.”

  “Neither is writing an attack piece about someone you’re supposed to be friends with,” Juliet snapped.

  “An attack piece? Oh…oh.” Realization hit Chloe, and she felt her knees go wobbly. “Are you talking about the Mothering article?”

  “The Mothering article,” Juliet agreed, her voice scornful. “Forgot about that, did you?”

  “Actually, I did. Oh, Juliet, I’m so sorry. I…I wrote that months ago…before I got to know you. Before we became friends,” Chloe said in a small voice.

  “What are you two talking about?” Anna asked.

  “You know, Anna, the article. The one about working mothers. Haven’t you read it? You’re quoted in it too, although not quite the way I was,” Juliet said. “You see, I made a joke to Chloe about Patrick being my housewife—you know, Chloe, a joke, as in ha-ha—and Chloe quoted me as though I seriously meant it. And, on a related note, Patrick’s taken the kids and left me. So thanks for that.”

  “Wait—Patrick left?” Anna repeated, looking stunned.

  “Yesterday afternoon. He took the girls to his parents’ house.”

  Anna reached out to touch Juliet’s arm, but Juliet stood, and Anna’s hand fell limply back to her side.

  “Juliet, I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. I feel…awful,” Chloe said. She looked like she was about to be sick.

  “I don’t give a damn how you feel,” Juliet said. She looked at Anna. “I have to go. I have to get out of here.”

  “Juliet—” Anna began.

  “Call me if Grace’s condition changes,” Juliet said. And she turned and strode away.

  Chloe sat down shakily and buried her face in her hands. Anna patted Chloe on the back.

  “Shit,” Chloe said. “Shit, shit, shit. I forgot all about that stupid article.”

  “Was it bad?”

  Chloe lowered her hands, but kept her head bowed. “I didn’t misquote her. I swear I didn’t. I always record all of my interviews for just that reason. Juliet really did refer to Patrick as her ‘housewife,’” Chloe said. “And honestly, I didn’t know she was joking at the time. Now that I’ve gotten to know her better and I know what her sense of humor is like…but then…and when I wrote the article…” Chloe’s voice trailed off. “Oh, God, I really screwed up. Juliet’s never going to speak to me again.”

  “I’m sure she’ll calm down eventually,” Anna said, although she sounded uncertain. “She can’t stay mad forever.”

  “You don’t think?” Chloe asked hopefully.

  “Well…” Anna hesitated. “No one can stay mad forever, right?”

  Chloe groaned, and again covered her face with her hands.

  Chloe spent the afternoon at the hospital with Anna, getting infrequent updates from Louis and feeling completely helpless. Louis, who was pale with fear, kept running his hands through his thinning copper hair, vacillating between tearful desperation and manic optimism.

  “I’m going to get some coffee,” Louis said, when he came out into the waiting room at quarter to three.

  “I’ll get it for you,” Anna immediately volunteered.

  “No, that’s okay. The walk will do me good,” Louis said. “Would you mind going back and staying with Grace, though? In case…in case…” He took in a deep, ragged breath. “I don’t want her to be alone if she wakes up.” He pressed his lips together.

  “Of course,” Anna said.

  “Will they let us go back?” Chloe asked. She looked questioningly at the nurses’ station.

  Louis nodded. “The doctor said it would be okay for a few minutes. And I won’t be long.”

  Chloe had expected that she and Anna would be forced to stand out in the ICU hallway and look in at their friend through a glass window, like they did in the movies. So she was surprised when they were allowed to walk right in to Grace’s room. The hospital room was surprisingly small—much smaller than the suites on the Labor and Delivery floor—and it was filled with glowing, flickering machines grouped around the bed.

  I’d never be able to sleep with all of those lights blinking, Chloe thought, before remembering—and then she felt foolish and glad that she hadn’t spoken the words out loud.

  Because Grace wasn’t just asleep as she lay in the hospital bed, her eyes shut and her skin so pale it was almost waxy. But she did look peaceful. That was the only word for it. Her face was smooth and untroubled, and Chloe was suddenly—and absurdly—reminded of Princess Aurora in the old Disney classic cartoon Sleeping Beauty.

  She looks too peaceful, Chloe thought. In fact, Grace looked almost corpselike.

  Chloe heard Anna’s sharp intake of breath and then what sounded like a sob being swallowed back down. When she turned to look at Anna, Chloe wasn’t surprised to see tears slicking her friend’s cheeks.

  “This can’t be happening,” Anna said faintly, and Chloe reached out and silently took her hand. They stood there, hand in hand, and looked down at Grace until Louis returned with his coffee. Chloe was ashamed at how relieved she was to retreat back to the waiting room.

  “I have to get home,” Anna said sometime later, after glancing at her watch. “Charlie’s with my mom, but after last night I don’t want to be away from him for too long.”

  Over the course of the afternoon, Anna had filled Chloe in on the events of the previous night, and now Chloe nodded, understanding.

  “I should go too,” Chloe said, rising to her feet. James got flustered when she left him alone with William. He acted as though William were a very complicated piece of machinery that needed to be constantly monitored and recalibrated. Chloe had tried explaining to him that babies weren’t as fragile as they looked, and as long as James kept William fed, changed his diapers, and cuddled him when he cried, the baby would be fine.

  “I can’t wait until he’s older and more interactive,” James had said one night, when they were standing side by side in William’s nursery, gazing down at their sleeping baby. “And then we can go out and throw a ball around, and I’ll teach him to ride a bike and play golf.”

  “You don’t have to wait until he’s older to do things with him,” Chloe had said.

  “I don’t think I can find a golf club small enough for him to hold,” James teased.

  “Well, no, he can’t play golf yet,” Chloe conceded. “But you could just hang out with him. You know—talk or read to him, hold up toys for him to look at. That’s important too.”

  But James had just put his arm around her and planted a kiss on the top of her head before heading downstairs to watch SportsCenter. Chloe didn’t think he’d taken in a word she’d said. Or maybe he just didn’t want to hear her. He seemed to think that all newborn activities, like diaper changing and burping and rocking William to sleep, were not part of the daddy job description.

  Which reminded her of something Juliet had once said: “Just because I’m the one with a uterus doesn’t automatically make me the shitty-diaper changer.”

  Chloe smiled, until the memory jarred her back to the unpleasant reality that Juliet was monumentally pissed at her. And just when they’d started to become friends—good friends even, Chloe thought. Chloe, with William
in tow, had met with Juliet for lunch a few times, and Chloe had even gone jogging with Juliet one morning. Well, sort of. Chloe had started jogging with Juliet but lasted only a half mile or so, at which point Chloe felt like her lungs were about to explode and she got such a sharp stitch in her side, she actually had to sit down on the curb for twenty minutes while Juliet ran on ahead. But still, Juliet had asked her, which meant a lot to Chloe.

  And now Chloe had gone and screwed it all up.

  I’ll just have to find a way to fix it, Chloe thought, as she swung her Jetta into her driveway. Maybe James will help me. He’s always good at people problems.

  “Hello?” Chloe called out as she walked in through her front door. She dropped her keys in the tray on the hall table and glanced at the pile of mail.

  “Hello, dear,” a voice said, from the direction of the kitchen. It was a gravelly woman’s voice, one that sounded as though its owner had smoked a pack a day for forty years. Chloe was so surprised that she started, wheeled around, and poked her head in the kitchen. There, sitting at the table, was a woman Chloe had never seen before. She was older, probably in her late sixties, and had a pleasant face, square-jawed and heavily lined. Her blue eyes were kind, and her plump face was framed by a short crop of steel-gray curls. She was wearing a coral T-shirt with shells screen-printed on the front and matching cotton shorts that stretched over her comfortably plump frame. William was next to her, sitting in his vibrating bouncy seat. He kicked his fat little feet up and chortled happily when he saw his mother.

  “Hi,” Chloe said. She smiled uncertainly down at the stranger who seemed to have made herself at home in Chloe’s kitchen.

  “Hello, dear. I’m Mavis Willert. I live two doors down from you. In the town house with the blue door and the rainbow wind sock.”

  “Oh! Right! Hi,” Chloe said, smiling at her. “We haven’t met many of our neighbors yet. It’s funny how things change. When I was growing up, I knew every square inch of my street and all of my neighbors by name.” Chloe bent over and kissed William on the top of his fuzzy head. “So, um, I see James got you some coffee?”

  Which was rather shocking. She didn’t know James could work the coffeepot. Or where Chloe kept the coffee, for that matter.

  “No, I made the coffee. I hope you don’t mind.”

  Okay. This is…well, bizarre, Chloe thought. There’s a stranger in my house, with my baby, making herself a cup of coffee. Where is James, anyway?

  “Oh…of course not. Um, where is my husband?” Chloe asked, looking around.

  “I think he said he was going golfing,” Mavis said. She stood creakily, with a groan. “But now that you’re back, I suppose I’ll be getting home.”

  “Wait—you mean, James left you here? Alone?”

  Mavis smiled vaguely, unperturbed. “Not entirely alone. I had William here for company.” She glanced up at the kitchen clock. “So that will be twenty-four dollars.”

  “Twenty-four dollars?” Chloe repeated, confused. She was still trying to get her mind around the part where James had left a complete stranger alone in their house to take care of William, while he went off to play golf.

  “That’s what your husband and I agreed on. Eight dollars an hour, and I was here for three hours,” Mavis said conversationally.

  Three hours? Chloe thought. James has been gone for that long?

  “Oh. Right.” Moving woodenly, Chloe reached into her purse and pulled out thirty dollars. She handed the money to Mavis. “Go ahead and keep the change,” Chloe said.

  “Thank you, dear,” Mavis said brightly. She beamed down at William. “He’s a good boy. If you ever need a sitter again, don’t hesitate to call me. It was nice to be around a little one again.”

  “Thanks,” Chloe said faintly.

  She walked Mavis out, said good-bye, and then returned to the kitchen. She sat down heavily at the table, and, as she looked down at William cooing happily in his bouncy seat, her rage began to swell. It burned in her chest and throat, moving outward until her entire body felt as though it were electrified with anger. She looked down at her hands; they were shaking. Chloe breathed in deeply, gulping in the air, and when she felt she’d calmed enough that she could speak without screaming, she stood and retrieved the telephone. She punched in James’s cell phone number.

  “Hey, babe,” James said, sounding obscenely cheerful.

  “Where are you?” Chloe asked, struggling to keep her voice calm.

  James hesitated. “I’m at the golf course. Is everything okay?”

  “So you didn’t have some sort of an emergency that required you to go to the ER to get stitched up? A bagel-slicing incident, perhaps? Or a freak Jet Ski accident? You weren’t attacked by a pack of wild rabid dogs?”

  “What? We don’t even have a Jet Ski. Are you okay, sweetie? You sound a little…weird. And you’re not making a whole lot of sense.”

  “I’m just trying to get this straight: You left William with a total stranger so you could go golfing?”

  “Oh! You mean Mavis. I thought she seemed real nice,” James said. His Texas drawl was more pronounced, which always happened when he’d had a few beers.

  Chloe gritted her teeth. “How did you find her?”

  “I went and knocked on a few doors.”

  “You…knocked…on doors? You mean, you just went from house to house, asking someone to take care of our baby?” Despite her best efforts to stay calm, Chloe’s voice rose shrilly.

  “Why are you yelling?”

  “I’m not yelling. I’m very calmly asking you if you really left our infant son with a stranger so that you could play golf. Because I’m finding it hard to believe that you would really do that.”

  “Chloe, calm down—”

  “Oh, I’m calm. I’m perfectly calm,” Chloe said. “In fact, I’m now going to very calmly hang the phone up on you.”

  And then she clicked the phone off, which felt good. It felt even better when James called back ten seconds later, and Chloe picked up the phone and hung it back up without a word. She thought for a few minutes, and then an idea came to her.

  Do I dare? she wondered, with a thrill of recklessness. But then she thought about how James was willing to risk the safety of their son by leaving him with a complete stranger while he went golfing—golfing, for Christ’s sake—and she thought, Screw it. He has this coming.

  Chloe pulled the heavy yellow pages out from under the kitchen counter, flipped open to the locksmith section, and called the first company listed there.

  James didn’t come right home. He wasn’t back by dinnertime, so Chloe ate alone, heating a can of soup in the microwave, before changing to go out for her evening walk.

  He’s probably waiting for me to cool off before he shows his face, Chloe thought resentfully. It hadn’t worked. If anything, his absence just made her angrier.

  When Chloe got back from power-walking around the neighborhood an hour later, pushing William in his carriage, James’s blue Honda Accord was parked in the driveway. Chloe took a deep breath and steeled herself for the inevitable scene.

  “I am not backing down,” she told herself, as she pushed the stroller up the driveway. “He left our baby with a stranger. I am not going to let him pretend that it’s no big deal.”

  But James wasn’t sitting on the tiny front porch, in the Adirondack chair they kept there, as she’d expected him to be. In fact, she didn’t see him anywhere.

  Did he break into the house? she wondered, with a thrill of anger.

  Chloe glanced into his sedan as she walked by, and she stopped. James was sitting in the car, in the driver’s seat, his head lolled back and his eyes closed. Chloe stared at him for a moment while it registered. He was sleeping. They were having a fight, and not just any fight, but the biggest fight of their marriage, and he was asleep?

  Then she spotted the bouquet of yellow roses, wrapped in plastic, on the passenger-side seat of his car. They looked a little shopworn, as though they’d spent a few too m
any days in the grocery store’s florist case. The edges of the petals were starting to brown and curl, and the baby’s breath looked limp.

  Roses, she fumed silently. He leaves our baby with a stranger while he takes off to play golf, and he thinks he can make it all right with a bouquet of cheap grocery store roses?

  Chloe’s resolve hardened. She turned abruptly away and marched up to the house. She unlocked the door with her shiny new key, let herself in, and locked the door behind her, fastening the security chain for extra measure.

  seventeen

  Grace

  When her eyelids fluttered open, it took Grace a long, groggy minute to figure out what was going on.

  Where am I? And what am I doing here? And why does my head feel like someone clocked me with a baseball bat? she wondered woozily.

  But then it clicked, and she knew exactly where she was. Orange Cove Memorial Hospital. She’d given birth to three babies here, and the room—with its painted concrete brick walls, orange upholstered visitors’ chairs, and awful bleachy smell—was all too familiar.

  Oh, Christ. I didn’t have another baby, did I? Grace wondered, with a jolt of panic.

  But no, that wasn’t it. She wasn’t pregnant. At least, not that she could remember…no, no. Definitely not pregnant. Thank God. So why was she here?

  Louis was dozing in one of the visitors’ chairs, his head leaning back against the wall. Grace frowned as she gazed at her husband. He looked awful, as though he hadn’t showered or shaved in days. Usually, he was freakishly neat about his clothes, carefully ironing every last crease out of his shirt each morning before work. But now his clothes were wrinkled, and there was what looked like a coffee stain splattered on the right knee of his khakis.

  “Louis,” Grace said, or tried to say. All she could produce was a froglike croak. But the noise was enough to wake Louis, who suddenly sat bolt upright and looked wildly around the room, blinking. His eyes focused on her—and widened with shock. She tried to smile at him, but her lips felt out of practice too.