by Jean Stone
“And booze,” the other added.
Shock had ripped through her. Suicide? The idea had cut to Jess’s heart like one of Father’s icy stares when she’d done something of which he didn’t approve.
Suicide. Her mother? It couldn’t be possible. Not her mother. Not her light-spirited, happy-times mother.
But somehow, Jess had known it was true, as if she’d always known her mother was fragile of soul as well as of body, as if she’d always known that light spirit was too perfect to last.
Shaking her head now, Jess moved her eyes to a string of faraway lights on a faraway barge and wished she weren’t thinking of her mother. Thirty years had passed. Thirty years, many good times, many more heartaches. But nothing had ever quite equaled the magic—or the despair—her mother’s life and her death had brought to Jess. Nothing, except maybe the hope, then the loss of the baby she’d given away.
She twisted the gold-banded ring on her finger once more, as if trying to lock in the past, as if trying to hold back the guilt and the emptiness and the memory of Richard that thoughts of her baby always evoked.
Richard—the one who had been there to comfort Jess at the funeral. Richard—the boyfriend Father had detested because his family did not measure up. Richard—who had quietly taken Jess’s hand and led her to her father’s limousine, where he had held her and kissed her tears. Where she had held him and kissed him back, and where, on that grizzly, drizzly, March afternoon, a baby had been conceived. The one who now was dead.
Or not.
I am your baby, the message had read.
She gripped her hands together, the stones of her ring pressing into her flesh. “What is going on?” she cried into the glass. “Why does this pain keep coming back?”
“Mom?” Maura’s voice called from the foyer.
Jess blinked. She wiped her eyes, turned toward the sound, and tried to pull herself back to the present. “Maura,” she said. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
“Who were you talking to? I thought someone was here.”
Unlocking her fingers, Jess tried to smile. “No one. I wasn’t talking. I was singing.”
Her blond, petite daughter—a mirror image of Jess without the beveled edges of time—bounced into the room and tossed her backpack onto the sofa. Jess said a quick prayer of thanks that Maura had emerged into a confident young woman who had not had to endure the kind of pain Jess had known, who had been spared the wondering, the guilt, and the years—decades—of grief.
“It didn’t sound like singing to me. Are you sure you’re not going batty?”
Jess walked toward her daughter and gave her a hug. “I didn’t realize that ‘batty’ was an acceptable term for a budding psychologist.” She caught a scent of wet wool. “Did you have a good trip?” It had only been this year that Jess had succeeded in not succumbing to the second-by-second dread that something would happen on the route between Greenwich and upstate New York, that Maura would be horribly, tragically crushed on the interstate, her Jeep mashed to a heap of charred metal and shattered glass, her backpack and textbooks flattened under the wheels of a semi trailer that had been going too fast. It was a dread that Jess had for all her children, arising, no doubt, from hearing years before of the accident that had ended Amy’s young life. But Jess’s other children had, thus far, survived. Unlike Amy. If Amy had been hers at all.
“It’s raining in New Haven,” Maura commented, stepping away from her mother’s hug and slipping off her coat. “What’s for dinner?”
“Travis is skiing this weekend,” Jess replied. “It’s just the two of us, so I thought you might enjoy the new Thai place in town.”
“Can we just order in pizza? I’m hoping that Eddie will call.”
Eddie was Maura’s new boyfriend, a Porsche-driving boy of “privilege,” who, despite the fact he was working on his MBA at Yale, had yet to convince Jess that her daughter would not be better off with someone less impressed with his own credentials.
Jess realized that perhaps Maura’s visit was due less to a desire to go clothes shopping with her mother than to the geographic reality that Greenwich was closer to Yale than Skidmore was. She forced a smile and went into the kitchen, where she picked up the phone and ordered white pizza with extra broccoli—the way Maura liked it—consoling herself with the thought that she might have time this weekend for her chenille robe and a book after all.
Their shopping expedition was indeed cut short because Eddie had called the previous night, and Maura wanted to drive to the college to see him.
“You understand, don’t you, Mom?” Maura pleaded over a quick lunch in a noisy sandwich shop on Fifty-seventh and Third. Yes, of course, Jess understood. She understood that this was the nineties and mothers and daughters were not like they once were and that the chicken sandwich parked on the plastic plate in front of her was not fresh seafood cocktail in the Palm Court at the Plaza.
“You’re seeing a lot of Eddie these days,” was all she could manage to say.
“Hardly a lot, Mom. We’re a couple of hundred miles apart during the week.”
Jess picked at her sandwich. “Is it getting serious?”
Maura laughed. “Serious? Mom, you sound like you just stepped out of a George Eliot novel. Serious,” she repeated, rolling her blue eyes and pursing her lips. “Oh, Jessica, whatever will we do if the—situation—becomes serious?”
Despite her misgivings, Jess laughed in return, savoring her daughter’s happy mood, wondering how many years it had been since she herself had felt carefree, invulnerable to despair. In this moment, Jess wondered if she should share the letter with Maura, share her feelings about it.
“Don’t worry, Mom,” Maura said, “Eddie and I are being careful about everything.” Which, Jess knew, meant that yes, they were sleeping together, but they were using condoms to avoid pregnancy and, God help us, AIDS.
She swallowed a mouthful of tea and decided that now was the time to tell Maura about the letter. But Maura spoke first.
“I wish you liked Eddie better.”
She set down her cup. “I never said I didn’t like him.”
“I know. But it’s a feeling I get. Kind of like when I know you’re pissed off at me even though you haven’t said so.”
Jess blinked at her daughter’s language. She took another bite of her sandwich and realized that the moment for mentioning the letter had passed; that they were now reentering the mother-daughter tug-of-war zone.
“I think it’s because he reminds you of Daddy,” Maura blurted out.
“Your father has nothing to do with this,” Jess said quietly, although Eddie did seem to value the same things Charles always had: schmoozing with the right people, owning the right things.
“Well, he’s not a bit like Daddy,” her daughter continued. “Eddie is fun. Daddy’s an insufferable, snotty stuffed shirt.”
Jess burst into laughter. It was the perfect description of Charles. Oh, yes, she thought, holding a hand to her side, sometimes she underestimated her children’s ability to think for themselves. “Hand me the check,” she said, trying to stop laughing. “We still need to get to Saks before you have to get home.”
Maura handed Jess the check: thirty-four dollars for two sandwiches and tea. Jess shook her head and opened her wallet. Even though she’d not had the chance to tell Maura about the letter, at least she’d had herself a good laugh.
As Jess helped Maura bring in the bags from Bloomingdale’s and the one from Macy’s with the “Mom, I have to have it” straw hat, she avoided asking if her daughter planned to spend the whole night in Eddie’s dorm room. Instead, she counted her blessings that Maura was happy, and that it was neither snowing nor sleeting, though the late winter air had turned hard-bitten, New England frigid, and perhaps the roads would be slick from last night’s rain.
Jess set the packages on the white tile floor of the two-story foyer and willed herself not to think about fast-moving trucks.
Maura breezed past her an
d went into the kitchen. “I’m going to check the phone …”
Jess opened the hall closet and squeezed her coat between ski parkas whose chair lift tickets clung to one another as if braced for the next storm.
Beep.
From the kitchen came the sound of the answering machine, but Jess was too weary to listen. She straightened the ski parkas and closed the closet door. Tonight she would have her night of peace. Tonight she would curl up in the old chenille robe.…
Maura appeared in the doorway. “Mom? There’s a weird message on the machine.”
This comment was not surprising: since the advent of Eddie, Maura seemed to feel that most of Jess’s new friends were, indeed, “weird,” that Jess’s life must be weird without the country clubs and cocktail parties and dinner invitations that once had dominated her life. Jess hoped that someday Maura would see that for what it was, too. “Who is it?” she asked.
“I have no idea. I think you’d better listen.”
Jess went into the kitchen. Her daughter stood back from the answering machine, staring at it as if it were a dead animal on the side of the road. Jess suddenly knew the message must have something to do with the letter.
“Well,” she said, trying to sound in control, “let’s have a listen.” She leaned forward and pushed the button.
Beep.
“Why haven’t I heard from you?” a hushed, garbled voice asked. “Why haven’t I heard from my mother?” The caller hung up. The machine shut off.
Jess stood next to Maura, the two of them as still as the house when the children weren’t home, like statues, like rocks.
“Mom?” Maura finally whispered. “Who was that?”
Wrapping her arms around herself to ward off the sudden chill that had entered the room, Jess thought for a moment. She could have told Maura that it was a client, one who enjoyed playing practical jokes. She could have said it was a friend, or a friend of a friend being silly. Jess could have said anything and Maura would have shrugged her “whatever” shrug and left to go see Eddie and do whatever it was she planned to do. But Jess remembered the pact they had made years ago, the decision made on their own, away from the offices of family therapy, from the easy chairs of the analysts’ offices. It was a promise to always—no matter what—be honest with one another, a pledge to always tell one another the truth.
She had already lied to Chuck about the reason she wanted to reach Charles. She had lied to Chuck; she could not lie to Maura as well.
Jess pulled her stare from the answering machine and twisted her ring. “Do you have time for hot chocolate?”
Maura blinked quickly and pretended to smile. “Oh, God,” she groaned. “I feel a mother-daughter talk coming on.”
Maura had been Jess’s greatest supporter, her us-against-him child, her buffer against Charles. She had once stood—albeit on legs that were only sixteen—resolutely beside Jess when she learned about Amy, when she learned that her mother had, in fact, become a mother long before she’d been a mother to Chuck and Travis and herself, long before the stigma of unwed and underage had ceased to matter to anyone but the right-wing moralists of the world.
Maura had stood beside her, helping Jess win the boys’ acceptance of their mother’s unsavory past. And though she had not succeeded in swaying Charles, she had made it a point to let Jess know that it was okay, that whatever her mother had done was okay, because she was their mother and they knew that she loved them.
Of course, that had all been five years ago, and the innocent high-school-girl-Maura of then was quite unlike the experienced, college-sophomore-Maura of now.
When Jess handed her daughter the letter on blue paper, she sipped her hot chocolate and waited for the look of disdain to appear on her daughter’s face. It was there in an instant.
“Who sent it?” Maura asked.
“I don’t know. But I expect it’s the same person who left that message.”
“It was hard to tell if that was a man or a woman.”
“I know.”
“But whoever it is, is saying your baby is still alive.”
“I know.”
“Mom? Is that possible?”
“I have no idea, honey.”
“But I remember the picture of Amy that Mrs. Hawthorne brought you,” Maura said flatly. “Amy must have been yours, Mom. She looked just like you.”
“Maybe I only wanted her to look like me.”
Maura picked up her mug, strode to the sink, and dumped the remaining contents down the drain. “But, Mom, you don’t know who’s doing this. It could be some wacko with a huge mental pathology.”
Jess refrained from commenting that if Maura truly intended to become a psychologist, she’d better learn a few other terms besides “batty” and “wacko.”
“No matter who it is,” Jess replied, trying to soften the edge in her voice, “the person obviously knows I gave a baby up for adoption.”
“So?”
“So someone is either trying to get me to connect with my baby, or knows Amy is dead and is trying to drive me out of my mind.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. There’s not much I can do.”
Suddenly her daughter turned around. “I think you should ignore it, Mother. For one thing, maybe it’s time for you to let go of the past.”
Jess blinked. “Excuse me? I didn’t ask for this, Maura.”
“Didn’t you? It seems to me you opened the door when you decided to search for that baby.”
Cellophane anger crinkled across Jess’s shoulders. She reminded herself of what Maura’s therapist had once said: that Maura suffered from guilt over having become pregnant herself at age sixteen. If not for that, Jess would never have searched for her own baby, would never have learned that Amy was dead, and would never have gone through with the divorce. Maura’s miscarriage had possibly only deepened her distress. Still, Jess had hoped that several years and many thousands of therapy dollars later, her daughter would have dealt with it. Dealt with it and healed.
“To begin with, that was nearly five years ago,” Jess said defensively—uncomfortably—now. “And I wanted to find my baby because it was unfinished business in my life.”
“And now some psycho has come out of the woodwork and is probably going to try and get money out of you.”
“What does money have to do with this? I don’t hide anything anymore.”
“No, Mom,” Maura said brusquely. “I guess you don’t. But maybe the rest of this family would prefer it if you did.” She plunked her mug in the sink. “I’m going to Eddie’s,” she said, stalking out of the room.
Jess stayed in her chair, silent in her anguish. Certainly, she had not expected this to be Maura’s reaction. She had not expected her to be so judgmental. She wondered if this had anything to do with Eddie’s country club influence. Then she took another sip of lukewarm hot chocolate and wondered if Travis would feel the same way as Maura, and if Chuck, the eldest, would follow suit. If Chuck ever returned from Boston, and if she could ever be sure he was in no way involved.
Why did this have to happen now, just when her life seemed to be coming together, just when it had settled into a level of comfort, of routine days and predictable nights?
Jess closed her eyes. Surely it would be better to ignore the whole thing than to upset her family like this, or to give in to the risky hope that her baby might still be alive. She knew, in her heart, that Amy Hawthorne had been her’s—didn’t she? And that Amy was gone, Amy was dead.
Quietly, Jess rose from her chair, went to the answering machine, and erased the garbled message.
Just after midnight the telephone rang. Jess’s eyes sprang open. She lay there, staring at the dark ceiling of her bedroom. Her pulse was racing, her hands shaking.
The phone rang again,
She turned onto her side and flicked on the light. She stared at the receiver that rested in its cradle.
It rang again.
It must
be her, she said to herself. Or whoever this person was who was determined to drive her mad. Well, she thought defiantly, whoever it is, is not going to get to me or my family. Even if it is my family. Even if it is Chuck.
She grabbed the phone.
“Mom?” the voice on the other end asked. “Did I wake you?”
Maura.
“Yes, honey,” she said, her pulse easing back, her heart slowing. “What is it?”
“I decided to stay at Eddie’s tonight,” she said. “It started snowing and I know you hate it when I drive in the snow.”
“Okay, honey,” Jess said, even though she knew she was condoning something she didn’t want to condone. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
There was a pause, then Maura added, “Mom? I’m sorry about our fight this afternoon. I love you.”
“Me too, honey.”
Afterward, Jess couldn’t sleep. Mixed with her anxieties about Maura and Eddie was the certainty that the blue-papered letter and the phone message were going to make her and everyone around her crazy if she didn’t do something. If she didn’t learn the truth.
She could not exactly go to Martha’s Vineyard, stand in the middle of the island, and demand to know who had sent her the letter. But there was somewhere else she could start. Someone else who might be able to help.
Mary Frances Taylor had retired to Falmouth after a career steeped in unwed mothers and other women’s babies. As for herself, she was an unhappy old maid, or at least that’s what the girls at Larchwood Hall had presumed until the night Bud Wilson emerged from her bedroom, zipping his pants, hair all askew. The night that had turned so … hideous.
But Jess could not allow herself to remember that night now. She needed to stay focused on her mission.
After a night of broken sleep, she dressed warmly and left a brief note for Maura saying only that she’d gone out of town. She hoped to return before Maura went back to Skidmore: maybe there would be news to tell her—news that would settle this once and for all.
The four-hour ride helped Jess put things into perspective, or at least into a perspective that she could accept. She decided that Charles could not have done this; he would not be this inventive. If he needed money, he would find a more direct route. Even more important was Jess’s realization that Chuck would not do this. He might take after Charles, but he was her son, too. And though they weren’t terribly close, they rarely argued; they rarely took the time.
