The Other Mother

by Carol Goodman

  Don’t forget to get our file, Laurel says.

  I pull out the file labeled Laurel Hobbes. Our file, I think as I stick it in the waistband of my pajamas. I’ve started thinking in the first person plural just like Edith. I suppose she’s right. It may have started out as Laurel’s but I’ve added to it now. We have become inextricably merged, as connected as the figures bound in Edith’s red yarn. It should frighten me that my allies are a dead woman and a crazy woman. But as I leave the office with Edith I find I feel less alone than I have in months.

  Edith’s Journal, September 29, 1971

  I don’t feel so alone anymore. Things have been better since the night I woke up calling Cal’s name. I told Libby all about him. How even though he was just a waiter up at the lake he was saving up to go to college and he and I were going to elope and both get jobs as teachers in Richmond. I told her how we’d meet at the boathouse and lie out on the pier on a bed made of life vests, looking up at the stars and talking about . . . well, everything. Our favorite children’s books and the names of our first pets and what we’d name our children. I felt so much better spilling it all out to Libby, even the bad parts when Mama and Papa found out and forbade me ever to see him again because he was poor and “not the right religion,” so they sent me up North so we couldn’t meet in the fall.

  “So you didn’t come here for the art history after all,” Libby said when I was done.

  “No,” I admitted. I was afraid she was going to make fun of me again but when she laughed I could tell it wasn’t at me. It was this low, smoky laugh, like we were sharing a secret. And then she told me all about her fella and how her father didn’t approve of him so he sent her away, first to a French boarding school and then, when she came home last summer and took up with him again, away to college.

  “Why doesn’t your father like him?” I asked, because I couldn’t imagine Libby going with any poor waiter or her folks caring what religion her boyfriend was.

  “Because he’s an artist,” she said, blowing smoke out when she said artist, “and no one understands artists. That’s why you understand. I’ve seen those sketches you do in class.”

  I only did the sketches to help me remember the art slides, but it made me feel so good that Libby thought I was a real artist that I told her I was thinking of changing my major to studio art.

  “You should,” she said. “Why should you study what a bunch of old, dead white men made when you could make your own art?”

  She told me she was going to be a writer and live in Paris with Clive. That’s her artist’s name. It’s so much more romantic than Cal’s plan for us to buy a house in Richmond, but still, I feel like everything has gotten bigger. Like I was looking at a beautiful painting and suddenly it became real and I stepped inside it. And that I was one of the beautiful, fascinating people you see in those paintings. Libby makes me believe I could become someone special, someone completely new!

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Edith knows a back door out of the building and a path that will take us to the back gate. She tells me this way we’ll avoid the searchlights and white angels. Apparently that’s what they called the dorm matrons at Vassar. I assume for our purposes she means the guards.

  The path we take goes through a garden that she calls Shakespeare’s Garden and past a Tudor-looking building she refers to as the infirmary.

  “That’s where Nurse Landry works, but the lights are out so she must not be there yet.”

  I remember looking down from the tower that first night and thinking that the hospital looked like a college campus; for Edith, the hospital is the campus of her memories.

  She takes me to a spot where the electrified fence traverses a steep ravine. We scramble down, clutching saplings to keep from sliding headlong into the fence. Improbably, I begin to feel like a college sophomore out on a lark, ducking curfew to drink a few beers or smoke a joint in the woods. The longer I spend with Edith, I realize, the more I enter into her delusion.

  At the bottom of the ravine Edith clears armfuls of dead leaves, revealing a gully where the ground has fallen away beneath the fence. There’s a gap about two feet wide and two feet deep. Edith flattens herself against the ground and squirms under it like an otter. When she pops out on the other side her face is smeared with dirt and leaves stick up from her hair like a wreath. She looks like a slightly demented Puck. “Come on,” she urges me. “It’s easy.”

  Maybe if you’ve been eating hospital food for more than forty years. Not only is Edith thinner than me, she also has the bones of a bird.

  She’s a sixty-year-old woman, Laurel says in my head. Are you really going to let her outdo you in the gymnastics department? Why did I bother taking you to all those Pilates classes?

  Shamed by Laurel’s rebuke, I lie down on the ground, my head facing the gap, and crawl. It feels like I’m burrowing into my own grave. The soil is damp and cold and smells like worms—

  Don’t think about worms.

  But of course now I am. Worms and snakes and spiders. Something slithers down my neck and it takes every ounce of my willpower not to thrash out and impale myself on the electric fence.

  That would be ironic, Laurel coolly observes, electrocuting yourself while running away from electroshock.

  I feel a laugh bubbling up inside me and then I’m crying, tears turning to mud in the dirt. It’s not my grave I’m digging, I realize, it’s Laurel’s. Snarky, carping, bitchy Laurel. The taste of dirt in my mouth is her death, the first time I’ve grieved for her. Laurel is really dead—

  But you’re not, she points out.

  Not yet, I reply, not if I can help it.

  Then I feel hands gripping my arms, pulling me out of the grave I’ve dug for myself. “I’ve got you,” Edith says, holding me to her as I sob. For Laurel. For me. For both our Chloes. For Edith’s lost baby.

  Edith pats my back. “It’s okay,” she says. “We’ll get her back.” She wipes my face with the sleeve of her pajamas and helps me to my feet. She leads me by the hand into the woods. It’s only when we’ve been walking a few minutes that I think about that “her.” According to Dr. Bennett’s notes, Edith’s baby was a boy. So, who, I wonder, is she talking about?

  AS WE WALK up the hill I try to make a plan. Should I run or should I go to Schuyler Bennett and try to convince her that I’m really Daphne Marist? If could get my ID and Laurel’s will and the photo of Peter from the tower, maybe that would convince her. On the other hand, if I show up at Schuyler Bennett’s house covered in mud and with a delusional woman, Sky will call the police. She has no reason to protect me. I lied to her about who I was and took advantage of her trust and hospitality. Also, I’m technically an escaped mental patient. But hers is the only house for miles. Where else can we go? What I need is to find a car so I can get someplace where I can prove my identity.

  I’m so lost in my thoughts that I don’t notice at first that we’re no longer climbing upward. We’ve been walking on a level path for some time, along the ridge Sky Bennett’s house sits on but not toward the house itself. Given her obsession about the tower, I had assumed that’s where Edith was leading us.

  Before I can ask where we’re going, we arrive at some kind of garden shed. A rather decorative one, with a pointed eave, gingerbread trim, and faded green paint. A storybook cottage in the enchanted woods. Maybe I really have gone crazy. When Edith opens the door, will we find the witch from Hansel and Gretel or a family of dwarves?

  What’s inside is nearly as surprising. A cot covered with a faded flowered quilt and embroidered throw pillows, an armchair, a table made in a rustic bent-twig style. There’s even an old-fashioned lantern, which Edith lights with a box of kitchen matches. A china teapot and two teacups are set out on the table as if for a tea party, but there’s clearly no way of heating water. There are books everywhere. I pick one up and see it’s a children’s book of fairy tales.

  This is some kind of playhouse, clearly, perhaps Sky’s when she was little.
But it’s in too good shape for it to have been disused since Sky’s childhood. Perhaps Billie’s grandchildren use it when they visit, or Sky has preserved it as a writing room. “What is this place?” I ask Edith.

  She lies down on the padded bench, cushioning her head with an embroidered pillow, and sighs. “Home.” Then she closes her eyes. Within minutes she’s snoring.

  I stand there, not sure what to do. Go to Sky’s house and try to steal a car? But instead I sink down into the armchair. As I sit I feel the edge of the file folders I stuffed in my pants rub against my back. I pull them out and lay them on the broad, flat arm of the chair on top of an illustrated collection of Norse myths. I can see by the light filtering in through the cottage’s one window that it will be daylight soon. I should be trying to get as far away from Crantham as I can. Once they discover that Edith and I have escaped, the woods will be filled with searchers. How hard could it be to find this place?

  But as I look around I notice the pictures on the wall. I’d assumed they were fairy-tale prints to match the books, but I see now that they’re reproductions of paintings and sculptures, temples and cathedrals. All the art that Edith studied in Art History 101 at Vassar and then some, so many that they’ve been layered on top of one another. Clearly Edith has spent considerable time here. It must be at least relatively safe.

  Still, I want to run, to get as far away from this place as I can. But running blindly into the woods is not a plan. I need to get to the tower to get Laurel’s will and Peter’s photo to prove there’s a conspiracy going on. I need my own ID to prove that I’m Daphne Marist. But I can’t just leave Edith here. I’ll have to wait until the morning and then go to the tower. In the meantime it might be useful to know more about Edith. I pick up her file and begin reading.

  Edith’s Journal, October 3, 1971

  Being friends with Libby is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Better even than Cal. I mean, that was romantic, sure, but Libby has shown me this whole other world I didn’t even know existed. A world of art and culture and ideas.

  I was surprised at first that Libby didn’t want to marry Clive. “Marriage is so bourgeois,” she said. “I’m going to travel. See the world. Live life. How else can I become a writer? We could travel together. You can paint and I’ll write.”

  That wasn’t at all like the plan I’d made of getting my teaching certificate and settling down in Richmond with Cal. “I don’t think my parents would give me the money to do that,” I said.

  “I’ve got money,” Libby said. “My mother left me loads. Enough for both of us to start out and then we can get jobs—waitressing or modeling. You’ve got a face like a Pre-Raphaelite angel. All the boys in Paris will want to paint you.”

  I looked up the Pre-Raphaelites in the art history library. Some of those women looked a little strange and when I read about the models I learned that one of them died from an overdose of laudanum. Her name was Lizzie Siddal. There’s a picture of her lying in a flower-covered pond, looking up through the water with dead eyes, that made me feel queasy. I read that the painter made her lie in a bathtub of cold water while he painted it and she got sick from the chill.

  “You have to suffer for your art,” Libby says.

  Sometimes I think Libby is trying to suffer. She hardly eats and I hear her throwing up in the bathroom sometimes, which makes me feel like I have to throw up too. She barely ever leaves Main Hall, and she huddles in those oversized shirts and sweaters of hers—I think they’re Clive’s—and sleeps through her classes.

  I’ve been so worried about her that I went to the infirmary and talked to one of the nurses there. Nurse Landry. She was really nice. She’s a small-town girl like me and just a few years older. After I told her about Libby she asked me how I was adapting to college and I told her that it was hard at first making friends but it was much better now that I was friends with Libby. She said Libby was really lucky to have a friend like me and I told her she had it all wrong. I’m the lucky one. Libby’s turned me into a whole new person.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  This is what I find out from Edith’s file: On December 10, 1971, a newborn male infant was found in the dumpster outside of the Vassar College infirmary. The on-call nurse saw Edith Sharp, a nineteen-year-old sophomore from Fredericksburg, Virginia, deposit the baby in a dumpster. When the nurse questioned her, Edith said that she’d given birth in her dorm room and that she had taken the baby to the dumpster to get rid of it because she thought there was something wrong with it. She became agitated when asked who the baby’s father was and had to be sedated, after which she was taken to Vassar Brothers Hospital and examined by the psychiatrist on call. Believing that she was Lizzie Siddal, model and mistress of the Pre-Raphaelite artists, she told the doctor that she’d been made to lie in a bathtub full of ice water. She’d made a drawing of herself giving birth in the bathtub.

  The drawing was attached to the file. When I looked at it I instantly recognized Edith’s drawing style. Here she had taken a painting by John Everett Millais of Ophelia drowned in a woodland stream, flowers scattered on the water’s surface, and reinterpreted it so that the woman is in a bathtub and a baby, still attached by the umbilical cord, is lying on her chest. It’s a disturbing image but even more disturbing is the picture underneath: the same woman in the bathtub but with the baby floating over her, attached by a long red string, along with other body parts—ears, eyes, a heart—also attached to the woman in the tub by red strings.

  Like the red ribbon that Edith wore around her wrist and the red yarn she had strewn around the rec lounge yesterday.

  At Vassar Brothers Hospital, Edith was diagnosed with borderline schizophrenia and transferred to the Crantham Psychiatric Center. The admitting notes, made by Dr. Bennett, confirmed the diagnosis.

  Patient continues to harbor delusion that something was wrong with her baby, representing a dissociative break with reality. Patient continues to search for the lost baby, convinced that it is alive.

  I turn back to the original report from the hospital in Poughkeepsie. It doesn’t say whether the baby in the dumpster was found dead or alive. I look up from the file, thinking about that, and find myself staring at the pictures on the wall. They’ve been layered on top of one another like a collage. A red line—like Edith’s red yarn—catches my eye. I get up and peel away another picture to uncover the rest of it. It’s a painting of a woman lying naked on a hospital bed. Blood stains the sheets beneath her bent legs. She holds a handful of red threads that attach to a half-formed fetus, a snail, a severed torso, exotic flowers, and some kind of gray contraption I can’t identify. I recognize the face of the woman on the bed, though, from a million tote bags and coffee mugs. It’s Frida Kahlo.

  I look back at the picture in Edith’s file. It’s less disturbing when you realize that she was mirroring a painting she might have known from her college art history classes.

  As I’m staring at the picture I hear Edith stirring. I quickly put the file away. Edith blinks at the room for a few minutes, then looks at me. “I think we missed breakfast in the cafeteria,” she says brightly.

  My stomach growls as I’m reminded of how long it’s been since I ate. We’ve got no money. Where are we going to find food?

  “Good thing we’ve put in supplies,” Edith says. She reaches under the bed and pulls out a red plastic bin full of candy bars and bottles of water. I’m afraid the candy will be moldering remnants left over from the seventies but when Edith hands me one I see that it’s a protein bar with a recent sell-by date. I eat it gratefully and wash it down with the bottled water.

  “Edith,” I ask, “who got all of this?”

  “My roommate,” Edith mumbles through a mouthful of granola bar. “She buys it all at the college store because she doesn’t like going to the cafeteria anymore.”

  “Do you . . . um . . . see your roommate bring it here?” I ask. How do you ask someone if they’re having hallucinations?

  “Of course, sill
y . . . only . . .”—Edith looks confused for a moment—“only she hasn’t really been herself lately. She stays in bed all day . . . or takes long baths in the hall bathroom. Nurse Landry says she sounds like she’s suffering from depression.” She gets up and paces around the tiny shed. “We have to go now,” she says. “We have to find the baby.”

  “Okay,” I say, getting to my feet and wiping chocolate crumbs off my pajamas. “Where should we look?”

  “In the tower, of course,” she says, plucking the red ribbon on her wrist. “That’s where I left him.”

  Edith’s Journal, November 2, 1971

  Libby asked me last night if there was anything I wanted to tell her. I didn’t know what she meant. It was so funny the way she said it, like how Mama used to put it when she thought I’d taken something or I had gotten a bad grade at school. Then I was afraid that she knew I’d talked to Nurse Landry about her. I was so ashamed that I blushed hot pink.

  “Ah! So there is,” Libby crowed like it made her happy. I was so embarrassed. And then I noticed she was staring at my belly and I turned even pinker. The truth is I have gained weight this semester. The freshman fifteen, they call it, even though I’m a sophomore. It’s the starchy food at the cafeteria and all the candy bars Libby keeps in the room.

  “I thought you didn’t mind me sharing your candy bars,” I said.

  “I don’t,” Libby said, “I just didn’t know you were eating for two. I thought you said you and Cal were careful.”