The Other's Gold

by Elizabeth Ames

  “Alice?” Adam inched away from Ji Sun, looked at his monitor again, wouldn’t meet their gaze.

  “Lainey, she, well, Adam said it. She bit Elizabeth.” Alice rubbed her temples again. “She bit her cheek.” Alice said this last part softly, and put her hand to her own cheek, left it there.

  “What do you mean she bit her? What is this?” Margaret still stood in the middle of the room, gesticulations as loud as her voice.

  “Sit down, Margaret!” Ji Sun didn’t understand what was happening, but she needed to do something that gave her some semblance of control.

  “What do you mean, though, she bit her? Like she nibbled too hard and it . . . hurt?” Ji Sun looked at Adam.

  “No,” Adam said, still staring at the screen.

  “Why?” Ji Sun said. “Why would she do that?”

  “Is she here?” Margaret asked. “Let us see her! This can’t be true. I want to talk to her.”

  “She’s here. She’s in with Elizabeth,” Alice said, pointing her chin toward Adam’s monitor, his uninterrupted stare.

  “Elizabeth only stopped crying when I let Lainey back in the room with her.” He waved his free hand at them as though staving off any action or inquiry. He shut his eyes, hard, like he could force himself not to feel whatever he did. He opened them again and looked back at the monitor. “They’re both sleeping,” he said, and Alice nodded.

  “Oh, my God, how did this happen? How could . . .” Margaret looked around the room, frantic, waiting for someone to tell her this was a bad dream.

  “I don’t know!” Adam snapped, too loudly. He put his hand over his mouth and leaned back against the couch cushions, less like he was tired and more like he’d been knocked unconscious.

  “I’m sorry,” Ji Sun said. “I don’t understand what happened.”

  Adam sat up, looked straight at her but also through her, animated by something outside himself.

  “Lainey bit Elizabeth,” he said in a voice she had never before heard. “Hard. Like an animal. She bit a piece out of her cheek.” He shook his face again, unpossessed, back to Adam. “Jesus, I’m going to be sick.” He ran from the room.

  “I think he’s coming out of shock,” Alice said. “I should call Kushi. I don’t know, I feel like shit. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  They could hear the sounds of retching from the bathroom in the hall.

  “Should we?” Ji Sun pointed toward the bathroom, but Alice shook her head.

  “He called me earlier tonight, he didn’t want to get CPS involved,” Alice said.

  “Right, yes, no, we wouldn’t want that,” Margaret said. “What’s that?”

  “The authorities,” Alice said. “If they’d gone to the ER.”

  “Was it, was it the kind of thing . . . where they should have?” Margaret said, brows furrowed deep.

  “Yes,” Alice said, but didn’t elaborate.

  “It’s bad?” Margaret put her hand over her mouth.

  Alice nodded.

  They listened to the wretched sounds Adam made, looked further down the hall to the closed door of Elizabeth’s tiny nursery, tried both to imagine and not to picture what they would see when it opened.

  Chapter 43

  They stayed the night, what little was left of it. Ji Sun and Margaret slept in Lainey and Adam’s bed, and Alice slept on the couch. They thought Adam probably didn’t sleep.

  In the morning, Margaret went to the kitchen. She passed Elizabeth’s nursery gingerly, heard a small cry and almost fell down. She heard Lainey’s voice, a shush and jostle, a latch and suckle. She heard her friend say, Shhh shhh, you’re okay and she wanted to open the door, see if it was true, see Lainey, maybe say the same to her.

  Margaret had liked being pregnant, appreciated the shift in the sort of attention she received, especially from women, to whom she was rendered less threatening, neutralized by her heaving belly. It wasn’t that Margaret saw the babies as parasites, as others—but never she herself—joked throughout her pregnancy. Instead, she failed to see them at all for those first four months, couldn’t even make out their distinct shapes; they were one baby, and one she knew could not be hers—surely, if it was, she would feel something for it, even a negative feeling, any feeling at all! She recited lines about love that she somehow knew by heart, from books or movies, from other mothers, from being raised a girl in a world that trained her to await this, her arrival as a mother. But none of the lines were felt by her, none were—nothing from that time was—real. Now she wondered at what Lainey felt, if she felt so much of what Margaret hadn’t felt, so much desperate, unprecedented love, that she was driven mad by it, that she harmed rather than protected her baby. A small, mean part of Margaret felt glad, grateful to Lainey. At least Margaret had never harmed her boys, had never even considered it. She supposed her indifference was its own kind of harm, but she wouldn’t dwell on that. She’d more than compensated for it since she came back to herself and recognized them as her babies, felt love in cascading waves that connected her to other mothers, made her understand some of the lines she’d only rehearsed in that first terrible stretch. But still there was the fear that in those first months outside her womb the boys sensed her rejection of them, and would go on to reject her, or all women, or the world. She couldn’t yet know.

  Mac knew a version of what Margaret had experienced, one called the baby blues that could be allayed by hiring a night nurse in addition to the live-in nanny they’d agreed upon when they learned they were expecting twins.

  When he brought the boys to her bedside in the night to nurse, and their wails did not wake her, Mac agreed that breastfeeding twins seemed very difficult.

  “Not difficult, Mac. Impossible.” She knew she would quit, it was only a matter of how soon she could.

  That defeat had been reinflamed by Lainey, too, the way she’d nursed Elizabeth without even a flinch of pain, without seeming to have to adjust anything, their two bodies moving to a harmony no one else could hear, but all could see. Lainey’s hand cupped against Elizabeth’s tuft of black hair, Elizabeth’s small suckling sounds, and a cloud of oxytocin that filled the whole room, everyone moony and fawning, sated.

  She could feel this comfort coming from the room now, and when she pictured what was happening on the other side, Elizabeth was unbit, and Lainey had never done the biting. Margaret touched her hand to the door, just the tips of her fingers. She did not turn the doorknob.

  When the twins first latched it felt to Margaret like a plastic barrette had clamped onto her nipple, snapped, and sprayed blood. Their gums, her skin, doused with the blood milk, some kind of horror show. They’d pulled tissue through the tiny holes in the silver nipple shield that Margaret’s postpartum doula had ordered from France, blood on the bright moon-metal. She’d dropped the bloodied shield in a crystal dish of distilled water, and blood blossomed and swirled like cream in coffee. Her doula had wanted to call another lactation consultant, but the skin through the shield—her own softest flesh like meat in a grinder—was the end for Margaret. I’m done, she said, and looked at the bowl, blood no longer tendrils, just rust red in a filthy dish. Everything around her was sticky with sweat and milk and blood.

  “Replace these teas with the ones that stop the milk. Bring the cabbage leaves or whatever. I’m not nursing anymore.”

  “But we don’t want to stop production. You can still pump!”

  The hospital-grade pump sat on its bar cart in the corner, hissing at Margaret even when it was turned off. It became a drone, then, and Margaret feared her doula might pilot it toward her in the night while Margaret slept, let its tentacles lash out and suction onto her, do its merciless work on her ruined nipples, already raw and abraded, all to save her sons from the horror of formula.

  “Trust me, love, this will get easier. If you can pump just to get through, while we work on the latch, keep your supply up for
when the twins have learned better how to transfer—”

  “No!”

  The doula leaped back. Margaret hadn’t realized how loud she’d shouted, but could see on the doula’s face how wild she must have looked, pale and haggard, a feral raccoon, vicious in protecting the trash of its own body. She wouldn’t sacrifice herself for these strangers, these creatures she was not yet convinced were her own! She wouldn’t let them bite her nipples off, exsanguinate her, extinguish her!

  She fired the doula and insisted she take the pump. Donate it to someone in need, Margaret had said, sick at herself for wanting to help other babies more than her own. Her night nurse helped her with cold compresses, and after finishing her course of antibiotics, Margaret agreed to take a small dose of antidepressants. She thought it might help combat the pain of mastitis, and the pain she still felt at her incision site, throughout her core. Now that she was through with nursing, there was no reason she couldn’t take any pill she liked, but she’d long held the belief that antidepressants weren’t for people like her, a notion that Mac and his family reinforced, though most of them had medicine cabinets full of psychotropic drugs, and those who didn’t abused painkillers they’d been prescribed long after surgeries, or simply felt heavy drinking was the most appropriate course of treatment for any psychiatric ailment.

  Margaret realized then that she could drink again, and she did. People gave dirty looks to a mother of two babies holding a glass of champagne, but she’d later learn they’d give dirty looks to a mother of children of any age, to a mother doing anything, so why not drink. She derailed the work of her antidepressants some, she knew, but it was worth it to feel herself in this way, frothing and effervescent, buzzed and alive like she had been so many weekends before the boys were born.

  Now, entering the kitchen, she found her hand was out, ready for a coupe of champagne even here, as though they were gathered for a long, boozy brunch and not to discuss how best to manage the burden of this new reality wherein their friend had bitten off a piece of her daughter’s cheek. She could barely think it to herself let alone say it aloud. She’d spent the night in shock, but now was deep in denial. Margaret wanted Lainey to remain volatile in a less alarming way, her wildest friend, the one who best knew how to enjoy life, even if it meant she also knew how best to find it miserable. Did these things have to go hand in hand? Did loving so much mean you knew more about hatred? Did destruction have to follow so close on the heels of creation, nipping away, threatening even the perfect, peach-fuzzed faces of their babies?

  Ji Sun and Adam were already seated at the kitchen table, Adam still in his outfit from the night before, monitor in hand. Alice came out from behind the fridge with a carton of eggs.

  “Adam, please, you can take a shower,” Ji Sun said. “We can watch the monitor.”

  “I just passed the room,” Margaret said, and then she said, “Good morning,” which felt weird since she hadn’t said it first, and since no one replied in kind. “Sorry, I’m, I don’t know what’s the right way to behave right now. But they’re, she’s nursing her, no?”

  “You went in?” Alice looked concerned.

  “No, no, I could tell. From the sounds,” Margaret said. “But . . . can I, can we see her?”

  “She doesn’t want to come out,” Adam said. “She’s ashamed.”

  Margaret realized when he answered that she’d meant Elizabeth. She wanted to see Lainey, of course, but her fears about Elizabeth’s face grew worse the longer the baby was kept from them, as though up in a high tower. Margaret adored babies, had always dreamed of being a mother not in an abstract sense to a child, but to a newborn, a baby she could hold in her arms. This had made the alienation she felt from her own babies worse, and her love for Elizabeth perhaps more pronounced, standing in as it did for her first enjoyable experience with a newborn that felt related to her. Elizabeth delighted in Margaret, too, preferring her over Lainey’s other friends, even if Lainey’s own rankings might have shaken out another way. Margaret felt grateful to Elizabeth for loving her so easily, and for bringing her closer to Lainey. Margaret and Lainey hadn’t spent much time together in recent years, what with how involved Lainey became in her career just as Margaret fell pregnant, and then the inevitable distance and divide wrought by new babies. But Lainey wasn’t comfortable leaving Elizabeth with anyone other than friends or family, even when she was home, so Margaret had, in recent months, begun to come over a few times a week. She left Anderson and Luc with their nanny and sat with Elizabeth so that Lainey could take a shower, do some emails. Margaret loved these spells with Elizabeth enough that she had started to say to Mac that she wanted another baby.

  “Ashamed, of course. And, I don’t know, distraught. She’s distraught. She’s not out of it, though. She’s completely lucid.” Adam looked to Alice for confirmation, and Alice nodded, but Margaret thought neither of them looked to be in any shape to confirm whether a third party was with it.

  “But we were talking, before you got up, about next steps.” Alice cracked eggs in a ceramic bowl.

  Margaret watched the whites drip from the shells, the bright yolks plop. She knew Alice was used to sleeplessness, familiar with emergency. But something about her movements was robotic, like if she stopped she might power down completely. Margaret had the urge to tell Alice to sit down, let her cook the eggs, but she couldn’t will it.

  Margaret understood Lainey, which was what none of them would ever grasp. In her jaws, Margaret knew that pull to bite. Once she’d come out of her postpartum depression and fallen in love with the boys, she would pretend to nibble their breadstick biceps, make a long growl to elicit their wild giggles, go again. And she’d feel, in the hollow of her mouth, the urge to bite, not down so much, not through, not into—though these were the only ways to bite, of course. But it was a rounder, fuller wish, a bite that wanted not to hurt, but to devour, consume, contain. People always talked about wanting to take a bite out of babies, strangers on the street! Margaret hadn’t known how physical a craving it was, how the wish to nibble would come alive in the jaw and remain there; she could feel it still.

  But to bite down. To hurt a child. Margaret could never.

  She didn’t think about what happened in Connecticut. But when she was forced, she remembered how clearly she had known herself to be a teenage girl in that moment. She could believe in time travel, alternate galaxies, astral planes, better than she could accept that she had hurt a child. The therapy with Dr. Lowenstein had been unseated quickly by her high-risk twin pregnancy, the doctor-sanctioned need to avoid any and all stressors, including the good long look at what she’d done, the look her friends insisted she need take.

  She could see that they thought she was foolish. No: disgusting. On the occasions they met for coffee or drinks and talked about their days, meetings Margaret always had to initiate, she saw the disdain on their faces, the way they lifted their cups to disguise their lips, curling up. She remembered reading in their freshman psych course that the worst emotion a person could feel about another wasn’t hatred, but disgust. That disgust toward a spouse was the most common predictor of divorce. Not the occasional disgust at domestic gross-outs—peed-upon toilet seats, chewed food in an open mouth—but general disgust at the sound of their voice, their posture, their very presence. She had felt degrees of this coming off her friends’ skin when she saw them, and she watched it soften, change, in the months after she told them she was pregnant.

  Then, the twins came and she wasn’t connected enough to the world to know what they thought of her, felt they probably hated her, but it didn’t matter because everyone did, she was worthless, and no one’s life was any better for having her in it, least of all her babies’.

  She operated on some plane outside herself to continue posting to her blog, sharing pictures of the boys, pictures she was so glad to have later, but that she could not recollect taking, nor even being in the room for, pictures of Lu
c and Anderson wearing the darling matching outfits that friends and family had sent, so many sets from Mac’s grandmother, perfect little French things that just about killed the women at her shower who were not yet pregnant but wished to be. The nanny gently wrested their wriggling limbs into the outfits; this she did remember, as there was a time Mac found Margaret struggling to put one in a romper.

  “Margaret, you’ve been in here for forty-five minutes,” Mac said, then, seeing her, “Jesus, have you been crying this whole time?”

  “I can’t get his arm in!” she wailed. “I can’t hurt him, Mac. I won’t hurt him!”

  “Of course you won’t!” Mac said, and scooped up the baby before taking Margaret in his arms. But the look he’d given her before she buried her head against his chest was one of fear. He’d urged her to let the nanny take on more of the “day to day” while she recovered, though what else was there for a new mother, she wondered, than the day to day, the minute to minute, the tedium that seemed to stretch into infinity even on those days when she opened her eyes to find that it was already dark outside.

  On one of the photographs Margaret had shared on Facebook, Lainey had written, More, Margaret! These babies are the world’s cutest, no doubt, but the mama stays in the picture!

  It occurred to her that perhaps Lainey just wanted to see her in her postpartum state, coming apart at every seam, nearer to annihilation than she’d been since she was a child. But then there were comments nested beneath Lainey’s, from Alice: Hear! hear! We want to see the hot mama alongside these precious, precious babes, and Ji Sun, who’d returned after a years-long hiatus from Facebook just to keep up with baby pictures: Yes. We can see your beauty in their faces, but we miss your face; we need to see it, too.

  It was this, knowing that they wanted to see her, that had let a crack of light into the pitch-dark room. She knew their notes were about more than the album, a photoset of Anderson and Luc at three months. Her friends had sent emails, asked to visit, all of which she’d ignored. They’d met the twins shortly after they were born, but it was easy to retreat back into their own lives after that, and easy for Margaret to beg off as too busy, too tired. But something about their little avatars moved her. There was Alice, beaming, in a years-old picture from her med school graduation; Lainey’s photo was outdated, too, but had appeared recently in a big magazine postmortem on the third anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, and showed her, sign aloft, mouth open midshout, cavernous; and Ji Sun’s own illustration of a black cat wearing a formal coat.