She felt their pixelated gaze on her, and even in the static images sensed a kind of admonition, but also love. She wanted to reply to their notes, but found she could not, and it was this inability to connect to her friends, rather than the failure to connect to her sons, that prompted her to finally consent to see a postpartum psychiatrist that Mac’s mother had pitched to her as having “the utmost discretion.”
Margaret considered saying that she thought all doctors were meant to have this quality, but knew the extra reassurance was offered, as it was so often in the case of Mac’s family, because they thought her a rube, a word she first heard from Lainey and found quite lovely before she learned what it meant.
It infuriated Margaret how rich people thought they had the market cornered on discretion, a two-dollar word for ugly secrets. Hush, hush. The ugly secrets Margaret had learned to keep before she started middle school would have made her mother-in-law cower and quake.
Margaret remembered how annoyed Mac’s mother had been after Margaret missed two appointments with her fancy doctor.
“This is not a man of limitless flexibility, my dear. He keeps an extraordinarily full calendar.”
Margaret had felt a pleasant burble of fury at this, that she could blow off this important man and her mother-in-law couldn’t do anything about it—forcing her, kicking and screaming, into a taxicab not exactly the picture of discretion. The desire to irritate Mac’s mother had been the first blip of motivation that she’d been able to call up in months, and she clung to it. Margaret didn’t want to pay another person to hold her secrets, or to imagine them and try to pry them loose. She was done with other people’s insistence that to speak pain was the only way to get out from under it.
Her uncle had appeared to her, once, five months after the twin’s birth. His shape loomed at the end of her bed, just as it had when she was a girl, and he carefully removed his work boots, as he had always done then, too, a gesture she came to recognize as the most fearsome kind of warning.
The twins were in their bassinets and Mac was at his office. The nanny was taking a shower. Her uncle stood in the corner and said, “Congratulations, Magic girl. You look like shit. Those are two strong and beautiful boys, though.” He’d smiled, showing too many teeth, two rows of teeth, like a shark, all of them mossy near the gums from chewing tobacco. When he’d reached for the babies she screamed, and they woke, their squalls joining hers until they were a bloodcurdling chorus, until they scared her uncle off. He vanished and the nanny came running, still wet in her towel.
“A nightmare,” Margaret told her. “I was having a nightmare.”
But she knew it hadn’t been a bad dream or a delusion. He had appeared somehow, to scare her now, to remind her that even though she’d escaped, he could find her, he knew her, what she was. What would it take to be worth something?
She stood on a ring of Saturn, poised to tumble into deep space. How was it that no one could see her there?
Hush, hush.
“But shouldn’t Lainey be here for this? While we decide what, what we’re going to do?” Margaret asked, looking at Alice and then Adam.
Adam took a sip of his coffee and spit it back into the cup.
“Alice was in touch with a friend, who gave her a recommendation for a place. A private, inpatient facility, upstate.”
“Like an institution?” Margaret asked. Alice had added shallots to the pan, and the smell was ghastly, less food and more force, it filled the room, reminded Margaret of the smells in the kitchen when her mother used to give home perms.
“You’d have her committed?” Ji Sun said, voice just above a whisper.
“No, no, a treatment center. It would be voluntary. We don’t want to set anything in motion, with child services or . . . I don’t know. I don’t know how any of this works because I never thought it would be relevant to my life,” Adam said.
“Lainey is not, she’s not insane. I mean, she’s given to moods, but she’s not unwell like this. She doesn’t need to be in an asylum!” Margaret said, eyes wide, terrified by the idea that people who loved you could sit in a room, in the house where you lived, and decide to send you away.
“But look what’s happened! What she’s done.” Alice clanged the pan on the burner. Even as the only one who had seen evidence of what her friend had done, she struggled to believe it. “Don’t you think it’s clear that means she’s more unwell than we knew?”
“No,” Margaret said. “I don’t know. I think there are a lot of hormones,” this word, she’d learned, the evergreen, inclusive excuse—not that it was an excuse, it was real, but so, she knew, were emotions unbolstered by a medicalized name, and so more easily dismissed, “and also emotions, that come in the postpartum period that—no offense—but I don’t know that you would understand.”
“Margaret, I’m a doctor. And also, fuck you. Try not to make me feel worse about my fucking hellscape of a womb right now, okay?” Alice looked at Ji Sun. “Care to tag in here at any point?”
“I don’t know,” Ji Sun said. “I really don’t know.”
“She bit her fucking baby! She took a bite out of Elizabeth’s face!” Alice said, and dropped the whole frying pan, still full of food, into the sink. The sound of its heat sizzled and the smell bloomed, sulfurous and sodden and burned.
“But she didn’t . . . eat the bite,” Margaret said.
The room was silent.
“Right? She didn’t, like, eat a bite!!” Panic rose in Margaret’s voice, her hands at her throat. She turned gray then green and fled the room.
“Of course she didn’t,” Adam said.
“Why didn’t you say that before Margaret lost her shit?” Ji Sun asked.
“I don’t know. I wasn’t there. I’m not sure. But Alice said it’s, it’s . . . it was two stitches.”
Ji Sun looked at Alice, stunned. She hadn’t even thought that her friend might have treated Elizabeth, had to treat her, but of course she would. What did she think? That Alice had cleaned Elizabeth’s face, said it was nothing, suggested Bacitracin and kissed her cheek? Two stitches. How that must have felt. How small Elizabeth was, how much Alice loved her. And where had Lainey been? In the room? Catatonic? Wailing? Forced to wait in the hall, clawing at the walls with her hands? Ji Sun could not, did not wish to, imagine. She felt a wash of gratitude and admiration for Alice, for the work she did that was so foreign to Ji Sun, for the wherewithal to do this work even under these circumstances, when Alice was herself hurt and shaken.
Margaret came back in the room in a hurry, as though she’d been interrupted midsentence.
“But even if she did. Even if she did, and I’m sure she didn’t, it wasn’t, it wasn’t like she meant to. She didn’t mean to. She didn’t mean to. I mean, she didn’t mean to.”
Ji Sun thought Margaret might never stop repeating this, so she answered, “No, she couldn’t have meant to”—she lowered her voice to a true whisper—“eat a bite. We all know this. This is getting nuts.”
“Getting nuts! It is nuts. It’s a completely insane thing for a person to do. But no, of course she didn’t mean to,” Adam shook his head, “eat the baby. She didn’t mean to bite her at all! She didn’t mean it. I believe her, of course, I have to believe her. And I know, I know she didn’t intend to hurt Elizabeth. Not consciously. And that’s why I know she needs help.” His voice cracked at Elizabeth’s name, and he put his head in his hands again, like it might roll off if he didn’t support it.
Who knew, Margaret thought, trembling, terrified. It might.
Chapter 44
After the aborted breakfast, Alice had to go home and nap, get to work. But before she did, they agreed together that there should always be someone else, that they could not leave Lainey, Adam, and Elizabeth alone. Ji Sun and Margaret went one after another back to their apartments to pack their weekend bags, as though headed upstate for fresh air
and a girls’ weekend, and not to take Lainey to a mental health facility, where she would self-commit. Margaret arranged for the nanny to stay for three nights, and Mac’s mother was ready to come up if she’d be away for longer, always eager to insinuate herself. Ji Sun left Howie, already in his studio, a long note saying that Lainey had had a sudden and serious onset of postpartum depression, and that they needed to get away for a few days, regroup. She couldn’t write down what had happened; she wasn’t sure she would even be able to say it over the phone. She trusted Howie, but she wanted to protect Lainey, and Elizabeth, too, not tell anyone outside those who already knew what happened. She hadn’t even seen Lainey yet—how could she know what to say?
When Ji Sun returned to Lainey and Adam’s apartment that afternoon, Margaret was helping Adam pack a bag for Elizabeth while Lainey and Elizabeth napped in the bedroom. Ji Sun went into the kitchen with her laptop to look for a place they could all stay. She found a nearby motel with a run-down log-cabin aesthetic, buffalo check on the beds and a taxidermied moose head that announced its specials. She couldn’t tell whether it was kitschy or just seedy, but it would do. She reserved three rooms, not knowing what Adam and Elizabeth would need, and not wanting to share a room with Margaret. She booked them for a week, though she doubted Lainey would consent to stay so long. Adam had talked to Lainey about the plan while Ji Sun was back at her place. Margaret told Ji Sun that she hadn’t been able to make out any of the words, but that she’d heard Lainey sobbing, and then Elizabeth wailed, too. Margaret had run to the door again, but hadn’t burst in.
“We’re going to see her,” Margaret said. “I mean, we’re all driving together.”
“Who is driving?” Ji Sun asked. Ji Sun didn’t drive, and hadn’t thought yet of who would. “Adam is wrecked. Lainey can’t, of course.”
“Oh, I will. Believe it or not, I kind of miss driving, living here. I thought we’d take our car anyway. More room. I just need to move Elizabeth’s car seat base.”
Ji Sun regarded her friend, how she’d shaken off her horror at breakfast and sprung into action, organized and efficient. Margaret wore a neat seersucker shell, dark jeans, and leather mules the color of toffee. Mom mode! Margaret called it, when she’d darted to a nearby liquor store for dry ice and a Styrofoam cooler to pack some of the breast milk that Lainey had stashed in her freezer, already having collected Elizabeth’s prescription for antibiotics. “Mom mode!” she said again now, as she stacked the suitcases—all save Ji Sun’s, which she’d also packed—neatly in the trunk of her SUV, Tetris-ing the pieces to make room for Elizabeth’s travel crib, her bouncy seat, the stroller that Lainey almost never used.
Their proximity to a new crisis gave Ji Sun the idea that she might finally ask Margaret about Laurent. Loss thinned the membrane between day-to-day decency and the darker maw we all avoided, where you looked head-on at the animals you loved and asked them to account for what they had done.
The urgency of her inquiry had faded so much after Margaret told them she was pregnant, and now, with this new horror, Ji Sun struggled to call up her indignation, to see in the friend who’d brought Gatorade back from the liquor store for Adam, insisted he drink one and give one to Lainey, the same woman who had sat on the edge of a thirteen-year-old’s bed, lips and cheeks red, and wailed that she couldn’t be to blame for whatever happened there, because she was a teenager, too.
Drunk after a baby shower for Margaret, Lainey had been the one to ask Ji Sun if there wasn’t some small part of her that felt almost relieved at what Margaret had done in Connecticut—not that she’d hurt someone, but that she wasn’t so perfect. Though Ji Sun understood that Lainey had long felt jealous of Margaret, the depths of it were revealed to Ji Sun in her friend’s question.
“No, not that she was perfect. I don’t mean that, exactly. Not that she lacked, like, the badness, but the complexity? I don’t know, I’m awful,” Lainey had said, and belched a sour champagne burp.
How fast champagne could go from golden and effervescent to acrid and sad, flat in the glass, moss on the teeth.
Ji Sun’s immediate response had been a stern No, and it was true that she’d felt no relief at what Margaret had done. But what Lainey said stuck with her, and in the days and years that followed, she understood that she was guilty of some of that same diminishment, crueler even than to think that your friend was too kind to hurt someone was to think that she lacked the complexity. It took no brilliance to cause harm. But that she and Lainey had thought of their friend in this way was such a failing that Ji Sun hadn’t been able to shake it, had the feeling that there were other questions she should ask Margaret, ones where the answers were more for Margaret than for Ji Sun.
What could she ask her now? How could she show she would listen?
Before she could figure out what to say, Margaret slammed the trunk shut.
“Will you run up and tell them that we’re ready?” she asked.
Ji Sun turned to go back inside, but when she came out from behind the car, she saw them there.
Adam and Lainey were frozen in place on the sidewalk, side by side but not touching, Adam held Elizabeth in her car seat rather than a pitchfork, American Gothic gone urban, gone haunted. They were so still.
Ji Sun didn’t know who to approach, or how. She couldn’t move, only stared at them from the street as Margaret swept past her, took Lainey in her arms, hugged her for long enough that someone pulled up and shouted at them to move the car.
Ji Sun realized that she had been terrified to see Lainey. What could she say? How should she act? How could she show her she loved her, didn’t fear her, believed her? She was flooded with relief that she even recognized Lainey, that her friend hadn’t transformed. Ji Sun realized that she’d still pictured her with blood on her cheeks and chin, had been doing so since she learned what happened. And here instead was her friend, loosed from Margaret’s arms now and looking like herself, but smaller, younger somehow, hair pulled back, a few freckles on her cheeks, like a child who someone else had dressed for school, dragged out onto the street. Ji Sun couldn’t tell if she was confused or tired or terrified, or all these things. She didn’t blink, but she was not so much expressionless as in wait somehow, like even she was not sure how to arrange her face.
Ji Sun looked back and forth between Adam and Lainey until she remembered Elizabeth. The shade on the car seat was pulled down and Ji Sun could only see the baby’s tiny feet. Loosed from the muslin blanket that had been draped over her, her feet wiggled, fat as dumplings, and Ji Sun, in spite of herself, thought how badly she wanted to put one in her mouth.
Chapter 45
By the time they arrived, it was nearly dark. They’d been slowed by the need to stop whenever Elizabeth whimpered, to change her diaper, or to let Lainey nurse her.
The first stop, at a gas station just north of the city, Elizabeth’s crying had ceased the moment Lainey lifted her from her car seat. Neither Ji Sun nor Margaret had been able to keep themselves from swiveling around to see the baby, the damage.
There was a clean square of gauze on the baby’s face, new white tape. The tape was nearly as large as the gauze, but together the bandage covered the fattest part of Elizabeth’s cheek, its unbandaged counterpart looking almost obscene in its fleshiness, its immaculate chub.
“Can we have the car?” Lainey asked, the first she’d spoken to them on the ride.
Ji Sun and Margaret went into the gas station, and Adam stayed leaned against the car, still holding his monitor, though it was powered off now.
When they got back on the road, Lainey shushed Elizabeth to sleep, her hand inside the car seat, hidden from Ji Sun’s view.
“She’s asleep,” Lainey said, and shortly after closed her own eyes, the others grateful to have a reason other than fear for their silence.
“Adam, please sleep,” Ji Sun said, meeting his eyes in the mirror of her sun visor. “They’re both
sleeping. Try. You must.”
When he did fall asleep, Ji Sun tore into her gas-station bagel, realized she hadn’t eaten since the day before. In her haste, she bit the inside of her front lip, hard enough that she cried out. She whipped her hand over her mouth, turned around to confirm that no one had heard her yelp.
“I bit my lip,” Ji Sun said to Margaret quietly.
“I see that, my God,” Margaret said, and gasped. She reached for a stack of napkins in the center console. “It’s just saliva. You know it mixes with the blood so it looks so much worse.”
Ji Sun hadn’t noticed the blood on her hands, but she wiped her face now, shocked at how badly it hurt, at the power of her teeth, how stupid it was that her body didn’t know to stop, that her teeth couldn’t sense, somehow, this next bit isn’t food, abort mission, turn back, don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it!
Napkin pressed over her mouth, Ji Sun turned to look at her sleeping friend. How could she have done it? How could she?
Her mouth was throbbing, the blood hadn’t stopped.
Ji Sun turned to Margaret, whispered, copper taste of blood on her tongue, “How could she? How could she? How could she do that? How could she?”
Margaret shook her head but didn’t answer. Ji Sun watched a single tear trail down Margaret’s face, wondered why her own eyes had stayed dry against all this pain.
The Other's Gold Page 28
