Nell carries a bar stool to the fence. She climbs on top of it and grips the coil wire, pulling herself up, hoisting a leg over the top. Her palms are damp and she loses her grip, her sandals slipping in the wire. She falls to the other side, landing hard on the pavement of the parking lot next door. Feeling the taste of blood from where she’s bitten her lip, seeing the razor cuts on the heels of her hands and knees, she stands and hurries through the parking lot out to the sidewalk, feeling a hard shoulder of a man bump into her side. “Jackass,” she yells. “Watch where you’re walking.”
Up the hill, back toward the park, she slows her pace. As she crosses the street, she senses someone walking close behind, shadowing her steps, and it all comes back to her. People waiting around the corner, watching her, trying to document her every move. She breaks into a tender, awkward run again, ignoring the ache in her C-section incision and the pain spreading along her inner-right thigh; across the street, down the block, and toward the day care. She has another hour before picking up Beatrice, and yet she forces herself to keep up the pace, her feet burning in her thin sandals. Within ten minutes, she’s arrived. She peers into the window between the cutout sunflowers and butterflies taped to the glass. Two women are kneeling on the floor in front of a bouncy chair, leaning toward the baby strapped into it. One of them is pressing the baby’s chest. The women—they look in distress. The baby is choking. Nell moves to get a different angle. The baby they’re kneeling in front of is Beatrice.
Nell dashes to the door, twisting the handle, but it’s locked. She bangs on the glass, slamming her fists, imagining Beatrice inside, choking on an object carelessly left within her reach, her face turning blue. Finally the lock clicks open. Nell runs down the hall and throws open the door, meeting the startled look of a young woman in ripped jeans and a T-shirt printed with a pink cupcake and the words Happy Baby Daycare.
“Ms. Mackey. You’re—”
She rushes past her, dropping to the floor next to the two women. Nell reaches for her baby, hearing her phone chiming in her bag as she registers the look on her daughter’s face.
Beatrice is beaming.
Nell turns to the woman. The thing in her hand: it’s a phone. She was taking a photo.
“Look at that gorgeous smile,” the woman says, grinning down at Beatrice.
“Smile?”
“Yes.”
“That’s not gas?”
The woman laughs, and Nell’s phone chimes again. “Not this time. That’s a smile. You haven’t seen her do that before?”
“No,” Nell says. “I’ve been waiting for it.” She kneels back on her heels, reaching for her phone, the tears smarting her eyes, her breath catching as she reads Francie’s message.
They found him.
I want my mother.
Colette breaks into a final sprint as she reaches the top of the hill. She is too old to be having the thought, and yet she keeps imagining it: sitting with her mother at the large kitchen table at their home in Colorado, the dogs at their feet, the glass doors thrown open to the yard as her father fixes them drinks and Colette tells her mother everything. About how worried she is Midas will never be found. About taking the file from Teb’s office and making copies and showing them to Nell and Francie. About the deep regret she’s been feeling over her decision to share the information with Token, whom she barely knows. She wants to admit how embarrassingly bad her writing has been, and tell her about this morning, at the doctor’s office for her second postnatal checkup, sobbing in the room with Dr. Bereck, admitting how overwhelmed and anxious she feels, how much trouble she’s having getting to sleep.
“What are you feeling most anxious about?” Dr. Bereck asked.
“Everything, but Poppy mostly. I’m worried something is wrong with her.” Colette has been trying without success to ignore her concerns—that Poppy’s limbs seem weak, that she still hasn’t mastered holding her head up fully, that she sometimes struggles to make eye contact. “When I’m around the other babies in my mom group—I don’t know. They seem different. Stronger,” Colette said, finally giving herself permission to cry. “And I get these daily updates from The Village. She’s not hitting the milestones they say she should be.”
“First of all, stop reading those,” Dr. Bereck said. “They assume all babies are going to develop at exactly the same rate. That’s not how this works.”
“I know, but still. I can’t stand the idea of it. Charlie says I’m crazy. That she’s fine. But I’m her mother. I can feel it. Something might be wrong.”
Colette wants to tell her own mother these things, but she can’t. She doesn’t even know where she is. The last time they spoke, ten minutes over a staticky phone line more than two weeks ago, Rosemary was in the San Blas Islands off the coast of Panama, conducting research on one of the last remaining matriarchal societies. Colette’s father, recently retired as the chair of biology at UC Boulder, had accompanied her. (“As a member of a matriarchal family, I feel I’ll fit in well,” he said when her parents called to tell her they’d be going away for three months, leaving a week after Poppy was due.)
Colette is breathless as Alberto, the doorman, opens the door for her, and when she gets out of the elevator on the third floor, stopping to unlace her sneakers, she can hear Charlie inside the apartment, in the kitchen, speaking to someone on the phone.
He drops the phone from his ear when she enters. “Wow,” he mouths. “You look hot.”
She glances in the mirror over the table in the hall. Her hair is soaked, her freckles crimson, the layer of sunscreen she applied on her way out of the doctor’s office chalks her skin. It’s the first time she’s gone for a run since giving birth, and she had to stop and walk several times. “I’m assuming you mean as in very warm,” she says to Charlie.
“No,” he whispers. “I mean as in hot.” He kisses her hand and then speaks into the phone. “We can make that work. I just can’t let these things get in the way of finishing the new book.” He pours a cup of coffee and hands it to Colette. “And I probably shouldn’t miss any major holidays. Doubt the baby would ever forgive me for that.”
“Nor the baby’s mother,” Colette says, assuming he’s on the phone with his publicist, discussing another invitation to speak somewhere. He finished his book tour two months earlier, but the requests for additional cities keep coming. She pours a glass of water and notices that the dining table—a vintage farm table Charlie bought them last Christmas—is set for two, with her grandmother’s dishes and their linen napkins. A handful of bright blue bodega daisies, some of the petals flaccid and wilting, are arranged in a stainless-steel travel mug in the center of the table.
She takes a grape from the bowl at Charlie’s elbow and wraps her arms around his waist, pressing her cheek into the familiar hollow between his shoulder blades, taking in his scent—Speed Stick and roasted garlic—hearing Womb Noises floating from the monitor on the shelf. She allows herself to feel the easy joy of the moment. The warmth of Charlie’s body. Poppy asleep in the nursery. The rhythm of the apartment. If only she could stay right here, in this exact moment, forever.
Colette unclasps herself and sees the book—Becoming a Family—on the counter beside the coffeepot. She takes her coffee and the book and slides onto a stool at the island as Charlie chops a thick bunch of parsley in quick, sure bursts, the phone pressed between his shoulder and ear. She opens to the early section on pregnancy, glancing through Charlie’s notes in the margins, the corners he’s turned back to mark certain pages.
Nine weeks: the baby is the size of a grape.
How to prepare your birth partner.
Things to avoid: raw fish and undercooked meat, excessive exercise, hot baths.
Colette feels the lump in the base of her throat as she reads the words, remembering those early weeks. The ache in her breasts as she climbed the stairs. The stomach-turning scent of strangers’ soap and perfume on the subway. Getting sick in her publisher’s restroom, in the middle of a meeting to discuss the direction of the second book.