“Daniel,” Francie says, quietly. “She has Midas.”
He is studying me, a peculiar expression on his face. When he approaches, he seems so big all of a sudden. I feel the light changing around us: a grayness shadowing the room, like clouds rolling across the sun. My legs give out and I reach for the counter, cradling Joshua’s head. I haven’t felt this out of sorts since my first trimester.
“You took Midas?” Daniel says to me.
“His name is Joshua.”
“Joshua?”
“Daniel, please don’t stand so close to me,” I say. “Go sit down. There’s beans.”
Francie is beside him then. “Scarlett, we just want to help. You’ve had a long day. Just you and the baby.”
“I have,” I say. “It’s hard.”
“I know.” Francie places a hand on Joshua’s back. “It is. It’s hard.”
I look at Daniel, and despite the hardened look on his face, I feel a wave of sadness for him. “It must be so much harder for you. Trying to do this as a guy.” I manage a laugh. “I know. Educated, wealthy white guy. Boo-hoo. The burden of it. But really, being a stay-at-home dad? That can’t be easy.”
“Give me the baby,” Daniel says. He grips my arm. His skin is smooth, his fingers strong, just as I’ve imagined his hands would feel on a woman’s body.
“No, I won’t give you the baby,” I say. “You have your own.” The sirens have grown louder and my back is pressed to the wall and there are footsteps on the stairs. Maybe it’s Gemma, or Yuko, with her yoga mat, arriving late again. But then the door is knocked open and men in black shirts are rushing into the room.
Francie is saying Midas’s name, and Daniel has his hands on Joshua. There’s so much shouting, and I can’t make sense of what’s happening.
I smell rain.
I’m in the stairwell, lumbering down the steps, belly first to the sidewalk, praying for the car service to hurry up and arrive. I feel the pain gripping my back, and see the look on the taxi driver’s face. The liquid seeps from me and I’m lying on the hospital bed, wishing Dr. H was here. Grace, the nurse, tells me to breathe.
I feel the pain and the darkness, and I know that something is wrong. Something is terribly wrong. I know that I’m going to lose Joshua. Again.
“Wait!” I yell. Francie is holding my arms, and Daniel is wresting Joshua away from me. “I can’t let you take him. Let me see his face. I want to see what he looks like!”
“Hands above your head,” Grace screams. But it’s not Grace. It’s a police officer.
“Please don’t wash him off. I want to hold him. Skin-to-skin contact immediately after the birth.” I feel the pressure, squeezing my chest. “It’s critical.”
“Hands above your head!” Grace says, louder, her gun a straight line to my heart.
I put my hands on the wall and close my eyes.
Closure.
My fingers spider the wall, and I reach for the knife hanging from the magnetic strip. I feel the slick, cold metal of the blade and wind my fingers around the handle, pulling, aware of the magnetic fields splitting, breaking free from one another.
The sensation stays with me as I hear Francie scream; as I see the glint of light where the blade has caught a thin ray of sun streaming through the terrace window.
I close my eyes, and just before the knife meets my skin, I call for him one last time.
Joshua.
Epilogue
One Year Later
To: May Mothers
From: Your friends at The Village
Date: July 4
Subject: This week’s advice
Your toddler: Fourteen months
In honor of the holiday, today’s advice is about independence. Do you notice that your formerly fearless little guy is suddenly afraid of everything when you’re out of sight? The friendly dog next door is now a terrifying beast. The shadow on the ceiling has become an armless ghoul. It’s normal for your toddler to begin to sense danger in his world, and it’s now your job to help him navigate these fears, letting him know he’s safe, and that even if you’re out of sight, Mommy will always be there to protect him, no matter what.
Winnie puts on her sunglasses and stuffs her short hair under a baseball cap before stepping into the small garden. She crosses the street quickly, her head bent toward the ground against the wind.
A man in a top hat is standing in front of an amplifier at the entrance to the park, a marionette strung from each hand, a line of children sitting at attention in front of him, their faces slack with awe. A gust of wind blows the hat from his head, and Winnie turns away from the crowds, heading in the opposite direction, down the sidewalk toward the break in the stone wall. She steers the stroller over the pebbles and under the arch, and when she mounts the hill and enters the wide lawn, she slows, surveying the crowd. Two young women in bikini tops lie on their stomachs, laughing at something, iced coffees in their hands, sections of the New York Times strewn on the grass in front of them. A soccer game is under way nearby, dozens of shirtless men running in the rising dust, yelling to one another in Creole. Winnie spots them in the distance, where they said they’d be—on blankets under their willow tree.
She walks across the lawn, averting her eyes from the flowering dogwood on her left, under which a dozen or so people are gathered; red, white, and blue balloons bob from strings tied to the legs of a plastic table. She sees herself under that tree—her mother’s tree—a year ago. She hasn’t returned to the park since that night when she made her way here, twenty minutes after leaving the Jolly Llama, walking aimlessly at first through the deserted streets, and then with purpose. The mosquitos circled and the oppressive heat of that July night bore down on her as she sat cross-legged, her back against the knotty trunk, writing her mother a letter.
It’s a practice she kept for years, coming here with the leather-bound notebook she found the night of Audrey’s death, wrapped in silver paper and left on the dining room table when her mom ran out to buy ice cream. The inscription on the front page, written in Audrey’s delicate script, has mostly faded: Today you may turn eighteen, but you will always be my baby. Happy birthday, Winnie.
The notebook is nearly filled, with long letters Winnie has written to her mother any time she had something she needed to share: that she’d quit Bluebird, and she and Daniel had broken up. That she’d used some of the family money to set up a foundation for young dancers. That Archie Andersen was in jail, finally, the same week her father died from a heart attack during a business trip to Spain. It was also under the dogwood that Winnie wrote Audrey two years earlier, letting her know she’d done it: she’d found the right sperm donor. She was going to have a baby.
She hadn’t initially planned to come to her mother’s tree the night Midas was taken, but as soon as Alma arrived, she knew she’d much rather be alone than at a crowded bar. After stealing into Midas’s room and kissing her sleeping son good-bye, she’d taken the notebook from the shelf. Later that night, as the sky sparkled with fireworks from the crowd across the lawn, she cried as she wrote under the light of a nearby park lamp about what an easy baby he was. About the way he smelled and how small he felt in her arms and that his eyes were just like Audrey’s, so much so that when he looked at her sometimes, Winnie thought she was looking at her mother.
A group of people nearby break into “Happy Birthday,” and Winnie sees that Nell is waving from under the willow tree. Winnie picks up her pace, trying to shut out the memory of that night, and it’s only when she approaches their blanket that she realizes she was wrong. She doesn’t know these women.
“Hi,” one says. “Can we help you?”
“Winnie!” Francie is gesturing from the next tree. “Over here.” Behind her, Colette and Nell are spreading gift-wrapped boxes on a blanket. Beatrice, Poppy, and Will dig in the dirt nearby.