Remember Mia Read online

  I gently placed Mia in her crib. As I pulled my hands up from under her body, I prayed that she would survive. Despite me.

  That day, I knew I was capable of anything, capable of silencing her cries. That’s when I knew her life was at stake. And I screamed and for the first time the volume of my screams topped hers.

  Jack’s “few hours” always turned into a full twelve-hour workday. As I pressed my forehead against the window, waiting for his return, I tried to recall how long he had been avoiding all physical contact. When was the last time he had hugged or kissed me, and for how long had he been secretive? Jack was becoming more and more detached, icy even, barely talking to me. Working late was no longer an exception but a rule and his distance added more insecurities to my already frazzled thoughts.

  I watched Jack exiting a sleek black town car. When he walked through the front door, his eyes were two seas of silent reproach.

  “Sorry, I’m late,” he said, meaning If you had picked up the dry cleaning, I’d have been on time. And with all the time you have, why isn’t dinner ready and why is the house still a mess?

  “Took me forever to get a cab,” he added.

  His briefcase was already open, his BlackBerry in his hand.

  “A cab?” Hadn’t I just seen him exiting a town car?

  We stared at each other for a moment, then I lowered my gaze. I knew I had changed physically, I could see it in Jack’s eyes every time he looked at me. I weighed about as much as I did in high school, maybe even less. My facial features seemed to have corroded and I had aged a decade in the past two months. Before Mia, I had a haircut every couple of months. I used to go to the gym, yoga, Pilates, you name it. I never seemed to have any energy anymore.

  “You said you’d be back in a couple of hours.”

  “What the hell, really?” Jack said. “Can you tell me what you want from me? I just want to understand because I can’t see how making money is not the right thing.”

  I tried to work out what to say. How could I explain when my head felt so cluttered and fragile? For a fraction of a second he looked like a little boy about to listen to a parent preach, and I saw how afraid he was that I was going to say something else, would question him further, something neither one of us had the energy for. I wanted to ask him why he’d tell me he took a cab when he got out of a town car, and if he was having an affair, but I wasn’t sure I really cared. His distance paled in comparison to whatever crazy I had living inside of me.

  Hey, honey, welcome home! Guess what, there’s a demon trapped inside of our daughter’s head, and with every passing minute it’s getting harder to resist the temptation of jamming a sharp object into her fontanel.

  “She cried all day, Jack. I don’t know what to do anymore.”

  It’s because of the demon.

  “Did you take her out?”

  You haven’t left the house in days.

  “All she does is cry. Why would I take her out?”

  The demon is making her cry. If I can get to the demon, everything will be okay.

  “Well, what did you do?”

  I didn’t answer.

  Help me, Jack, help me. I’m afraid of hurting her.

  “She doesn’t cry all the time, Estelle. She’s not crying right now, is she? She cries sometimes, all babies do, that’s how they communicate.” He plopped on the couch and opened his briefcase. “I have work to do; let’s talk later, okay?” Jack absentmindedly jabbed chopsticks at Chinese leftovers while hacking away on his BlackBerry.

  “It’s okay,” I said more to myself than to Jack. I stared out the window, my reflection nothing but a distorted body in a sea of darkness.

  Jack’s mood tended to improve the sleepier he became. Later, in bed, he caught me staring at the ceiling. He asked, his voice now soft and gentle, what I was thinking about.

  “Dark, horrible thoughts,” I answered but kept my voice light and cheerful. “Demons, mainly.”

  He brushed my words off with a halfhearted smile. “Well then . . . as long as it’s nothing serious. You can always get a sitter a couple of times a week. I’ll help out as much as I can.”

  “Sure,” I said. Our conversations were nothing but a distorted reality we both chose to accept. There was nothing he could do for me.

  “Well, then let’s not dwell on it.”

  “Yeah, let’s not,” I said and felt a cold fist tightening around my heart.

  “I’m sorry about earlier. How was your day?” Jack said, flipped over, and pulled the blanket over his shoulders.

  “Just the usual.”

  Let me see. The thought of tomorrow being just like today makes me want to jump off a bridge. I feel as if I’m at the bottom of a dark well with my feet submerged in murky ankle-deep water, toad cadavers floating atop the slimy water’s surface, spiderwebs full of dried-up cocooned bugs and beetles. And that’s before I look closely.

  Jack’s breathing was slow and steady. I didn’t have to look at him to know that he was asleep.

  But it really didn’t matter because even if he was awake, he couldn’t bear half of what I had living inside of me. And regardless of what people say, you can’t see the stars from the bottom of a well.

  CHAPTER 8

  I parked in front of Jack’s building and watched the traffic lights change and cars float by. When the security guard made his rounds, I took the elevator up to the fifth floor and found all the offices dark, except Jack’s.

  As I listened to the contorted voices drifting toward me through Jack’s office door, I imagined what hands were doing, where tongues slithered like snakes, what pieces of clothing were draped over office chairs or bunched around ankles like turtlenecks, what the room smelled like. I observed myself in the glass door panel and was dumbfounded by the woman I had become. No longer a woman, really, but a crone, in baggy clothes and stringy hair with a chilly, triumphant cackle. I knew I was helpless, for the crone’s powers were infinite.

  Seconds after I began pounding the door with my fists, Jack ripped it open, looked at me, with surprise at first, then his eyes turned into rage. I didn’t speak, just turned and ran. I reached my car, shaking, unable to think, but I managed to drive home. When I pulled into the driveway, I was surprised I had made it there.

  Aashi, the sitter, was asleep on the couch in Mia’s room. A medical student from India, chronically sleep deprived yet easygoing and patient with Mia’s colicky behavior, she smelled of cardamom and anise and her upper lip appeared darker than the rest of her face. My hand still hovered over her shoulder when she opened her eyes.

  “Mrs. Connor, she didn’t wake up at all. I fed her around ten, and she fell back asleep right away,” she whispered and brushed a blanket of black hair from her face, her colorful bangles dancing on her wrist.

  “She must have been really tired,” I said. “We spent all day at the park, all that fresh air . . .” What sounded like a pleasant outing had been nothing more than a screaming baby in a stroller who eventually fell asleep out of sheer exhaustion.

  I looked over at Mia, picture perfect in her crib, her face angelic and placid while only hours earlier she had thrashed her hands toward my face, her mouth a gaping wound.

  Aashi left and I wandered around the apartment, unable to settle. I found myself in front of Jack’s office. I didn’t want to snoop but my behavior at his office—now nothing more than a moment of lunacy—demanded an explanation and I had nothing to give him. Nothing but a sea of irrationality. Jack was going to ask questions, he’d want to know what had possessed me to do what I had done. I needed a logical reason, proof of his infidelity, proof that he couldn’t be trusted any longer. I had to find a picture, a letter, a photograph, anything tangible beyond a random accusation that would justify my outburst.

  I stood in the doorway, taking in the shelves and filing cabinets. I had no idea what I was even lookin
g for. Jack had started paying all the bills after Mia was born, handled all the paperwork, and I was glad he did. There wasn’t another chore I could manage, especially not anything that involved deadlines. But maybe his taking over the finances was just a way of increasing control over the woman who had floundered. It was ironic that the differences that brought us together—Jack’s sense of purpose and his attraction to my carefree attitude toward life and, as he saw it, unpredictability—were the very things that were also driving us apart. That and the fact that I was an absolute failure as a mother.

  The floorboards creaked as I entered the office and a familiar aroma of leather greeted me. Like an observer I stood beside myself, watched a woman scan fake paneling between rows of books, pushing at conspicuous spots, looking around, expecting an antique oil painting to fall off the wall, an envelope yellowed by age dropping to the ground, containing some clandestine content. The woman’s fingers slipped, almost snapping her nails off, as she tried to pull open a locked drawer. I watched her, running her fingertips alongside the bottom of the desk’s surface, pushing here and there, lifting keyboard, mouse pad, and desk organizer, but reality greeted her harshly: no hidden drawers, no secret compartments, just a piece of contemporary office furniture. The woman jerked back into reality when the phone rang.

  I backed away from the desk. The chair fell to the floor. Thud. The phone continuously nagged to be picked up.

  Ring. Ring.

  Its pesky urgency was replaced by an infant’s faint gurgle echoing through the house. The baby monitor’s light display on Jack’s desk indicated the volume of Mia’s cries: six out of ten. Then the lights alternated from the middle scale all the way to the top. The phone went silent and so did the baby monitor. The phone rang again, slicing the air with determination. I ignored Mia’s cries emanating from the baby monitor and wiped the tears that were running down my neck, trailing inside my sweater. I looked at the clock on the wall. It was midnight.

  The gurgling baby monitor turned into a whimper, the whimper into a howl, and the howl into a full-blown bellow. The lights remained at the very top of the display window, until one last gurgle drifted off into the distance. Then there was silence.

  I left the study and went through the bedroom into Jack’s walk-in closet. A masterpiece of built-in shelves constructed of maple wood and hardware of brushed steel, next to mine, separated by a wall, both accessible by individual doors. Jack’s dress shirts, arranged by color, immaculately pressed, aligned on one wall, his shoes along the other. I looked up at the top row of storage shelves, reachable only with the attached rolling ladder.

  Reluctantly I passed the full-length mirror, a shadow of Jack appearing, checking his designer suit, belt, and shoes, playing a cruel trick on me.

  As I stepped closer, a figure stared back at me. The woman was a stranger, a mere visitor who looked at me in anger. I considered her, even tried to force a winsome smile on her, yet her opaque eyes seemed empty, like doll’s eyes. Not one of those pretty dolls with an elaborate dress and curly hair, no, less than that, really more like a rag doll with crooked button eyes attached by only a wisp of thread. A thief of a woman, so powerful and potent that she made off with my prized possessions, my composure, my sanity, my joy, and the part of me that was a mother. Unable to lift my gaze off her, a familiar yet lesser twin almost, an inferior replica of myself, we stared at each other, contemplating if we’d met each other but I couldn’t place her and she wasn’t sure of me, either.

  That night, in Jack’s closet, surrounded by immaculately pressed shirts and shoes shined to perfection, I fell apart into millions of little pieces. The walls closed in, wrapped themselves around me. I felt threatened by my own skin, by the cars driving by, the honking cabs, and the sirens. The ticking clock—I could clearly hear the ticking all the way from the other end of the apartment—held a message for me that I was unable to decipher. No longer was there a difference between the mundane and the bizarre. I saw the world through a magnifying glass, and my mind was about to explode and spatter whatever was left of my lucidity all over Jack’s starched shirts and polished shoes. I was a bloated corpse and I needed relief. I needed to make sense. But was sense something one can make?

  White noise on full blast. A voice escaped the subdued grain of the maple shelves, and unlike mine, it made sense.

  The box, it said. Where is the box?

  The box that didn’t fit with the rest of the items in the closet?

  Yes, that one.

  The box that was old and torn, which I noticed every time I hung up his clean clothes, that he moved from the overhead storage one week to a lower shelf the next?

  Yes, the old yellowed photo box with reinforced metal holes, rectangular and flat, larger than a shoe box.

  Am I supposed to look for it and open it?

  Yes, look for it. Then open it.

  I pulled the ladder to the far corner of the shelf, its metal balls sliding along the tracks, humming like a swarm of hornets. I kicked off my shoes and climbed up.

  There it was. A quite unremarkable and ordinary cardboard box. I managed to climb down the ladder without dropping it, sat it on the floor, and knelt next to it.

  The box was cumbersome to open; the lid had to be lifted on both ends simultaneously. I recognized the castle logo in the lower right-hand corner: Rosenfeld, Manhattan—one of the largest wedding gown stores in New York, maybe even the country. I parted the tissue paper. Photos with scalloped edges, tinged yellow by time, depicting people unknown to me. A little boy in a blue coat, a woman standing next to him, leaning on him, her arm around his shoulders.

  A property deed. Jack had mentioned that he had flipped properties while in law school but I didn’t know he owned a house. A deed for a brownstone on North Dandry in Brooklyn.

  Before I could make sense of the deed, I came across a black pouch, heavy in my hand. I felt the shape of a gun through the velvety fabric. I removed the revolver from the pouch and cradled it in my hand. It seemed old-fashioned, but I really knew next to nothing about guns and therefore I pointed it away from me and randomly pushed the cylinder. It swung to the right. It was empty.

  Below the black pouch was a concealed-handgun license card, laminated, with Jack’s information. I never knew Jack owned a gun, let alone had a license to carry, but it seemed logical for a lawyer to have one. Tucked in the corner was a full box with bullets.

  I grabbed a few and lined them up in my palm. They were cold and made a gentle clinking sound when they touched. I filled up the chamber, engaged the cylinder, and allowed my finger to gingerly touch the trigger. The gun I could stomach—lawyers owning guns isn’t unheard of—what was hard to believe was the fact that it had been there all along and I never knew.

  I turned the gun toward my face and looked down the hole. It soothed me somehow, and as I wondered what it would be like to put the cold barrel in my mouth, I heard the ticking of a wristwatch. Then the crinkly plastic sound of a diaper demanded my attention, a whiff of baby powder along with the stench of deceit, a combination that had the power to silently command me. I looked up.

  There was Jack, standing in the closet, Mia sleeping in his arms. There I was, gun in hand. He stared at me, his eyes blank. I hid my hands behind my back and for a second I wanted to kick the box to make it slide under his dress shirts, the Berber carpet allowing it to glide like a ghost to a secret hiding place. I needn’t have worried; Jack was focused on the usual.

  “Didn’t you hear her cry?” Icicles around his every word. Again, I wasn’t vigilant enough. Again, I failed to be the mother I should have been.

  There were words Jack never said, words Jack never used, yet I had heard him say them over and over again—flawed, unfit. A bad mother, a bad wife. Faulty and imperfect. I had no business being there. I had no business being at his office earlier, in his closet now, his house in general, his life, period. I had no business being the mother
of his child.

  “What’s this?” I said, holding up the deed in front of him while hiding the gun behind my back. I was surprised by the strength of my voice. Everything was wrong. Jack, Mia, the ticking clock, the gun, the photographs, the property deed. “We’re not as broke as you’re making us out to be. While we’ve been struggling, you owned a house worth what . . . a million? Were you ever going to tell me? What other secrets do you have?”

  His posture wilted, he looked like a little boy: small, softened, less confident. “It’s a property I tried to flip but haven’t been able to find a buyer for.”

  I stared at him, suddenly realizing that I knew next to nothing about him.

  “It’s just an investment property, it’s in shambles. What did you want me to do? Worry you even more? You’re doing a great job at that already.”

  “I’m your wife, I think I ought to know everything about our finances.”

  “There weren’t any problems until you started with your obsessions, all those doctor visits while you were pregnant, all those tests you insisted on, all those specialists you consulted, over nothing. It was nothing until you made it into something.”

  “So it’s nothing to you? Or is it something you didn’t want me to know about?”

  “I didn’t say that. We are broke, if you care to know.” He raised his voice then; I felt him dropping the façade, becoming real. “We have perfectly adequate health insurance. But you insisted on all those specialists that weren’t covered. And I get it, you know I get it. You were worried. But you didn’t stop there, either, did you? Even after Mia was born, you continued . . .”

  I could tell he was looking for words, looking to put a name to my madness. Am I even mad? Was there such a thing as a little bit crazy? A lick of mad? I worried about Mia. I still do. Every waking minute.