Mommy Tracked (28 page)

“Hello, dear,” a voice said, from the direction of the kitchen. It was a gravelly woman’s voice, one that sounded as though its owner had smoked a pack a day for forty years. Chloe was so surprised that she started, wheeled around, and poked her head in the kitchen. There, sitting at the table, was a woman Chloe had never seen before. She was older, probably in her late sixties, and had a pleasant face, square-jawed and heavily lined. Her blue eyes were kind, and her plump face was framed by a short crop of steel-gray curls. She was wearing a coral T-shirt with shells screen-printed on the front and matching cotton shorts that stretched over her comfortably plump frame. William was next to her, sitting in his vibrating bouncy seat. He kicked his fat little feet up and chortled happily when he saw his mother.

“Hi,” Chloe said. She smiled uncertainly down at the stranger who seemed to have made herself at home in Chloe’s kitchen.

“Hello, dear. I’m Mavis Willert. I live two doors down from you. In the town house with the blue door and the rainbow wind sock.”

“Oh! Right! Hi,” Chloe said, smiling at her. “We haven’t met many of our neighbors yet. It’s funny how things change. When I was growing up, I knew every square inch of my street and all of my neighbors by name.” Chloe bent over and kissed William on the top of his fuzzy head. “So, um, I see James got you some coffee?”

Which was rather shocking. She didn’t know James could work the coffeepot. Or where Chloe kept the coffee, for that matter.

“No, I made the coffee. I hope you don’t mind.”

Okay. This is…well, bizarre
, Chloe thought.
There’s a stranger in my house, with my baby, making herself a cup of coffee. Where is James, anyway?

“Oh…of course not. Um, where is my husband?” Chloe asked, looking around.

“I think he said he was going golfing,” Mavis said. She stood creakily, with a groan. “But now that you’re back, I suppose I’ll be getting home.”

“Wait—you mean, James left you here? Alone?”

Mavis smiled vaguely, unperturbed. “Not entirely alone. I had William here for company.” She glanced up at the kitchen clock. “So that will be twenty-four dollars.”

“Twenty-four dollars?” Chloe repeated, confused. She was still trying to get her mind around the part where James had left a complete stranger alone in their house to take care of William, while he went off to play golf.

“That’s what your husband and I agreed on. Eight dollars an hour, and I was here for three hours,” Mavis said conversationally.

Three hours?
Chloe thought.
James has been gone for that long?

“Oh. Right.” Moving woodenly, Chloe reached into her purse and pulled out thirty dollars. She handed the money to Mavis. “Go ahead and keep the change,” Chloe said.

“Thank you, dear,” Mavis said brightly. She beamed down at William. “He’s a good boy. If you ever need a sitter again, don’t hesitate to call me. It was nice to be around a little one again.”

“Thanks,” Chloe said faintly.

She walked Mavis out, said good-bye, and then returned to the kitchen. She sat down heavily at the table, and, as she looked down at William cooing happily in his bouncy seat, her rage began to swell. It burned in her chest and throat, moving outward until her entire body felt as though it were electrified with anger. She looked down at her hands; they were shaking. Chloe breathed in deeply, gulping in the air, and when she felt she’d calmed enough that she could speak without screaming, she stood and retrieved the telephone. She punched in James’s cell phone number.

“Hey, babe,” James said, sounding obscenely cheerful.

“Where are you?” Chloe asked, struggling to keep her voice calm.

James hesitated. “I’m at the golf course. Is everything okay?”

“So you didn’t have some sort of an emergency that required you to go to the ER to get stitched up? A bagel-slicing incident, perhaps? Or a freak Jet Ski accident? You weren’t attacked by a pack of wild rabid dogs?”

“What? We don’t even have a Jet Ski. Are you okay, sweetie? You sound a little…weird. And you’re not making a whole lot of sense.”

“I’m just trying to get this straight: You left William with a total stranger so you could go
golfing
?”

“Oh! You mean Mavis. I thought she seemed real nice,” James said. His Texas drawl was more pronounced, which always happened when he’d had a few beers.

Chloe gritted her teeth. “How did you find her?”

“I went and knocked on a few doors.”

“You…
knocked
…on
doors
? You mean, you just went from house to house, asking someone to take care of our baby?” Despite her best efforts to stay calm, Chloe’s voice rose shrilly.

“Why are you yelling?”

“I’m not yelling. I’m very calmly asking you if you really left our infant son with a stranger so that you could play golf. Because I’m finding it hard to believe that you would really do that.”

“Chloe, calm down—”

“Oh, I’m calm. I’m perfectly calm,” Chloe said. “In fact, I’m now going to very calmly hang the phone up on you.”

And then she clicked the phone off, which felt good. It felt even better when James called back ten seconds later, and Chloe picked up the phone and hung it back up without a word. She thought for a few minutes, and then an idea came to her.

Do I dare?
she wondered, with a thrill of recklessness. But then she thought about how James was willing to risk the safety of their son by leaving him with a complete stranger while he went golfing—
golfing
, for Christ’s sake—and she thought,
Screw it. He has this coming
.

Chloe pulled the heavy yellow pages out from under the kitchen counter, flipped open to the locksmith section, and called the first company listed there.

James didn’t come right home. He wasn’t back by dinnertime, so Chloe ate alone, heating a can of soup in the microwave, before changing to go out for her evening walk.

He’s probably waiting for me to cool off before he shows his face
, Chloe thought resentfully. It hadn’t worked. If anything, his absence just made her angrier.

When Chloe got back from power-walking around the neighborhood an hour later, pushing William in his carriage, James’s blue Honda Accord was parked in the driveway. Chloe took a deep breath and steeled herself for the inevitable scene.

“I am not backing down,” she told herself, as she pushed the stroller up the driveway. “He left our baby with a stranger. I am not going to let him pretend that it’s no big deal.”

But James wasn’t sitting on the tiny front porch, in the Adirondack chair they kept there, as she’d expected him to be. In fact, she didn’t see him anywhere.

Did he break into the house?
she wondered, with a thrill of anger.

Chloe glanced into his sedan as she walked by, and she stopped. James was sitting in the car, in the driver’s seat, his head lolled back and his eyes closed. Chloe stared at him for a moment while it registered. He was
sleeping
. They were having a fight, and not just any fight, but the biggest fight of their marriage, and he was
asleep
?

Then she spotted the bouquet of yellow roses, wrapped in plastic, on the passenger-side seat of his car. They looked a little shopworn, as though they’d spent a few too many days in the grocery store’s florist case. The edges of the petals were starting to brown and curl, and the baby’s breath looked limp.

Roses
, she fumed silently.
He leaves our baby with a stranger while he takes off to play golf, and he thinks he can make it all right with a bouquet of cheap grocery store roses?

Chloe’s resolve hardened. She turned abruptly away and marched up to the house. She unlocked the door with her shiny new key, let herself in, and locked the door behind her, fastening the security chain for extra measure.

seventeen

Grace

W
hen her eyelids
fluttered open, it took Grace a long, groggy minute to figure out what was going on.

Where am I? And what am I doing here? And why does my head feel like someone clocked me with a baseball bat?
she wondered woozily.

But then it clicked, and she knew exactly where she was. Orange Cove Memorial Hospital. She’d given birth to three babies here, and the room—with its painted concrete brick walls, orange upholstered visitors’ chairs, and awful bleachy smell—was all too familiar.

Oh, Christ. I didn’t have another baby, did I?
Grace wondered, with a jolt of panic.

But no, that wasn’t it. She wasn’t pregnant. At least, not that she could remember…no, no. Definitely not pregnant. Thank
God
. So why was she here?

Louis was dozing in one of the visitors’ chairs, his head leaning back against the wall. Grace frowned as she gazed at her husband. He looked awful, as though he hadn’t showered or shaved in days. Usually, he was freakishly neat about his clothes, carefully ironing every last crease out of his shirt each morning before work. But now his clothes were wrinkled, and there was what looked like a coffee stain splattered on the right knee of his khakis.

“Louis,” Grace said, or tried to say. All she could produce was a froglike croak. But the noise was enough to wake Louis, who suddenly sat bolt upright and looked wildly around the room, blinking. His eyes focused on her—and widened with shock. She tried to smile at him, but her lips felt out of practice too.

“Grace.” Louis jumped to his feet, and crossed the distance between them in two steps. He picked up her hand and peered down at her. “Gracie, you’re awake. Can you hear me?”

“Water,” Grace said creakily. This time the word actually came out, although she sounded like the Tin Man from
The Wizard of Oz
before Dorothy oiled him.

Louis beamed down at her, his eyes filling with tears. “Water? Did you say water? Oh, my God—that’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard in my life,” he said, and he picked up her hand and pressed it to his lips. She could feel the warmth of his tears on her skin.

“The doctor! I have to get the doctor,” Louis said. He picked up the call button strapped to the side of her hospital bed and began pushing it on and off, on and off, on and off.

“You’re only supposed to push it once,” Grace croaked. “And please get me some water.”

A nurse—young, freckled, and wearing mint green scrubs—came flying into the room at a full sprint, her plain oval face looking grim, as though she was expecting the worst. But then she stopped suddenly when she saw Louis smiling down at Grace.

“She’s awake,” the nurse said unnecessarily, and her face broke out in a broad smile.

“She’s awake,” Louis confirmed. “And already bossing me around.”

“Excellent! I’ll go get Dr. Patil.”

Dr. Patil turned out to be a middle-aged man with kind brown eyes and soft hands, and he stayed for a long time, asking Grace questions and checking her reflexes, while Louis stood nervously on the other side of the hospital bed, clutching Grace’s hand. Dr. Patil finally pronounced Grace’s prognosis to be “promising” and cautioned that they would need to run more tests before she could leave.

“Fine by me,” Grace said. She’d had some water and was getting her voice back, although she still sounded husky. “Lying in a bed, with everyone waiting on me hand and foot, and no diapers to change—throw in a few margaritas, and I’ll think I’m at Club Med.”

Dr. Patil laughed as he left the room, but when Louis turned back to Grace, he wasn’t smiling. Instead, his eyes were narrowed and his lips were thinned into a tight line.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“How can you joke about this?” he asked, his voice strained.

Louis looked thin, Grace thought, as though he hadn’t been eating well. She felt an odd mix of guilt and jealousy. She decided to try to coax him out of his anger.

“I’m serious. After five years of sleep deprivation, I could use a little vacation. In fact, are you sure I was even in a coma? Maybe I was just sleeping really, really hard,” Grace joked.

But Louis didn’t laugh. Instead, he crossed his arms and glared at her through bloodshot eyes. “Grace, it isn’t funny. You almost
died
. Do you not understand that? That tea you were drinking almost killed you,” Louis said.

Grace blanched. “God, don’t even say it,” she said, shivering a little.

“I’m going to say it, and you’re going to listen.” Grace had never heard Louis sound so stern. He crossed his arms and glowered down at her, just as he did at the girls when they were misbehaving. “You have to promise me, right here and now, that you won’t ever drink that poison again. And you have to promise me, no more crash diets.”

Grace, remembering her eleven-pound weight loss, hesitated.

No
, she thought rebelliously.
No. I’m not giving up being thin. No way.

“I asked my paralegal to do some research on that tea. Did you know that ten women in the U.S. alone have died while taking it?”

“Really? Why? Did they get dizzy and fall like I did?”

“No. The research indicates that the laxative effects of the tea caused an electrolyte imbalance, eventually causing heart failure,” Louis said.

Grace gave another shiver.
Heart failure
. “No, I didn’t know that,” she said in a small voice.

“Grace, listen to me.” Louis sat down on the edge of her bed and folded her hand into his. “I can’t do this without you. Any of it. I need you, the girls need you. They can’t grow up without a mother. For my sake, for
their
sake, you have to promise to stop,” Louis said. His voice cracked, and his eyes were welling with tears again as he looked at her. “I couldn’t stand to lose you,” he said simply.

Tears were now stinging at Grace’s eyes too. The thought of her family going on without her broke Grace’s heart. “Okay,” she finally said, nodding. “I promise I’ll stop.”

“Maybe you should talk to someone,” he said.

“Talk to someone? You mean a shrink?”

“Or a therapist. Someone you can talk to about why you feel so bad about yourself. Why you have such a negative self-image that you would risk your health like this just to lose a few pounds.”

The tears began to spill out of Grace’s eyes and run hotly down her cheeks.

“But I needed to lose the weight,” she said. “I looked awful before. I was bloated, and pudgy, and…and—”

“Beautiful.” Louis’s voice was firm. “You had just given birth to our daughter, and you were beautiful.”

Louis leaned forward and wrapped his arms around her. Grace winced when his arm hit the IV needle taped to her arm, but she didn’t let go. Instead, she held him to her, gently stroking his hair, just the way she always did when one of their daughters was upset.

“Fill me in on all of the gossip,” Grace demanded. It was Tuesday, the first day the doctor had cleared her to have nonfamily visitors, and Grace had been crazed with boredom. She’d never felt so disconnected from her life.

Anna laughed. She kicked off her flats, and tucked her feet up underneath her on one of the ugly visitors’ chairs. “You’ve only been in here for three days,” she said. “It’s not like the Orange Cove social scene ever shifts that dramatically.”

Grace shook her head. “Come on. You’re going to have to do better than that. I want gossip.”

“Well, I don’t think this qualifies as gossip, considering she is one of our closest friends, but I assume you’ve heard that Juliet and Patrick are having trouble?” Anna said.

Grace’s expression turned grim. She nodded. “Yes, and I can’t believe it. Do you know what’s going on? Juliet was in here earlier, but she didn’t really tell me anything, other than that Patrick’s taken the twins down to his parents’ for a few days.”

“That’s all I know too. I’ve tried calling her, but she doesn’t answer her phone and she hasn’t called me back. How did she seem when you saw her earlier?”

“She was acting a little strangely.”

“How so?”

“Well, for one thing, she looked awful. She was wearing sweatpants, and her hair was all sticking up, like she hadn’t brushed it in days,” Grace said.

Anna’s brow wrinkled. “Sweatpants? So she wasn’t coming from the office?”

Grace shook her head. “I don’t think so. Louis told me that when he called in for his messages, his secretary said Juliet wasn’t at the office today or yesterday.”

“That’s not like her.”

“Tell me about it. And she was sort of manic, hyper even, like she’d been knocking back shots of espresso, and—get this—she was talking about doing some work around her house,” Grace said.

“Housework?” Anna’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “Juliet doesn’t do housework.”

“I know. That’s why I thought it was weird. Apparently, she’s painting. She brought in a stack of paint chips with her when she visited me, so that I could help her pick out colors. In fact,” Grace paused and ducked her head, her cheeks flushing a rosy pink, “she said she wants to hire me to help her redecorate once I get back up to speed.”

“That’s a great idea!” Anna enthused.

Grace shrugged, as though it wasn’t any big deal, but her smile gave her away. “I told her that it’s the professional version of a pity fuck. But, hell, I’m not proud. I’ll take it.”

“Will you stop,” Anna said, although she laughed.

“I think I’ll get her to take some before-and-after pictures. It’s about time I started getting a portfolio together,” Grace mused. She stretched and looked disconsolately around her. “I know I’ve been joking about how I had to land myself in the hospital in order to get some sleep, but I have to say, I’m going to be glad when I can finally get out of this hellhole. I swear, there’s a vampire in here taking blood samples every other hour.” She lifted her arm to show Anna the needle pricks on it. “I look like a junkie covered in track marks.”

Anna looked sympathetic. “Do you know when you’re getting discharged?”

“No.” Grace sighed and kicked back the hospital sheets. “Every time I ask Dr. Patil, he just says, ‘We’ll see.’ But he’s already run every possible test there is to run on me, and other than having a nasty bump on my head, he hasn’t been able find anything wrong with me. Hopefully, they’ll let me out soon. So, come on, give me some more news. I can’t tell you how boring it’s been in here.”

“I really don’t have any—Oh! Wait, I do! I saw Mandy Rider yesterday, and…” Anna paused dramatically. “She’s pregnant again.”

“Oh, yawn. I wanted juicy gossip,” Grace complained. But then she reconsidered. “Still, you just know the Wonder Twins aren’t going to cope well with a new sibling. They may even stop composing symphonies and start scribbling on the walls with crayons like normal kids. It’ll be fun to watch.”

“You’re evil.”

“I know. Have you seen Chloe? She came by this morning too.”

Anna shook her head. “I haven’t seen her since Sunday. Why, what’s going on?”

“You didn’t hear? Jesus, I’ve been in a coma, and I still have better gossip than you. Apparently, Chloe’s locked James out of the house. Is it just me, or does it seem like everyone’s marriages are suddenly imploding all over the place?”

“What, Chloe and James?” Anna asked, looking shocked. “But they seemed so sweet together.”

“Except for the part where he spent her labor and delivery passed out in the bathroom,” Grace said wryly.

“Except for that,” Anna conceded. “What happened?”

“Something about how James left the baby with a stranger while he went golfing, although I think it’s more than that. General assholery. Chloe had the locks changed on the house, and he’s been living outside.”

“What, in his car?”

“At first. But then one of their neighbors took pity on him and lent him their RV. So now he’s living in that, parked in the driveway,” Grace said. She grinned at the image.

“Is that why they have that camper in front of their town house? I noticed it on my way in to work this morning,” Anna exclaimed.

“That would be it. The Trailer of Shame.”

“Well, you have to give James credit. At least he’s not going away.”

“I didn’t know Chloe had it in her to stick to her guns. I’m actually proud of her,” Grace said.

“Like you’d ever lock Louis out of the house,” Anna scoffed.

“If he left our baby with a stranger, I damned well would,” Grace said. She rattled the ice cubes in her plastic water mug and then sipped at the straw while she eyed Anna thoughtfully. “Are you ever going to tell me what happened between you and the wine-store guy, or am I going to have to beat it out of you?”

“Tough talk from a woman who’s hooked up to an IV.”

“Oh, come on—please?”

“There’s nothing to tell,” Anna said, and promptly belied her words by flushing bright pink.

“Uh-huh. So you slept with him, hmmm?” Grace grinned.

But Anna didn’t return her smile. She just bit her lip and looked down at her hands. “Yes, but I wish I hadn’t.”

“Oh, no. It was that bad? Like, bad-breath-and-no-foreplay bad?”

“No, no. Nothing like that. It was just bad timing for us.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The whole dating-with-kids thing—it’s too complicated. More complicated than you’d think.” Anna shrugged. “I just can’t do it right now.”

“Oh, no. You’re not really going back to that whole I’m-not-going-to-date-while-Charlie-is-young thing, are you?”

“Well…yes. Pretty much.”

“Anna—” Grace shook her head, but Anna jumped in before Grace could start her lecture.

“This isn’t just paranoia. Really. I don’t know if Juliet or Chloe told you, but while I was with Noah, while we were…well,
together
, Charlie was over at Brad’s house, and Brad wasn’t watching him closely enough. Charlie ended up wandering out of the house. Alone. In the dark. Right near the beach. We’re lucky as hell that he didn’t go toward the water and—” But Anna couldn’t bring this thought to its terrible conclusion. She just shuddered and wrapped her arms around herself.