Mother of All Secrets(23)

I never left the house with everything—whether it was diapers, a sweater, or my keys, I could be sure that I was forgetting something I would invariably need.

I forgot whole conversations with Tim, resulting in him looking at me incredulously, saying, “You really don’t remember us talking about this already?” before backtracking after he realized he was hurting my feelings.

I had forgotten Clara’s middle name while filling out a form at the doctor’s office. I actually had to text Tim so that he could remind me that it was Violet. It simply wasn’t in my brain. I knew it was a flower. I could not for the life of me remember which one.

I had neglected to upload Clara’s birth certificate to file my maternity leave with the Department of Education, resulting in some nightmarish calls with Human Resources to sort it out.

I watched the same episode of Sons of Anarchy three times because I didn’t remember having seen it. It was Tim who asked me, half paying attention to the show while he worked beside me on the couch one night, “You really like this episode, huh?”

Most concerningly, it was only about a week ago that Tim had woken me up from a sound sleep—while I was standing over Clara’s bassinet. “Babe, what are you doing?” he’d asked softly, putting a hand on my back.

“Checking on the baby. One of us has to,” I’d snapped. (Even in a total fog, I was good for some unwarranted passive aggression.) There was only one problem.

“The baby’s in the bed,” he’d said, pointing to where the baby was indeed fast asleep on her DockATot atop our comforter. I had been sleeping standing up, hovering over an empty bassinet.

Was there any way I could have written this about Isabel and forgotten about it? Or written it in my sleep?

And if so—could the apparent anger I felt toward Isabel have played a role in her disappearance? Could I have played a role?

I tried to claw my way out of this thought tunnel. I deleted the file hurriedly and then deleted it from my trash folder. I wouldn’t be able to forget it, but I needed to make sure no one else saw it. There had been detectives at my home to ask me about a missing woman, whom, according to my Google documents, I had some kind of issue with, and with whom I’d apparently had plans the night of her disappearance.

Suddenly, the water I was swimming in felt much, much too deep.

I looked at my tiny, perfect daughter, half dozing but still latched to my breast. The one thing I was sure of: I had too much to lose for anyone else to see what was written on that document. But I also needed to figure out why I’d written it, or how it had gotten there. Because if I had written it and had forgotten—and had forgotten what had caused me to write it—what else might I be forgetting?





May 1

Dear Baby,

Very soon now, you’ll be in my arms instead of in my belly. You and me against the world. We, us. A team. Will I be enough for you? I’m going to try my hardest, that’s for damn sure. And I’m going to make your world as beautiful as I possibly can.

In a way, I wonder if the strange mess that brought you to me will make us closer, right out of the gates. I hope it will.

And I hope you know that, whenever you read this, you can ask me anything you want to.

So here goes—the truth. Our truth: you were conceived during an ill-advised one-night stand.

If you can even call it that.

I stayed behind at a bar after my friends left one night. I wanted one more drink—it had been an exhausting week at work, and I was too wound up to go home yet.

And there was a guy, and he was alone, too, and he was suave and persistent and handsome. There were drinks, too many of them, and there was his hotel room, right upstairs.

I don’t remember that much, but what I do remember is not pretty.

I’m sorry I don’t have a better story for you. Mom and Dad met, fell in love, got married, baby makes three. This isn’t that, or anything close to it.

When I decided I wanted to be your mom—and again, please know that for me, it was a stunningly easy decision—I vowed I’d put him out of my mind. That he wasn’t part of this, wasn’t relevant, never would be.

But it wasn’t that easy. I thought about that night a lot. And I got curious, because I knew you would one day get curious, too. And I wanted to get ahead of that.

One problem—I knew almost nothing about him. Nothing to tell you not if, but when, you asked, no way of contacting him in the event that I felt I should, for whatever reason. What if you needed a kidney donor one day, for God’s sake? I knew that I should at least know who the hell he was, even if I have no interest in ever seeing or speaking to him again.

Of course I tried googling him—he’d told me that his name was Brendan Wallace, that he was a sports agent from Cincinnati. Google could not find such a person.

Fortunately, your aunt is the kind of woman who can track anyone down on social media or the internet, even if all she had was a cocktail napkin they’d used, or the first name of their second cousin’s dog. So I enlisted her help.

The fact was, I hadn’t even wanted to tell her I was pregnant, at first. She’s sort of been more of a mom than a sister to me; she’s eight years older, and our mom died when we were young, so she always helped take care of me (while also being extremely judgmental of what she perceives as my many shortcomings). I knew she’d have some strong opinions about my choice to keep the baby. Sorry, to keep you. So I waited until pretty late in my pregnancy to tell her.