Mother of All Secrets(24)

I should have given her more credit. She was supportive, or supportive-ish, and promised to love you like mad.

Anyway, when I told her I wanted to find out more about your father, she went back to the bar where we’d met that night. She sweet-talked the bartender into printing out the credit card receipts from the night we were there. The bar wasn’t crowded that night. There were forty-one receipts. Twenty-five of them men. She googled and pulled up pictures of every single one of those men until we found him.

I looked him up—the real him. Suffice it to say, none of what he told me about himself that night was true.

For one thing, he’s married. Of course he is. When I found that out, I felt a lot of emotions, but surprise wasn’t one of them.

Is it too soon for me to give you advice, having not even met you yet? If you find yourself in a situation with a guy, or girl, and things aren’t going the way you anticipated—if it isn’t what you wanted—say so. Scream it! It’s hard for me to say that to you, because I don’t want you to think that I regret the outcome of that night—you—and yet, I do regret not trying everything I could to stop it while it was happening. Because it wasn’t what I wanted. Or what I thought it would be.

I also know better than to blame myself. Officially. But while it was going on, and even now, that’s exactly what goes through my head: You shouldn’t have stayed there alone. You shouldn’t have drunk so much. You shouldn’t have been wearing that top. You shouldn’t have kissed him. It’s what women are trained to do—blame themselves. I promise to teach you better.

Only one thing matters to me, now, though: you. Kicking, churning inside me. My sweet love. I will see you soon.

Love you forever,

Mommy





Chapter Ten



Monday, October 5

As much as I didn’t want anyone to find out what was on my phone, I was also desperate to talk to someone about the detectives’ visit and what they’d asked me about my alleged plans with Isabel the night she disappeared. It made no sense, and the more I thought about it, the more certain I was that this was a simple misunderstanding with an accessible explanation. Maybe one of the other moms would be able to make sense of it. I told Tim that detectives had stopped by to talk to me, but he was surprisingly nonchalant about it and didn’t ask me too many questions about their visit. He said it was logical that they’d talk to everyone who had seen her recently. For reasons I couldn’t explain myself, I didn’t tell him about what they’d said about me having plans with her, though.

And of course, I didn’t mention the Google Doc to him. I would never mention it to anyone. I needed to make sure no one ever saw that again. Including myself. As much as I yearned for an explanation—and surely there was one—it was more important that it stayed buried and forgotten. Forever.

Add it to my list of secrets.

Days had passed since Isabel’s disappearance, and there were no leads that I was aware of. I kept looking for news items on Isabel, even though her name was already plugged into my Google Alerts. There was a brief item in the local West Side Rag: Search Underway for Local Missing Mom: Foul Play Suspected. The comment thread on this article had devolved, just like the one following the Upper West Side Moms Facebook post, into an argument about whether it was safe to house the men at the Two Parks Hotel.

I supposed that if Isabel were found dismembered on the side of the highway, it might be newsworthy. But for whatever reason, as it was, the search for her was still largely not being picked up by the press.

Punctuating the stress I was feeling about Isabel still being missing, and the Google Doc that must never be excavated, was the fact that I was also one week closer to ending my maternity leave—just three weeks to go, in fact. My principal had called me about a week ago to “check in,” and the conversation had left me nauseated. She’d brought up various tasks I would need to complete before returning, such as syncing up my syllabus with the substitute’s, submitting my first unit plan for my yearly portfolio, and drafting an assessment map for the year. These tasks, which I had once executed with relative ease and enthusiasm—actually enjoying poring over rubrics, geekily thinking about each and every word in every grid box—now sounded completely foreign to me, like I was being given a to-do list in another language. I didn’t even know where to begin. Tying my shoe tired me. Literally. I was pretty much exclusively wearing slip-ons. Opening up an Excel document and generating grading criteria for a thesis statement would surely kill me.

I had been uneasily dwelling on my conversation with her ever since—a conversation that had, ironically, ended with her asking if I was excited to have a break from the baby. As if work were some kind of a break! As if the thought of being separated from Clara didn’t make me salivate with both desire and nausea. My feelings were ineffable, but “excited” wasn’t the word. The strangest part was that my principal was in her early forties and had three young kids herself. So I couldn’t understand why she seemed to have no idea how I was feeling right now, how impossible my return felt to me. It just served to confirm that I might really be the only person, or at least one of the very few, who found all this so very hard.

On this Monday morning, Tim had stuck around putting final touches on the design he was pitching at a meeting closer to our apartment than his office in Brooklyn. I think he also felt guilty about leaving me alone with the baby all day on Sunday.