Mother of All Secrets(29)

I knew she was right and I also knew that I seemed unhinged. I felt involved, though. My name was in her phone and hers was in mine. A baby whose cheek I had touched and whose paci I had retrieved from the floor was missing her mother. If that were me who was missing, I would want anyone who’d ever met me to feel involved, to try to find me and bring me back to my girl. Selena may disagree with my meddling, but I disagreed with her apathy. Just because we hadn’t known Isabel long, that didn’t mean that her disappearance shouldn’t mean something to me.

“But it just seems like we could help,” I protested lamely.

“If we wanted to help, we could have reached out to help her before this happened, because anyone could have guessed that she was having a hard time. The fact is that she probably killed herself and tried to cover it up so as not to hurt her family or ruin her reputation.” My ears rang at this, but she kept on. “I’ve seen it happen before—mainly with people whose companies have gone under and who feel they’ll never be able to recover financially. That they’ve failed their families. Maybe even because of some shady business dealings. They kill themselves but try to make it look like an accident—to save face, and sometimes for insurance money. Of course, Isabel didn’t need money, but otherwise, this could very well be the same thing. She’d had enough but doesn’t want people to know that this is something she chose. Having detectives in the mix may honestly be a polite formality on the part of the police. And the lack of press may be because it’s obvious to both police and her family what really happened. Who knows.”

So she did have opinions that she had been withholding. Frightening ones, too.

I absorbed her words, slowly, painfully, like a blunt knife. This whole time, I’d been operating on the assumption that Isabel was kidnapped, hurt, maybe murdered, but possibly still alive. In my mind I’d already ruled out suicide, but maybe that’s just because I was trying to deny my own culpability—for indeed, I’d been so caught up with my own sleep deprivation and depression and anxiety over Clara and grief over my mom that I hadn’t once said to Isabel: Hey—are you okay? Really okay? I’m here if you need to talk. Even though I’d noticed her dark undereye circles and wondered about her anxious watch checking, I’d never asked, truly asked, how she was. And maybe if I had—

But no. I clung to the conviction that she wouldn’t choose to leave Naomi. I knew that as hard as things were for me, too, the idea of not being with Clara was unfathomable. Impossible. Worse than anything else. “Do you think we could somehow get access to her phone?” I heard myself saying. “Her mom would honestly probably let us look at it, if they have it.”

Selena looked at me with disbelief. “And we’d be looking for what, exactly? Jenn, do you understand that for me to meddle in a missing persons case is not, like, some fun distraction? I’m just trying to take care of my baby and enjoy new motherhood, just like you. Look, I’m deeply disturbed that Isabel is missing, too, but honestly, would you really even consider her a friend?”

“What do you mean? We’re all friends—”

“If you think we’re all friends, then you must not have any real friends. This is mommy networking bullshit. Not friendship.”

I felt like I’d been slapped. “If that’s how you feel, why do you even do the group?”

“For my son, Jenn. I hang out with a bunch of whiny white women because, for better or worse, I live in this neighborhood and your kids are Miles’s peers. Good parents learn from other good parents. So I’m in this group, and then I’ll be in the PTA when he’s older, and whatever other freaking committees I need to participate in to make sure that I don’t slack on one single thing when it comes to raising my son. Because as a Black woman, I can’t mess up. You get that, right? Your biggest problem may be that your husband doesn’t help with laundry or whatever, but mine is that my son will be looked at as less than because of the color of his skin. Or that he’ll be arrested for something he didn’t do. Or worse. I have to be very, very careful as his mom, until the day I die, and God willing that’ll be long before he does. So yes. My due diligence as his mom entails spending a few hours a week drinking chardonnay with the sisterhood of the traveling BabyBj?rn. I have no choice but to make nice with the ‘nice white parents,’ and I’ll do it for him, gladly.” Her eyes stayed on mine the whole time she spoke. “But my real friends and I talk about things other than bottles and swaddles. They’re the ones I talk to about the fact that, you know, when people see me pushing a stroller in this neighborhood, they assume I’m the nanny. Stuff like that.” She shook her head with tightly controlled, mirthless frustration.

She continued before I could begin to recover or formulate a response. “But, Jenn, the main thing is—and please, hear me when I say this”—she slowed down, speaking to me as if I were a wayward child she was scolding—“the main thing is that I’m not interested in being involved in your little game of Nancy Drew. I have no idea what happened to Isabel. But it’s outside my lane. And whatever you’ve got going will not end well. So my advice for you is to drop it and find another way to occupy your time and mind. And if you aren’t going to do that, then at least leave me the hell out of it.”

I was speechless, and I’d never felt so stupid. I knew that she was right about every single thing she’d said. Why had it never occurred to me to think how she might feel being the only Black mother in our group? And that, because of pervasive and harmful stereotypes, she didn’t have the luxury of being a “hot mess mom” like me or Kira? She had to have her shit together. I felt embarrassed for my trivial problems and my utter selfishness.