Mothered (33)

From the top of the stairs, she heard her mother’s voice in the living room. Grace assumed she was on the phone, but then she heard someone else.

“Thank you, I’m glad you understand.”

It was a young woman’s voice. Vaguely familiar.

After hesitating near the bottom of the stairs, Grace decided it was best to give Jackie her privacy—grateful for her mother’s good behavior during her picnic—and took the dining room route to the back door. A distant rumble of thunder reminded her that her mission was time sensitive.

“Gray?” Her mother drew the word out, making it two syllables. Her tone was both a warning and a rebuke, uttered the way Miguel spoke to Coco when the cat looked ready to dig her claws into the furniture.

Grace stopped, rattled. Why would her mother reprimand her while a stranger was in the house? Grace felt like a child about to get in trouble. She looked at Miguel’s vibrant new painting, as if it had advice to offer. Maybe she should just dart out the back door and not respond to her mother’s summons.

In the silence, she felt them waiting for her—Jackie and the young woman with the vaguely familiar voice. Grace sighed. Her mission diverted, and her curiosity piqued, she went to the living room.

Jackie was sitting on the IKEA chair, which she’d moved closer to the sofa and the proximity of her guest. The woman looked very young indeed, a teenager, and in her arms was an unmistakable bundle: a blanket-swaddled infant.

“I’m very disappointed with you, Grace.”

Her mother’s tone was even more severe than before. Grace didn’t like the way it made her coccyx burn, and even without the details she knew she’d done something truly awful. But what? She looked to the young woman, certain she was part of the answer, but the girl gazed down at her baby and wouldn’t meet Grace’s eyes. The baby’s face was hidden from Grace’s view by the blanket. It struck her that the infant was utterly silent and the girl wasn’t rocking or coddling it, just . . . gazing.

“What’s wrong?” Grace asked, a generic inquiry directed at everyone.

A flash of light strobed the room, followed several seconds later by a rolling cascade of thunder. For an instant she was in an animated world where lightning was like an x-ray, making cartoon skeletons of her mother and the girl and the baby. Grace didn’t want to be in this room with these people. Even getting trapped outside in a storm would be less punishing than this strange fellowship.

“Surely you remember Bethany.” Jackie made a formal gesture with her hand, forcing Grace to look again at the girl on the sofa.

Bethany. A vaguely familiar name.

“I remember you, Paxton.” Bethany made daggers of the words.

Paxton. That was a name Grace hadn’t used for many years.

Bethany. Paxton.

Oh fuck.

How had Bethany unearthed her identity and found out where she lived?

“How could you tell this girl to do such a horrible thing?” Jackie asked. She and Bethany were both scrutinizing her now, with cold, unforgiving expressions. But her mother’s question wasn’t rhetorical, and they waited for Grace to answer.

Grace didn’t remember, off the top of her head, the details of Bethany’s life. She might still have Paxton’s notebook, stashed in the basement with a box of other old things, but she could hardly excuse herself to go look. Suddenly she knew what it felt like to stand before an inquisition. And she couldn’t even defend herself without knowing the charges.

“I’m sorry about . . . whatever—”

“Whatever?” Jackie cut her off with a snarl. “Look what you did!”

Bethany peeled away the blanket and held her baby out for Grace to see.

It was stiff. Mangled. Its limbs askew like a poorly put together doll. Did the pale-blue blanket mean it was a boy? Its skin was blackening with rot.

“Why?” Bethany begged, shaking the corpse of her child for emphasis.

The shaking ruptured something. Dark-cherry blood gushed from a tear in the dead baby’s skin. Now Bethany bounced the child, shushing its silent cries as she tucked the blanket back into place. Blood seeped through, dripping onto Bethany’s lap and Grace’s sofa.

“I didn’t do that!” Grace lost control of a trickle of urine. She’d never been more horrified. “How could you think I—”

“You didn’t advise this young girl to kill her baby?” her mother, the Inquisitor, demanded.

“Of course not!” What they were suggesting was obscene. Why—how—could they think Grace capable of such—

Oh. Now she remembered.

Bethany had been sixteen. (Though Paxton hadn’t known that at first.) Bethany’s boyfriend had already dumped her. Her parents were very religious, and she was afraid to tell them she was pregnant.

“I didn’t tell her to . . . I advised her. Of the option of terminating the . . .” Grace shook her head. Had Bethany lied about more than her age? Paxton had reassured her that, at eight weeks, the embryo was a mindless mass of dividing cells. Had he—she—unknowingly presented the option to abort a viable baby?

“No!” Grace was suddenly furious. They had no right to think such repugnant things about her. “She was young, and alone. I was trying to give her reasonable advice, considering her situation.”

“Telling someone to kill their child is never reasonable advice. I’m ashamed of you.”