The School for Good Mothers(25)

The judge said it was her choice.

In order to get Harriet back, Frida must learn to be a better mother. She must demonstrate her capacity for genuine maternal feeling and attachment, hone her maternal instincts, show she can be trusted. Next November, the state will decide if she’s made sufficient progress. If she hasn’t, her parental rights will be terminated.

“You’ll need to pass our tests,” the judge said.

Judge Rogers’s hair was gray and frizzy, pulled back with a plastic headband. Frida thought the headband was unprofessional, insulting. She remembers the beauty mark next to the judge’s nose, her blue silk kerchief. She remembers watching the judge’s mouth move.

The judge barely let Renee get a word in. The lawyer for the state said Frida’s negligence was astounding. There was the damning police report, the fact that she’d decided her work was more important than her child’s safety. Anything could have happened. Someone could have taken Harriet, molested her, killed her.

The men from CPS produced a report on Frida’s character. They noted that she had no visitors in sixty days. Soon after the monitoring began, there was a sharp decrease in her nonwork-related emails and texts and phone calls. There were a few times when she seemed to leave her phone at home intentionally.

They expressed concern about her diet, weight loss, and sleep. They called her behavior erratic. The original claim of being overwhelmed was inconsistent with her conduct after the incident, when her house became spotless overnight. Analysis of her expressions suggested feelings of resentment and anger, a stunning lack of remorse, a tendency toward self-pity. Her emotional orientation was directed inward, rather than toward her child and the community.

“I didn’t appreciate Ms. Liu’s attitude,” the social worker said. “With me, she was difficult. Abrasive. With Harriet, she was needy.”

The social worker said Frida talked back. Frida couldn’t follow directions. Frida kept asking for special treatment. She couldn’t set boundaries. See the bite and the nosebleed and Harriet’s regression: crawling instead of walking, losing her speech, wanting to be held, climbing into her mother’s arms, acting more like a baby than a toddler. See also: the mother putting the child in an ExerSaucer on the day of the incident. Using developmentally inappropriate equipment to trap the child and keep her out of the way.

“I don’t think we can completely rule out physical, emotional, or verbal abuse,” the social worker said. “How do we know she never hit Harriet? Maybe she didn’t leave bruises. The neighbors told me they heard yelling.”

In his report, the court-appointed psychologist found Frida insufficiently contrite. She was hostile toward her co-parents. She was a narcissist with anger-management issues and had poor impulse control. They had her medical records: a diagnosis of clinical depression at age nineteen, over seventeen years on antidepressants. A history of panic attacks and anxiety and insomnia. The mother was unstable. The mother lied about her mental health. What else might she be lying about?

The bus turns onto a bridge. There’s traffic. The driver is tailgating. Frida looks down at the frozen river. It rarely gets this cold anymore. Last year, the cherry blossoms bloomed in January.

Next November, Harriet will be thirty-two months old. She’ll have all her teeth. She’ll be speaking in sentences. Frida will miss her second birthday, her first day of preschool. The judge said there would be weekly video calls, ten minutes every Sunday. “Believe me,” the judge said, “I’m a mother. I have two kids and four grandkids. I know exactly what you’re going through, Ms. Liu.”

Frida leans her head against the window. Susanna needs to make sure Harriet wears a hat today. She’s too casual about dressing Harriet for cold weather. Blood rushes to Frida’s face. She wants to know what time Harriet woke up this morning, what Harriet is doing right now, what Harriet ate for breakfast, whether Gust has been delivering messages every day as promised. Mommy loves you. Mommy misses you. Mommy is so sorry she’s not here. Mommy will be back soon.



* * *



The mothers disembark. They squint and shiver. They stretch their legs and dab their eyes and blow their noses. More buses pull into the parking lot of a field house. How many mothers will there be? At the family court building, Frida counted eighty-six women. Renee promised her that real criminals—murderers and kidnappers and rapists and molesters and child traffickers and pornographers—are still being sent to prison. The majority of the parents CPS deals with, Renee said, will have been charged with neglect. That’s how it’s been for years.

“The surveillance might keep you safe,” Renee told her. “Everyone will behave themselves, I hope.”

Frida has peddled this line of thinking to her concerned parents.

Guards escort the mothers from the parking lot to an imposing walkway lined with bare oak trees. It feels like they’re in France. An estate in the countryside. The walk takes ten minutes. Frida hears a guard say they’re going to Pierce Hall. Up ahead is a gray stone building with windows edged in white, tall white columns, a gray domed roof.

At the entrance, a trim white woman in a pink lab coat stands before a set of doors, flanked by two guards.

Renee thought they’d be sent somewhere secluded, but the mothers have arrived at an old liberal arts college, one of the many that went bankrupt in the last decade. Frida visited this campus twenty-two years ago when she was touring colleges with her parents. She still remembers the details. Her parents repeated them often. This one had been their first choice for her. Four hundred acres for sixteen hundred students, two forests, a pond. An outdoor amphitheater. An arboretum. Hiking trails. A creek.