The School for Good Mothers(32)

Linda wants to know what got said about her at breakfast. “I saw you all looking.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Did that girl Lucretia say my kids got sick or something?”

Frida walks faster. Linda says Lucretia doesn’t know what she’s talking about. It wasn’t every night. Only when her kids were fighting and stealing food from the pantry. She had to keep the pantry padlocked because they’d finish all the groceries in a day. It was her super who called CPS. He’d been trying to get rid of her for years. Her kids are now in six different foster homes.

“You don’t have to justify anything to me.”

“What’d they get you for?”

Frida doesn’t answer. She waits out the awkward silence. Linda says Lucretia is a snob, that Lucretia thinks she’s hot shit. She knows ’cause they’re friends on Facebook.

They pass the music-and-dance library, the art gallery. Both buildings stand empty.

Frida tries to walk ahead, but Linda keeps pace.

Morris Hall is an imposing five-story stone building on the western edge of campus, one of the only classroom buildings above three stories. It’s been remodeled with a set of modern glass doors that are nearly impossible to push open. The front of the building faces a quad, the back faces the woods. Behind the building, the electrified fence is visible.

Mothers dawdle on the steps leading from the foyer to the second floor but move aside for Linda, giving Frida quizzical, amused glances. Frida hangs back. She’d like to clarify that she’s not Linda’s bitch, that this isn’t a women’s prison. Let no one think that she’s been made a bitch already.

They’re in the old biology building. Classroom 2D, a former lab, still smells of formaldehyde, triggering memories of frogs and fetal pigs. There’s a frosted-glass door marked EQUIPMENT, a dry-erase board, a teacher’s desk, a clock, and wall-mounted cupboards, but no chairs or other furniture. The mothers deposit their coats in the back corner. They look up at the clock. There’s a camera above the door, another above the dry-erase board. Four high, arched windows overlook the woods. Sunlight warms the room, warms the mothers, who’ve been told to sit cross-legged on the floor.

“Like preschool,” Linda says, staying close to Frida.

The mothers form a circle. Their instructors are Ms. Russo and Ms. Khoury, both around Frida’s age, both wearing pink lab coats over dark sweaters and tailored trousers and nurse’s clogs. Ms. Russo, the taller of the two, is a plump, plummy-voiced white woman with a brunette pixie cut who talks with her hands. Ms. Khoury is petite and bony and Middle Eastern–looking, with sharp cheekbones and wavy salt-and-pepper shoulder-length hair, a lilting accent, and the bearing of an Eastern bloc ballet master.

They ask the mothers to introduce themselves by stating their names and offenses and a few pertinent details about how they harmed their children. There are five women, including Frida and Linda. Frida is pleased to see Lucretia, the friendly mom from breakfast. Lucretia goes first, tells the group that her daughter broke her arm after falling off a slide. Frida nods warmly. Lucretia and Linda exchange a hostile glance.

A white teenager, Meryl, is here for bruises on her daughter’s arms and drug possession. A young white woman named Beth lost custody after she checked herself into the psych ward. Since she was a danger to herself, she couldn’t be trusted with her daughter. Lucretia and Meryl were reported to CPS by ER doctors. Beth was reported by her ex-boyfriend.

At first glance, Frida thinks Meryl and Beth look alike, but there’s no actual resemblance, only a similar petrified expression. Both girls have dark hair. Meryl’s is wavy and dyed black, a blue-black that doesn’t occur in nature and doesn’t match her pale eyebrows. Beth’s hair is straight and glossy, chestnut brown. Meryl seems like she shouldn’t be messed with. Beth has the glittering haunted air of Will’s broken birds, her black Irish coloring well-suited to blushing and tears.

Frida and Linda are the class elders, both here for neglect and abandonment. As Frida tells them about her very bad day, she notices Linda watching her, gloating.

Ms. Khoury thanks them for sharing. Ms. Russo excuses herself and slips inside the equipment room. There’s movement behind the frosted glass, the sound of shuffling feet, peals of laughter, the high-pitched murmur of small children.

The mothers hold their breath and listen, hoping for the impossible. Lucretia pulls her knees to her chest and whispers, “Brynn? Are you in there?”

Frida looks away. These must be recordings designed to taunt them into submission, to keep them desperate and drooling during these months when they have no child to hold. The judge would never allow it. Gust would never allow it. Harriet is on the way to the airport. Frida doesn’t want Harriet anywhere near this place or these people, but if, somehow, a fissure has opened in time and space and delivered her baby, she’ll do anything they ask. If she could hold Harriet right now. Holding Harriet for ten minutes could last her the long winter.

When Ms. Russo opens the equipment room door, she’s trailed by five toddler girls of different races. There’s one Black girl, one white girl, one Latina. Two of the girls are mixed: one looks to be half Black and half white; the other looks Eurasian. The girls are mirror images of the mothers, dressed in navy blue jumpsuits and sneakers.

The circle constricts. They sit close enough to touch shoulders, becoming, for a moment, one mother, a hydra of disappointed faces.