Mother May I(15)

“Yes.” I didn’t. It sounded bizarre, impossible. In the pause I heard Robert mutter and shift, and she drew a ragged breath. Was this the sickness that was killing her? Something respiratory? Or did her chest feel closed and tight from stress, like mine? I was seeking clues to her in every word and sigh, trapped in our terrible intimacy.

When she spoke next, her voice dropped. We were to it. The thing she wanted from me. “Before ten o’clock, you need to get at least three of those pills down Spencer Shaw’s throat.”





She’d taken Robert because I was close with Spence. Well, Trey was. Or partnered with him anyway. I smoothed a caffeinated cream over my eyelids to take down the swelling, feeling an irrational surge of rage at my husband.

How many times had I watched Trey rub his forehead, rueful, over some mess of Spence’s? And yet he kept on working with him. Spence landed clients, but Trey did most of the work that kept them. Spence was better at cocktail parties than contracts, and he was also willing to break rules that Trey would not so much as bend. Spence stayed within the lines of the law, Trey had assured me, but I got the feeling it was sometimes only barely. And now this was happening. I set the cream back in the drawer, then turned to check on Robert.

In the space of half a breath, I’d forgotten he was gone. It almost undid me. I froze, fighting back a wave of tears and panic. I’d read about something like this happening to people who had lost a limb. They would reach out with a hand that wasn’t there or feel cramping in a foot they no longer owned.

I stood abruptly, turning to the built-in drawers behind me. I kept my jewelry in the top two. I opened the lower one, which held costume jewelry and some older pieces. The bracelet I wanted, a chunky gold thing meant to be worn above the elbow, was all the way in the back. It felt too young for me now, and ever since I’d had the girls, it was a little tight. I wanted that, though. The bite of that cold metal in my flesh.

I pushed it up my arm until it pinched, then nodded, calmer. I could not forget myself again. I could not keep reaching for him. It would break me down, and I would fail.

The bracelet would help. It was a trick I’d learned in a college acting class, what felt like a thousand years ago. If some real-life sorrow or anxiety was pulling me out of a role, I could use something physical to locate that distraction in my body. I’d pack my pain or worry inside the squeeze of a tight shoe or the tug of a ponytail holder. Then the rest of my body was free to become someone else.

I’d used a variation of the trick all three times I’d been in labor. I’d pinched the tender spot between my thumb and forefinger as each contraction hit, moving myself into the small pain while my body heaved and surged. The trick had worked in the early stages, until some animal inside me took over and I was nothing more than a will to push.

I was still a mother, but separated from all that made me so. I had to put Robert’s absence into the constriction of the bracelet. I put my fear there, too, the whole choking cloud of it. And my anger with my husband, which was quickly changing into a pure, wild rage at Spence, as cold and clear and biting as grain alcohol. I added my desperate longing for Trey to be here with me, my surges of desire to call the police, and most of all my paralyzing love for my child. I had to let some other woman ride my body.

Be Betsy, I thought then. She’d been bolder than me, always, and dead calm in a crisis. Betsy had owned any room she’d entered. I could almost feel her presence closing over me. My best friend, gone but still saving me.

“You want me to roofie Spencer Shaw?” I sounded as incredulous as I felt. “You want Spence to . . . what? To not remember tonight? Why?”

“Don’t you worry about that. Just you worry about your part.”

Her voice was still gentle. We spoke softly to keep Robert asleep, but the near whispers seemed to pull us closer. Her voice, breathy in my ear, was so intimate, and I desperately wanted to please her. I wanted her to like me. Hell, a small, crazy part of me wanted to like her, too, because she had me wholly in her power. I needed to believe there was sweetness in her. That she liked babies and would be kind to mine. That if I did exactly what she said, she’d give him back.

I said, “Help me understand why you’d do this. I know it’s not money. Can you please tell me what you really want?”

Her voice dropped even lower. “What I want, you can’t give me. Not direct.”

“Maybe I can help you get it. If you—”

“I want to put the world right. I want what’s fair,” she interrupted, and it was a cry right from the center of her. It shook her voice into something younger somehow, because the world was not fair, and anyone her age already knew that. “If you drug Spencer Shaw, I can make him do right by us.”

I felt the power between us shift, just a bit. I had asked, and she had answered. She had given me something. “But it’s not fair to take Robert.” I used her word. “He’s innocent. I don’t know you, but I don’t think I ever did you wrong?” I made it a question, afraid of angering her.

I heard that thinking little hum she’d made before. “I am sorry for that.” It sounded like she meant it. “This isn’t about you, and I’m not without feeling. I know it’s hard, especially for a girl like you. You were raised soft, everything laid out on a pillow. Most folks open their eyes onto a harsher world.”