The Perfect Mother(21)
Colette watched it at least a dozen times last night in bed, Poppy sleeping peacefully beside her. Charlie was working, and she’d given up on her own sleep after an hour of lying in the dark, her thoughts trapped in a hamster wheel of worry. In the video, Winnie sat on a gray upholstered armchair in front of her terrace windows. She looked so pretty: her pulled-back hair, the strong cut of her jaw, her long, thin neck against a simple black crepe blouse.
“Please,” Winnie said, gazing into the camera, her voice breaking the word in two, “please don’t hurt my baby. Please, whoever you are, please give him back to me.”
Colette hears the squeaking brakes of an approaching train and digs two quarters from the bottom of her bag. Inside the crowded car, she tries to keep her balance among the undulating throng of people pressing against her as she opens the paper to the article. The byline belongs to a reporter named Elliott Falk; the headline reads:
Oh Ghosh!
People are beginning to shake their heads about Police Commissioner Rohan Ghosh’s handling of the investigation of Midas Ross, seven weeks of age, who has been missing for two days. The baby’s disappearance on July 4 was first reported by his babysitter, Alma Romero. The Post has confirmed that it took officers more than twenty-three minutes to respond to Romero’s 911 call, which they blame on the department’s strain due to Fourth of July security, and an accident near the Brooklyn Bridge involving two city buses, in which dozens were injured, including two young children and a young mother, currently in critical condition. After arriving at the Ross residence, police failed to properly secure the crime scene, perhaps even allowing people who may have been inside the home to exit via a door left unattended.
The baby’s mother, the former actress Gwendolyn Ross, was out for the evening with members of her so-called mommy group.
Colette pauses; returns to the sentence: . . . people who may have been inside the home to exit via a door left unattended.
Is that possible? Was the person who took Midas still inside when the police officers arrived? Is that why the side door of Winnie’s building was open?
A few photos accompany the article. In one, Midas is lying on his back on a sheepskin rug next to a small plastic giraffe, staring into the camera, his skin porcelain, his brown eyes so shiny they look polished. In the photo below it, Winnie is on a blanket in the park, cradling Midas in her arms. Colette’s breath catches as she realizes it’s the photo she gave Detective Mark Hoyt yesterday, when he showed up at her apartment in the late afternoon, after Charlie had taken Poppy out running with him and she was preparing dinner.
“What do you know about her background?” Hoyt asked her. “What kind of details did she share about herself?”
There was something that seemed vaguely familiar about Winnie, Colette admitted. But it had been more than twenty years since she was on television, and Colette hadn’t made the connection between Winnie and Gwendolyn Ross, although she’d watched the show periodically. Sometimes, while the other girls at her school were getting together with bottles of wine and joints stolen from someone’s parents, Colette would convince her mother—on the rare weekend Rosemary wasn’t traveling for work—to join her on the couch, their faces sticky with the egg-white-and-honey mask Colette had read about in Seventeen magazine, a bowl of popcorn on the couch between them, watching Bluebird.
The train arrives at Colette’s stop, and she climbs the stairs and makes her way through City Hall Park, past a crowd of tourists taking photos in front of the fountain. There was one interaction she had with Winnie that Colette hadn’t mentioned to Mark Hoyt, which she had remembered just the night before.
It was the afternoon she and Winnie walked home together, after the very first May Mothers meeting. They’d taken their time, strolling along the park wall, staying in the shade. Colette can still smell the roasting nuts from the vendor at the corner, where Winnie stopped to buy a bag of cashews. It was here that Colette admitted, without planning to, how terrified she was when she learned she was pregnant.
“I called the whole thing a mistake, for months,” Colette said. “I’m excited now, but it’s been a process. I was not ready for her.”
Winnie’s expression was stark when she looked at Colette. “I can understand that.”
“You can?” Colette asked, feeling flush with relief. Since joining May Mothers, she’d felt like an outsider—if not a total impostor—among the other women, who all seemed as if they’d spent their whole lives just waiting to become moms. Who’d spent years charting their cycles, taking their temperatures, their legs suspended in the air above them after sex, hoping this month was their time. Women like Yuko, who’d gone off the pill the night of her engagement. Scarlett, who’d become vegan, believing it would better prepare her body for pregnancy and birth. And Francie, who had shared, very early on in their meetings, the pain of enduring two miscarriages, finally conceiving after two rounds of IVF that left them thousands of dollars in debt.
“What’s your story?” Colette asked Winnie. But she waved away the question.
“We’ll save that for another time,” she said, rifling through her wallet. An older woman in front of them turned, a paper cup of roasted nuts in her hands. She smiled, noticing the rise of their bellies. The woman placed her free hand on Winnie’s arm. “You have no idea what you two are in for,” she said, her eyes moist. “The world’s most wonderful gift.”