The rash appeared overnight, marring the baby’s sweet face with angry red blotches. Elise could no longer put off taking her to a pediatrician.
Fern and Amelia had been telling her to go since the third day Mira had been in their care. Elise was just afraid to involve any outside authority.
“I have a friend in Truro,” Amelia said. “She’s one of us and it won’t be an issue.”
Elise was not sure what “one of us” meant, exactly. From Provincetown? Gay? Generally unconventional?
When she met Dr. Mary Brandt, Elise decided the answer was at least two of the above. She appeared to be in her sixties and had close-cropped white hair, thick glasses in black square frames, and an Australian accent. She wore clogs and a white medical coat over a blouse and a long denim skirt.
Elise did not know what Amelia had told Dr. Brandt about Mira’s origins, but the doctor did not ask. She went about weighing her and measuring her in a brisk, businesslike fashion. She asked Elise and Fern about Mira’s eating and sleeping habits, suggested adjusting her formula to one that might produce less gas, and pronounced the rash “baby acne.”
“It looks ugly, but it’s harmless,” Dr. Brandt said.
It went so smoothly, felt so natural, that Elise began to relax. And then the doctor said, “Amelia told me you’re in the process of adoption.”
Elise froze. She had assumed Amelia had said nothing.
“Very early in the process,” Fern said quickly.
“Do you know if she had a hep B vaccination at birth?”
Fern and Elise looked at each other. “Would a hospital do that automatically?” Fern said.
“Typically.”
Elise did not know for sure if Mira had even been born in a hospital. The white blanket with the pink and blue stripes seemed like a hospital-issue receiving blanket. But the simple fact was she didn’t know for sure and therefore couldn’t say. “I can try to find out,” Elise said lamely.
“She will need her DTaP, Hib, and RV in a month, so on your way out, make an appointment. And in the meantime, don’t worry about the rash. She’s still a beauty.” Dr. Brandt smiled at Mira and gave her a little wave.
Elise realized now the value of that beaded anklet with the birth date on it. If she’d had to guess about Mira’s age, she wouldn’t have been able to make accurate decisions about her medical care. She felt with renewed certainty that the baby had been loved and that she had not been recklessly abandoned on their doorstep.
Fern was silent as they walked back to the car.
“Well, that went okay,” Elise said uneasily. Fern didn’t respond.
Elise buckled Mira into the backward-facing infant car seat, then climbed into the front passenger seat. Fern waited until they were on the road before saying, “This is not okay.”
“What? You didn’t like Dr. Brandt?” Elise knew that wasn’t what she meant.
“We have no legal right to be making medical decisions.”
“What’s the harm? Do you think a state agency wouldn’t give her those vaccinations? You’re focusing on the wrong thing. We’re being responsible and taking care of her. No one would do anything differently. And if her mother had a philosophical objection to vaccinations, I guess she could have written a note.”
“That’s absurd.”
“Is it? She left us clues. She didn’t make us guess her age. The blanket she arrived with is clearly a hospital blanket. Mira wasn’t born in the wild somewhere. And the more I think about all of these things, the more I know that our doorstep wasn’t randomly chosen.”
“That’s really irrelevant. Amelia lied to the doctor—she said we were in the process of adopting. Why did she lie? Because the truth is unacceptable.”
“It wasn’t a lie, it was an exaggeration. We are in the process—just the very early process, before we alert DCF.”
Fern’s knuckles were white as she gripped the steering wheel. “You’re putting me in a tough position here, Elise. I don’t want to betray you, but I don’t want to betray myself either.”
Elise nodded, turning to look out the window. “I know exactly how you feel.”
Olivia wasn’t able to climb three flights of stairs to the guest room, so Shell Haven’s first-floor den with the foldout couch seemed a perfect solution. Olivia, however, had her doubts about this setup.
“I won’t have any privacy.”
“Who is going to bother you? Everyone else is staying upstairs; the kitchen is far enough away you won’t hear a lot of noise. Please just stop fighting me on everything,” Ruth said.
Secretly, she was delighted about this turn of events. She had resigned herself to the visit ending on a bad note, and now she had the chance to turn things around. Of course she didn’t want Olivia to be in pain. But Olivia had told her that the back problem was a nuisance, not anything serious.
Fluffing the pillows, Ruth said carefully, “Maybe this is your body’s way of telling you not to run off.” She smoothed out the extra comforter she’d found in the closet in the master bedroom and patted it. “Come sit.”
Olivia seemed on the verge of tears. “Actually, Mother, I was doing just fine. I was all set to leave. I was practically driving away, but then I found out…I found out…”
Ruth moved close to her, concerned. “You found out what?”
“I lost my job,” Olivia said, then began sobbing. Ruth reached for her arm, steered her to the bed, and helped her ease down into a supine position.
“Oh, Olivia. I’m sorry. But weren’t you thinking of leaving anyway? That first night at dinner, you talked about wanting to start your own company.”
Olivia sniffed and nodded. “I did. I do. But I need clients. I was waiting for the right time. And I totally messed things up.” And then out came a story about a breakup, the flu, a sober TV star, and an Instagram snafu.
“Have you been in touch with your ex? Now I feel bad calling you to come out here when you have so much going on in your personal life.”
“I was upset when we broke up but it’s nothing compared to how upset I am about my job. I don’t know how I’m going to fix this, but I have to.”
Truly, Olivia’s passion for this job made little sense to Ruth. By the time social media became a thing, her company had people for everything and she hadn’t had to bother with it any more than she’d had to bother with their traditional ad campaigns. Ruth’s focus, her talent, had always been in product development. For her, it was about creating something, not selling something, though of course the selling was crucial to the life of the company. She surrounded herself with people who had a knack and a passion for selling. But at the end of the day, she was always thinking about what women really wanted or needed to make themselves feel and look their best. She understood what Olivia did on a technical level, but on a personal level, she couldn’t imagine a career based on something so intangible and, frankly, meaningless.
“Are you worried about money?” Ruth said. “I can help you until you figure out your next move.”
Olivia shook her head. “No, it’s not that. Thank you, though. I just—my career is my life. I can’t believe I screwed it up this badly.”
“Everyone makes mistakes,” Ruth said. “And no path to success is a straight shot upward.”
“Yours was.” Olivia sniffed.
“Oh no, it certainly was not.” Ruth wished she could tell Olivia that when she was her age, she was juggling the jobs of mothering a toddler and running a company, that she had felt panicked and spread too thin much of the time, but she did not want to imply that motherhood had ever been a burden. Instead, she said simply, “There were many, many weeks in the beginning when I was up all night wondering how we were going to make payroll.”
“At least you started the company. You did it.”
“True,” she said. “But it was never easy—not one minute of it. And I hadn’t planned to start my own company. It was just an idea that took on a life of its own.”
Really, it was amazing how life had snowballed into shape. Looking back on it, she saw the way the many small choices added up to the big picture of how things turned out.
In the fall of his senior year of college, Ben surprised her by announcing he was applying to medical school. What about writing? she asked. He said, unconvincingly, that he could still do it on the side. When he was accepted to Penn Med, they got engaged, and after they were married, they moved to his hometown of Cherry Hill, New Jersey, just across the river from the university.
She searched the want ads in the Philadelphia Inquirer, but the options were limited. By the time she saw an ad for a customer-service position at a cosmetics company, she was desperate. She interviewed on a Tuesday in a small gray room with a man who declared she had a “good phone voice.” She was at her new desk the following Monday.
The company manufactured cosmetics and skin-care products. Big brands contracted them to create products in their labs, and then the outside companies packaged these with their logos and labels. Ruth was amazed to learn that no matter the brand name, half the time you were buying the same product; the quality was interchangeable. Sometimes there was customization—a Chanel lipstick had the same basic ingredients as any other lipstick, but the level of pigment might be different. Still, chances were, if you were buying a mascara, it made little difference what brand it was.
Ruth’s customer-service job evolved into sales, and she was optimistic she might be able to climb the corporate ladder to an executive position. Her dream was to get more involved in product development. But three years after she’d started the job, just before Christmas 1986, the company’s manufacturing facility burned down. The owners told the staff they had no intention to rebuild. Ruth was frustrated to find herself back to the newspaper listings. There was nothing. She settled for a job in retail banking, lasted six miserable weeks there, then told Ben: “I miss the cosmetics company. It was a good business. I want to try to start my own.”
Ben, to his credit, supported her ambitions. It heartened her, made her feel confident she would not have her parents’ marriage. Ben borrowed a few grand from his parents, and she incorporated RC Cosmetic Labs in 1987. It was a big leap; Ruth had no idea what she was doing, but she surrounded herself with six trusted lab technicians, all women, whom she knew from the previous company. They put the colors and formulas together; Ruth sampled and then approved or rejected them. It was all trial and error and Ruth’s instinct. The lab techs cooked with stockpots before Ruth could afford more professional equipment. They worked out of a three-thousand-square-foot rental space in the back of a large manufacturing business in Voorhees.
For her birthday, she asked for twenty-five-pound manufacturing kettles and lipstick molds. That first year, they did $250,000 in business and made a $25,000 profit.
“But when you were my age, you created the nail polish,” Olivia said. “After that, you were basically set.”
Yes, the nail polish. The game-changer. Ruth thought again about the discontinuation of Cherry Hill and what it meant for the company that she’d been forced to leave behind. “You’ll find your own version of the nail polish, sweetheart,” Ruth said. “I believe in you. But for now, rest.” She kissed her on the forehead. “I’m going to pick up lunch.”
She needed to call Lidia Barros and postpone their plans for coffee until later in the day. For the first time in a very long while, Ruth had some mothering to do.