THE NIGHT NURSE
Sarah Langan
Before
When the night nurse first told Esme that she was a witch, Esme did not believe it. Or at least, she hadn’t envisioned the dark arts. She’d pictured a group of Waldorf School mothers sitting in a circle, knitting boiled-wool dolls and talking about their menstrual cycles. They had trust funds, smelled like patchouli, and they were gentle as pillows.
Esme first met the night nurse at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum. She’d been seven months pregnant with baby number three. Baby one too many, in other words.
It had been one of those school holidays that wasn’t really a holiday: White Hegemony Day or Teachers Hate Their Jobs and Need Four-Day-Work-Weeks Day. The museum had been a mob scene of kids with no place else to go, their moms and babysitters punch-drunk with anxiety. She’d lost five-year-old Lucy as soon as they got there. The kid ran straight past the ticket line and into a black-hole-dense crowd of humans. Ten minutes later, Esme assumed the worst: a sex-crazed pervert had stolen her child. Right now, he was speeding across the Lincoln Tunnel, her lovely daughter hogtied in the back of a van.
“LUCY!” she’d screamed while carrying Spencer, who’d been too heavy to carry but had walked too slowly to keep up. Two-year-olds, constitutionally, are passive-aggressive. It’s literally a hallmark of their personalities.
She found Lucy in the Tots section, dressed in Native American garb and reading Babar Goes to Paris to a rapt three-year-old, the picture of maternal sweetness. At this, Esme cried with relief while trying not to cry, because when moms cry it’s very upsetting for their children. To an outsider it had looked like hiccoughs, or else those shivers you get when you suddenly have to pee.
The trip ended at the gift shop, where both children conspired against her, begging for an ant farm colony because it was educational. They promised that they would name and love these ants like pets. She’d been blanking out, adrift in a mental vacation along the Amalfi Coast, when the old lady at the register had taken her by the elbow with a plump, callused hand.
Wendy, her nametag read, and Esme had been reminded of the last scene of Peter Pan, Wendy all grown-up and shriveled.
“You’re goina need some help,” Wendy had said in a thick, southern accent. She was about six feet tall and strong-looking, her face wrinkled and her eyes bright blue. Her hair was shocking white, like someone had scared the hell out of her thirty years ago, and she was still getting over it.
Wendy’d reached lower, and pressed her hand flat against Esme’s belly. It felt awkward and inappropriate, the hand radiating a damp ick. But Esme didn’t mind. It’s nice, sometimes, just to be noticed.
“I can help. I’m a night nurse. Trained and licensed.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I’m broke,” Esme had answered.
Wendy’d reached into the pocket of her green corduroy dress and produced a soft and wrinkled business card that smelled like lilacs. “We can work somethin’ out. I’ll bill your insurance for ya.” Then Wendy waved and smiled wide at the kids. Her too-cheerful manner reminded Esme of all her still-single friends who liked kids only in theory. In reality, they preferred something that stuck to a script. A Japanese hug robot, for instance. Or a boyfriend that didn’t live with you.
The kids, sensing this, had looked away.
“I should warn you. I’m a witch,” Wendy had said. “Some mothers don’t like that.”
“Like, a feminist?”
“No. A real witch.” She had this glimmer in her eyes. Delight or something deeper, an emotion that hewed to her bones.
Creepy!
Esme bought the stupid ant colony, then put Spencer in the stroller and Lucy on the kickboard and they took the handicap ramp heading out. “Thanks, anyway!” she called behind her shoulder.
* * *
She got a text from Mike that night, saying he had to work late. After she put the kids to bed, she discovered the lilac-scented card in her back pocket and Googled Wendy Broadchurch, Night Nurse. The website showed pictures of the woman from the museum, tall and strong, holding tiny babies with loving skill. Under these were testimonials about how she’d saved families by allowing frazzled parents to sleep, helped babies bond and latch, worked miracles.
WENDY BROADCHURCH, NIGHT NURSE
SHE’S MAGIC!
Literally, every testimonial said she was magic. Her fee was on a sliding scale. New moms, and she dealt only with new birth mothers, could pay whatever price they were able to afford.
Weeks passed. Esme thought about Wendy when she woke early to do her exercises, which included labor-prep squatting and shoving her legs up a wall to drain the swelling from her sad, sick cankles. She thought about her while getting the kids ready for school. She thought about her while cooking dinner, and she thought about her when collapsing onto the couch at night, too tired to make it to the bed. The woman had smelled rich as a pine forest, and the touch of her hand had been so soothing. She hadn’t really been creepy. It’s a special skill to be good with infants, and that skill doesn’t often translate to being good with kids or even adults. The woman’s words haunted her: You’re goina need help… Even a stranger could see it: this third child was going to sink her.
Esme rubbed her thumb along the wrinkled card as she dialed the number. “Just let me know when you’re home from the hospital,” Wendy told her. “I’ll be right there.”
“I’m worried my husband won’t be happy about the money. Can he meet you?” Esme asked, and partly this was true, but she also wanted to interview this woman who’d be holding her infant half the night, alert in her home full of sleeping loved ones. But she didn’t know how to come out and say that. She was out of practice negotiating with adults.
“I don’t deal with husbands,” Wendy said, then hung up.
* * *
Month One
Esme felt a cool hand on her forehead. Callused yet strong. She rolled to her side and pulled down her soft, cotton nightshirt. A suckle. It hurt the way it always hurts when newborns first start nursing. The way no one ever tells you, just like they don’t tell you that delivering a baby feels like smashing a basketball through a buttonhole.
The baby bit too hard, latching more with skin than nipple. Esme’s eyes popped open, and there was Wendy, the white-haired night nurse, her head bent low, holding baby Nicky in place. When she saw Esme’s pain smirk, she slipped her thick index finger inside the baby’s mouth, un-suctioning the latch and then refitting it.
Before kids, Esme would have been appalled by such intimacies between strangers. But your body’s less precious once someone else has lived inside it. A man on the subway might squeeze your ass while you’re too busy wheeling the stroller to fight back. Everybody you ever meet might feel obliged to comment on the size of your boobs, your baby weight, how much of it you’ve lost. You feel you belong to the world, and so it’s especially wonderful when someone notices you in particular.
“Thanks,” Esme whispered, her voice all gratitude as she drifted back to sleep, and the baby suckled. And along the blue sheet, milk and blood.
Wendy was gone when Esme woke. Her shift lasted from eight at night until five in the morning. At five-thirty, Nicky started mewing and Esme nursed him, then occupied Spencer in the den of their parlor-floor apartment, trying to keep them all quiet so Lucy and Mike could get a full rest. Around seven, she put Nicky on the kitchen floor in his boppy, held Spencer to her hip, made toast breakfast, then packed Spencer’s snack and Lucy’s lunch.
Mike left for work at seven-thirty, which gave her forty-five minutes to brush Lucy’s hair and get everybody ready for the day. This involved a lot of running around and then running back to get the thing that had been forgotten, and then socks, always socks! No one could ever find, match, or put on their own socks! And then securing the double stroller, and Lucy would have to walk even though she didn’t want to, and somehow, even though Esme had promised she wouldn’t yell she was literally screaming and the children became frightened and cried, and then baby Nicky was crying, and they all sat on the couch and wept while Esme explained that mommy’s very sorry, and then it was off to school.
Getting the kids to school was probably the worst part of Esme’s day, in part because she was still tired from the night before, and, having drunk three coffees to make up for it, was now irritable and likely to pee her pants, which happened from time to time.
Also frustrating for Esme was the group of perfectly coiffed moms who materialized at drop-off before heading out to jobs like television producer and advertising copy writer and office manager. These occupations, which had once seemed mundane, were now like the tips of sailboats floating away from the horizon, Esme standing on the shore.
The other group at drop-off was the home-maker wives, who wore Lululemon and complained about money, but spent the time their kids were at school in group yoga classes, training for half-marathons, or having Friday lunches with unlimited mimosas. They tended to have nice figures and their children tended to be the smartest and best adjusted. They supported each other, too, doling hugs and laughs when this child-rearing gig got just too darn hard! Some of them even watched each others’ kids and shared cooking obligations. Esme had tried to befriend these women, but they happened to be the same kinds of women who read Eat, Pray, Love, and considered Love, Actually the best movie of all time. They were lovely women who would raise lovely children and Esme had nothing in common with them.
Also, now that she had three children she’d broken an unwritten rule of Brooklyn parenting. Everybody kept saying, “I don’t know how you do it! Are you moving to the suburbs?” Unspoken and more to the point, it’s hard to arrange playdates with a mom who has three kids. Nobody wants that many people in their tiny apartments.
So, drop-off. First at PS11, then the preschool, and then home with baby Nicky, a two-mile walk round trip. By the time it was done, the cold had taken its bite. Though the baby was well wrapped, Esme’s hands were frozen too much to flex. But you can’t drive in Brooklyn, particularly not with three kids (you can double park, sure, but if you leave anybody in the car some asshole calls child services), so walking it had to be. This was also the problem with alternate-side-parking-street-cleaning days. Don’t even ask!
Drinking more coffee, she tried to type while the baby slept. She was working on a story she thought was good, about the prison system in Riker’s Island. She thought maybe someone would publish it, like they used to publish her work back when she’d been able to make deadlines. As a favor, her old friend who now worked at the Huffington Post asked for a first look when she finished. But she didn’t finish that day, because Nicky started crying. And she knew she was supposed to go help him. All the baby books demanded this. If you did not help a baby when he cried, he didn’t properly attach, which led to personality disorders like narcissism and borderline and even psychosis. Yes, you had to answer babies when they cried or you were a BAD MOTHER.
So she got up and held the baby. Offered her breast, which the baby bit, tearing up the scab that had just healed. “I don’t want you,” she cooed sweetly, because babies don’t know English.
Pick-up happened two hours later. Nicky was napping so she had to wake him, because Spencer threw fits when she was late, which it turns out is normal for a two-year-old, but somehow unacceptable at a preschool for two-year-olds.
She was in such a rush that she forgot her gloves, or maybe there just wasn’t time, but at least she’d remembered that tenth cup of coffee. Off they went, carrier and empty stroller, walking fast as waddling ducks.
The preschool on Prospect Avenue had this cheesy awning of happy stick-figure kids. A bunch of moms were waiting outside—the happy moms who’d all gone out for coffee and talked about their feelings during the last two hours. They smiled when they saw Esme and she tried to smile back but she was sweating at her core and ice-cold on the outside. Like a cherry pie a la mode.
The doors opened and Esme felt the familiar thrill. Her beloved, returned. Toddlers ran out from a large playroom with its indoor slide and bounce animals. They rushed for their mothers and that one overwhelmed, lonely dad. Playdates were arranged for the post-nap dead zone. The room emptied.
Esme felt a hand on her shoulder. It was the director. A sixty-year-old woman named Meredith who taught the children about hatching chicken eggs and self-esteem. “He’s in the office,” she explained. The lagging-behind mothers heard this, and offered looks of schadenfreude wrapped in sympathy. She followed Meredith into the office where Spencer sat on one of the small training potties instead of an adult chair, which would have been too big. His put-upon teacher Natalie stood beside him, seeming concerned.
It was always concern. Never anger, frustration, or annoyance. Just concern.
“He ran out of the classroom. We have a stop sign so that doesn’t happen. We teach them to read that sign on day one. For safety. But he ran out into the big playroom anyway.”
“Oh,” Esme said. Spencer came to her. Leaned in. Nicky yawned with closed eyes.
“We planned a field trip for next week. Spencer will have to stay home with you. It’s not safe.”
Esme felt all kinds of ashamed, which she always felt when this kind of thing happened, but also all kinds of confused. Because Spencer surely knew the difference between a classroom and a busy street full of cars.
“Well, if that’s what you think,” she said.
“It is. We’re so sorry. Maybe you could work with him at home.”
She felt she should defend her kid, but she was so tired that she was afraid she’d start crying. “Okay. We’ll work on following rules more. Except it’s hard because he’s two years old.”
“That might be the problem.”
“Hm?”
Meredith, the big gun, stepped in. “Have you been spending enough time with him? I think it might have to do with the new baby. He’s acting out.” She said this in front of Spencer, like he wasn’t just willful, but retarded.
“Oh. Should I cram this baby I’m holding back into my vagina?” she asked.
Everybody got all quiet and uncomfortable. Even Esme, who was not the kind of person to use the word vagina out loud.
“Okay! Sorry about the stop sign,” she said, took Spencer’s hand, and walked out.
* * *
They got home with two hours to spare before kindergarten pickup. Her fingers weren’t numb this time, just really cold. She fed everybody and then napped everybody and then they had a half-hour. She drank another coffee and somehow peed her panties and jeans, and promised herself to stop having coffee, because she was a grown woman capable of impulse control. Right?
Then she remembered the thing she kept forgetting, which was the ointment Wendy had brought to heal her sun damage. So kind! Because Esme was black, almost nobody ever noticed her sun damage. Her rich, drunk mom used to send her outside all summer long back in East Hampton. She’d felt this was good for Esme, as it had afforded them both more freedom. Esme was less sure. But now Esme’s face had all kinds of weird freckles and parts of her nose were scarred little spiderweb calluses from blisters over blisters over blisters, summer upon summer.
She couldn’t remember where she’d put the ointment, and then she remembered Wendy saying to her really slowly, “I’ll put it in your med’cin cabinet ’cause it’s strong magic. I don’t want the children messing with it.”
So, in her bathroom. She rubbed it on her face. It was a small jar, its contents reeking of frankincense and bergamot. The secret ingredient, Wendy had told her, was the blood and milk she’d collected from Esme’s nipples, which may or may not have been a joke.
Her skin tingled in a good way. The ointment pressed through her pores and went deep. She could even feel her bones. She worried briefly that Wendy had actually given her a whitener, since hillbillies from Kentucky probably thought blackness was a thing that needed curing. But then she looked into the mirror, and yeah, she could even see it. Her spots softened, the pigment turning uniformly dark. The scars on her nose looked smaller. She glowed.
“I’m still pretty,” she whispered with total surprise.
It felt so good she put it on her hands. The cracks merged together to heal. Heat sank deep, into her bones. The chapped red softened into muted brown. She was about to put it on her raw nipples when she looked at the clock. Time to go!
They went out again, this time straight to PS11. Lucy and her best friend Ritah came whizzing out the side, kindergarten exit. Ritah’s mom was this angry twenty-something from Massachusetts who was training to be a doula. She was always asking Esme to look after Ritah, which was actually pretty easy because Ritah was an easy kid, but it also kind of sucked. Today both moms took all the kids to the park. Lucy and Ritah played on monkey bars and sang their best-friend song and practiced their best-friend handshake. Ritah’s mom complained about how hard her life was because her ex-husband had a trashy girlfriend, and then something about how she wished she had some OxyContin. As Esme surveyed the situation, nodding politely at this woman’s litany of mistreatment, Nicky and Spencer stuck to her like extra appendages, Esme decided that private school would have been a better bet. They’d have met a higher class of family, whose kids used more normal cuss words. For example: what the heck is a douche-slut? Does she cheat on one douche with another? Do they even make douches anymore?
Esme, Lucy, Spencer, and Nicky got home at four in the afternoon. Everybody collapsed on the couch. Lucy cried because she missed Ritah and Spencer cried because two-year-olds cry in the afternoons, sometimes for as long as an hour, and Nicky cried because he heard other humans crying and wanted to be in on the fun, so then Esme cried, and then the kids all got really upset because mom was crying, so Esme turned the television to Animaniacs, which they streamed for an hour while she ordered groceries from Amazon, thank god for earth-scorching, minimum-wage-slavery Amazon, because no way she was getting these kids out of the house one more fucking time, just for Hamburger Helper.
She got the text from Mike that he’d be coming home late. He had this pattern since they’d started having kids. He stayed away until they were sleep-trained. Over the years, she had vocally protested and threatened and at last begged for his help, but her pleas had fallen on deaf ears.
She was not a moron—she’d done the math. But divorced people had to do stupid things, like splitting the kids between apartments three days a week. This sounded fantastic (three nights on her own, her husband stuck taking the kids! A fantasia! She’d brush her teeth and take baths and get real writing done!), but then you consider the practicalities. The kids were attached to their home, which they’d have to leave for something cheaper. Mike would certainly not take care of the kids. He’d have his mom do it. His mom was competent and loving but also a bully, which explained Mike, who never met a confrontation he didn’t avoid by either working the longest hours possible or just drinking his feelings into itches. You know how people with hammers are always looking for nails? His mom was an iron, always looking for something to flatten.
The stuff you have to manage—playdates and emotional well-being and simply asking the kids about their lives—this would not happen unless they were with Esme, nor would the doctor appointments and sick days. While she’d not been able to work for years, Mike was finally earning real coin. If she put a wrench in those gears, then they’d all be struggling. And while this situation wasn’t working for her—this was, in fact, terrible—she indeed loved these people. Even Mike.
She’d planned to revisit the notion of divorce, or at least couples’ therapy, once Spencer started kindergarten. Two kids in school full time, she’d have been able to work and make decisions with a clear head. But then she got pregnant again. The pill that was supposed to solve the problem didn’t take. And then the second pill didn’t take, either. She never got around to making an appointment for an abortion. She’d known it was specious thinking, but with the kid having survived so much, she’d gotten the idea that he’d had more of a right to her body than she did.
* * *
When Wendy arrived that night, she wore this red cloak with a black underside and she hugged Esme, hard, like she could guess just by looking how tough the day had been. Esme cried. She wished her mom, or even her husband’s mom, had done this after any one of the babies had been born. Just once. She would have cherished it.
Spencer and Nicky were already sleeping. Lucy wasn’t keen on Wendy. She thought she smelled bad and was weird, which Esme couldn’t actually refute. So it was Esme who put her to bed, this time with three chapters of Junie B Jones and a back scratch. When she came back out to say goodnight to Wendy, the woman was waiting at the kitchen table.
It felt weird, another woman at her kitchen table, telling her what to do. Even if the woman in question happened to be her savior. “Why?”
“Trust me.”
Esme sat. Wendy put Nicky in the bassinet, then pulled a boar bristle brush and a spray bottle from her mammoth, old-lady sack of a purse.
“My hair’s tricky,” Esme said.
“No, it’s not.” She sprayed something oil-based along Esme’s scalp. It smelled like a field of spearmint, and it felt much better that that. Her scalp tingled, drinking thirstily. She felt this wave of freshness wash over her, all the way inside her ears and sinuses and even her bones. Then came Wendy’s hands, sure through every snarl. She didn’t braid. She let it loose.
Wendy showed her what she looked like in a mirror. Her skin was dewy. Her hair soft and full. She’d never pulled this look off before, always afraid it would appear like a failed afro. But this was something different. Something just her own.
“My mom could never get this right,” she whispered.
Wendy handed her the oil. A blue bottle, small. She opened and saw that the contents were clotted white marbled with red. She was too grateful to ask the obvious question: is this my blood?
Wendy leaned in, her breath like bergamot, and kissed her on the cheek. This wasn’t the first time this had happened. More like the third.
Mike walked in, mid-cheek kiss. He stopped where he was standing, like he’d just caught them fucking a double-ended dildo while smoking crystal meth. “Who’s got the baby?” he asked.
Esme looked away, ashamed.
“Is he lost? We thought you had him,” Wendy answered. Then she said to Esme, “Go to bed. You’re exhausted. And put that ointment on your nipples and vagina. It’ll help.”
Blushing at the words nipples and vagina, Esme got up fast and went to her room. From there, she turned on the monitor, where she heard Wendy and Mike talking low so as not to wake the kids. This was new. He didn’t usually talk to Wendy. Just came in super late and walked past her, collapsing next to Esme on the bed.
“Did we ever get a résumé or references from you?” Esme died a little bit. Not literally. Or maybe literally. The part of her that loved her husband died a little bit.
“Do you need them?” Wendy asked.
“You know, now that you bring it up, that’d be great!” Mike said.
“I’ll give them to your wife,” Wendy answered, just as cheerful.
“I can take them,” he said, and he said this curtly, like it meant nothing. He was doing her a favor. She recognized the tone. But she heard it with new ears, now that he was employing it on someone else. It occurred to her that Mike, so cowed by conflict, so meek toward the outside world, might also, like his mother, be a bully.
“Actually, I’m so sorry!” Wendy said, with the same tone a person might use when explaining that all the gum in the pack is gone. There’s no more Doublemint! I’m so sorry! “You can’t have my references because you’re not my employer.”
“You can bet I’ll be the one paying you,” he said, and now he’d switched from charming to paternal, like he was clearing something up for poor, confused Wendy, the sixty-five-year-old hillbilly whose day job was selling ant colonies at the Children’s Museum. Which, you know, they’d never ordered the ants for. The ants had involved an online code from the inside of the box. So all they had was an empty ant house in the middle of the living room.
“I’ll waive my fee, maybe,” she answered.
Nicky started crying, which stopped the conversation. Esme heard shuffling, and then, “Oh, don’t be such a piggy,” Wendy whispered. “Let your momma relax.” Then a beer can cracked open, which would be Mike.
In the dark, Esme rubbed the ointment on her nipples and then her vagina. These, too, went deep. She felt the ointment all through her, vibrant and healing and startlingly alive. The healing felt like a window opening. A mountain moving, just slightly, proving that such things were possible.
It wasn’t so surprising, then, when Mike came in an hour later, and kissed her neck and felt between her legs, that she went along with it, and even came, her sore body throbbing with confused joy.
Around midnight, Esme was woken by a callused caress. She rolled halfway. Fed Nicky. He made suckling, animal sounds but her nipples didn’t mind as much and there wasn’t any blood.
Wendy smiled at the baby and she smiled more at Esme, like she mattered. Like she was a person who could be seen. “Cunt’s all cleaned up now, isn’t it, lucky girl?” she whispered. “It’s like you never had them at all.”
* * *
Month Two
The next day Mike slept in because it was Saturday and he was tired. She and the kids padded around the creaky, two-bedroom, brownstone floor-through until nine and then went for a walk in Brower Park and then to the Children’s Museum. She was hoping to see Wendy, whom she wanted to talk to about the whole cunt thing. She didn’t exactly know how to articulate it. She thought she’d say something like, chill out on the language. Or, can we not talk about sex while I’m nursing a four-week-old? But maybe she’d say nothing. Just smile and pretend everything was fine. Just reassure herself that Wendy was a functional person with a day job and a place in the world and friends. But none of this happened, because they were told she didn’t work there anymore. In fact, no one there could remember her ever having worked there.
Back home, she put both Nicky and Spencer down for a nap and played Uno with Lucy, but kind of fell asleep during a discard, at which point Lucy climbed on top of her and started humping her face, which—little known fact—most children do until you say, “Get the hell off! Stop humping my face!” and then they stop.
That night, Marlene the date-night sitter showed up. She was from Trinidad and the kids loved her rice and beans. They greeted her with utter joy, unlike the way they greeted Wendy, whom they viewed as some kind of smelly penny that kept turning up at their door. Wendy would not return until Monday. She had weekends off.
While Nicky cried in his boppy, Esme took a shower and then used the new spray on her hair so that it shone pretty. Her bones felt different now, from regular ointment use. Stronger and reknit somehow, into a slightly different configuration from the woman she’d once been.
She let her hair hang loose, the best it had ever looked. Her dress was this blue tiger print number that she’d gotten online and she looked great. Mike wore jeans and a suit jacket. They took Nicky with them and headed for the restaurant, where they were meeting the rest of Mike’s team along with their spouses.
The restaurant was on Vanderbilt Avenue. Mike walked ahead of her and Nicky that last block because they were late. The table had two spaces left, far away from each other. She was happy for this, which felt a little like betrayal. But only a little.
The food got served family style. She had a glass of wine and fed the baby from milk she’d pumped, so she felt dizzy and cheerful a half-hour in. The man next to her was from Scotland. He told her he liked black people. “I do, too!” she said. He thought she was funny. “Mike, your wife’s funny!” he said.
Mike nodded, kept talking to the guy next to him, the big boss, with whom he wanted to start a new division. She turned to the woman on her left, who was married to the man on her right. The woman on her left was from a town outside Chicago called Berwyn. She said she loved babies and could not wait to have some. She got tears in her eyes when she said this, like babies were something that came from a bank, and there was a run on them. “Have my baby!” Esme said.
Then she heard Mike say a crazy word. A word she’d never have guessed he knew, let alone repeat. It sounded like Wigger.
“What?” she called across the long table. Mike kept talking. The four people around him were laughing hard. “What did you just say?” Esme shouted, loud now and a little angry. They stopped laughing.
“I was just telling them about our hillbilly night nurse,” Mike said. Mike was from Florida. The state where people smoked bath salts, then ate each other’s faces. Esme was a Presbyterian from Westchester who’d gone to boarding school until college, and who’d have inherited a ton if not for some jerk hedge-fund manager’s ponzi scheme. Her people had been professionals for generations, long before the civil war. His people had come over during the potato famine. This is for background. For the establishment of who gets to call whom a low class.
“What about her?”
Mike grinned. It was his phony work grin because sometime between meeting her and the first baby, he’d lost his real grin. “All those potions,” he laughed. “She thinks she’s a witch or something. The two of you smell like potheads.”
“Did you say wigger?” she asked. The word meant white nigger. The men and women around him averted their eyes, sheepish.
He looked at her like she was crazy. “Of course not.”
Nicky and his fucking timing. He started crying.
“I think Dan’s on board,” Mike said on the ride home. “This is really big.”
She broke pace and walked in front of him on the way back to the apartment. “Did you say wigger? Be honest,” she called behind.
Mike looked at her blankly.
“When you were telling some mean story about Wendy. Did you call her a wigger?”
“Honey, I’m so drunk. I don’t even remember talking about her,” he said.
* * *
Inside the house, she paid Marlene, and then Marlene asked to speak to her privately, outside the apartment.
“Are you using voodoo?” Marlene asked as they shivered on the cold front stoop. She looked upset. Shaking and close to tears.
“Oh! You mean the night nurse?” Esme answered. “She’s into organic. She makes all these great ointments. They’re really helping me.”
“It’s voodoo,” Marlene whispered. “I can smell it on the children. You’re marked.”
This sank inside Esme, sidling across her bones. “I don’t believe in magic.”
Marlene shook her head. “Please.”
“Please, what?” Esme answered.
Marlene started down the steps. From the cramped, dim vestibule, Esme watched her turn around the corner, lost to the sideways horizon.
She put sleeping Nicky down in his bassinet. He’d sleep until his next scheduled feeding at two in the morning. “Can you feed him? I left a bottle,” she asked Mike.
Mike popped a last beer, and answered like he’d only vaguely heard. “Sure.”
She’d been through this before. Sure meant absolutely not, but she decided to let it play out.
Like clockwork, Nicky’s insistent hunger cries started at exactly two in the morning. She shoved Mike but couldn’t wake him, and she knew that if she let Nicky keep going, he’d wake Spencer and Lucy in the next bedroom, and then everybody would be crying messes all day long. Plus, there’s that whole attachment parenting thing, about how if you don’t hold them when they cry they become psychopaths. Plus, the milk was practically exploding from her nipples. She got up and warmed the bottle and then figured that one glass of wine six hours before wouldn’t kill him, and went ahead and nursed.
He looked up at her with soft, small eyes, and she loved him like you might love the first sight of a new and beautiful planet populated by Muppets. “I’m so unhappy,” she told him.
* * *
She couldn’t sleep after that. Too angry. Her first thought was to open Mike’s whiskey and get soused. But then she saw how Wendy had cleaned up the tiny corner of her kitchen that was her workspace, arranging pencils next to the laptop. When had that happened? Yesterday? A week ago? When was the last time she’d tried to write?
She sat down there, and saw the note Wendy had written, “You go, girl!” It made her smile, and then chuckle (You go, girl?), and then start typing.
The problem with Riker’s Island was that there wasn’t enough room for the inmates, so they floated around on barges. If they refused to plea bargain, they had to wait for at least a year, trapped, before they could stand trial. They’re stuck there, all these women. On fucking barges.
She finished a draft two and a half hours later, then made herself an exhaustion snack of torn crust from sliced bread smeared directly into a bar of butter—her favorite, secret late-night snack, which maybe explained the stubbornness of the baby weight. But God, it was good. Especially if you sprinkled a little salt on the top.
* * *
Nicky woke up. She took him out of the bassinet and brought him into the bedroom with the bottle. Held him next to Mike until he opened his eyes. “Your turn,” she said. He stayed like that for a ten count, then took the baby and the bottle and got out of bed. By the time Esme woke again it was after ten in the morning. Lucy had turned on the television and was watching it with Spencer. Nicky was just starting to coo. Mike had stuck a note to the fridge:
Putting in a few extra hours at the office. Have a great day!
Month Three
The next few weeks were uneventful, but also very eventful. Esme kept yelling; Nicky kept eating and sleeping; the weather stayed cold; Spencer kept getting in trouble; and Lucy kept playing with the kid who shouted weird cuss-words at PS11. Esme’s sun damage totally reversed. Her skin could have been mistaken for belonging to a twenty-five-year-old. True to Wendy’s word, so could her cunt.
It happened one Friday, that Esme woke to find Wendy still in the house. She’d made pancakes. These were thicker and more cake-like than normal pancakes, and they smelled like lavender. Everybody except Esme took three bites to be polite. Esme drowned them in syrup and butter and then they were fine.
“Thought I’d stick around, help out,” Wendy explained.
The kids stayed especially quiet because Wendy freaked them out. No panic attacks about mean teachers or bullying friends. No shouting about how she loved one of them more than the others, or that everything was totally unfair. It gave Esme’s nervous system time to breathe.
Wendy waited inside the car with the remaining kids when they stopped at PS11 and then the preschool, too. They were done quickly, and with significantly less physical tax. Nicky wasn’t upset because his nose wasn’t cold, and Esme didn’t pee her panties even a little.
“Turn left,” Wendy commanded, so Esme did. Instead of going home, she directed her to the old armory in East New York, about two miles down Atlantic Avenue. Wendy told her to pull over. She did. Do you work here, now? Esme wanted to ask. I heard you’re not at the Children’s Museum. You gave that up… Why couldn’t they remember you?
Wendy smiled at Esme with real warmth, or what passed for it. Her eyes squinted into a grin and her voice got soft, like she was reminding herself that gentle people whisper. “It happens in a blink,” she whispered. “And there’s so much power in it.”
“I know what you mean,” Esme said. “It’s so nice to have you, Wendy. I can’t tell you how grateful I am, to have someone in our house who cares. These first months are so hard. I’m counting down the seconds, wishing they’d pass faster, but I know it’ll be over in a snap. It all happens so fast and I love them so much… Saints and poets.”
Wendy looked at her with confusion. “Oh. Right.” Then she got out of the car.
Always before this, Esme had seen mammoth Wendy behind a register, or crouched by the side of a bed, or sitting at her kitchen table. But now Wendy stood tall. The outdoor expanse was finally wide enough to showcase her girth. She loped up the walk, her body in graceless disjoint, then pushed through an ornate wooden door and disappeared inside.
Esme watched the closed door, the giant turrets above, the pretty red brick faded to the color of city-soot and rust. She had questions. So many.
“What do you think?” she asked Nicky. Nicky cooed, because he liked Esme’s voice. All her kids were like that: they loved her more than anybody else in the world. It’s a kind of love so momentous that you can’t let yourself think about it or you’ll be like that guy, Narcissus, drowning in his own reflection.
She took Nicky out of his car seat and headed for the armory, which she realized looked a lot like a church. She climbed the steps. A funny feeling ate at the pit of her stomach.
A piece of red poster paper that looked like it had come from her house read:
No Men Allowed!
She opened the heavy door, and then another heavy door. She entered a giant atrium with an altar at the center. The room was empty. Dust motes filled the air. It stank of patchouli. She headed for the altar, where she found a pile of ashes and amidst this, a knot of black, human hair.
She turned and started out. The door squeaked loudly. She pressed her lips to the top of Nicky’s head and, panting, ran out. Up in the window, a top turret, a white-haired face peered down.
* * *
She meant to confront Wendy after that. To say: Uh, what was that place? Who are you? But when she got home there were tasks to accomplish, and she was afraid to tell Mike, because once she did that it would be out of her hands. He’d fire Wendy and she’d be alone in this apartment. So she decided to soothe her nerves with the ointment. It calmed her. Ran through her, placid and healing. After that, she ate the kids’ and Mike’s leftover pancakes, too.
She’d been paranoid. Wendy was a helpful person. She’d taken the morning just to give Esme a hand. She already knew from neighborhood meetings that the armory was a homeless shelter. Wendy surely volunteered. How could Esme possibly respond to her night nurse’s kindness with ungracious questions?
Besides, Wendy’s work was coming to a close. Nicky would be sleeping through the night any day now. A week at the most. Why end the relationship on a sour note?
* * *
On a Monday, Wendy ran Esme a bath full of clay while chanting softly. Tuesday, she caressed Esme’s cheek until she started crying and couldn’t stop. While Nicky fed, Wendy held her. Strong, callused hands. At one point, she wiped away a tear and ate it.
“What do you want?” Wendy asked. “If you imagine it, then the spirits give it to you. They divine it.”
Wendy thought about her Riker’s Island article, and about her friend from the Huffington Post whom she’d sent it to weeks ago, but who still hadn’t read it. She thought about this cramped apartment, and the shitty preschool which she wished they could afford full-time, and she thought about the person she shared her bed with, who made her feel so invisible, and mostly she thought about sleep, and how much she missed it.
“I want my mom,” Esme said.
Wendy climbed into the bed. Spooned her like her mom had never done, but she’d always wished for. It felt awkward, and then weird, and finally bad. Esme got up, pretending to need to use the bathroom, and didn’t come out again until Nicky started crying.
* * *
Wednesday, at exactly twelve weeks, Nicky slept through the night.
Esme’s breasts woke her up. They were too full. It was nine a.m. The kids would be late for school! “Lucy! Spencer!” she called. Nobody answered, and she had this irrational fear that Wendy had stolen them. That was the price. And now the loves of her life were gone forever.
She raced into the kitchen, where the dishes were washed and the counters cleaned and Wendy was standing at sweet attention.
“I dropped them off,” she said.
“You did? How? What about their lunch sacks? It’s such a walk!”
“I took the car. I made their lunches. It was fine.”
Esme tried to smile, but she was afraid. Something had changed. Something was wrong. Also, not cool to take a car without permission. “I guess we should talk about your fee. I think you should stop coming.”
“See you tonight,” Wendy said.
* * *
Wendy didn’t show up Thursday night. So Esme put the kids to bed, finishing up another Junie B Jones, and snuggling Nicky until his breath got deep. It felt like the end of something momentous, the beginning of another chapter, too.
Around midnight, she jackknifed awake, sneaked out of the bedroom where Mike was sleeping, and found Wendy sitting at her kitchen table. The apartment felt different. Everything rearranged and of different hue. Was this what happened at night? Did the house switch loyalties, locating a new master?
“Sorry I’m late,” Wendy said.
“Oh, it’s fine,” Esme answered. “But I should pay you. I think we’re not in the market for night nurses anymore.”
Wendy opened her giant old-lady purse and pulled out a deck of Tarot cards—the cheap, Walmart kind. “I made dandelion tea,” she said, sipping from and then passing the full mug in Esme’s direction. “It’ll help dry you out. I’ll leave the bottle.”
“So, the fee?”
Wendy laid down the cards. The light was low. She was too big for the chair. Twice Mike’s size. Probably twice as powerful, Esme suddenly realized.
“I’m so tired. Can it wait?”
Wendy shook her head. “I’ve already started.” She flipped a bunch of cards. To be polite, to get her on her way, Esme sat and listened. Something about cusps. Something about choices and rebirth and gobble-de-gook that you nod and smile at, because this person had held her defenseless infant all night for three months, and given her love and affection when she’d needed it most, and maybe she was crazy but who else would do such a thing? And then she nodded off, because when she woke up, Wendy was looking at her with this obscene smile on her face; gaudy, wild, and insane.
“Yeah?” Esme asked.
“So you’re about to make a big decision,” she said. “This is the turning point of your entire life.”
Esme stared at the card, which was marked death. She looked back at smiling Wendy. And the cup, she looked inside. Was it really dandelion tea? Because it had curdled to thick, custardy pink.
“You need to think the name. While you sleep, you’ll think the name, and in the morning they’ll be gone,” Wendy said.
“I don’t understand,” Esme answered.
“Of course you do,” Wendy answered. “It’s my fee.”
“Why don’t I just pay you in money from a bank?”
Still with that disquieting, bone-deep psychotic grin, she packed her Tarot cards into her giant canvas purse and left.
* * *
Esme did not go back to sleep. She stayed up all night and drank a lot of coffee and fed Nicky and got the kids ready for school. Before heading out the door, Mike hugged her hard and told her he loved her, which made her wonder if maybe she’d turned psychotic, and none of this life she was living was reality.
Then she dropped Lucy off. Lucy kissed her hand like they were in love, then waved this sweet, adorable wave before disappearing into mammoth PS11. “I’d love you even if you were a stranger,” Esme called out, to her own surprise.
Meredith and Natalie were waiting at the preschool. They ushered Esme and Spencer into the office for another talk, Spencer sitting on the training-toilet.
“Could you get my kid a real chair, please?” Esme asked. Meredith immediately complied, unhooking it from the stack in a closet just behind her desk. Then Natalie suggested a psychological interview, as she was worried Spencer might have oppositional defiant disorder, a rare condition that demanded immediate attention. It came from poor infant attachment and physical abuse. To this, Esme replied, “How much am I paying you? Just… Fucking keep him alive for two hours. Can you do that?”
Nicky strapped to her chest in a bright orange Moby Wrap, she left without Spencer (she forgot him!), then returned and took his hand. “I trust you’ll give me my money back. A false accusation of child abuse is a big deal. I can’t imagine you’ll keep your accreditation if I sue.”
Back at home, they watched television. Not even Sesame Street. Ozark, followed by Bojack Horseman. It was unclear to her whether she was repudiating or following in her shitty mother’s footsteps.
Five hours later, they picked up Lucy. Ritah’s mom asked Esme to babysit. “You realize I’m drowning and you’ve never once offered to watch Lucy, right?” she asked, and then she kept walking, her face red with shocked blush.
Once home, she got an e-mail from the Huffington Post that her story had been accepted and would run front page. This was her first real publication since Lucy, and she was delighted. To celebrate, she brought out her mom’s Baccarat and everybody drank orange juice out of $200 crystal. The bedtime routine lasted two hours. Mike caught the tail end. He held Nicky, who shared his small ears with joined earlobes. Soon, even Mike was snoring but Esme wasn’t, because what had Wendy meant about a fee? About thinking a name before sleep, and when she woke, the person with that name would be gone?
She Googled Wendy Broadchurch again, but the website about the night nurse was gone. What she found instead, not even buried, but on the first page, was a newspaper article from the Washington Post, about a woman in Whitesburg, Kentucky, who’d stabbed her husband and three children to death. A self-declared witch, she’d then engaged in ritual sacrifice, peeling the skin from their bodies and hanging it on the backyard trees.
Wrong woman, had to be. Except, there was the photo of a young Wendy, her crazy eyes just the same. Esme used her account at LexisNexis that the New York Times had never revoked when they’d fired her for getting pregnant, but had pretended it wasn’t because she was pregnant. A downsize upon a downsize upon a downsize of a collapsing industry.
After murdering her family, Wendy served twenty years in a psychiatric hospital in Lexington. She didn’t seem to have a handle in chat sites, but her name showed up a lot. Mothers talked about her like she was a ghost. They called her a savior. They called her a monster. They said she’d been their night nurse. They’d met her in dime stores and coffee shops and libraries. She’d earned their trust. And then she’d stolen their children. But no one believed. No one remembered the children, at all.
Esme was shaking when she finished. She still hadn’t slept. She didn’t sleep. Two nights in a row. That morning, Mike hugged her hard, and kissed her goodbye, because husbands always know when they’ve pushed you too far. They always come back, because the last thing they want is for you to break.
She got Lucy, Spencer, and Nicky dressed and cleaned for the day, but at the last minute turned back from the front door and had everyone take off their coats. Because it was Saturday. No school day, after all.
While the kids watched television, she went on another Wendy Broadchurch deep dive. There were three mentions of Wendy Broadchurch in the Park Slope Parents Listserve, dating back to 2004, when Wendy first moved to New York. All named her as the nanny they’d employed when their families fell apart.
Esme called one of these women, having located her name in an online directory, and paying the five dollars to get her cell-phone number. The woman answered on the first ring. “Hi, my name’s Esme Hunter, and I’m writing an article about the Park Slope Parents. I was wondering if I could speak with you?”
Esme explained that her article was about the usefulness of web groups for women over the last twenty years. “Did you find your nanny on a website?”
The woman’s voice got soft. “Yeah.”
“Right. And she was named Wendy Broadchurch?”
A long pause. Can you feel rage through a phone?
“Is it you?” the woman asked.
“I… what do you mean? My name’s Esme Hunter?”
“Give me back my fucking baby!” the woman screamed. “Give her back. Give her back. Give her back, you sick fucking cunt. When I find you I—”
Esme hung up. The phone starting ringing from that same number. She silenced it, her heart beating so fast it felt like all the vessels had burst, and blood was everywhere inside, drowning her.
She went to the children and held them one by one, and then altogether. They smelled like patchouli and bergamot and frankincense. The whole apartment reeked of it. She found the dandelion tea, which stank of blood and milk. She found the hair oil and the skin salve. She put them in a Ziplock bag and threw them in the garbage outside the house.
* * *
Late afternoon, Esme called Wendy on the phone. “I’d like to pay you your fee. I can sell my family’s Baccarat crystal or I can give it to you. It’s worth about five thousand dollars.”
Wendy’s voice was cold. The deep-down voice. The bone voice. “Sleep, honey. Stop avoiding it.”
“This is crazy. You’re crazy. I know about you. I changed the locks,” Esme answered.
Esme heard faraway laughter on the other line. She had to strain her ears. Then Wendy hung up.
After that, she really did have the locks changed, and then she texted Mike and asked him to come home. Something was wrong. She needed to explain. He called back right away and she told him everything. “I’m afraid to fall asleep. What if everything changes? Do you believe me?” she asked.
“I believe that you believe,” he answered. He said he’d be home as soon as his new department finished its meeting.
At last, she joined the kids on the couch. Her eyes kept closing. Mister Rogers played. The soft light of the setting winter sun pushed through the parlor window. Her mind skipped stones.
Wendy. How had they met?
The Children’s Museum, where no one remembered her.
She put Nicky down for his afternoon nap, and then went to her bedroom to get some rest while Lucy and Spencer continued their Teen Titans marathon. As she dozed, she wondered which child she might have picked. Nicky, of course. Because she loved him, but he’d been a setback. She could do without Nicky, and all the better, if no one had to know.
But she’d never do that.
Lucy and Spencer? No. They were a part of her, sewn in tighter than her stomach.
Mike? In magical fairy land, she could do without Mike, but not in the real world, where cash was exchanged for goods and services. Then again, he did have a life insurance policy.
No, not Mike. He was the father of her children. Not Mike.
In her dream, her skin tingled. Her bones broke and reknit with the architecture of briar-patch vines. These vines filled the room and the apartment. They covered the children and then broke the children apart. Everything stank of blood and sour milk.
Not anyone. Of course, not anyone. She chose no one.
And then she thought: Esme. Esme would love to disappear.
* * *
“Dad!” Esme heard as she awoke in her bed. “There’s a lady!”
She stood, and it was Lucy, dressed in a fancy frock adorned with purple hydrangeas, her hair a ragged mess like it had been combed by white people. Then Spencer was toddling beside her, wearing a polo pullover instead of a t-shirt, shorts belted. When he saw Esme, he screamed.
Esme came to them, but they started running. She followed them into the kitchen. Which was different. Her office was gone. It was refinished like she’d always wanted, in sparkling marble. Mike’s mom was cooking supper. She wore this frown on her face even before she saw Esme. The frown was the same one the kids wore. A light had gone out inside of them.
Mike’s mom lifted the cast-iron frying pan as a weapon, but it was hot and burned her hand. She yelped as she dropped it. Esme turned out to the living room. There was Mike, holding baby Nicky. He was about forty pounds heavier, his light gone, too.
“It’s a lady!” Lucy screamed again.
“Get out of this house,” Mike’s mom said, because underneath all that bullying, she’d always been a nervous wreck.
Esme was at the door. Somehow her shoes were on her feet, and her coat on her back. The furniture, she now saw, was different. Crate and Barrel instead of the stuff she’d inherited from her mom. No Baccarat for Lucy to inherit, either.
She was in the doorway, and she wanted to explain, but they were all so upset. And then Mike came closer, baby Nicky in his arms. Nicky wailed at her like he couldn’t stand her stench, and something in Mike showed recognition. Something deep remembered. Because he looked at her with the most perfect expression of hatred.