Madeline pulled open the sliding door from the backyard and saw Abigail sitting on the couch, looking at something on her laptop. “Hey there!” she said, and winced at the fake cheer in her voice.
She couldn’t speak naturally to her own daughter. Now that Abigail only came on weekends, it felt like Madeline was the host and Abigail was an important guest. She felt like she had to offer her drinks and check on her comfort. It was ridiculous. Whenever Madeline caught herself behaving this way, she got so angry, she went too far the other way and brusquely demanded that Abigail perform some domestic chore, like hanging out a basket of washing. The worst part was that Abigail behaved exactly like the good-mannered guest that Madeline had brought her up to be and picked up the laundry basket without comment, and then Madeline was guilty and confused. How could she ask Abigail to hang out washing when Abigail didn’t bring any washing home with her? It was like asking your guest to hang out your laundry. So then she’d rush out to help put the clothes on the line and make stilted chitchat while all the words she couldn’t say poured through her head: Just come back home, Abigail, come back home and stop this. He left us. He left you. You were my reward. Missing out on you was his punishment. How could you choose him?
“Whatcha doing?” Madeline plonked herself on the couch next to Abigail and peered at the laptop screen. “Is that America’s Next Top Model?”
She didn’t know how to be around Abigail anymore. It reminded her of trying to be friends with an ex-boyfriend. That studied casualness of your interactions. The fragility of your feelings, the awareness that the little quirks of your personality were no longer so adorable; they might even be just plain annoying.
Madeline had always played up to her role in the family as the comically crazy mother. She got overly excited and overly angry about things. When the children wouldn’t do as they were told, she huffed and she puffed. She sang silly songs while she stood at the pantry door: “Where, oh where, are the tinned tomatoes? Tomatoes, wherefore art thou?!” The kids and Ed loved making fun of her, teasing her about everything from her celebrity obsessions to her glittery eye shadow.
But now, when Abigail was visiting, Madeline felt like a parody of herself. She was determined not to pretend to be someone she wasn’t. She was forty! It was too late to be changing her personality. But she kept seeing herself through Abigail’s eyes and assuming that she was being compared unfavorably to Bonnie. Because she’d chosen Bonnie, hadn’t she? Bonnie was the mother Abigail would prefer. It actually had nothing to do with Nathan. The mother set the tone of the household. Every secret fear that Madeline had ever had about her own flaws (she was obviously too quick to anger, often too quick to judge, overly interested in clothes, spent far too much money on shoes, thought she was cute and funny when perhaps she was just annoying and tacky) was now at the forefront of her mind. Grow up, she told herself. Don’t take this so personally. Your daughter still loves you. She’s just chosen to live with her father. It’s no big deal. But every interaction with Abigail was a constant battle between “This is who I am, Abigail, take it or leave it” and “Be better, Madeline, be calmer, be kinder, be more like Bonnie.”
“Did you see Eloise get kicked off last week?” asked Madeline. This is what she would normally say to Abigail, so this is what she said.
“I’m not looking at America’s Next Top Model,” sighed Abigail. “I’m looking at Amnesty International. I’m reading about the violation of human rights.”
“Oh,” said Madeline. “Goodness.”
“Bonnie and her mum are both members of Amnesty International,” said Abigail.
“Of course they are,” murmured Madeline. This must be how Jennifer Aniston feels, thought Madeline, whenever she hears about Angelina and Brad adopting another orphan or two.
“What?”
“That’s great,” said Madeline. “I think Ed is too. We give a donation each year.”
Oh, God, listen to yourself! Stop competing! Was it even true? Ed might have let his membership lapse.
She and Ed did their best to be good people. She bought raffle tickets for charity, gave money to street performers, and was always sponsoring annoying friends who were running yet another marathon for some worthy cause (even though the true cause was their own fitness). When the kids were older, she assumed she would do some sort of volunteer work like her own mother did. That was enough, wasn’t it? For a busy working mother? How dare Bonnie make her question every choice she made?
According to Abigail, Bonnie had recently decided she wasn’t having any more children (Madeline didn’t ask why, although she wanted to know) and so she’d donated Skye’s pram, stroller, cot, change table and baby clothes to a battered women’s shelter. “Isn’t that amazing, Mum?” Abigail had sighed. “Other people would just sell that stuff.” Madeline had recently sold Chloe’s old baby dresses on eBay. Then she’d gleefully spent the money on a new pair of half-price designer boots.
“So what are you reading about?” Was it good for a fourteen-year-old girl to be learning about the atrocities of the world? It was probably wonderful for her. Bonnie was giving Abigail a social conscience, while Madeline was just encouraging poor body image. She thought about what poor Jane had said about society being obsessed with beauty. She imagined Abigail going into a hotel room with a strange man and him treating her the way that man had treated Jane. Rage ballooned. She imagined grabbing him by the hair on the back of his head and smashing his face over and over against some sort of concrete surface until it was a bloody, pulpy mess. Good God. She watched too much violent TV.
“What are you reading about, Abigail?” she said again, and hated the irritable edge in her voice. Did she have PMS again? No. It wasn’t the right time. She couldn’t even blame that. She was just permanently bad-tempered these days.
Abigail sighed. She didn’t lift her eyes from the screen. “Child marriage and sex slavery,” she said.
“That’s awful,” said Madeline. She paused. “Maybe don’t . . .”
She stopped. She wanted to say something like Don’t let it upset you, which was a terrible thing to say, which was just the sort of thing a privileged, frivolous, white Western woman would say, a woman who took far too much genuine pleasure in a new pair of shoes or a bottle of perfume. What would Bonnie say? Let us meditate on this together, Abigail. Ohmmm. See? There was her superficiality again. Making fun of meditation. How did meditating hurt anyone?
“They should be playing with dolls,” said Abigail. Her voice was thick with angry teariness. “Instead, they’re working in brothels.”
You should be playing with dolls, thought Madeline. Or at least playing with makeup.
She felt a surge of righteous anger with Nathan and Bonnie, because, actually, Abigail was too young and sensitive to know about human trafficking. Her feelings were too fierce and uncontrolled. She had inherited Madeline’s unfortunate talent for instant outrage, but her heart was far softer than Madeline’s had ever been. She had too much empathy (although, of course, all that excessive empathy was never directed at Madeline or Ed, or Chloe and Fred).
Madeline remembered when Abigail was only about five or six and so proud of her new ability to read. She’d found her sitting at the kitchen table, her lips moving as she carefully sounded out a headline on the front page of a newspaper with an expression of pure horror and disbelief. Madeline couldn’t remember now what the article was about. Murder, death, disaster. No. Actually she did remember. It was a story about a child taken from her bed in the early eighties. Her body was never found. Abigail still believed in Santa Claus at that time. “It’s not true,” Madeline had told her quickly, snatching up the paper and vowing never to leave it anywhere accessible ever again. “It’s all made-up.”
Nathan didn’t know about that, because Nathan wasn’t there.
Chloe and Fred were such different creatures. So much more resilient. Her darling little tech-savvy, consumerist savages.
“I’m going to do something about this,” said Abigail, scrolling down the screen.
“Really?” said Madeline. Well, you’re not going to Pakistan, if that’s what you’re thinking. You’re staying right here and watching America’s Next Top Model, young lady. “What do you mean? A letter?” She brightened. She had a marketing degree. She could write a better letter than Bonnie ever could. “I could help you write a letter to our MP petitioning for an—”
“No,” interrupted Abigail scornfully. “That achieves nothing. I’ve got an idea.”
“What sort of idea?” asked Madeline.
Afterward she would wonder if Abigail might have answered her truthfully, if she could have put a stop to the madness before it even began, but there was a knock on the front door just then and Abigail snapped shut the laptop.
“That’s Dad,” she said, getting to her feet.
“But it’s only four o’clock,” protested Madeline. She stood up too. “I thought I was driving you back at five.”
“We’re going to Bonnie’s mother’s for dinner,” said Abigail.
“Bonnie’s mother,” repeated Madeline.
“Don’t make a drama of it, Mum.”
“I didn’t say a word. I didn’t say, for example, that you haven’t seen my mother in weeks.”
“Grandma is too busy with her social life to even notice,” Abigail said accurately.
“Abigail’s dad is here!” yelled Fred from the front of the house, meaning, Abigail’s dad’s car is here!
“Gidday, mate!” Madeline heard Nathan say to Fred. Sometimes just the sound of Nathan’s voice could evoke a wave of visceral memory: betrayal, resentment, rage and confusion. He just left. He just walked out and left us, Abigail, and I couldn’t believe it, I just could not believe it, and that night, you cried and cried, that endless new baby cry that—
“Bye, Mum,” said Abigail, and she leaned down to kiss her compassionately on the cheek, as if Madeline were an elderly aunt she’d been visiting and now, phew, it was time to get out of this musty place and go back home.