We were sitting on my couch. I couldn’t get warm. Was still wearing my coat. Erik reached for my hand, but I shook my head. “I can’t.” I felt my smile wobble. “I wish I didn’t have to tell you this.”
“If it means I get to know—”
“Please. This isn’t something you’ll be glad to know.” I swallowed. “It’s about my marriage.” I glanced at him. “We had a child.”
“You—what? My God, Claire.”
“She’s ten, and she lives with…with Nick. I lost—” But I couldn’t say it. Once I did, nothing would be the same. “I lost—” I needed to say I lost my parental rights, but all I could get out was, “I lost her.”
“What do you…You mean you lost custody?”
I nodded. It was a start.
“Lucy, right? That’s why you sign your collages that way?”
I nodded again. I kept staring at the tip of his collar. The missing button was probably here, I thought, beneath the couch cushions or under the rug, and I had the crazy longing to find it, to fix this one small thing. Instead, I forced myself to meet his eyes. “I relinquished my parental rights, Erik. She was almost three.” I felt as if I was going to get sick, though I knew not to come up for air. Keep going, keep going, don’t take a breath. “There was an accident,” I continued. “I—I spent time, over two years, in a psychiatric hospital.”
“What do you…I don’t understand.” He looked pale, eyes dark with shock and confusion. “What do you mean ‘accident’?”
“I’m sorry. I know you don’t want to hear this. She…she almost drowned, and it was my fault.”
“Oh, Claire, no. No, honey.” Honey. It’s what he called Spencer when Spencer was upset.
“Nick saved her, but I…I let it…We didn’t know if she would…it was touch and go for months.” I clenched my teeth to keep my jaw from trembling, but my whole body was shaking. I pressed the tips of my fingers together until they turned white.
“Hey. Come here.” His voice a candle flame lit against darkness.
I stared at the collar of his shirt. The missing button. His chin moving as he spoke.
“Claire, honey, look at me.” But I couldn’t. I knew what he was thinking. Maybe she fell into a pool. Was pulled away by a wave. A freak tragedy, the sort of thing no one could predict or prevent.
His knee, his khaki pants, his hands, his long fingers, fingers that had touched every part of my body.
“It’s called postpartum psychosis,” I said thickly, and something in his gaze crumbled.
“What?” he said. “Wait. What?”
I started with before. She was born in January and I was fine, happy—God, I was so happy! I was a mother! I had a daughter. I loved saying that word. “Our daughter slept six whole hours,” I would tell Nick. Or “Is that our daughter crying?” And he’d laugh and say, “I believe it is our daughter.”
We had such a good life, I told Erik. We lived at the beach, close to our parents; our mothers were over the moon about their granddaughter, Kelly was my sister-in-law now, and Lucy, Lucy was beautiful. “I loved being a mom,” I said. “And I was good at it.”
“I have no doubt.” He brushed a strand of hair from my face.
“And then, when she was five months old, everything changed.”
I started having panic attacks, though I didn’t know that’s what they were at first. But every second she wasn’t near me, I imagined awful things happening: She’d stop breathing or…I don’t know, carrying her across the room, I’d see myself tripping and she’d go flying. I could barely drive when she was with me; I pictured gruesome crashes, or not even that, just my car swerving for no reason into oncoming traffic. I was terrified of everything, every minute. “It’s like I became afraid of her,” I told Erik. “She was so little and fragile and it seemed impossible that I could protect her.” I never thought I would hurt her; I just was afraid someone or something would.
“Everyone said it was ‘the baby blues.’ ‘All mothers go through this,’ my mom and Nick’s mom kept insisting. ‘It is overwhelming! Of course! To be so responsible for another life!’ ” I paused, struggling to keep the tremor from my voice. “I wanted to believe them, but it was devastating. To be failing so horribly at being a mother? It felt like failing as a human being.” I told him how my mom phoned every afternoon and she’d ask all these little things: What did you dress her in today? What book did you read at nap time? Did you notice her hair is getting a little curl to it? All these years later, I could still hear the pleading in my mom’s voice, how desperate she was to help me fall back in love with my baby, because the fear was ruining that too. I was so tense around her, afraid to just play or be silly or take her places.
I took another deep breath. “The day it happened—”
“It?”
“The accident.” I swallowed. Except for my lawyer, I’d never told this story to anyone outside the hospital. I’m not sure I believed I’d ever find someone I would trust enough. I looked at Erik’s kind eyes, worry lines creasing his forehead. Please understand, I willed him. Please. I thought of that night Spencer had uncharacteristically squished next to me on the couch, head on my shoulder, and the expression I’d seen on Erik’s face: wonder and gratitude and love.
“Do you have any clue what that means to me?” he asked later. “To know my son feels safe with you?”
“The day it happened, I thought I was doing better,” I said softly. I told him about taking Lucy to the boardwalk the night before, riding the Ferris wheel. The fact that I could do that at all! But it was okay, more than okay! The three of us in our own little basket, away from the noise and heat, the lights of Cape May shimmering in the distance.
The next morning Nick got up with Lucy, brought me coffee in bed. We talked about how we’d gotten so caught up in being new parents we’d forgotten each other. “We’ll make more time,” Nick promised. “We’ll go on dates!” I felt such hope. Later, I left to run errands, and even that felt great. I’m getting out, I thought, I’m leaving her with Nick, I’m not panicking, I’m doing ordinary things. Ordinary. I told Erik how my mind still snagged on those first two letters—or—and I think of how many alternatives, options, ors, were stacked up next to that day, and how I couldn’t imagine any of them.
Until later.
After Lucy and Nick were gone.
“I always wondered if, because it was such an ordinary morning, I let my guard down,” I told Erik. “But honestly, there was no reason to have my guard up. Even in the worst panic attacks, the things I imagined hurting Lucy were always things I needed to protect her from: my own clumsiness or a lousy driver or a sharp object left within reach. The idea that I might hurt her—it never crossed my mind. Not once. Not ever.”
I told him how, when I got home from my errands, I felt like a switch had been flipped: Suddenly I was terrified again. “I don’t know what’s happening,” I sobbed to my mom on the phone. She said she’d be right over, but I told her Nick was there—he was mowing the lawn and Lucy was asleep. And then…” I stopped. More than any other moment, this was the one place where I could have changed everything. “My mom asked if I was worried I’d hurt myself or Lucy.”
If I had just said yes.
I will never not be haunted by that.
“But I wasn’t worried,” I told Erik. “I was devastated my mom could think this. ‘I can’t believe you,’ I told her. ‘Have I ever said or done anything to make you think I’d harm my own child?’
“ ‘No, sweetie, but I’m asking. That’s all. You’re taking the antianxiety meds, right?’
“ ‘Yeah, Mom, and they’re helping about as much as this conversation.’ And then I was full-on furious, which years of therapy taught me was probably terror at how close to the truth my mom actually was.”
I hated remembering that conversation. My mom is devastated to think she might have put the idea of hurting Lucy in my head, something she admitted to me only once. “I thought I was doing the responsible thing by asking,” she had sobbed, and though I promised her that her words had nothing to do with what happened, I can’t ever really know, and neither can she. I can only remind her that none of the usual signs were there. For most women the psychosis occurs weeks after their child is born, not months. For most women there’s a family history of bipolar illness or a difficult birth, a difficult pregnancy, and for me there weren’t any of those things. For most women there are dark thoughts of hurting their babies, and I never had any. So, my mom’s questions felt far-fetched, insulting even. And in another version of that day, that’s all they would have been.
“I don’t remember much after that,” I said. “Lucy woke with diarrhea, covered with it. There was nothing to do except get her in the tub….”
The rest was a blur: the scissoring drone of the lawn mower interspersed with her crying the minute I lifted her into the tub. I’d checked the water, terrified it was too hot, but it wasn’t. “I was careful,” I said, a pleading tone creeping into my voice. “I was trying.” I paused. “She wouldn’t stop screaming. That’s all I remember. What was I doing wrong?” Even in memory the sounds are amplified, deafening, as they were that day, so that I felt as if I were being smashed apart in the same way a wineglass can be shattered by a high frequency. The bathroom was white—white walls, floors, towels—and the white was unrelenting, suffocating. I felt blinded, as if the whole world were reduced to her screams and that constant roar of the lawn mower, and I remember thinking that if I just let her go for a second, let her sounds go underwater—one second—it would fix whatever was wrong.
Erik’s eyes were closed. He’d brought his steepled hands to his mouth. I waited for him to look at me, but he didn’t, and I realized he couldn’t, that he was bracing himself.
There were only fragments after that. Nick slamming me sideways into the toilet and shouting and calling 911. I thought he’d hurt himself with the lawn mower, and I kept trying to take Lucy, but he wouldn’t let me and I didn’t understand and then Kelly was there and the EMTs and the police and then my mom…. “I never meant to hurt her,” I said quietly.
Nothing. Erik didn’t move or open his eyes. It seemed he was barely breathing.
She was underwater for two and a half minutes, I learned later. “I don’t remember,” I said again. “It’s a medical…I still…It’s called a fugue state. Nick came in and she wasn’t…He called 911.” I knew I was repeating myself.
I didn’t look at Erik, but at my hands, his shoes. I could feel his retreat, and the metal ball of the word over pinging through my insides, knocking against my ribs, slamming into my heart. Erik hadn’t moved, but an awful thrumming radiated from him. Finally, I saw his eyes: bewildered, hurt, stunned. Like watching a TV screen scramble into static, the confusion of too many emotions all competing with one another. And then the picture cleared. “I don’t know what to say,” he said. His skin was blotchy, as if he’d been slapped. “You said…Is she okay now?”
“I think so. Everyone thought…they said she’d have a full recovery. I know that doesn’t undo anything, but I wasn’t in my right mind, Erik. You have to know that. It’s like being in a coma. You wake up and weeks have passed.”
“You told me you couldn’t have kids.”
“I can’t. I had a tubal ligation.”
“And after the hospital? You said you were there two years? Did you see her? Did you want to give her up?”
“I wanted her to be okay,” I said quietly. “That’s all I wanted. And—and I wasn’t sure she would be with me.” Even more than the accident, this was the part that still filled me with a shame so strong I could taste it. I told him how Nick would bring Lucy to my mom’s or I’d go to his parents’ house, where he was living, but Lucy didn’t know me, or maybe she did and was frightened, and, of course, I was anxious too, afraid to be alone with her. It was awful. Awful for her, awful for Nick, awful for my poor mother, who fought me tooth and nail to not relinquish my rights, actually got down on her knees in the kitchen one day and begged me. Nick was already involved with Andrea, Lucy’s physical therapist, and Andrea loved Lucy. “I felt like giving her up was the only way I could even begin to…to make it up to her. To give her a chance at a normal life.”
“And she has that now? A normal life?”
“I hope so, but…we have no contact with Nick. I think my mom tried. And at one point, we thought maybe Kelly—but I don’t know.”
He nodded, eyes closed.
I glanced at the manila folder on the dining room table: medical articles about postpartum psychosis; etiology, prognosis. Occurs in one out of a thousand births…commonly misdiagnosed…I should have given him the articles first, I thought. And now it was too late. A memory rose of watching a surfing movie, Nick explaining how the moment the wave climbs into its perfect curl is already past the moment when you have to make a decision whether or not you’re going to surf it.
“I printed out some information.” I could hear my own breathing. Waves rising and falling. “I know you have questions.”
“Claire.” His voice was so far away.
“I’m not saying it isn’t awful, but it can’t happen—”
“Claire.” His voice was gentle. “I understand everything you’re saying, and I’m sorry you went through this, but it’s so far beyond anything…” His voice cracked, and he bowed his head again, elbows on his knees. When he glanced up, his eyes were glassy. “I don’t know what I think right now beyond feeling like a fool.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because the past three months…I’ve been living in fucking la-la land. Everything I thought…” He inhaled a shuddering breath. “It’s all been pretend.”
“Please don’t say that.” My voice felt impossibly small. A straight pin trying to hold up a painting. “Maybe it was stupid to think you would understand, but it doesn’t nullify…” I was holding myself by the elbows, trying to stop from shaking. “It doesn’t nullify how we felt. And I know you love your children—you’re an amazing dad—and it must seem…I don’t even know what it seems, but I loved my daughter too, Erik. I still do.”
“How, Claire? How? I’m not trying to be a jerk, but you don’t even know where she is!”
“Because I can’t!” I cried. “How would that help?”
He looked at me blankly, then lowered his face to his hands. I stared at the curved line of his back, the knobs of his spine against his shirt. Hesitantly, I touched him, just my hand on his shoulder blade, feeling his warmth and the rise and fall of his breathing.
“I need to go,” he said. “I’m sorry.” He stood, reached for his jacket on the arm of the couch, and walked to the door. “I know you’re in pain, and there are things you probably need me to say, and I wish I could.” He paused. “I need time. I…I just need time.”
“I know.” My heart was pounding. “But will you…if you can’t, if you…” Please don’t go, I wanted to say. Please don’t leave me.
“I won’t just disappear,” he said. “I’ll call. I just—I don’t know when.”
After he left, I lifted the pillows from the sofa, reached into corners, searching for that button from Erik’s shirt. I looked under the edges of the rug, felt under the skirt of the couch. Dust, a pen, a plastic cap from a water bottle, and then, the thumbtack-sized button. I clutched it in my fist; lay down on the couch, still in my coat; and closed my eyes. I was exhausted. I felt the blood rushing back into my arms and legs, a tingling prickly feeling. Beneath my eyelids a bright burning color. Red. Or orange. Something painful. I felt the sting of tears but couldn’t cry.
I woke later, the lights on, the button making a small indent in my palm. I pushed myself up, my stomach growling. I hadn’t eaten much dinner, the leftovers in a Styrofoam box in the refrigerator. How could I feel hungry now? The earlier adrenaline was gone, leaving behind a dull sadness. I walked into the kitchen, then sat with the box at the table.
I stayed there for a long time, feeling the grief pour through me, over me, as if I were standing in a rain shower. What hurt as much as anything was his accusation that I’d been pretending, that I wasn’t who I said I was, as if I could only be one thing: the woman who hurt her child. It was my greatest fear.
I had loved Lucy. All those months I carried her, and the five and a half months before the psychosis set in, I was a good mom. Proud of my girl, delighted with her every blink and expression and gurgle. The shape of her ears and toes. Her furrowed brow and wispy flyaway hair. Her bee’s knees. I had loved her.
As I had the rainy March morning I sat in my lawyer’s office in Georgetown, Delaware, and completed the parental rights termination form. My dad came with me because my mother wouldn’t, railing at me that they hadn’t lost everything—everything! their house, for God’s sake!—for me to throw it all away. But I wasn’t. What I believed was that I didn’t deserve to be a mom, or maybe something had broken in me and I wasn’t capable anymore, but at least I was giving Lucy the best chance I could. Maybe that was wrong, maybe I should have tried harder—I will never know, but I was trying to do what was right for my child. How, how, could that not count for something? I gave her the only thing I thought I had left to give her. And coming here, starting my life over, what other choice did Erik think I had?
I pushed my chair from the table and walked to the window. My reflection was transposed onto the dark glass like an image from one of my collages, and I thought of how the collages themselves were really about her. All the layers of paper and cloth and tissue and paint, as many as ten layers on some canvases. In the end, wasn’t every piece a metaphor for drowning, for what lies beneath the surface? And even then, not a single collage felt complete until I signed my name with hers: Lucy Claire.
That’s not pretending, I wanted to tell Erik.
It’s surviving.