“When I left Christine’s office,” Eva was saying, “Kelly was at the copy machine—you know how it’s in that alcove—and she had this…this look on her face. She asked why we were talking about Lucy and saying we had no right.”
Annabelle scrunched up her face. “What the hell?” she laughed, then added, “Good Lord! No wonder you didn’t want her here.”
Eva glanced at her, then said to me, “I told Kelly there must be a misunderstanding, but before I could finish, she said something about you giving up your parental rights? And how it was unconscionable for us to mention Lucy around her?”
My mouth went dry. “What did you say?”
“That Lucy was the name you used on your art and I had no clue what she was talking about. And then I left. I was furious with her.” She was playing with her straw again, dunking it in and out of her drink. When she finally looked up, her mouth was trembling. “Do you have a daughter, Claire?”
“What?” Annabelle said. “Why would you even ask her that, Eva?” She was already pissed on my behalf, and I loved her for this even as it broke me: how sure she was that I would never have kept something this big from her.
My blood was pumping so loudly in my ears I felt as if I were underwater. “I wanted to tell you,” I said thickly to Annabelle. I started to lift my coffee cup, but my hands were shaking, and I set it back down.
Eva reached for my hand.
“She isn’t mine anymore,” I said woodenly. “Kelly was right about that.” I stared at the swing set in the yard behind Eva, the empty seats swaying in the warm breeze as if a child had just abandoned them.
“Hey.” Eva squeezed my fingers. “Talk to us.”
“I don’t know what to say.” The leaves of the ginkgo moved in the breeze, their undersides turning silver like the wings of tiny birds. “Losing her is the worst thing that ever happened to me.” My voice sounded hoarse.
Annabelle turned on the bench. “This is what you were talking about the other night? When you said there was an accident?”
I nodded.
“What kind of an accident?” Annabelle asked.
“She almost drowned,” I said quietly. “I was giving her a bath.”
“Oh my God, Claire,” Eva said.
Annabelle clapped her hand over her mouth. “How old was she?”
“Seven months.”
“But she was okay?”
“She was in the hospital for a while. And there was a lot of physical therapy. But now—I think she’s okay.”
Annabelle blew out a long breath.
“And how is Kelly connected?” Eva said. “I know you were good friends—”
“She was my sister-in-law.”
Eva’s eyes widened.
“I was married to her brother,” I said as if it weren’t clear. I traced my finger over a gouge in the painted table, then looked up. “Kelly is her godmother.”
I told them everything then, my secret like a ship in a bottle. How had something this big and complicated fit all these years into the space that was my life?
I told them about the panic attacks, about seeing a psychiatrist, about taking antidepressants. I told them that I’d talked to Nick and my mom and Kelly about how scared I was, but how I also didn’t really know what I was scared of. None of us did.
The afternoon of the accident came back in shards, as it always does: the glass bowl of oranges on the kitchen table, Nick’s surfboard against the brick wall, the changing blue of the sky, Lucy’s screaming, the roar of the lawn mower, smell of baby shampoo. And then Nick’s howl, a long knife of color slicing through the silence. Later, the emergency lights washing over the house and Kelly screaming, “Let me in!” and my mom with me in the back seat of my dad’s car, taking me to the hospital.
Annabelle was sitting up straight. In the stillness, all I could hear was her sniffling and the sound of my own breath, and I remembered Gabe—or was it Scott? Whoever had gone scuba diving—telling us that’s all you heard underwater when you did deep-sea dives, your breathing magnified and echoing back to you, a loud whooshing.
“You’re…you’re not saying…” Eva looked at me with disbelief. “You let her go? You were right there?”
I nodded, feeling like some stupid bobblehead. “I didn’t know what I was doing. It’s—it’s a severe form of postpartum that…it turns into psychosis.”
“No.” Annabelle’s face was white. “This is Andrea Yates crap, Claire. This is—please please tell me that’s not what you are saying. Please.”
Andrea Yates was the Texas woman who had drowned her five children in a bathtub the year I married Erik. She’d been an international horror story, her picture and her children’s pictures on the covers of magazines. The journalist, Anna Quindlen, had written a column about it in Newsweek: Every mother I’ve asked about the Yates case has the same reaction. She’s appalled; she’s aghast. And then she gets this look. And the look says that at some forbidden level she understands.
“It’s not Andrea Yates,” I said quietly. “My daughter’s alive, and she’s—she’s healthy. We were lucky.” But I knew that’s all it was. Luck.
Annabelle was crying, holding one hand across her eyes. Eva set a travel pack of tissues in front of her.
“I know this is shocking,” I said.
“Why did you give her up?” Annabelle said.
“By the time I got out of the hospital…” I stopped. Where did I begin? With the state institution where I was incoherent, practically comatose, for months? Or with the months after that when I tried to reconnect with a child who didn’t know me? Who cried as soon as she saw me? Actually, no; it wasn’t a cry. It was a terrified whimper. And when she wasn’t whimpering she was fixated on some task, picking up Cheerios from her high chair tray and putting them in a Tupperware container, and when I’d come close, she’d pick them up faster and faster, her little face crumpling with fear. It was devastating. And it didn’t get better. Months of that, and then I’d see her toddle to Nick or Andrea or Nick’s mom and I’d hear her emit that popgun shriek of joy.
“Why the hell did you give her up?” Annabelle asked again. “Were you unfit, Claire? Incapable?” Her voice rose. “I just want to understand how someone who’s terminated her parental rights could think it was okay to raise another woman’s children.” Her voice was shaking.
“Oh my God, Annabelle. It’s not like that.”
“Then answer the question!”
“I gave her up because I loved her. And because while I was away, she bonded with the woman Nick got involved with. And because I was terrified, okay? Because I was traumatized by what happened too! You think I wasn’t horrified? I didn’t trust that I could be what she needed. Maybe that would have changed—I think now it would have—but at the time, I just wanted her to be okay. It’s the only thing I wanted. It’s the only thing I still want.” I was crying now. How could I make them understand? “The accident was sixteen years ago,” I sobbed. “It has nothing to do—”
“Bullshit, Claire!” Annabelle swiped her hands furiously across her face. “You should have told me this!” Her voice broke. “You were taking care of my children!”
“Annabelle, please. You know I love those children. You know I’m a good parent, you’ve told me a thousand times—”
“No—”
“I had my tubes tied. I made sure this couldn’t happen again. Come on, you don’t seriously think—”
But she did.
I looked at her hard eyes, arms crossed across her chest. Everything in me collapsed. “You think I could have hurt them?”
“No,” Eva said. “She doesn’t.” She turned to Annabelle. “You’re angry, and you have every right, but you don’t believe that.”
“The girls were toddlers, Eva! And I trusted her!” She was sobbing now. “I made you their guardian!” she shouted at me.
“Annabelle, please, this has nothing to do with that.” Fear razored itself across my insides.
“It has everything to do with that!” she cried. “And I had the right to know!” She jerked back her side of the bench, the wooden legs scraping the cement. “I can’t talk to you right now. I just—I need to go. I need you to go.” At the door, though, she stopped. “Does Erik know this?”
“What? Of course he does.” Did she really think I wouldn’t tell him? “I told him the minute I realized we were getting serious.” I thought this would reassure her, but everything in the hard set of her face, her stiff posture, the stone-coldness of her eyes, screamed WRONG.
“Do you really think he would have given me the time of day, much less married me, if he thought I was a danger to his children?”
“Sure, he would have, if he was thinking with his—”
“Annabelle, stop,” Eva said.
“His dick,” Annabelle finished.
“Don’t,” I said. “Please don’t. You know Erik is a good father. You know—”
“A good father? Are you kidding? He’s no better than you.”