Cutting Teeth(63)

TWENTY-SEVEN




Children, like show business, simply must go on, Darby thinks. Try having them in a catastrophe, just try. They still need dinner and baths and bedtime stories. She can’t sit on the couch and stare into space and cry and think properly. She must tend to Jack. She must heat up leftovers and tell him, “Just one more bite, just one more bite for Mommy.” She does it all according to routine. One foot in front of the other. On second thought, that’s probably the best thing about having children, too.

She’s developed a peculiar skill as a mother. She can read an entire picture book out loud, cover to cover, while thinking about something else entirely. She’ll reach the end of the book and literally have no idea what she’s just read. Nothing. It’s kind of amazing. So there she is, splitting her brain in two as she reads The Pigeon Wants a Puppy, complete with funny voices and a theatrical performance, and all the while she is thinking, thinking how she cut her leg shaving a couple days ago and used toilet paper to stop the bleeding. She threw the bloodied wads in the wastebasket and about half an hour later she passed back through and found Lola had pulled them out and was licking the dried spots of blood.

The first bite on her hand was scary. Such a terrible shock to her system. Her daughter meaning to hurt her like that. But that wasn’t even the truly frightening part. The frightening part was how Darby had loathed Lola in that moment, detested her, abhorred her. Whatever you wanted to call it, Darby felt it. There’s no way around it. She couldn’t stand her daughter then. It was like an out-of-body experience. The canine teeth sank through her skin and she might have thought: I don’t want to be her mother. The words felt familiar in her head, like an echo. What kind of terrible person thinks that about their child?

She wonders if Rhea even remembers those late-night texts they used to send to each other. Facts swapped back and forth to pass the time. Darby always had a penchant for true-crime tidbits, killing time by looking up the horrific deeds of notorious murderers. You wanna know what? She would text Rhea now if they were on texting terms at the moment, which she suspects they’re not. Murderers always became murderers because they had bad mothers. Watch a few episodes of Criminal Minds and her analysis will be proved unassailably true. Unloving, negligent, no-good mothers. Like Darby.

Darby went to do one little thing for herself—go to the gym—and look what happened. Just look! It’s like she’s being dragged back by her hair to be taught a lesson. She might feel like she’s giving so much, but somehow it’s still less than the other mothers. She wasn’t joyfully available or responding intuitively or whatever the fuck it’s called. Sometimes—or often—she responds to Lola’s myriad requests with a tense jaw and a barely concealed quiver of annoyance. She thinks guiltily of the sappy posts she puts on Facebook each Mother’s Day—Feel so lucky to be these two’s mom—and feels like an imposter even though it’s true. Absolutely, fundamentally, unequivocally true.

She’s thinking herself in circles. At some point, she’s moved on to reading Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. Jack fidgets in her lap, trying to push to the next page, when she hears the back door beep-beep and her heart leaps. They’re home!

She lets Jack push past the remaining pages and she hurries to get him settled in bed. She wants to see Lola, to give her a big hug and tell her, I love you and I know you had nothing to do with Miss Ollie, I know it, I know it, a mother always knows. Even mothers like Darby.

She scuttles down the stairs—skit skat skoodle doot, the picture book words stick in her mind like an earworm—and nearly runs headlong into Griff as he rounds the banister. Lola’s head rests on his shoulder, open-mouthed, her legs wrapped boa constrictor style around his waist.

“She fell asleep on the drive home,” he whispers.

Darby’s body throbs with longing. The little girl she created looks so peaceful. She has such a nice, sweet, perfect nose and long fingers and shiny hair like a Pixar character. Is it supposed to hurt this much? Darby wonders. Even when her kids aren’t trying to hurt her, sometimes it’s their beauty that does it.

Once again, she’s relegated to waiting, more waiting, while Griff carries Lola up to her room and deposits her gently in bed.

It’s not until he reappears without their darling daughter nestled in his arms that it hits her all over again, like the second point of impact in a one-two punch: Griff’s role in all this. It’s her least-favorite kind of argument to have with her husband, the kind where he doesn’t know they’re in one.

Of course she believes Rhea. Darby may not exactly be Miss Corporate America any longer, but she’s still a modern woman and so Of course I believe you has to be her go-to response even if every cell in her body vibrates in the opposite direction, telling her, No. No. No. Not Griff. But the evidence is not in his favor. Not now, when there is a Sarah Met-Online. And if there is a Sarah Met-Online, who is to say there aren’t more women, more possibilities, more terrible truths waiting to be discovered.

She only has one shot at this. Darby, you cannot fuck this up, she cautions herself. So she waits, waits to talk through the day, the interrogation—no, it wasn’t just Lola, other kids are being questioned, too; no, he doesn’t know what they’re after; yes, Lola was polite; no, he doesn’t think they should be worried, not really, not yet. She has to read his face or she’ll always wonder.