“We’re not supposed to talk about that.”
Because we weren’t. We never talked about anything. Even to this day, my parents prefer secrets and silence to uncomfortable conversation. They never even mentioned it to us. They never even explained what happened; never allowed us to understand or grieve. They simply closed the door to her nursery and continued on as if everything were fine, letting my memory wash her away.
I think about how my mother couldn’t look at me the morning after Margaret died—or any day since that morning—and the man who came to the house and talked to her. Let her cry. The way my father had held out Mason, and the way she had just stood up, walked away, like she didn’t feel she deserved it.
Last night, as we were making dinner.
“You know I love you. You know that, right?”
My mother never hated me; she never blamed me. She hated herself. She killed Margaret, her own daughter, and she had tried to kill me. And because of that, she wouldn’t let herself near me. She wouldn’t let herself be my mother again.
I suppose I should be grateful my father got there in time—that he ran into the water and scooped Margaret into his arms, putting himself between my mother and me before she could do it again. That he had cleaned me, changed my clothes, and led me back to bed the way he had done so many times before when he found me wandering around the house at night. That he had coached me in the morning, told me exactly what to say.
That he had quit his job, gotten my mother the help that she needed—but only behind the fortressed walls of our home.
Only in secret, where nobody else could see.
It would have been the end of him, after all. Everything he and his father and his grandfather had worked toward would be gone in an instant if the world found out what my mother had done. The Rhett name would no longer be cemented in history as something regal and refined; instead, it would be synonymous with death, just like the house itself.
I think about the way Chief Montgomery had barely even pushed me that morning, like he only needed me to recite a few lines. How he and my father had huddled together after, whispered on the porch steps, crafting the perfect story: just a tragic accident. A summer drowning. The wrong side of the statistic. Deep down, the chief must have known it wasn’t true, but still, he let himself believe it. It was the story he had wanted to be real. The one that was easier to accept. And so my father had nodded, sniffed, and created an alternate reality that was just easier for everyone to swallow. Then he held on tight to his secret, his lie—not to protect me, though, but to protect my mother. Himself.
All of us.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
I stay at the cemetery until the legs of my jeans are soaked through with damp. Then I stand up, make my way back to the car, and unlock it, sliding into the driver’s seat.
I eye the folder again, reaching out and touching the flap. My broken skin is bandaged over from the cut from the wineglass, and I can feel my heartbeat in my palm, thumping hard in my hand. Then I take a deep breath and pull the folder onto my lap, flipping it open and scanning the pages of notes that doctor had taken as he listened to my mother cry.
Her official diagnosis was postpartum psychosis, a “very rare, severe yet treatable condition that can occur after the birth of a baby,” exacerbated even further by the trauma, grief, and isolation following the death of said baby. Words like delusions or strange beliefs, inability to sleep, and paranoia and suspiciousness leap out at me from the page, branding themselves into my brain.
All of it had been there. All of the signs, the symptoms, if only someone had cared enough to look.
There’s a sense of relief knowing that I was wrong about Margaret—knowing that it wasn’t me who led her out there, held her body down in the dark—but still, the uneasiness isn’t gone. It’s just something new now. Something different.
Postpartum psychosis is considered a clinical emergency, I continue to read. Symptoms wax and wane, meaning a woman can be lucid enough to hold a conversation, then suffer hallucinations and delusions just hours later. There is a five percent suicide rate and four percent infanticide rate associated with the illness, and the risk of developing postpartum psychosis is higher in women with a history in their family, such as a mother or sister—
I slap the folder shut and toss it back onto the passenger seat before turning out of the cemetery and finding my way back to the highway, letting my mind wander as I drive. The thought makes me sick: That maybe I did something to Mason in the same way my mother did something to Margaret. That maybe I really had acted on those thoughts, peeled myself from bed that night, and wandered into his bedroom the same way my mother had wandered into mine.