* * *
The house, which has never felt like hers, feels even less so tonight. After eating a microwave dinner, after straightening each room, mopping the dirt tracked in by CPS, closing drawers, folding Harriet’s bedding, and rearranging the toys, Frida retreats to her cramped bathroom, wishing she could collapse her life into this room, sleep and eat here. She showers and scrubs her face, applies toners and moisturizers and antiaging serums. She combs her wet hair, clips and files her nails, bandages her torn cuticles. She tweezes her eyebrows. Sitting on the edge of the tub, she pokes through the bucket of bath toys: the wind-up walrus, the duckie, the orange octopus that’s lost its eyeballs. She plays with Harriet’s robe. She rubs Harriet’s lotion on her hands so she can wear the coconut scent to sleep.
Though it’s a warm evening, she layers a hooded sweatshirt over her nightgown. Cringing at the thought of the men touching her pillows, she decides to change her sheets.
She gets into bed and pulls up her hood and ties it under her chin, wishing she had a shroud. Soon, the state will discover that she rarely has visitors. She lost touch with her New York friends after the divorce, hasn’t made new ones, hasn’t been trying, spends most of her solo evenings in the company of her phone. She sometimes eats cereal for dinner. When she can’t sleep, she does stomach crunches and leg lifts for hours. If the insomnia gets bad, she takes Unisom and drinks. If Harriet is here, just one shot of bourbon. If she’s alone, three or four in quick succession. Thank God those men didn’t find any empties. Each morning, before breakfast, she measures her waist. She pinches her flabby triceps and inner thighs. She smiles at herself in the mirror to remind herself that she used to be pretty. She needs to quit every bad habit, can’t appear vain or selfish or unstable, as if she can’t take care of herself, was perhaps unprepared, even at this age, to take care of a child.
She turns on her side and faces the window. She lifts a hand to her mouth, then stops. She looks up at the blinking red light. Is she giving them enough? Is she sorry enough? Afraid enough? In her twenties, she had a therapist who made her list her fears, a tedious process that only revealed that her fears were random and boundless. Whoever is watching now should know that she’s afraid of forests and large bodies of water, stems and seaweed. Long-distance swimmers, people who know how to breathe underwater generally. She’s afraid of people who know how to dance. She’s afraid of nudists and Scandinavian furnishings. Television shows that begin with a dead girl. Too much sunlight and too little. Once, she was afraid of the baby growing inside her, afraid that it might stop growing, afraid that the dead baby would have to be suctioned out, that if this happened and she didn’t want to try again, Gust might leave her. She was afraid that she might succumb to her second thoughts, take herself to a clinic, claim that the bleeding happened naturally.
Tonight she’s afraid of the cameras, the social worker, the judge, the waiting. What Gust and Susanna might be telling people. The daughter who might love her less already. How devastated her parents will be when they find out.
In her head, she repeats the new fears, trying to leach the words of meaning. Her heart is beating too fast. Her back is coated with cold sweat. Perhaps, instead of being monitored, a bad mother should be thrown into a ravine.
* * *
Frida discovered the photos last year. It was early May, the middle of the night, insomnia striking again. She went to check the time, grabbed Gust’s phone from the nightstand. There was a text sent just after 3:00 a.m. Come over tomorrow.
She found the girl in an album marked “Work.” There was Susanna in a sun-filled living room, holding a meringue pie. Susanna smashing the pie onto Gust’s crotch. Susanna licking the pie off his body. The photos were taken that February, when Frida was nine months pregnant. She didn’t understand how Gust had time to meet this girl, why he’d pursued her, but there were late nights at the office and weekends with friends, and she was on bed rest and trying not to be the kind of wife who dug her nails into his sleeve.
She sat in the kitchen for hours, studying Susanna’s naughty grin, her messy face, Gust’s penis in her hands, her little wet mouth. The girl had pre-Raphaelite coloring and a pale, freckled body with heavy breasts and boyish hips. Her arms and legs were finely muscled, her collarbones and ribs protruded. She thought Gust hated bony women. She thought he loved her pregnant body.
She didn’t wake him or yell, just waited until sunrise, then took a selfie, however awful she looked, and texted it to the girl.