Frida begins to weep. She needs to tell the judge about the house of her mind in the house of her body. Those houses are cleaner now and less afraid. She would never leave Harriet like that, not again.
* * *
The social worker keeps changing the date of the next visitation. September turns to October, and by the fourth postponement, Frida has dropped a dress size. She’s been sleeping four hours a night, sometimes three, sometimes two. She has no appetite. Breakfast is coffee and a handful of almonds. Lunch is a green smoothie. Dinner is an apple and two slices of toast with butter and jam.
She’s seen Will on campus twice, bumped into him once at the bookstore, once at the main food court. She asked him to stop calling, wouldn’t let him hug her in public. Her work is slow and scattered. She sometimes shows up at her desk having obviously been crying in the bathroom. Emotion makes her boss uncomfortable. After another round of late articles, her boss rescinds her work-from-home days. He’s sorry this will mean less time with Harriet, but the organization must come first.
“I don’t want to have to speak to HR,” her boss says.
“It won’t happen again. I promise. There have been…” Problems at home, she wants to say.
She’s thought about looking for another position, has considered quitting, but she needs health insurance. Penn has good benefits. Her father called in favors to help her get this job.
She’s been lying to everyone at work. The professors never ask her personal questions, but the support staff is mostly female, married with children. Convention dictates that they talk about their children at every opportunity. Never How are you?, but How is Tommy? How is Sloan? How is Beverly?
She told them, “Harriet’s new word is bubble.”
“Harriet has been asking to go to the zoo.”
“Harriet is obsessed with butter cookies.”
She doesn’t tell them that Harriet is in therapy. That in the office of some court-appointed child psychologist, Harriet is supposedly being healed. Renee said the child psychologist would probably use a dollhouse, have Harriet act out her feelings with a mama doll and baby doll, have her draw and see how hard she presses down with the crayons. The psychologist would look for signs. There’s a trauma checklist, but everyone responds to trauma differently. To Frida, it sounded an awful lot like guessing.
She doesn’t tell anyone that her parents have wired her $10,000 for her legal fees, that they’ll send more if she needs it, that they offered to take money from their retirement savings. Their generosity makes her feel even guiltier, unworthy of being their daughter or Harriet’s mother or waking up in the morning.
They sent the money without her asking. Their interview with Ms. Torres was tense. She kept asking them to repeat things, to speak more slowly, as if she couldn’t understand their accents. They said she didn’t talk like a normal person. Her tone was fake friendly, but she was cold like a scientist. She made parenthood sound like fixing a car. The food part, the safety part, the education part, the discipline part, the love part. They told the social worker that Harriet is Frida’s joy. Her bao bei. Her little treasure.
According to her mother, Frida is swallowing bitterness. Chi ku, a phrase Frida hadn’t heard in years. To bear hardships. They used the phrase to describe what her paternal grandmother, her ahma, endured during the Cultural Revolution. Her father sometimes told the story of the night Ahma was almost killed. She was the widow of a landowner. Soldiers came to their village to find her. They made her kneel. Her sons hid beneath the wooden bed in the room that served as their house. That night, both children screamed until they tore their vocal cords. They watched as soldiers put a gun to their mother’s head and threatened to shoot her.
Frida used to feel guilty whenever she heard that story. She felt spoiled and useless. She never learned Ahma’s dialect, could barely say more than hello and good morning to her. She had no way of asking her beloved ahma what happened. But Frida has no gun to her head, no soldier’s boot on her neck. She brought this bitterness on herself.
* * *
The visitation is supposed to begin at five. It’s the end of October, Tuesday night, eight weeks since they took Harriet, nearly six weeks since Frida last held her. The social worker gave them only an hour’s notice.
Frida steps around puddles. Jack-o’-lanterns are waterlogged from last night’s storm. Hurricane season lasts longer now. Fake cobwebs are drooping. Her coworkers have been asking about Harriet’s costume. To one woman, she said lion. To another, she said ladybug.