She finds Beth’s willingness to talk about her problems unseemly. Her mother would too. Only a white woman, an American, would be so indiscreet. Beth’s favorite subject is her most recent attempt.
“I was being responsible,” she said. She’d been hoarding her medication, planned to combine her pills with two bottles of vodka. Her first attempt was when she was thirteen. She tried again in high school and college. This time, the night she planned to do it, she dropped her daughter off with her ex and drove herself to the hospital.
Meryl often asks for details. She asks about the other patients, if they were actually crazy or medium-functional self-harming crazy like Beth, who has chunks of flesh gouged out of her forearms and pale crisscrossing scars on her legs that resemble winter birch trees.
Meryl has asked Beth how she started, whether she used knives or razors, how she prevented infections. Whenever she does this, Frida steers the conversation back to Ocean, sometimes also elbowing Meryl in the ribs.
The three of them mill outside the computer lab on Sunday, shuffling past the waiting mothers who still have phone privileges, trying not to make eye contact or brush shoulders or attract the attention of the guards or cameras or Ms. Gibson. Eavesdropping on the calls is morbid. They can hear children crying.
Meryl says, “It’s like that thing people do on the highway.”
“Rubbernecking,” Frida replies.
“Yeah, that.”
The buzzer rings. Twenty mothers file out. Another twenty enter. The mothers who just said goodbye weep silently. It’s a technique Frida needs to learn. No wetness, no ugliness, just a brief face crumple and a sag of the shoulders, a dignified, private aching. The mothers hug and hold hands. They talk about how their children looked, if their children seemed healthy, whether their children were happy to see them, what they would have said if they’d had more time.
Frida needs Gust to check on her parents. She needs to know what’s happening with Harriet’s diet, if her second birthday party will have a theme or decorations in a particular color, if Harriet has a favorite color now, how Gust and Susanna will explain her absence.
Life has carried on without them. Relatives have had strokes. Children have responded to their mother’s absence with aggression—with pushing, tantrums, even biting. Linda’s oldest, her sixteen-year-old son, Gabriel, ran away from his foster home. He’s been missing for five days. It’s not his first time running away or the first time she’s worried that he’s dead, but it’s the first time she can’t look for him.
Though they haven’t forgotten what Linda did to Lucretia, they’ve been trying to be nicer, given the circumstances. They say, I understand. They say, I can’t imagine. Was Gabriel having problems at school? With his foster parents? Did he run off to be with a girl? Is he getting into drugs?
Linda covers her ears. She says, “Goddamn it, shut up!” Can’t they leave her alone?
“Stop making this about you,” she snaps when Beth tries to hug her.
Linda’s sorrow makes their already tense mealtimes unbearable. Others have been saying their class is cursed. Beth suggests a moratorium on news from home. They try not to discuss their children. No talk of babies or birth, their bodies, how long it’s been since their children were taken away, no whining about phone calls, what they’re permitted, whether they’ve forgotten their child’s touch or smell. Instead, they talk about gas prices and the latest natural disaster, stories gleaned from the women in pink lab coats, who check their phones when they think the mothers aren’t looking. They try to keep their conversation substantive and focused on real-world concerns. Thinking of themselves to the point of pathology is one reason they’re here.
* * *
As in all institutions, germs are a problem. There have been cases of bronchitis. Stomach bugs. Colds. For a place claiming to simulate parenting, there’s a distinct shortage of hand sanitizer.
This week, the mothers share the flu. It is, as Frida imagines, how the plague worked in a boardinghouse. One cough, one sneeze, another mother goes down. Roommate infects roommate. Whole classes get sick. Roxanne’s dream laughter has been replaced by hacking coughs. Frida finds that her entire brain has been reduced to thoughts of mucus. Linda proves to have a remarkably strong immune system.
With illness comes small rebellions. Some mothers try to cough on the women in pink lab coats, but after a few episodes of targeted coughing and malicious hand shaking, all punished with trips to talk circle, the staff starts wearing face masks and keeping their distance. No masks are provided for the mothers, who, even at their sickest, are not allowed to miss class. Beth unwisely asks about sick days and has the request added to her file.