Mommy Tracked (29 page)

“Juliet mentioned something about it, but I didn’t realize that Charlie was out alone at night. I thought he just went out the door for a minute.”

“Try four hours. The police came. It was awful.”

Grace gasped. “Oh, my God! Did you kill Brad?”

“I wish it were that easy,” Anna said grimly. “I think a nicely planned murder would be easier to pull off than getting his visitation revoked.”

“You’re trying to keep Brad from seeing Charlie?” Grace asked, trying not to sound as shocked as she felt. She could understand Anna’s anger, but surely this was going too far.

“I’m going to sue for full custody and to have Brad’s visitation scaled back. And I want his visits supervised.”

“Anna…”

“What?”

“I know Brad screwed up, and I know you’re angry—Christ, I’d be furious if I were you—but maybe you should think this through before you do anything drastic. You know it’s important for Charlie to have a relationship with his father.”

“Not if his father is too busy screwing some bimbo to watch him,” Anna said stubbornly. She crossed her arms in front of her. “Did Juliet tell you that part? That the reason Brad didn’t notice our two-year-old son got out of bed and let himself out the front door—the
unlocked
front door—is that he was upstairs getting it on with his new girlfriend? One night. He couldn’t even take one night off to spend some quality time with his son. I mean, who does that? Who lets his own child get away from him like that?”

Grace wondered if Anna would have been so angry if Brad had been distracted by a football game rather than a woman, but upon seeing the mutinous expression on her friend’s face, she refrained from sharing this insight with her.

Instead, Grace said, “Well, I did.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“Molly got away from me.”

“What? When?”

“It was just after Hannah was born. Hannah had colic and was up screaming all night, and both Louis and I were dragging around like zombies right out of
Night of the Living Dead
.”

“I remember that. It went on for months.”

“The longest three months of my life,” Grace agreed. She plunked her water cup down on the over-the-bed table. “I’ve never been so tired. Anyway, one morning, after a particularly bad night where I hadn’t slept at all, I’d finally just gotten Hannah to fall asleep in her swing and I collapsed on the sofa. Molly was a toddler, and she was sitting at the coffee table, coloring, so I let myself close my eyes. I remember thinking,
I’ll just rest for one minute
—and the next thing I knew, the doorbell was ringing. It was Sandy Howard, who lives two houses down from me, bringing Molly home. While the baby and I slept, Molly had let herself out of the house and was halfway down the block when Sandy spotted her.”

“Oh, no! Grace! You never told me that!”

“I was too embarrassed to tell anyone.”

“You must have been beside yourself,” Anna said sympathetically.

Grace nodded and shuddered. “I was a mess. I felt like a complete failure as a mother. For weeks after, I had nightmares about what might have happened to Molls if Sandy hadn’t seen her. She could have been hit by a car, or grabbed by some creep, or fallen into someone’s pool…”

Anna was quiet for a minute. “I know where you’re going with this. But my situation is different. Brad didn’t lose track of Charlie because he’d been up all night for months on end with a screaming baby.”

“No. He screwed up, and I’m sure he feels awful about it. But sometimes that’s what it takes. You have a close call like that and it wakes you up. That night Louis put security chains on every door in the house. And we haven’t lost one of the kids since,” Grace said, now smiling wanly. She rapped on the over-the-bed table. “Knock on wood. Or plastic. Whatever this is. Just promise me you’ll think this through before you do anything drastic, okay?”

Anna didn’t say anything for a minute, but finally she nodded and said, “Okay.”

“And remember, if you do decide to date, Charlie will be
fine
. Kids are adaptable.”

But Anna just shook her head and pressed her lips together in a tight line. Grace decided to change the subject.

“Back to Mandy Rider. Please tell me she looked bloated when you saw her,” Grace said, settling back against her reclined hospital bed.

Grace was finally discharged on Thursday afternoon, and she was thrilled to get home.

“Mama’s home,” she called out, dramatically throwing the front door open. Louis was following behind her, her overnight bag slung over his shoulder, being overly solicitous. He kept trying to hold on to her elbow and guide her into the house, as though she were a doddering old woman, until she finally swatted him away and said with exasperation, “Louis, let go of me! I can walk on my own.”

“Just tell me if you’re feeling dizzy again, okay?” Louis said, his face knit with concern.

“Mommy! Mommy’s home! She’s here!” Hannah and Molly came rocketing down the stairs and hurled themselves at their mother, nearly knocking her off her feet.

“Girls! Be careful with your mommy, she’s still not feeling well,” Louis said sternly.

But Grace ignored him. She swooped down and pulled both of the girls to her, breathing in their deliciously familiar smells, a combination of strawberry shampoo, girly sweat, and lavender-scented talc. They hadn’t been allowed to come see her at the hospital—which was probably just as well, Grace thought, since it might have scared them to see her so incapacitated—and she’d missed them to pieces. Five long days. It was the longest she’d ever gone without seeing her girls.

“Come here and cover me with kisses,” she said, and the girls giggled and wrapped their arms around her neck.

“Honey, welcome home,” Victor said, hurrying out from the kitchen and pulling her into another hug. Alice followed behind him, holding Natalie perched on one hip. Alice was smiling, but it looked forced.

“Hello, Grace,” Alice said.

“Hi,” Grace said breezily.

She and Alice hadn’t ever resolved their spat over Alice’s redecorating project. It was a typical pattern for them. They’d argue, and rather than reconcile, they’d just keep their distance from each other for a while, and eventually they’d forget to be mad. Now Grace was in the uncomfortable position of being indebted to Alice for coming to watch the girls all week, while not yet ready to forgive her stepmother.

“Come here, Nat,” Grace said, reaching out for her youngest daughter, but Alice stepped back, moving the baby out of Grace’s reach.

“I really don’t think you should hold the baby just yet,” Alice said. “What if you have another one of your attacks and end up dropping her?”

Grace’s cheeriness at being home instantly evaporated. “I’m fine, really,” she said evenly, stepping forward and pulling Natalie from Alice’s arms.

Alice’s mouth thinned into a disapproving line, but she remained silent while Grace cooed down at Natalie, who was kicking her dimpled legs and grinning up at her mother.

“She’s started sucking her toes,” Victor announced proudly, as though Natalie had started solving quadratic equations.

“Always a useful skill to have,” Grace said, laughing down at her baby girl.

After dinner, the men tag-teamed the kid’s bed routines—Louis gave the baths and Victor read the stories—and Alice finished up the dishes. Grace had been firmly instructed by everyone that she was not to exert herself, so she decamped to the family room, where she curled up in her favorite armchair—a battered old leather club chair from the thirties that she scored at a thrift store—with the stack of interiors magazines that had arrived during her absence. She flipped through a few pages of one issue—green was the in color this year, she noticed, and wallpaper was still popular. As usual, her pleasure at seeing the pictures of beautiful rooms artfully arranged was dampened by a pang of regret that it wasn’t her work on display, her design that the writer was gushing over.

And then suddenly she remembered.

Oh, shit! The stain!

Grace had forgotten all about the chocolate-milk stain that she hadn’t been able to get out of the sofa. She’d meant to camouflage it before Alice’s next visit—maybe with an artfully draped throw or a large pillow—not anticipating, of course, that she’d be unconscious in the hospital when her stepmother arrived.

But when she looked over at the spot where the stain had been on the right back cushion, it wasn’t there. Grace peered at it, confused. She stood and walked over to the couch so that she could get a closer look. Maybe Louis had flipped the cushions around—but, no, the stain was completely gone. Scrubbed clean.

Grace knew instantly who was responsible: Alice. But rather than feeling pleased that the ugly stain on her newish sofa had come out, Grace just gritted her teeth. It wasn’t just the stain. It was one more way for Alice to feel superior, one more failure for her to keep track of, Grace thought, feeling ruffled as she settled back down on her chair.

Just then, Alice breezed into the room. “Do you have everything you need?” she asked Grace. “I know the doctors said you’re supposed to be taking it easy.”

It was an innocuous-enough statement, yet the underlying tone was unmistakably critical. It was as though Alice was taking Grace’s convalescence as a personal insult.

“Fine, thanks,” Grace said. She lifted up her magazine and attempted to hide behind it.

But Alice was not to be put off so easily. She sat down on the now stain-free sofa, facing Grace. Alice was wearing a white sleeveless cotton sweater and perfectly ironed blue seersucker capris. Grace wondered, as she often had, how the woman managed to get through the day without a single wrinkle.

Freak
, Grace thought.
The woman is a freak
.

“Actually, I’m glad to get you alone for a minute. I have a bone to pick with you,” Alice said pointedly.

Gah
. When Grace was a teenager, those words—
I have a bone to pick with you
—had always struck fear in her heart, as they were inevitably followed by a lecture about Grace’s weight (too heavy), or clothes (too slutty), or attitude (bad), or school performance (merely average), or any other area in which Grace fell short of Alice’s expectations. That was to say, pretty much everything Grace did, including breathing, which, Alice had informed her on occasion, she did too loudly.

Grace put down her magazine. “What does that mean, anyway? ‘A bone to pick with you’? Where do you think that came from? Do you think it dates back to cavemen, beating one another with dinosaur bones?” Grace asked, in an attempt to distract Alice from her bone-picking.

It didn’t work.

Alice sighed heavily and brushed some invisible lint off one of the pillow cushions.

“I know I’m not your mother,” she began. “But I like to think that we’ve formed a special relationship over the years. And I think I’ve earned the right to offer you the sort of guidance your mother would have given you, had she lived.”

Oh, Christ. I know I’m not going to want to hear whatever it is she’s about to say
, Grace thought. And yet, perversely, Grace couldn’t bring herself to stop Alice. It was like worrying at a canker sore—as much as it might hurt, you can’t leave it alone.

“I know no one wants to say anything that might upset you, but I think it’s time you heard the truth,” Alice continued.

“The truth,” Grace repeated.

“Yes. The truth. And don’t look at me like that.” Alice held her hand up, palm facing out. It was an imperious gesture and had the effect of making Grace want to slap her.

“Because the
truth
is, if everyone wasn’t so worried about you, what with the coma and all, they might actually tell you how furious they are at you for being so stupid,” Alice continued. “Thank goodness you were alone when you fell! What if you’d been holding Natalie and you dropped her? Or what if you’d been driving with the girls in the car when you had one of your attacks? What then?”

Grace shuddered at this grim thought, and her guilt over the danger she’d posed to her daughters momentarily edged out her annoyance with Alice.

“Please don’t,” she said quietly. “I can’t bear to think about that.”

“Well, I think you should think about it. I think you should think long and hard about how much damage you could have caused. As it was, you were lucky. You only hurt yourself. What if something had happened to one of those girls? You would never have forgiven yourself.”

“I know. I was very lucky,” Grace said, struggling to keep calm.

“I don’t think you do know. Have you thought about what this has done to Louis? What you’ve put him through? Or the girls? Or your father?”

“Alice.
Please
. I know how lucky I am that my girls weren’t hurt. You don’t think it makes me sick to my stomach that it could have been one of them lying in that hospital instead of me? That I could have been the reason they were in there? You don’t think I know how stupid I was? I
know
I screwed up. I
know
that.”

Alice crossed her arms and pursed her lips. “I should hope so,” she said severely.