The woman doctor gives me a small, sad smile. “That’s why you had a dissociative break. You saw yourself in your friend’s dead face, so you ‘died.’” She holds up two fingers on each hand and wiggles them like bunny ears. “You became your friend.”
“You became Daphne,” the male doctor says. He turns to Dr. Hancock. “I think the patient is making progress with talk therapy. Is ECT really necessary?”
“She still thinks she’s Daphne Marist,” Dr. Hancock replies. “She’ll persist in the delusion until something jolts her out of it.”
“Perhaps,” the woman doctor says, “we should consider the possibility that she’s telling the truth, that she is Daphne Marist.”
Dr. Hancock barks a short, rude laugh. “Are you really buying this outlandish conspiracy theory? You’re feeding into the patient’s delusion.”
The woman glares at him. “Could it hurt to have outside verification? A friend or relative of Daphne Marist?”
“Well,” Dr. Hancock says, “in fact, we do have one. I was going to wait until after the evaluation, but since this has come up again . . .” He leans back toward his desk and hits the intercom button on his phone. “Rose, would you please send in Ms. Greenberg?”
Ms. Greenberg? “Esta’s here?” I say.
“Yes. After Ben Marcus was fired he contacted her and asked her to come up here to identify you. I told her it wasn’t necessary, but she insisted.” He makes a face and I can imagine how unpleasant Esta has made herself. I feel like cheering. Sour, disagreeable Esta! I can’t think of anyone I’d rather see right now.
The door opens and Esta bustles in. She’s wearing flowing layers of linen and wool and carrying an enormous tote bag. Her face is turned down in a scowl, her hair standing up in spikes. Miniature crystal chandeliers sway from her earlobes. She looks like Mary Poppins in Eileen Fisher. I could hug her.
“Esta!” I say, standing. “Thank God. Tell them who I am.”
Esta gives me a long, assessing look. Then she turns to the three doctors. “I can’t believe I drove three hours for this. This woman is Laurel Hobbes.”
Laurel’s Journal, August 2, 20—
I’ve decided that I have to leave. And I can’t trust JB anymore, which means I can’t depend on drawing my monthly allowance from the trust.
After Daphne left, Stan came home and sat down on the couch with his “concerned” look on his face. He said that JB had called him to say I’d come into the city and that I sounded “irrational.”
I was furious. “That’s a complete breach of client-lawyer confidentiality,” I told him.
“I think JB was acting as a friend, not a lawyer,” Stan said. “He didn’t even tell me what you wanted . . .”
His voice trailed off like I was going to volunteer what I was there for, but I was damned if I was going to tell him what I wanted even if Daphne was right. I mean, if he knew he’d no longer profit from me dying then I suppose I’d be safer but it’s not like I’m going to let him do anything to me and I’m leaving anyway. Daphne’s provided me with the perfect solution. I reread Daphne’s last email to me about the job in the Catskills. I’d ignored it at first because it sounded dull but now it occurs to me that it’s the perfect place to hole up until I can have my money transferred to another lawyer and divorce Stan. I’m going to send Schuyler Bennett an email and apply for the job. If I weren’t so mad at Daphne I’d call her up and thank her.
August 8, 20—
The papers came yesterday and I went to the notary to sign them and then express mail them back to JB. I also took out as much cash as I could. Weirdly, I find that I can’t leave without saying goodbye to Daphne. I’ve really been wrong about her. When I emailed Schuyler Bennett, she wrote back asking if I’d changed my email address and was I still planning on arriving on the fifteenth. Quelle surprise! Daphne applied for the job for me! I need to thank her. And I guess I should apologize for how I acted. I can see now that she couldn’t possibly be in on Stan’s plan. Now that I’ve stopped drinking that “vitamin water,” I’m thinking much clearer. I’m going over there right now.
I’M IN FRONT of her house right now, but Daphne’s car isn’t here and Chloë is sleeping in her car seat, so I thought I’d pass the time by reading over these entries. What a bitch I’ve been! It’s like I’ve been someone else since Chloë was born and I think I know who—my mother. It’s like as soon as I became a mother I thought I had to be like her. Well, I can be better than that.
I feel bad about letting Simone go. She cried and said she’d lose her visa. I gave her all the money I’d taken out of the bank. She tried to give it back to me but I told her I didn’t need it where I was going. And I don’t. I see that now. I can see everything more clearly now.
For instance, I’ve just seen Esta coming out of Daphne’s house. Quelle surprise! I think I’d better go in and find out what’s going on. If Peter’s there, I’m going to give him a piece of my mind. I’ll bring my suitcase in so he can see I’m serious about leaving and that he’ll never see a penny of my money. And I’ll tell him what I think of how he treats his wife and that if he keeps bullying Daphne I will personally pay for a divorce lawyer who will make sure he never gets to see Chloe again. That will be my parting gift to Daphne.
Chapter Twenty
I remain calm. I don’t make a scene. I don’t fall to pieces. Because that is clearly what they expect of me. I can see it on Dr. Hancock’s face. He’s watching me like a boy watches an ant under a magnifying glass, waiting for it to go up in flames.
“Esta,” I say calmly, “look at me closely. I’m not Laurel; I’m Daphne. I know we look alike and you aren’t expecting to see me.”
Esta gives me a long, steady look, giving me a chance to observe her. She’s looking good. Laurel used to make fun of her shapeless hippie clothes but I notice she’s given them an upgrade. Eileen Fisher instead of J.Jill. She’s gotten a younger, sharper haircut. The crystal earrings might actually be diamonds. Her skin glows like she’s recently had a salt scrub at a spa.
“Actually,” she says, “I never thought you looked all that much alike. Daphne, poor thing, had a sweetness in her face that you never had.” Then she turns to the trio of doctors. “Forgive my tone. I can’t help blaming Ms. Hobbes for Daphne’s suicide, although perhaps I should blame myself. I saw how Laurel was influencing Daphne, first in how she dressed but then also in how she thought. She filled her head with horror stories. I saw that Daphne was suffering from postpartum OCD and was internalizing Laurel’s stories. I warned Laurel not to tell them—”
“No!” I shout, unable to stay silent any longer. “That was me you told.”
The doctors all look from Esta to me. Dr. Hancock smiles. The woman doctor quickly jots down a note. I bet she’s thinking she can get a paper out of this: “The Woman Who Thought She Was Her Own Best Friend.”
“Of course it was you,” Esta says, smiling a dazzling smile. Has she had her teeth capped? “I just said it was you. But you didn’t listen, did you? You told your horror stories of women jumping from windows with their babies, women drowning their own children, women leaving their babies in the backseats of running cars in closed garages—until poor Daphne was so afraid she would kill her child that she took her own life.” She shakes her head and then turns back to the doctors. “Classic borderline personality disorder. You should be careful who you expose to her.”
“I’m afraid I have to agree,” Dr. Hancock says. “I gave her greater freedom this past week and the patient she’s been spending the most time with just had an episode in the lounge.”
“That wasn’t my fault,” I object. “All I did was sit by her as she drew.”
“Here’s one of those drawings.” Dr. Hancock takes a sheet of paper out of a folder and passes it to the other doctors. The woman doctor flinches and gives me a look of horror.
“That’s not fair,” I say. “I’m not responsible for what Edith Sharp draws.”
The male doctor holds up the pa
ge. There’s the same scene Edith’s been drawing all week: the tower, the group of people below. But now a woman is dangling a baby out the window of the tower and the people below are shouting up at her. Poor Edith, I think, she’s descended into a nightmare world.
But so have I.
The doctors are all looking at me with stony faces, as impassive as the face of Edith’s Solomon. They are ready to sacrifice me, to cleave the part of me that is dangerous from my own brain.
I look away from them to Esta, who has the same stony look on her face. For a moment the mask slips and I can see a look of satisfied pleasure beneath it. It’s like she’s an entirely different person beneath that mask. It makes me wonder if anyone really knows who anyone really is.
AFTER ESTA LEAVES, Dr. Hancock tells me that they’ll confer on my case and let me know when they’ve come to a decision. “But rest assured,” he adds in a grave, paternal voice, “whatever we decide will be in your best interest.”
Yeah, right, Laurel quips, like volts to the head is in our best interest.
“Just please,” I say, ignoring Laurel’s voice, “consider that Esta’s been paid off to say I’m Laurel. Get someone else. Vanessa Lieb, my babysitter, or one of the other mothers in the group . . . Alexa Hartshorn or . . .” I can’t remember any other names. Why wasn’t I friendlier with the other mothers?
Because I was more fun, Laurel answers.
“We’re not having fun now.” I say it out loud. The woman doctor picks up her head and I see the look of certainty on her face: I’m a nut job and I need to be treated. I certainly can’t be trusted with making my own decisions.
I see heavy-handed Connor hovering outside the door, waiting to take me back. If I struggle he’ll hurt me. And what’s the point? I’ll only convince them that I’m crazy and a menace to myself and others.
I go peaceably to my room. Not the lounge. There will be no lounge privileges for me for a while, at least not until I’ve been made docile with electroconvulsive treatment and pills. I wonder how Edith is doing. Was I a bad influence on her? I’d been happy to encourage her drawing because it gave me an excuse to sit outside waiting for Ben Marcus. There’s another person I’ve harmed; Ben’s lost his job trying to help me. How many others have I let down? Laurel? By not believing her? By letting her get killed? And Chloe—my Chloe—whom I abandoned because I was so traumatized I took the wrong baby?
It’s thinking about Chloe that undoes me. I sit on the edge of my bed, staring out the barred window as the light leaches out of the sky, imagining what Chloe will be told about me when she grows up. I remember when I got the news that my mother had been in a car wreck, driving home drunk on a Saturday night. I’d thought about her getting in that car drunk, never thinking that she was leaving me behind, never thinking that I was worth staying alive for.
Just before dark, Dr. Hancock comes to tell me that the other two doctors have concurred in his assessment that I should receive electroconvulsive treatment. “You needn’t be afraid,” he says, kind now that he’s won. “You’ll be anesthetized for the treatment. You won’t feel a thing. And when you wake up, you’ll feel like a new person.”
I smile at that. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? For me to be Laurel. Much better to have a rich patient than a poor one.”
He ignores my comment and pats my knee. “Get some rest,” he suggests.
As if.
I agree with Laurel that there’s no point in trying to sleep. I sit on the bed, watching the window, waiting—
And there it is. The light in the tower comes on and then goes off again. A signal, but from whom? What good does it do me? I turn my own light off but I don’t turn it back on. Let that be my response to whoever is signaling. Over and out. I have nothing more to add.
At some point I fall asleep. I’m not sure for how long. I’m awoken by the sound of a key in the lock. Is it morning already? Have they come to get me? It’s still dark but I imagine they like to start early. Nothing like electroshock in the morning to get the day started right. I curl into a ball, hugging my knees to my chest, head tucked, trying to make myself small. Trying to disappear, so they’ll go away—
A hand touches my shoulder, so gently it’s like a bird brushing against my skin, and I open my eyes. Edith is standing above me, her spiky hair standing out around her head like a halo in one of her beloved Renaissance paintings. She’s holding up a ring of keys. “Come on,” she whispers, “let’s go find your baby.”
Part III
Edith’s Journal, September 6, 1971
I’m finally here! After all the shouting matches and tears, all the forms and sitting in offices, and hours on the train and running through Pennsylvania Station with all my bags like the Keystone Cops were after me, I’ve finally made it! Vassar College! And what do I discover when I get here? My clothes are all wrong, the girls are all snoots, and my roommate, Libby, is crazy. Since I got here all she’s done is lie in her bed, read French poetry, and smoke, smoke, smoke. When I told her I’d come here to study art history she snorted like a pig and asked what I was going to do with that, was I just looking to have some polite dinnertime conversation with my husband’s boss?
I could’ve asked her what she planned to do with French poetry, but I couldn’t stand the smell of smoke a minute longer. I spend all my time in the art history library, where they hang copies of the slides we’re supposed to know for the midterm and final. After every class there’s a whole slew of new pictures hung up in a long hallway. The girls line up chairs all in a row so you can sit in front of each one and test yourself. If you have a friend you can test each other. I don’t have anyone to test me, though.
If you’re on your own you have to decide when it’s time to get up and move to the next chair or the girls behind you get annoyed. It’s like musical chairs, only instead of music it’s dates and painters and temples and churches. I had a dream last night that I was sitting on the line and when I got up the girl to my right wouldn’t give up her chair and the one to my left had already taken the one I’d been in but when I went to step back out of the line I saw we were all balanced on a narrow bridge between two buildings and below us was a bottomless pit. Then one of the girls said, “You don’t belong here,” and gave me a shove.
I woke up screaming and there was Libby, lying awake, staring up at the ceiling, smoking. “Who’s Cal?” she asked.
Chapter Twenty-One
Edith leads me to a doorway I’ve always assumed was a broom closet, but when she unlocks it I see it’s a stairwell. It smells like cigarette smoke and sex.
I hesitate to follow her. As scared as I’ve been here these last few weeks, the hospital has become my routine, an orderly place where I know what to expect. Once I enter this door I may never get back.
But Edith is pushing me through. I hear why; the squeak of rubber on linoleum heralds an approaching orderly. Edith has timed our exit perfectly to get us to this door in between rounds.
Edith draws the door closed behind us, holding the lever so that it doesn’t make a sound. I have just time enough to admire her skill before we are plunged into darkness.
I follow Edith down the stairs. When she stops at a door I’m pretty sure we’re not on the ground floor yet, and sure enough, when she unlocks the door I can tell right away from the carpet and soft yellow walls and the creepy paintings that we’re on the floor with Dr. Hancock’s office. “What are we doing here?” I whisper.
“We have to get your record from the dean’s office to find out what they’ve done with your baby.”
I try to stop her. I know where my baby is—a hundred miles away in Westchester with my lying, no-good husband. But she’s already creeping down the hallway, one hand on the wall trailing over the framed paintings. I follow, anxiously peering under doors for a telltale scrap of light that would reveal a late-working doctor. What if Dr. Hancock is here? But no, he said he commutes from Garrison.
At the end of the hall Edith has paused in front of the paintin
g of the disembodied eye. “This is when it happened,” she says.
“When what happened?” I whisper, afraid that the paintings are triggering her psychosis the way that drawing the tower had. What will I do if she starts to fall apart here?
“When Solomon took his ax to us,” she says. “When he cleaved us apart.”
“You mean when Solomon said he’d split the baby in half?” I ask.
She nods, her eyes glassy in the dim fluorescent light.
“But remember? He doesn’t do that. The real mother says she’d rather give up her baby and that’s how he knows she’s the real mother and he gives her back her own baby.”
Edith gives me a look like I’m the simpleminded one. “We tried that,” she says with heavy patience, “but it didn’t work. They still cut us up in little pieces.”
I shiver at the image. This is what years in a mental hospital must feel like to Edith: as if a bunch of all-powerful men had taken knives to her poor bewildered brain and cut it into little pieces. This is how I’ll feel in twenty years if I don’t get the hell out of here.
“We’re still whole,” I say, laying my hand over Edith’s. “And my baby is still out there somewhere.”
Edith nods and squares her jaw. “And so is ours,” she says, taking the keys out of her pocket. They are each wrapped in red yarn. She selects one and opens the door to Dr. Hancock’s office like she’s done this before. How many times has she escaped, I wonder as I follow her into the office, only to come back again? Why should the outcome of my escape be any better?
Because you’re not crazy.
I’d like to agree with Laurel, but the fact that I’m hearing her voice undermines her message.
Edith finds the key to the filing cabinet in Dr. Hancock’s desk and opens the middle drawer. “Here’s mine,” she says, plucking out the pale-green folder. “It’s just as I thought. Nurse Landry has taken our babies to the tower.” She shows me the drawing that she herself made earlier today, the one that Dr. Hancock demonstrated as proof of my corrupting influence. This is how madness works, I think, it’s a self-perpetuating loop. One delusion proof of another, the crazy voices confirming the crazy theories—