“It’s important you look and feel your best,” Peter said.
Which made me realize I’ve really let myself go. I still haven’t lost all the weight I gained while I was pregnant. Peter hasn’t said anything about it, except once when he said he was just a little disappointed because I’d been so fit when we met. When I told Laurel that, she said that was a really passive-aggressive thing for him to say and what did he expect? Pregnancy is like having an alien take up residence in your body. But then I told her it wasn’t really Peter’s fault because I had never told him how hard I used to work to stay thin, running three miles a day, counting calories, measuring portions. I had to give up running when I started spotting in my second trimester and my OB/GYN said I had to eat more. I still feel guilty that my running and being underweight might have caused Chloe to be premature. But once I stopped counting and measuring everything I kind of went a little overboard. And then after Chloe was born I just felt so overwhelmed and the medication the doctor gave me makes me feel so bloated and groggy.
“What you need is to feel in control again,” Laurel told me.
So we’ve been going to Laurel’s health club every morning. It’s so relaxing! We take a yoga class and then run on the treadmills and get massages from this dreamy guy named Bjorn and then have lunch in the café. I always order exactly what Laurel is having because I figure, hey, it’s working for her! At first I was a little shocked at how little she ate—kale salad with sunflower seeds and plain hot water with lemon juice—but then she told me that the antidepressants she’s on actually suppress her appetite. She gave me a bottle so I could ask my doctor about prescribing them and left a few in it so I could try them. Now I don’t feel hungry at all! I’ve lost 5.2 pounds and I have so much more energy! I don’t even mind when Chloe wakes me up at night, it’s like I really don’t need that much sleep anymore.
We usually go straight back to Laurel’s house after the gym to play with “the two Chloes” as Laurel calls them, but today Laurel took me to her hair salon. She said I needed a new haircut to go with my new figure. She spent a lot of time talking to the stylist and colorist about what would look good on me. I’d always just gotten a blunt cut because I don’t like the feeling of hair hanging around my face, but Laurel said a little layering would give me a lift and I would get used to it. “Just you wait,” she said, “a good haircut is better than an antidepressant.”
And she was right! The minute I saw myself I felt like a new person.
She was right about something else too. We really do look alike. Especially with my new haircut. We could be twins!
Chapter Five
I search Billie’s bland and guileless face for any sign of deception and find none. Then I look at Chloe. She has the kind of fair skin that blotches when she cries, but her plump cheeks are as smooth and unblemished as a porcelain doll’s face.
“I thought I heard . . .” I begin.
“Were you in the tower?” Billie asks, filling a spoon with bright-orange strained carrots. I’m so distraught that I don’t even mention that I haven’t started giving Chloe solid food yet.
“Y-yes,” I answer. Where else would I be? Wasn’t that where I was supposed to be?
Billie nods and holds the spoon to Chloe’s lips. Chloe purses her mouth like a baby bird. “There are strange sounds in the tower. When the wind blows it plays those spiral stairs like a xylophone.”
“I heard a baby crying, not a xylophone.”
Billie smiles at Chloe and makes a chirping sound that makes Chloe chortle. “It can sound like a baby. Dr. Bennett saw a patient there once—a poor distracted soul—who said she could hear her lost baby crying. She was sure they were keeping her baby in the tower. One night she escaped—”
“Escaped? How?” I demand, alarmed that my vision of an escaped lunatic might be a real possibility.
“Don’t worry,” Billie says, hearing the panic in my voice, “this was back in the seventies; they’ve improved security since then. And this woman was crafty. She waited for the guard at the back gate to turn around and she clobbered him over the head.”
“She was able to overpower him?”
“Madwomen have surprising strength,” Billie answers placidly, all the while smiling at Chloe and making encouraging faces to keep her eating. “Especially a woman who thinks her baby’s life is at stake. See, she’d developed the delusion that Dr. Bennett was experimenting on her baby—ridiculous, of course; Dr. Bennett was a saint!—but you can see where the idea came from. Imagine if you were surrounded by men in white coats always probing, asking questions, dispensing drugs and electric shock—”
“Electric shock? They gave that to women who—”
“Had the baby blues?” Billie says, her face still arranged in the cheerful expression she’d assumed for Chloe’s benefit. It makes her seem as if she thinks electric shock was a treat. “When I worked at the hospital . . .”
“Wait. You worked at the hospital?”
“Why, yes,” she says, looking surprised I didn’t know. “Didn’t Sky tell you? I was a volunteer there before I went to nursing school. Dr. Bennett noticed me and helped me pay for nursing school and
