I shudder. In my worst moments I hadn’t imagined anything so diabolical—only now I do imagine it: a helpless infant strapped to an operating table, a white-coated doctor approaching with a scalpel—
Leave it!
I shake myself to get rid of the awful picture but it has lodged there now, a piece of grit that will grow inside my brain.
Billie smiles at my expression. “So you see how she was driven to get out and search the tower. She hit the guard over the head—poor old Herb Marcus, he was never the same afterward—and made her way up the back path to the house . . .”
I see it as Billie tells the story: the madwoman from my imaginings last night, unkempt, hair loose and matted, wild eyes, bare feet—surely they gave them shoes in the asylum, a reproving voice points out—creeping up the hill toward the tower, all the while hearing her baby’s cries. I see her finding her way in through the downstairs apartment where Chloe and I are living and climbing the spiral stairs, turning around and around in a tight coil as convoluted as her own mad delusions, hearing her baby’s cries all around her in the wind and the creak of the spiral stairs. And when she got to the top of the tower and didn’t find her baby—
“What did she do?” I cry so sharply that Chloe stops mouthing her carrots and lets some dribble out of her mouth. “When she didn’t find her baby?”
Billie grimaces. “Ah well, she found a doll the doctor kept for some kind of demonstrations he did, a model, like, the kind that came apart.”
“Oh no!”
“Yes.” Billie nods. “The poor woman thought they’d taken apart her own babe. She gathered it up and jumped from the top of the tower.”
I stare at Billie, horrified, while she cleans Chloe’s face off with a washcloth as placidly as if we’d been talking about the weather. “That was the end of the doctor seeing patients in the tower. And the end, really, of the doctor. He never was the same. And the poor woman—”
“Didn’t she die?” I ask, somehow more appalled at the thought of surviving such an episode than of her dying.
“No, she broke her leg in the fall and was crippled but she survived. In fact . . .” Billie looked up at me, a strange light in her eyes. Something almost . . . triumphant. “She was much better after that, as if the shock of falling shook some sense into her.”
“Oh,” I say. It’s not the ending I was expecting. “And her baby?”
“What baby?” Billie asks. “The poor soul gave her baby up at birth. The baby in the tower was all in her head.”
EVEN THOUGH IT’S time for lunch, I don’t have much of an appetite after Billie’s story. I change Chloe myself and rock her until she’s ready to go down for her nap. Billie has set up a cot in the kitchen where she can watch her while she cooks dinner so I can go back to work. “Unless you need a rest yourself,” she says.
“No,” I say, thinking I’m unlikely to ever rest again with that awful story revolving in my brain. “I want to make some notes on the journals I indexed this morning.” On my way out of the kitchen, I shoulder the diaper bag. “I’ll just go refill the diapers.”
“No need. I’ve got some here for when my granddaughter’s visiting. I just took the bag to check they were the same size and to see if you had another baby blanket. The one in the car was sopping wet.”
“Oh,” I say embarrassed that I’d left the wet blanket in the car. “I’m sorry you had to bother.”
“No bother. It’s hanging up in your bathroom.”
“Thank you,” I say. “I’ll go into town to pick up some more diapers.”
But once again Billie waves me off, telling me she’s already put it on the house shopping list. I leave, feeling a little useless. Back in my apartment I go into the bathroom and find the blanket hanging over the towel rack. Billie must have bleached it, because all Chloe’s blankets were pink and this one is white. Then I look closer and see that where her name is embroidered there’s an umlaut over the e. This is one of Laurel’s blankets. She must have left it at my house . . . or we got them mixed up during one of our playdates. Just like I accidentally took her diaper bag, which I open now.
I dig out the packet that contains my own ID and the envelope I’d taken from Peter’s desk. They’re just where I left them, hidden in the folds of the bottom diaper, only hadn’t the IDs been on top of the envelope? I stare at my driver’s license. The four-year-old picture doesn’t look much like me now, and it feels like a relic of another life. Daphne Marist’s life. Daphne Marist was weak. When her husband threatened to take her child away from her she ran away instead of defending herself. Laurel wouldn’t have run away; she would have stayed and fought. Far better to be Laurel Hobbes than Daphne Marist from now on.
I pick up the envelope I’d found in Peter’s desk. It’s thick, ivory-colored, the kind of envelope that would have held a wedding invitation, discolored where tape had held it to the underside of his desk drawer. I found it because when I opened the drawer to find a stapler the drawer had stuck. Which had seemed odd because Peter never tolerated anything broken. If a faucet leaked he tightened it. If a lock stuck he oiled it. If
