So I took out the drawer to find out why it stuck.
I slide out the two items now to look at them again. One is a photograph of a little boy, maybe three or four years old. His hair is cut badly and he’s not smiling. It looks like a school picture, only more institutional. The boy is glaring at the camera, square chin clenched, head tilted slightly to the side so that he’s eyeing the photographer sideways. That would have sealed the likeness if I needed anything else to convince me that the picture is of Peter, but I hadn’t needed anything else. The square jaw, the mole just below his left eye, the expression of distrust. Yes, this was my husband as a boy. Although I’d never seen a childhood picture of him I knew him immediately.
When I turned it over I’d found the words Thomas Pitt, age 3 written in precise handwriting. Why had my husband, Peter Marist, been called Thomas Pitt?
The photograph is as much a mystery as the other document: the last will and testament of Laurel Hobbes, naming Stan as trustee of all Laurel’s money left in trust to Chloë. I have no idea why Peter has a copy of Laurel’s will, but I know from the fact that he has hidden it that he wouldn’t want anyone to know he has it. Nor, I am guessing, would he want anyone to know about Thomas Pitt. The note I left for Peter said: “I have the picture and the will. I’ll show them to the police if you come after me.” They’re my insurance policy.
But I need a better hiding place.
I look around the apartment. I could duplicate Peter’s method and tape the envelope to the underside of a drawer, but I don’t trust meticulous and efficient Billie not to poke around my stuff. So I tuck it in my back pocket and head up the spiral stairs. Surely there’s someplace in the study, with its boxes of papers and files, where I can secure one slim envelope.
As I climb the stairs I think of Billie’s story about the deranged mother come to rescue her baby. What kind of a story was that to tell a new mother? But then I remember that the nurses in the NICU could be a bit sadistic. When Chloe was five days old, an IV clamped to her skull, blue veins pulsing in the blue bilirubin lights, a masked and gowned nurse force fed her because, she told me, she was too frail to expend the energy it would take to breastfeed.
And yet she was not too frail to scream and fight the tube going down her throat. Her face was red, her tiny fists clenched. Surely she was expending more energy like this than if she were in my arms and at my breast. I suspected the nurse was doing it to punish me because the last time I’d fed Chloe she’d taken too long to finish her allotted formula. It was my fault. My fault my baby was crying. My fault she was in pain. My fault her life was at risk.
I’m standing in the study now, tears pricking my eyes, but I’m not myself anymore. I’m the lunatic mother searching for her lost baby. Where would she look? There’s no place here to hide a baby.
I climb to the next floor, to the top of the tower. In the daylight the room is ringed by blue sky and floating clouds. It’s like being in a hot-air balloon, floating untethered to the ground. I wonder if that’s what that mother felt when she stood here, clutching a broken doll she thought was her child. Did she think the only way she could be free was to leap into that endless blue?
Peter told me a news story once about a woman who jumped out of a high window, her baby strapped to her chest. She had developed the obsession that she’d harmed her baby, that he was hopelessly impaired, and that it was all her fault. She couldn’t live with the guilt—or leave her child to lead a damaged life. So she decided to take both their lives. When she landed, though, her body absorbed the blow. She died; her baby survived and went on to live a normal life. The idea that her baby was damaged had been a delusion. Peter wanted me to see what could come of always fretting about Chloe, but after I heard that story I’d become terrified of standing near windows, afraid that I’d take it into my head that Chloe was damaged and I’d leap to my death.
When I shared the story with my group, Esta took me aside. “It may be better if you don’t tell stories like that,” she said. “Some women who may be suffering from postpartum OCD are very . . . suggestible. They may hear a story about another mother with delusions and begin to think that they are suffering from those very same delusions.”
“You mean,” I’d said, “that delusions may be contagious?”
“Well,” Esta had said, looking flustered, “I wouldn’t have put it like that, but basically, yes. I would recommend that you stay away from reading accounts of other mothers with postpartum psychosis and perhaps . . .” She had hesitated, looking uncharacteristically unsure of herself. “Perhaps this group’s not the right place for you.”
“You’re kicking me out of the group?” I exclaimed. “But it’s the only thing holding me together!”
She’d looked a little alarmed and then her face had softened. “I guess I could just try to monitor what you’re exposed to. I’ll bring it up in next week’s group—without naming any names—that we should all refrain from
