“Ha!” Sky barks the one syllable laugh I’m becoming accustomed to. “What didn’t we argue about? The Vietnam War. Civil rights. Women’s liberation. Mostly the latter. My father expected me to do everything a boy would—shoot, climb mountains, go to medical school—but he was convinced that most women were ‘congenitally unfit for the full responsibilities of the workplace.’”
“I suppose that wasn’t unusual for the time,” I say, finally freeing the trout’s spine from its flesh. “He saw women at their worst in his line of work. In fact . . .” I hesitate, not sure I want to go down this road. But then, how long could I avoid it? “. . . he seems to have specialized in women with mood disorders, especially postpartum mood disorders.” I glance at Chloe, who’s sleeping peacefully in her stroller. She’ll be up all night after such a late nap, but it’s so nice to be able to eat dinner in peace that I don’t have the heart to wake her.
“Does that bother you?” Sky asks. I look toward her and see she has transferred her attention from the faraway mountains to me. The sun has slipped below the ridgeline, turning the papery mountains into a singular black cutout. Sky looks like another cutout, dark against the smoldering sky.
“No,” I say quickly. Too quickly. “Why should it?”
“I just thought, being a new mother yourself. It can’t have been easy these last few months . . . especially being a single mother.”
I have to remind myself that is what I’d told her in the emails we’d exchanged. It hadn’t even felt like a lie. We might as well be single mothers for all the help our husbands give us, Laurel had said. I’d thought that Stan was actually quite helpful, and I’d felt a little guilty eradicating him from Laurel’s curriculum vitae.
My husband and I have separated, I had written, and I’m looking for a place where I can work and live with my six-month-old daughter.
“Oh,” I say now, spearing a morsel of white-boned flesh and imaging what Laurel would say. “Do men ever really help out with babies all that much?”
But Sky doesn’t take the bait. “So you didn’t experience any postpartum depression?”
I think about the days after Chloe was born, while she was in the NICU, in a plastic incubator, attached to tubes and wires like a science experiment. What would “depression” have looked like? I’d felt an aching sadness and guilt. But then I remember that was me—not Laurel.
“No,” I say with a certainty born of Laurel’s confidence. “I think I just felt . . .” What had Laurel said that first meeting? Not the part about feeling homicidal, but later. “. . . like I lost track of who I really was. That my identity had been swallowed up by the idea of Motherhood with a capital M.” Motherfuckinghood, Laurel sometimes called it. “That’s why I felt it was so important to apply for this job. When I saw your ad, I thought, This is perfect.” I pause because I can feel myself tearing up. I don’t have to fake this part; seeing that ad on the library job site had felt like someone had tossed me a lifeline when I was drowning. “I knew that getting back to doing what I was good at would be my way back to myself again.”
I look up. Sky holds my gaze and then gives me a curt nod. On anyone else it would be a dismissal but on her it’s an affirmation. “Well, then, it’s a good thing I placed that ad.”
AFTER DINNER CHLOE wakes up fretful, so I take her for a walk around the garden. The Orbit stroller handles the gravel like a BMW hugging the Autobahn (it really was worth the ridiculous price), and the gravelly sound soothes Chloe. It’s nearly dark but the garden holds the last light like a jar holding fireflies. The glow lingers in the orange flowers shaped like Chinese lanterns, and in the real Chinese lanterns suspended from glossy-leaved trees, and soaks into the marble statues of mournful women with bowed heads. The path curves through a shrubbery, emerges at a marble fountain where a woman perpetually pours water from a vase, and then plunges back into a hedge maze.
The path turns back on itself so often I lose all sense of direction. I stop at a particularly lugubrious statue of a veiled woman, her features smeared by her stone cloak, and look around for the house, but the shrubbery is too high and the sky has faded to the uniform violet of twilight. I have the ridiculous notion that the rest of the world has vanished while I looped around the garden, but then a light appears high above me and the tower springs into view like a lighthouse. I am a sailor lost at sea glimpsing shore. My breath evens and, looking down at Chloe, I see that she is also transfixed by the light in the sky.
“Home,” I say experimentally, and she gurgles back at me as if agreeing.
I follow the path, which soon comes out at the front of the house. Billie is kneeling in the perennial border, deadheading chrysanthemums, a basketful of withered blooms beside her muddied knees.
“Just thought I’d get these before I left for the night,” she says. “How’s our little miss?”
I peer around to the front of the stroller to see that Chloe has fallen asleep again. “She’ll be up all night,” I say.
“Maybe not, the air up here is good for sleeping. I bet she sleeps straight through.”
“Has Sky gone to bed?” I ask.
“Gone to bed, but she’ll be up all night writing. That’s when she gets her best work done.”
“I hadn’t realized she was still writing.” I look up at the tower room and notice that the light has gone out. “Does she work up there?”
Billie, who has gotten to her feet slowly and is brushing dirt from her knees, stares at me. “She hasn’t been
