I squeeze Edith’s hand, thinking of how she loved her roommate so much she’d taken on her own shame of giving birth. I’m still holding her hand when we arrive back at Crantham.
When the back door of the van opens, Dr. Hancock is already out, waiting for us. I can feel Edith tense. Connor grabs her by the arm and hauls her off the van. “Hey!” I cry, but the orderly who rode with us restrains me.
“Search them for anything dangerous they might have picked up,” Dr. Hancock barks.
The orderly runs his hands over my body as impartially as if I were a piece of meat he was tenderizing. “This one’s clean,” he calls.
Connor is treating Edith to a rougher pat-down. When he touches her leg she screams and bolts, running so blindly she careens into me and nearly knocks me off my feet. Connor tackles her and brings her to the floor. The other orderly grabs me and drags me into the building, into the elevator. I don’t fight or struggle; I don’t want to end up in the Green Room again.
He takes me to my room and pushes me inside. “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll behave,” he says as he closes the door. I hear the lock click into place.
When I’m sure he is gone I unclench my fist to examine what Edith pressed into my hand: three keys wrapped in red yarn.
I HIDE THE keys under my mattress. When they bring me my dinner and meds on a tray I placidly tip the Dixie cup full of pills into my mouth. As soon as the nurse leaves I spit the pills out into my hand and tuck them with the others I’ve been stockpiling. So that I could kill myself if it grew too painful to live without Chloe. Being separated from her is like having a part of my body gouged out. But now I realize that turning off the pain is not an option. Not when Chloe needs me.
I rinse my mouth out with water, and spit. Then I sit at the edge of the bed watching the sky grow dark and waiting for lights to come on in the house on the hill. I keep thinking about what Edith said about Peter reminding her of Solomon. I can’t think of anything Peter has in common with Solomon, but then apparently I don’t know Peter very well. I think back to things he told me about his childhood: his parents were strict but they had taught him self-reliance; when I wanted to keep Chloe in bed with us he said his mother always said that would spoil a child. But what mother had he been talking about? He’d been in an orphanage for two years. All the parenting books I read said that babies learned how to love by their attachment to their mothers. What happened to a baby who didn’t have that?
They treated me differently, like there must have been something wrong with me for my mother to abandon me.
Or, it occurs to me now, maybe they treated him like a monster because they thought that’s what someone becomes when they’ve lived in an orphanage for as long as Peter did.
I feel chilled by the thought, and guilty for having it. If Peter had told me about being in an orphanage for two years might I have hesitated to marry him? What if I’d known his father was in a mental hospital and had killed himself? Might I have feared he was a monster?
But no, he loved Chloe. I could see that from the moment she was born. He doted on her. Every burp, every smile was a sign of her intelligence and similarity to him. He loved it when people told him she looked like him. It must have been like looking into a mirror—
Something about that idea bothers me. I get up and move to the window. There are lights on at the house now. Perhaps Sky and Peter are sitting in the ornate parlor watching Chloe crawl on the rug, play with her toys. It gives me a pang to think of them in the warm circle of lamplight while I sit here in the dark. How often had Peter felt that, I wonder, growing up in foster homes? He must have always felt like he was on the outside looking in. No wonder he had reacted so badly when he thought I was going to take Chloe away from him. I remember how he had looked at her—
Not so much as if he loved her, but as if he wanted to consume her.
Some kinds of love are as dangerous as hate.
What would Peter do if he thought he was going to lose Chloe? It would be like losing himself. Like looking into the mirror and seeing nothing.
I think of the pain I feel being separated from Chloe, the stash of pills hidden under the mattress. I think of that woman who jumped from a window with her baby strapped to her chest because she thought he would be better off dead than living damaged without her. I think of the moment when I thought that it might be better to take Chloe with me if I killed myself. I rub my arms and blink away a tear. My vision blurs, turning the lights in Sky’s house blurry. They swell and flicker. I rub my eyes, but the light has only grown, reaching up to the sky like—
Flames! The house is on fire. With Chloe inside.
I grab the keys from under the mattress, find the one to unlock the door, and run down the hall to the stairs. Once again I hear Edith’s voice telling me that Peter reminded her of Solomon. But it wasn’t Solomon she really meant; it was the false mother, the one who would rather see the baby
