Chapter 1 Molly #3
She looks up at me. “I think the reality of being a mother was hard, though. She wasn’t sleeping—-neither of you were.
She didn’t have a lot of help, because your father was traveling for work.
It was like there was a film covering her, like she was somewhere else even when she was sitting next to me.
Sometimes she couldn’t remember how to turn on the stove in her own apartment, or which key opened her front door.
But every time I started thinking something was wrong, she would act completely normal.
I guess I doubted myself, instead of doubting her. ”
“So . . . she had postpartum depression?” I know what it is. There’s plenty of literature all over Dr. Mantillard’s office about it—-how to recognize the signs, when to ask for help. “Did she go to a doctor?”
“She saw a doctor, and she took medication—-but it made things worse. She called me one day and told me she was afraid she was going to hurt you. Begged me to come over, so I did.” Evie draws in a breath.
“She told me she was possessed by the Devil, and that the only way to keep you from being possessed was to kill you.”
A shudder trails down my spine. Not postpartum depression, then. Postpartum psychosis. Vaguely I recall a story about a woman in Massachusetts who strangled her three children before jumping off the roof of her own house.
“Your father was in California for work when I called him,” Evie says.
“He begged Eloise to go to the hospital, but she refused, because the last time they’d given her medication it had sent her off the rails.
Finally, he got her an appointment with a psychiatrist she’d seen before.
He was going to fly in on a red--eye and meet her there the next morning. ”
“The doctor’s office,” Jesse says, “in the World Trade Center.”
“Yes.” Evie nods. “The night before, I stayed in the living room with your bassinet next to me. But I must have dozed off, and when I woke up, you were gone. I heard the water running in the master bath and found Eloise there, holding you facedown in the tub.” A sob chokes out of her throat.
“I grabbed you. You started to cry, and that’s when she snapped out of it.
I don’t even think she knew what she was doing. ”
I listen to this the way I would ingest any real--life horror story—-with pity, with revulsion, with the secret relief that it happened to someone else. Except, in this case, it happened to me.
Evie is weeping, her face red and blotchy. “I was supposed to go to the appointment, too. With you. But you had a fever, and so I sent her in a cab instead. If I hadn’t . . . if I had gone—-”
Then she might not be alive to tell me this, and I might not be alive to hear it.
“It was my fault,” Evie sobs. “I was the one who called Adam and told him she needed help. I paid the cabdriver to take her downtown. She was my best friend, and I thought I was the reason she died. I thought I was the reason you’d been left without a mother.”
She buries her face in her hands. When I don’t respond, frozen, Jesse clears his throat. “Evie,” he says, “you saved Molly’s life.”
I try to imagine Georgia—-the woman who fawns over newborns at Dr. Mantillard’s office; the stranger who clutched my hand at the ER—-holding me under the water of a bathtub and waiting for my lungs to fill.
I’d had questions before I arrived today about why my mother ran away on 9/11, but now, they have multiplied.
If she was hearing voices telling her to hurt me, if she was psychotic—-were those voices the ones that told her to disappear?
And what changed? Because Georgia doesn’t appear to be confused or hallucinating or any of the things Evie described.
But.
Why didn’t Evie mention any of this before? Or my father?
If my mother hadn’t returned, would they ever have said anything at all?
“Anything else you haven’t told me?” I ask.
Then I hear the flannel of my father’s voice. “Hey, you,” he says, from where he has been listening at the doorway. “Maybe we should talk.”
Evie makes up an excuse to check on the turkey, and Jesse offers to help, as if peering into an oven is a two--person job.
My father sits in front of the fire, hands clasped between his knees.
“You have to understand about that day—-at first, it was chaos. Evie thought I was at the World Trade Center, too. The phone lines were jammed. I couldn’t get from Newark Airport to Washington Heights—-so many streets were blocked off that I got out of the cab and walked.
It took hours, and when I finally got back to the apartment, Evie was hysterical.
She expected Eloise to be with me.” He rubs the back of his neck.
“We called hospitals for days. We went to the armory and put up posters of her. Every day we heard nothing. And every day it seemed less likely that we would.”
“Evie said she tried to kill me.”
My father ducks his head. “Yeah. I think when she said that, it finally got me to stop pretending Eloise was all right. I knew something was wrong . . . but I didn’t want to see it.
I couldn’t be there all the time to take care of her and still pay the rent.
So I convinced myself this was just hormones, something that would .
. . resolve on its own.” He runs a hand over his face.
“I had nightmares of her in the psychiatrist’s office when it suddenly turned into a giant fireball.
I imagined she thought it was Hell, and that was where she belonged.
” Finally, he meets my gaze. “I loved your mother the minute I laid eyes on her, but she wasn’t in her right mind, Molly,” he says, voice breaking.
“Whatever she did—-she wasn’t in her right mind. ”
I know he is trying to placate me. I know he is just as blindsided by the fact that my mother is alive as I am.
We should be pooling our resources to understand why and how she disappeared—-but instead, I feel like my insides are scraped raw and he’s holding the blade.
“You never thought this was information I deserved to have?” I accuse.
“Evie and I talked about it. You were a baby when we lost Eloise. We knew you wouldn’t have memories of her—-only the bits and pieces we gave you.
We didn’t want one of them to be that your dead mother tried to drown you.
When you thought of Eloise, we wanted it to be positive.
A victim of circumstance. Not a villain. ”
Frustration boils. “How I thought of her was my decision to make, Dad. Not yours.”
“I was protecting you—-”
“You were protecting yourself. She was going to be a stranger to me, either way. You’re the one who didn’t want to remember the monster she turned into.” I add, in disbelief: “Your wife was having conversations in the kitchen with Satan and you just . . . went on a business trip?”
“It wasn’t that simple—-”
“Yes, actually it is. Let me break it down for you. You lied to me.” I get off the couch, staring down at my father.
Blind with tears, I walk into the kitchen to find Evie mixing a pot on the stove while Jesse stands at the counter, grating cheese.
“Jesse,” I say, “take me home.”
Instead of Christmas dinner at my childhood home, we go back to our condo, where I put on my pajamas and crawl into bed. Jesse heats up leftover lasagna, and we eat it while watching It’s a Wonderful Life.
We do not discuss the fact that I fought with my father, or that when we left, Evie had tears in her eyes.
“Did you know,” I say, “this movie was a flop when it was released?”
Jesse has an arm wrapped around me, cradling my belly. “How come you like it so much?”
“How can you not? Clarence . . . Zuzu’s petals . . . Jimmy Stewart getting a second chance . . .” As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I twist to see his face. “Don’t you dare say it.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Jesse replies.
I sigh. “I just feel . . . stupid,” I admit. “Like I’ve been gaslit my whole life.”
“Gaslighting is when you lie to someone for your own personal gain. I don’t think Evie and your dad were being intentionally malicious.”
“Would you do it?” I gesture to my swollen abdomen. “Would you lie to our daughter?”
“Yes,” he says immediately. “If I thought it would keep her from getting hurt.”
I sit up. “I guess you and I have different ideas about child--rearing.”
“Probably something we should have talked about six months ago.”
“Jesse, how can you even joke about this?”
On the television, Jimmy Stewart is running through the streets, racing through the snow to the bridge, begging to get his old life back.
Jesse sits up, too, so that our knees are touching. “What if your dad and Evie had told you? What would have changed?”
I give this serious consideration. If I’d known my mother was suffering from postpartum mental illness and had tried to hurt me, it would have been much harder to canonize her.
“I always thought of her as some kind of sainted martyr. I think everyone who died on 9/11 leveled up to that status, right? I mean, when you hear about someone who was killed that day, it’s that they were a beloved son or a brave firefighter or a devoted mother. ”
“Tragedy gilds victims,” Jesse agrees. “When I think of my sister Anna, it’s all about how she died too young, and how fucking brave she was for a thirteen--year--old.
What I don’t think about is how she used to steal shit from my room, or how she would egg on a fight with impeccable timing, or how her actions literally made my dad move out of the house because he was so pissed off at my mother.
I’m guessing that right now, you see your mom as a little less shiny? ”
I glance up at him. “Yeah. Now she’s real.”
Jesse reaches over and takes my hand. “It’s easy to love someone you’ve put on a pedestal,” he says. “But it’s a lot more impressive to love someone you haven’t.”
He’s not wrong. Yet, after years of wishing I could actually know my mother, I’m the one creating the obstacle to that.