Page 39 of The Other Mother
Something primal and desperate rises in my chest. Before I can think about what I'm doing, I'm moving toward the nursery. My feet carry me down the hallway faster than my brain can process, muscle memory taking over where rational thought has failed.
I reach Eva's room and lock the door behind me, my hands shaking as I turn the deadbolt Adam installed when we first moved here. "For safety," he'd said then, though I'd never understood what we needed protection from in our quiet suburban neighborhood.
Eva is awake now, her dark eyes wide and alert in the dim light from her nightlight. I lift her from the crib, pulling her against my chest where she fits perfectly, like she was made to be there. Her weight is solid and real, the first thing that's felt certain in weeks.
Behind me, Adam bangs on the door once. It’s hard enough to rattle the frame.
"Don't do this, Claire."
I rock Eva gently, whispering nonsense words against her soft hair. My breathing is coming too fast, too shallow, but she doesn't seem frightened. If anything, she seems calmer in my arms than she's been all evening.
"They can't take you," I whisper, and my own voicesounds unfamiliar, higher and more desperate than I recognize. "No one can."
Through the door, I hear Adam's footsteps pacing in the hallway. He tries the handle once, then again, but doesn't bang or shout again. Maybe he's afraid of escalating the situation, or maybe he's already planning his next move.
I drag the rocking chair across the room and wedge it under the door handle, creating a barrier between us and whatever Adam thinks he needs to protect Eva from. Then I sit on the floor with my back against the wall, Eva cradled in my lap, and wait.
The minutes stretch into an hour, then longer. Adam's footsteps eventually fade down the hallway, but I don't trust the silence. He could be calling his mother, or a doctor, or someone else who will agree that I'm unfit to care for my own child.
Eva falls asleep in my arms, her breathing soft and even against my chest. In the quiet of the nursery, surrounded by the pale yellow walls and cheerful decorations that were supposed to welcome her into our family, I try to make sense of how we got here.
Maybe Adam is right. Maybe I am spiraling, seeing connections that don't exist, creating mysteries to explain the ordinary difficulties of new motherhood. Maybe the emails and the pacifier and the hospital records are just coincidences, and I'm the unreliable narrator driving my own family apart.
But holding Eva, feeling her solid warmth against me, I can't shake the certainty that something is deeply wrong.
21
WHERE'S MY BABY?
Idon't sleep. Not really. I drift in and out of consciousness while sitting on the nursery floor, my back against the wall, Eva's weight warm and solid against my chest. The house settles around us with those peculiar desert sounds. The wood creaks as it expands and contracts with the shifts in temperature and the sand whispers against the windows when the wind picks up.
Eva's breathing is steady and rhythmic, her tiny chest rising and falling in perfect time. The sound should be comforting, but instead it triggers something deep in my memory, something that's been lurking just beneath the surface for weeks.
The hospital monitors. That same steady rhythm, beeping in time with a heartbeat that might not have been mine.
When I was still working as an editor, before Eva,before the move to the desert changed everything, I used to have this recurring nightmare about losing a manuscript. I'd dream that I'd been working on something important—the next big literary breakthrough—and then suddenly it would be gone. Vanished from my computer, erased from my memory, like it had never existed at all. I'd wake up in a panic, searching through files and folders, convinced I'd lost something precious.
Now I realize those dreams weren't about manuscripts at all. They were about the gaps in my own story, the missing pieces of my life that I've been too afraid to examine closely.
Adam and I met at a bookstore reading in Newport Beach five years ago. He'd been there for a friend's girlfriend, sitting in the back row looking slightly uncomfortable among all the literary types. I was there because I genuinely loved the author—a debut novelist whose work I'd discovered through my job. After the reading, we'd ended up at the same coffee shop, and he'd surprised me by asking thoughtful questions about the book, about my work, about what made a story worth telling.
"I'm not much of a reader," he'd admitted over our second cup of coffee, "but I like watching you talk about it. You get this look on your face, like you're seeing something the rest of us miss."
That was Adam at his best. He was genuinely curious about the world, willing to step outside hiscomfort zone for someone he cared about. He'd supported my writing dreams even when they meant late nights and weekend workshops and the kind of creative frustration that made me difficult to live with. When my mother got sick, he'd driven me to every chemo appointment, sat in waiting rooms reading engineering journals while I held her hand through the worst of it.
"Promise me something," my mother had said during one of our last conversations, when the pain medication made her words slur slightly. "Promise me you'll know your own child when you see her. Some women, they need time to fall in love with their babies. But you'll know. When it's really yours, you'll know instantly."
I'd thought it was the medication talking, one of those strange things people say when they're dying. Now I wonder if she was trying to tell me something important.
The memory surfaces gradually, like something rising from deep water. I'm not sure if I'm remembering or dreaming, but suddenly I'm back in that hospital bed, the taste of metal and antiseptic thick in my mouth.
Dark. Blurred ceiling tiles spinning slowly above me. My eyelids feel heavy, like they're weighted down with sand. My mouth is dry, so dry I can barely swallow. Pain pulses through my abdomen in waves, sharp and relentless.
I'm in a hospital bed. Post-op. The knowledge comes to me gradually, like puzzle pieces clicking into place.
I try to speak but only manage to croak out "My baby ... where's my baby?"
The room is dim, lit only by the green glow of monitors and the hallway light seeping through a gap in the curtain. Shadows move behind the fabric and I hear people talking in low, urgent voices.
