The woman didn’t talk to us anymore, but I noticed her glancing at Catherine a few more times. Catherine wasn’t doing anything unusual. She was just swaying back and forth and looking around. But to this mom, it seemed as if Catherine was a puzzle she couldn’t quite figure out.
After a few minutes, I took Catherine out of the swing, and we walked to the bus stop to make our way back to the three-hundred-square-foot room I’d sublet from another single mom who had a two-bedroom apartment. The trip took thirty minutes each way, but the playgrounds around this part of the city were much nicer than the one by me. The only time we’d ever gone to that one, I’d found a used condom next to the slide and broken glass from bottles of booze in the grass.
I tried not to think too much about that other mom’s reaction to Catherine, but I guess it stayed lodged somewhere in the back of my mind. When we got back home, I washed Catherine in the kitchen sink because we didn’t have a tub. Even when she splashed her hands in the soap bubbles, her expression didn’t change. She didn’t coo or laugh. She seemed as detached as a scientist.
I tried using the high-pitched voice of the mom at the park: “Ooh, bubbles! Splashy-splash!”
Catherine looked at me like I was a fool, and I guess she wasn’t wrong.
I went back to talking like a normal person, and in time Catherine found more words to communicate with me. When she was three, she had a pretty advanced vocabulary, so I guess starting to talk late didn’t hurt her one bit.
I wasn’t alarmed that Catherine didn’t exhibit a wide range of emotions. Truthfully, I’d be even more exhausted if I had to take care of a toddler whose moods ticked like a metronome between angry and joyful and sulky. I liked my quiet daughter exactly as she was.
There was just this one thing.
Shortly after she turned five, we were waiting for the bus to go buy groceries—at times I felt like I spent half my life waiting for or riding buses—and something on the sidewalk behind the glass bus shelter caught her eye. I couldn’t exactly see what Catherine was doing, but it looked like she was poking at the ground with a stick. I was distracted and tired. I was working as a telemarketer from home thirty hours a week because it was one of the few jobs I could do that didn’t require child care, and I also took whatever babysitting gigs I could get from other parents on my block. Most of them couldn’t afford much, and sometimes they couldn’t pay me at all, but they always managed to give me a little something, even if it was just a hot meal or hand-me-down clothing and supplies.
By the time I finished rustling in my wallet for my bus pass and walked around behind the shelter to check on Catherine, she was squatting down, staring at something intently.
It was a dead squirrel.
I instinctively recoiled. The squirrel must’ve been hit by a car and flung through the air before landing in this spot. Its stomach was partially torn open, probably from crows feasting on it. You could see a bit of its pink insides.
Most little kids would’ve been grossed out or burst into tears—the squirrel still had a fuzzy tail and brown fur and was recognizable as a formerly cute animal—but not Catherine.
She used the stick to gently tap on its limp little paw.
“What are you doing?”
She gazed up at me, then resumed exploring the animal carcass with her stick.
“Stop it!” I almost screamed the command.
Catherine didn’t seem to hear me. She leaned even closer to the mutilated creature.
“Normal kids don’t do this!” I grabbed her arm, hard, and yanked her away.
Later, I noticed small purple bruises in the shape of my fingerprints marring her upper arm. It was a replica of the injury my mother had inflicted on my arm the night I got her off Timmy. You know how parents always say, “This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you,” before they spank their child? I swear, it was true. Seeing those marks on her soft little arm gutted me.
But what I couldn’t—and still can’t—get out of my mind was Catherine’s expression when she looked up at me as I interrupted her examination of the dead squirrel. Instead of fear or disgust or sadness—any of the emotions you might expect to see in a little kid who’d just discovered a gory animal carcass—Catherine’s faded denim eyes were serene and gentle.
They were James’s eyes.
That whole long night, I didn’t sleep despite being so exhausted that every inch of me ached.
* * *
Even though I’m not scheduled to work at Sam’s today, I rise before the sun and quietly move to the kitchen to make coffee. I plan to do what I usually do on my days off: catch up on laundry, clean the kitchen and bathroom, and go to the library to do my checking.
Catherine’s door is shut. I’ve barely seen her in the last twenty-four hours. She didn’t come home until late last night, long after I’d gotten into bed.
Her absence feels significant.
I bring a mug of coffee into the living area and sit down on the couch, savoring my first sip. At times like these, when the apartment is quiet and the fresh slate of a new day is before me, it’s easier to pretend everything will work out. The mistakes I’ve made, the choices that may not be the right ones—all will be smoothed out in time. The road ahead will be easier than the bumpy portion I’ve traveled this far, I try to tell myself.
If 3 a.m. is the darkest hour of the soul, then dawn is the flip side. Few things conjure more hope in me than a sunrise.
On the coffee table in front of me is the journal Catherine bought, its title mocking me: Tell Me Your Life Story, Mom.
I pick it up and turn a few pages.
Maybe I can write down a nugget for Catherine and leave the page open for her to see. As a sort of peace offering, even though I’m not sure exactly why I feel the need to extend one.
I just have the feeling she’s upset with me.
Catherine doesn’t have many friends. All that moving around we did when she was young prevented her from forming enduring ties. Plus, school and work always took up so much of her time and energy she didn’t have a lot left over for socializing. It’s a little odd that she picked last night to go see a movie, so soon after Dr. Chen told us our days of spending meaningful time together were coming to an end.
I find a page in the journal that has the prompt Describe when you first knew you were going to be a mom. How did you feel?
This is both an easy and a hard question to answer.
I find a pen and write the truth. I felt everything all at once, Catherine. Terrified and happy and sad and determined and awed by the very thought of you. I felt everything. I still feel it all every single day.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CATHERINE
Sunlight muscles through the cracks in my blinds. I can hear my mother moving around in the kitchen. Every sound has a precise meaning: the gentle bump is the cabinet door above the stove closing; the faint rushing is water flowing from the sink tap; and the gurgle signals the Mr. Coffee machine is doing its job.
I can’t keep avoiding her.
The terrible suspicion I felt yesterday hasn’t abated, but I’m not ready to share it with anyone yet.
I can barely acknowledge it myself.
I’ve heard of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, in which a parent—typically the mother—sickens their child with poisons or unnecessary medication. That manifestation of severe mental illness, which is a form of child abuse, gets a fair amount of media attention.