Goodnight Nobody (3 page)

Three

The next afternoon, after I'd schlepped the kids to Little People's Music, fed them grilled cheese and pickles for lunch, and read to them from
Where Did Grandpa Go?
, a treacly watercolor book written by two psychologists to "aid young readers as they process loss and grief," I piled them into the van, along with the requisite two tons of extra clothing, Wet Ones, Dora the Explorer stickers, and juice boxes, and went to the Upchurch Community Park.

I'd lived in Upchurch for almost eight months and, by my own clear-eyed estimation, hadn't done one single thing right. I'd worn my customary cargo pants to the Red Wheel Barrow Preschool open house, when all the other mothers were in skirts and boots with heels. I'd yelled,
"Son of a bitch!"
when Sophie slammed my thumb in the car door, even though Rainey Wilkes, whose son was in my kids' nursery school class, merely uttered, "Fudge!" after her husband, Roger, backed over her foot in the parking lot.

But none of this compared to the disaster that was my twins' third birthday party.

Back in New York, where Ben and the kids and I had lived in a two-bedroom apartment with a sliver of a view of Central Park, it would have been a perfectly appropriate fete. I'd invited all of the kids in the boys' nursery school class to join us on Liberty Lane, plus half a dozen friends from New York, including Zeke, who had two mommies, and Jonah, who had two daddies, and May, whose single mother had adopted her in China the year before. I'd bought a pinata, baked a cake (from a mix, but I'd thrown in chocolate chips and a packet of pudding), and served it with punch and soda, cut-up vegetables, and a bowl full of Cheez Doodles. Ben and I had shoved our couches against the walls to make more space in the living room. For entertainment there was fingerpainting, pin the tail on the donkey, and, for the adults, Janie in a short black dress, mixing mojitos and discoursing voluminously and obscenely on her latest beau's lack of bedroom skills.

Everybody seemed to have a good time, although I did notice that the other Upchurch mothers were keeping their kids away from the Cheez Doodles as if they were severed fingers and asking lots of questions about whether there were artificial dyes in the punch. I also saw a few of the kids staring at our back yard and asking where the pony rides were, or when the men were coming to set up the bouncy castle. I'd figured they were kidding. They weren't.

I found that out two weeks later, when we attended a party for one of their nursery school classmates. It was held at the Upchurch Inn, and it featured a catered spread with a smoked fish buffet, a sushi chef, and a life-sized ice sculpture of the birthday boy. No plastic forks or pin the tail on the donkey, no nontraditional families, no partially hydrogenated snack foods or artificial anything, and no talk of inept cunnilingus over punch. The entertainment was also a cut above what we'd offered. The father, a sports agent, had set up a half-sized basketball court in the parking lot and had somehow prevailed upon the entire starting lineup of the Knicks to make the trip to the suburbs and play H-O-R-S-E with the party guests. And lose.

Ben didn't say a word, but I knew how upset he was from the way his lips were pressed together, and how he jabbed at the radio buttons extra hard as we drove home.

"I didn't know!" I protested, as the kids, wiped out from the excitement of the four-tiered birthday cake, the personalized goody bags, and the thrill of meeting the seven-foot-tall center, snoozed in their car seats. "Honest to God, if I'd had any idea, I would have hired a clown!"

Ben sighed noisily.

"Or a circus!"

"You're with those women all day long. You didn't know?"

I shrugged. "I'm sorry," I told him.

"Next time, ask someone" was all he said.

I promised that I would, even though I didn't think it would help. The die had been cast. If our disastrous birthday party hadn't sealed the deal, Sophie's a cappella rendition of "Don't Mess with My Toot-Toot" at the Red Wheel Barrow's "Every Child Is Talented" show would have done it. Not only had the teacher sent a note home about the need for "more appropriate lyrics" for future performances, they'd had a schoolwide conference about it, complete with a child psychologist from Greenwich on hand to answer any questions the kids might have had about what constituted a toot-toot and who was allowed to touch theirs.

"Don't mess with my toot-toot," I sang, piloting the minivan into a parking spot. "Don't mess with my toot-toot. I know you have another woman. So don't mess with my toot-toot."

I did feel a twinge as I climbed out of the driver's seat in the town park's parking lot, wondering what kind of morally deficient opportunist would leverage a neighbor's murder to improve her social standing. I wasn't even sure it would help. I wasn't at the bottom of the Upchurch mother totem pole; I wasn't even on the pole. I could barely see the pole. If one woman announced that she was using recycled-paper diapers, the mother next to her was using cloth, and the woman next to her was using cloth diapers she'd personally sewn. If one mother was allowing her child to eat only organic food, then Mommy Number Two was feeding her kid organic vegetarian cuisine, and the mommy after her was an organic cruelty-free vegan who gave her children only cucumbers and carrots grown in her backyard, nourished with mulch she'd composted herself.

Not that the Tal-bots, as I sometimes called them, were empty-headed, muffin-baking Martha Stewart clones. Marybeth Coe, prior to Powell and his big sister Peyton, had been a bond trader. Carol Gwinnell had managed an art gallery in SoHo. Heather Leavitt had been in the arbitrage department at Goldman Sachs before retreating into the wonderful world of cloth diapers, handcrafted wooden toys, pesticide-free snacks, and scheduling every second of her children's lives for maximum enrichment. Preschoolers in Upchurch took tumbling classes and ice-skating lessons. They went to craft circles and learned tennis. They studied at least one instrument and two languages apiece. The girls went to dance class, the little boys played T-ball, and all children of both genders played soccer (with practice twice a week and games every Saturday) through the fall and the spring.

The parents behaved as if this were perfectly natural, as if, in fact, this were the only way they could imagine raising their young. I couldn't figure out why. Maybe after they'd delivered their babies, a malevolent lactation consultant had sprinkled Super-Mommy dust onto their pillows, or had bent and whispered into each sleeping ear,
From now on, the only thing you will care about is breast-feeding, toilet training, Mommy and Me Pilates mat classes, and whether the kindergarten's better at Greentown Friends or Upchurch Country Day.

I didn't stand a chance. Even if I'd only had one child on which to lavish my energies and intellect, even if I were thin and pretty and motivated enough to do my makeup plus an hour of exercise every morning, and my idea of a really good time were arranging eensy-weensy cubes of cut-up tofu in the shape of the Cyrillic alphabet at mealtime. Even if I had the kind of kids who lent themselves naturally to such an endeavor.

The other Upchurch toddlers had never seen so much as a minute of television. They didn't have tantrums that made us late for school, or scream for Kentucky Fried Chicken, inevitably mispronounced as Kenfucky Fried Chicken, or occasion parent-teacher conferences because of their talent-show choices. Oh, well. I smoothed my pants and opened my door just as Lexi Hagen-Holdt pulled in beside me in her SUV, a brand-new model so high off the ground, and with so many oversized windows, that it looked like a mobile greenhouse. I looked at myself in the rearview mirror--chapped lips, shiny skin, unruly wavy brown hair, and too much excitement on my face. I tried to replace it with more appropriate sorrow before I opened the door.

"Oh my God!" Lexi said in her hoarse voice, extracting Hadley from his car seat without a single scream or struggle with a recalcitrant bucker. "Did you hear?" She settled the toddler on one slim hip, tossed her streaked, straightened hair over her shoulder, and pulled her pristine diaper bag from the snack-cracker-free carpet beneath the car seat. "I watched the news for hours last night, and I still can't believe it!"

Lexi walked briskly into the park, and I followed her as my kids scattered, the boys in the direction of the metal-and-plastic climbing structure and Sophie for the swings. I sat down on the bench that in my post-baby suburban life had replaced the popular girls' table in the cafeteria, a bench where I'd never dared sit before, and I waited until I was sure all the mothers could hear me before I ducked my head modestly and said, with just the right tremor in my voice, "I found her."

"Oh, no," murmured Carol Gwinnell. I saw Sukie Sutherland and Marybeth Coe hurry over to the bench. Marybeth's eyes were red, and Sukie's hair was swept into a hasty ponytail.

"Tell us everything," Lexi said, patting my shoulder sympathetically and almost certainly leaving bruises. Lexi wore what I'd come to think of as the Upchurch mommy uniform: a snug (but not slutty) long-sleeved T-shirt topped with a cardigan or a suede jacket; pressed, boot-cut wool trousers; shoes that were styled like sneakers but were made of suede and nylon mesh and cost about three hundred bucks.

I took a deep breath. "Kitty called me Wednesday night to ask if I could bring the kids for lunch."

"You two were friends?" asked Carol Gwinnell, her earrings jingling.

I shook my head, wondering why she'd asked. These women saw me in the park or the library or the school parking lot every day. They had to know that Kitty hadn't been my friend any more than they were.

"So why was she calling you?" asked Sukie Sutherland.

"I don't know," I said, digging the toes of my grimy sneakers into a pile of crimson leaves. "I have no idea."

There were more questions. The ladies wanted details. She was in the kitchen? On her front or her back? Was the door unlocked? Had anything been stolen? How did she look? Had the police said anything? Were there any leads? Was this a random crime, or someone with a grudge? What were the police doing? Was the family offering a reward? And what about Kitty's daughters?

"They're at my house," said Sukie. Sukie and I had been struggling for cordiality ever since the day we'd met, when she'd told me her kids were named Tristan and Isolde, and I'd laughed, thinking she was kidding, and she wasn't. "Philip didn't think they should spend the night in the house where...you know." She tugged at her ponytail. "Where it happened. He's taking them to his parents' house tomorrow."

"Do you know the Cavanaughs well?" I asked.

Sukie shrugged. "We're neighbors, and the girls are in Tristan's class at Country Day."

"Do you have any idea who could have..." I lowered my voice as I saw that all of our kids were within earshot. "You know."

Sukie shook her head. Her big brown eyes were shiny. "The police talked to me, but I don't think I was much help. I bet," she murmured, flicking an invisible bit of lint from her long-sleeved pink T-shirt, "that it might have something to do with her job."

"Wait..." said Carol.

"What?" asked Lexi.

"Kitty had a job?" I asked. This was a shocker. As far as I knew, none of the Upchurch mommies had jobs.

"What was it?" asked Lexi, easing her shoulders in circles, probably already planning her afternoon workout. "What'd she do?"

"She was a writer," Sukie said. "A ghostwriter."

"For who?" I asked.

"Do you guys ever read
Content
?" Sukie asked. Everyone nodded. So did I, even though the truth was that I didn't really read
Content.
My husband and I subscribed, as did practically every person I knew of a certain age, class, and degree of education. Every week I'd mean to read it, but the issues full of cutting-edge postmodern fiction written by twenty-three-year-olds, cartoons that required careful deliberation before you'd get the joke--provided there was one--and political exposes about countries I couldn't find on the map would end up stacked underneath the coffee table gathering dust until, in a fit of guilt, I'd toss them into the recycling bin. "You know that column 'The Good Mother'?"

"Laura Lynn Baird's column?" I asked.

"Laura Lynn Baird's byline," said Sukie. "Kitty was the one who actually wrote it." She smoothed her ponytail and looked at us. "It was all over the Internet this morning."

Like I had time to get online. Like I could even remember where in the house my laptop was located.

"I can't believe it," Marybeth Coe exclaimed. I couldn't either. Laura Lynn Baird was a conservative bomb-chucker, a telegenic blonde with a pageant queen's smile, a sailor's vocabulary, and politics that made Pat Buchanan look like a moderate. It had been big news when the normally left-leaning
Content
had hired her. "We're looking for writers to shake things up," the editor in chief, one Joel Asch, had told one of the morning news shows that Ben taped religiously and made me suffer through before we went to sleep. "Laura Lynn Baird is possessed of that rare combination: a fine mind and a witty, engaging voice," he'd said. He'd sounded, I'd thought at the time, mildly surprised to discover those two qualities coexisting in a woman.

"The Good Mother" appeared every month, but I'd only read it once or twice because it made me so angry I could feel my blood pressure rising with each word. The good mother, according to Laura Lynn, was one who gratefully retreated to "the sanctuary of hearth and home" after the birth of her children and wouldn't venture forth again until her offspring had attained the age of majority. Laura Lynn was opposed to mothers who "warehoused their children in day care," critical of "affluent, educated women, so-called feminists, bored with the routines of domestic life, hiring dark-skinned immigrants to care for their babies, mouthing platitudes about sisterhood while paying them under the table." As far as I knew, she hadn't yet expressed her opinion of mothers who hired the occasional sitter for a Saturday night, but I could bet that she wasn't a fan.

"Kitty wrote that stuff?" I asked.