Page 50 of Good Bad Girl

“Where is the baby?” Clio asks, her hair wild, her eyes already frantic. She’s been a mess since the baby was born. It doesn’t surprise me that her husband runs away for work so often these days, it’s as though she can’t see who she has become. But I can. She’s turned into me, and that is not what I wanted for my daughter. Being home alone all day every day with a baby has taken its toll. She still has dark circles beneath her eyes, even though I’m the one who has been looking after the child for three days and three nights. Her clothes are dirty, she hasn’t worn makeup for weeks, she smells as though she hasn’t had a wash for a while either. She looks like she might be drunk, but she isn’t. This is what real exhaustion looks like.

I choose my words carefully but none of the options feel like a good fit.

“I’m so sorry,” I whisper.

Clio is up and out of the bed and rushing toward me.

“Sorry for what? Where is the baby?”

“I...”

How can I tell her that her baby is gone when she is already broken?

Just say it.

“She’s gone,” I blurt out. “Someone has taken the baby. I’m so sorry.”

Clio stares at me, then pushes me out of the way and starts to search the house. As though the child is a missing key that will turn up if she just looks long and hard enough. I follow my daughter through the darkened rooms. “Please, wait. She’s not here. We were at the supermarket. I turned my back just for a minute.”Maybe two.“And then she was gone.”

Clio stops, turns, and stares at me as though I am speaking a foreign language. Tears are already streaming down her face. I find a tissue tucked in the sleeve of my cardigan and try to wipe her tears away, like I did when she was a child, but she takes a step back.

“The police. We need to call—”

“They already know,” I tell her. “They’re outside. They want to speak to you.”

She nods. Then she rushes to the bathroom, where she is violently sick.

I hold her unwashed hair away from her face until she is finished. Then I flush the toilet and offer her the tissue again. She refuses by shaking her head, and uses the back of her hand to wipe her mouth. Even now, she does not want my help. She’s on her knees, so I offer my hand to pull her up but she ignores it. Ignores me. Just like she has for years.

“Is this real?” Clio asks. And suddenly my thirty-four-year-old daughter is my little girl again, the one who looked up to me, the one who needed me. I nod and she starts to sob. She closes her eyes,curls into a ball on the bathroom floor, and wails like a wounded animal. I am crying too, because I can see that I have broken what was left of her. Time stretches again. She cries like that for so long, too long. The sound of her excruciating pain hurts my soul.

“Yes, this is real. I’m so very sorry,” I say, because I truly am. I try to hold her but she pushes me away. My little girl is gone again, replaced by the woman she grew up to be.

“Send them in,” she says, wiping her eyes.

“The police?”

“Yes, of course. Then get out.”

“Clio, I—”

“Get. Out. I don’t ever want to see you again.”

Edith

Edith lies awake in the spare room at her daughter’s house. She remembers being here for three days and three nights when Ladybug was kidnapped, and then not being invited back for years. She lived here very briefly last year—before Clio stuck her in a home—but she has never really been welcome in the pink house. And she and her daughter have never been good at being in each other’s company for too long.

Clio has promised that they will go to the police station first thing in the morning but Edith doesn’t believe her. She only seems to make promises in order to break them. Dickens interrupts her thoughts by whining; he doesn’t like sleeping on the floor.

“Shh. You’ll get us both in trouble,” Edith whispers. “You can only come up if you promise to keep quiet.” Dickens wags his tail and jumps onto the bed, turning in a circle three times before sitting down on the pillow beside her with a satisfied sigh. “There’s something I have to do, old friend,” she whispers, stroking the dog. “You’re not going to like it, but I have thought long andhard on the subject and it is the right thing to do. Theonlything to do.”

Ten minutes later, when Dickens is lying upside down and dreaming, and the rest of the house is quiet, Edith gets up, gets dressed, and creeps out of the room, gently closing the door behind her. There is another door at the end of the hallway, to a room which was once a nursery. Its door is open, and Edith can’t stop herself peering inside. Moonlight floods the room and she takes in the sight of all the wooden shelves and shoeboxes. She has always found her daughter’s obsession with shoes designed for exercise strange—especially given Clio hasn’t set foot inside a gymnasium since she was at school—too scared of other people’s sweat—but this is bonkers. One of the boxes is open and sitting out of place on the expensive-looking rug. There are no trainers inside this box, just newspaper articles from the looks of it. Some of which are still unfolded on the floor.

Her daughter has spent a lifetime hiding her feelings in boxes.

Edith picks up one of the newspaper clippings her daughter has kept all these years. It has yellowed with age, but she doesn’t need to be reminded of the date at the top of the page. Edith can’t remember what she had for breakfast, but she can remember everything about that Mother’s Day twenty years ago. She sits down on the floor, partly because it feels like she might fall, and begins to read.

Heartbreak for Mother of Missing Baby

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