Mother Knows Best

  MOTHER KNOWS BEST

  A Novel of Suspense

  KIRA PEIKOFF

  ALSO AVAILABLE BY KIRA PEIKOFF

  Die Again Tomorrow

  No Time to Die

  Living Proof

  For Zachary,

  who made me a mother

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I owe a great debt first and foremost to my agent, Erica Silverman at Trident Media Group. Erica leveled with me about an early version of the manuscript and suggested I undertake a thorough rewrite; her advice paved the way for a much-improved book. While Erica is a tough critic, she is also my fiercest advocate. I am extremely grateful to have her in my corner, along with her colleagues Robert Gottlieb, Nicole Robson, Caitlin O’Beirne, Kristin Cipolla, and Lucinda Karter.

  Deepest thanks to Matt Martz and Jenny Chen at Crooked Lane for embracing the book and guiding me through yet another rewrite, and then—you guessed it—another one. Their tenacity carried me through to the finish line when my own stamina was waning, and their wise suggestions made all the difference. Thank you to the entire Crooked Lane team for putting together an amazing package and carrying it out into the world—Sarah Poppe, Melanie Sun, Jennifer Canzone, Ashley Di Dio, my copy editor, and the sales reps whom I will never meet but whose efforts I am no less grateful for. And to my publicist extraordinaire, Meryl Moss.

  Thank you to the expert sources who provided me with inspiration and education in the area of fertility medicine—Dr. Mark Sauer and Dr. Eric J. Forman. And thank you to Robert Klitzman and my other professors in the Bioethics Master’s Degree program at Columbia University for a world-class learning experience.

  Thank you to my friends and family for the encouragement over the difficult years it took to finish this book, while I was also caring for my own new baby—specifically, to my parents, Leonard and Cynthia, for their unwavering belief in my writing ability, and to Rosalie and Alan Beilis for cheering me on and providing countless hours of loving childcare. It really does take a village to raise a kid—and to write a book.

  My husband Matt takes the cake for the world’s most supportive spouse. He tolerated my weekend and night writing schedule for many months and was often game to talk late into the night about my latest plot problem. His perceptive feedback pulled no punches, and the book is immeasurably better for it.

  I could not have written about pregnancy, birth, and a mother’s love for her child without having experienced those things for myself. I happened to start writing this book the week before I found out I was pregnant. I finished it when my son was two years old. The story may be fictitious, but the sentiment behind Claire’s character is not; Zachary, I would do whatever it takes on this Earth to make sure you are healthy and happy—and one day, when you are much older, I will also try to let go. This book is for you.

  Now you are mine

  From your feet to your hair so golden and fine,

  And your crumpled finger-tips … mine completely,

  Wholly and sweetly;

  Mine with kisses deep to smother,

  No one so near to you now as your mother!

  Others may hear your words of beauty,

  But your precious silence is mine alone;

  Here in my arms I have enrolled you,

  Away from the grasping world I fold you,

  Flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone!

  —Lucy Maud Montgomery, The Mother

  PART ONE

  CLAIRE

  An hour into our drive, Abby’s announcement startles us.

  “I have a surprise for you, Mommy.”

  “Oh?” I crane my neck to see her grinning in the back seat. She has the same coy dimple as Colton, the brother she never met. “What kind of surprise?”

  “A big one.” Her cell vibrates then, sucking her attention into its dragnet. For once, I’m thankful; she doesn’t notice my sharp inhale.

  But my husband does. He takes one hand off the wheel to rest it on my thigh. As we speed down the West Side Highway, I stare out the window at the gloomy gray Hudson. I despise nothing more than surprises, but my daughter is a black box of mischief, brimming with secrets and delight.

  While she’s lost in her phone, I peek again at her face. Her eyes are cool blue, like glacier ice; her nose is spattered with freckles; her creamy skin is not yet pimpled by puberty. It’s impossible to tell that my beautiful girl is the first of her kind.

  Even she doesn’t know.

  The only thorn in the comfort of her appearance is her hair. It’s the color of a shiny penny, though no one in the family is a redhead. I’ll never forget the time a stranger joked, Are you sure she’s yours?

  She catches me staring and closes her phone. “How much longer?”

  “Five minutes,” Michael says, turning off at 79th Street and Riverside Drive.

  We exchange puzzled looks. This trip to the Natural History Museum, our annual ritual on her brother’s birthday, means little to her. He passed away a few years before she was born.

  Michael never met Colton either, but he savors my tradition because it’s the one day each year we allow ourselves to act like the regular family we’ve never been. Once a year, I’m willing to take the risk. The odds of disaster are so low.

  The rest of the time we avoid the city. God forbid we wind up caught on camera, then splashed across social media. I view the outdoors the way others view blizzards—as dicey exposure to the elements, requiring us to cover up. Better to hunker down and lie low.

  But someone out there will never give up searching. Someone who’s long out of prison, whose name I can’t bear to utter or think.

  J looms over every school pickup and drop-off, as I stay behind the wheel of my Accord, declining to chat with the other moms. If one recognizes me and the media pick up the scent, the police will come knocking—

  And J won’t be far behind.

  As we cross Broadway toward the museum, J lives in the recesses of my brain like a bloody knife buried deep underground.

  Abby knows nothing about J. One day, we’ll have to sit down with her. Tell her the truth. But not on Colton’s birthday. Today he would have been twenty-one.

  Michael parallel parks on a side street near the museum, and my throat constricts. Visiting my son’s favorite place brings me so much closer to him than visiting his grave.

  As soon as the car stops, Abby jumps out.

  “Wait!” I yell, but she’s already zipping past a row of yellow tulips planted along the sidewalk.

  “Hurry up!” She beckons me impatiently. “It’s almost time!”

  “Time for what?” I ask Michael.

  He shrugs. “No idea.”

  As we step out of the car into the cool spring morning, I tug the brim of my baseball cap down low over my eyes. It’s a Yankees hat I ordered online to blend in with the city people, even though I couldn’t name a single player on the team.

  The city’s energy is a jolt after our rural town upstate. Pedestrians, joggers, and dog-walkers vie for sidewalk space between rows of half-bare trees. Across the street, a group of protesters is huddled in front of a grocery store holding signs that read SAY NO TO GMOS and QUIT TRYING TO GET IN MY GENES. A few yards ahead of us, Abby pauses to ogle them—not much activism happens in our sleepy town—and Michael quickly shuttles me past.

  “It’s okay,” he mutters. “No one’s looking.”

  My nervous side glances have become a tic. But he’s right. Nobody sees us, nobody cares. Do people still remember scandals over a decade old? To be safe, we walk faster and stare forward like normal people who aren’t living in fear.

  Today is about Colton, I remind myself.

  I wonder whether Abby’s surprise involves a tribute to him. After all these years of her whining
about the long drive to the city and the “boring” museum, maybe she’s decided to finally participate in honoring his memory. But I have no idea what her gesture might be, or why it would involve a schedule.

  What was she typing into her phone?

  When I catch up to ask her, she smiles. “You’ll see.”

  Then she skips ahead. The museum looms large, its magnificent glass and steel dominating the entire city block. Walking the path reminds me of the final month of Colton’s life, when I pushed his wheelchair from our apartment to the museum for the last time. I try to tamp down the guilt, but it still twists knots in my stomach.

  Michael telegraphs his support by squeezing my hand: It wasn’t your fault.

  When we reach the bottom of the museum’s legendary steps, my eyes are stinging. I lean against the railing.

  “I just need a minute.”

  Abby hops up beside me.

  “So Mom, remember when we did that spit test in biology a few months ago?” She rises onto her tiptoes with a strange excitement.

  “Not right now, honey.”

  “Okay, but you do remember?”

  I sigh. “Of course.” The entire fifth-grade class participated in a genetic experiment through the company MapMyDNA. All the kids spit into a tube and received a report of their inherited traits, like whether they had detached earlobes or could taste bitter flavors. We felt cornered into letting her participate. It was easier than answering the questions that would follow, but the test came and went without a hitch.

  “What about it?” I ask.

  “Well, me and my friends created profiles so we could compare our reports.”

  “You never told me that!”

  My sudden harshness makes her scowl.

  “It’s not that big a deal, jeez. But guess what, I have two hundred and thirteen distant cousins!”

  My back stiffens. In the corner of my eye, I notice Michael frown.

  “So get this,” she continues, oblivious. “I got a message from someone who shares thirty-seven genes with me, and we started talking, and it turns out she’s a cousin you lost touch with!”

  I grip the railing to keep my balance. “Did you say thirty-seven?”

  “Mom doesn’t have any long-lost cousins,” Michael snaps. “And since when do you have permission to talk to strangers online?”

  “Yes, you do,” Abby says to me, ignoring him. She jumps off the railing to look me in the eye. “I know for a fact, ’cause DNA doesn’t lie!”

  My knees turn liquid. Michael’s arm shoots out behind me.

  “Mom’s not feeling so hot,” he says. “Maybe we should go.”

  “But I promised her she could meet us today! It was going to be a family reunion in Colton’s honor.”

  I hear myself gasp. “What? Where?”

  She points up the dozens of stairs to the museum’s glass doors.

  The time it takes me to turn my head stretches out to the length of her lifetime, all eleven years flattened down to one irrevocable glance.

  All the way up on the top step, a young woman with sleek red hair stands watching us. She’s wearing a skintight black dress that shows off her cleavage and her confidence. Anyone else might call her beautiful, but all I can see is the hardness in her gaze, the smile that is both triumphant and chilling.

  It is J.

  Noises cease. Hours unfold in the space of seconds.

  For some indeterminate period, I simply stare. I’m capable of nothing else. My mind is on lockdown, my reflexes on standby. I’m trapped in her gaze as though she has me by the neck.

  Though she’s at least fifty steps away, I can sense the victory in her smirk:

  Gotcha.

  In this numb state, I am severed from time and space. I find myself tumbling back years, to the last time we saw each other. It was at a wine bar only a few blocks away, the meeting that set our lives on a collision course. Back then, her beauty evoked Renoir—the ginger curls tumbling over her large breasts, the fair skin, the full pout. But unlike the soft eyes of those painted women, hers were weapons; their intelligence cut through you like an act of violence, an intrusion into your soul.

  They hook me again now. It’s how I recognize her, because she has transformed. Gone are her long curls, her round cheeks, her ample curves. She’s still young, still fifteen years younger than me, but her body has grown hard and lean. Her hair is cut close to her chin, and her face, despite her smile, projects a bitterness that terrifies me.

  Over the years, I’ve fantasized about fighting her if she ever came near Abby—pushing her off a cliff, drowning her in our pool. But now I see that’s a joke. If I punched her in the stomach, my knuckles would probably bruise.

  “Mom!” Abby cries, breaking my trance. “Are you okay?”

  I pull her instinctively against my chest, the way I used to when she was a baby and the world was still actively searching for us.

  Michael folds us both into his arms. He’s blocking us from her sight, protecting us however he can. His eyes are wide. His shock compounds mine.

  Abby squirms away from us. “What’s wrong?”

  I’ve never felt more unprepared to answer her. I’m about to open my mouth when something at the edge of my vision catches my eye.

  A little boy is playing on the top step amid all the tourists who are waiting in line. I shift to get a better look at him, and immediately sink to the cold concrete; a scream erupts from my throat.

  He’s Colton in the flesh.

  I am gripped by a panic and longing so intense I can’t move. Michael tries to lift me off the ground, Abby says a few words I don’t hear.

  He’s eight years old again, the age he died, but now he’s smiling and skipping in circles around a group of other children—I know that straw-colored hair, that perky nose, the shape of those eyes, almond like mine. I have missed him, dreamed of him, ached for him for thirteen years, bargained with a God I don’t believe in, if I could only see him one more time …

  My sight goes opaque behind a curtain of tears, and just like that, he’s gone. I claw at my eyes, but it’s no use. He’s vanished. I lunge toward the stairs, I will find him—to hell with J—but Michael yanks me back, shouting, “What are you doing?”

  “Let me go!” I smack his chest, but he’s stronger, he holds me down, and I whiplash back in time again to the dark days when my son’s silhouette teased me in the shadows.

  Michael’s voice obliterates the memory. “You’re hyperventilating. Breathe.”

  My head is throbbing. A sour liquid climbs up my throat.

  “Did you see him?” I choke out. “Over there?”

  “Him?” Michael peers up at the stairs in confusion. J is still there, smirking at us beside a stone column, but I blank her out, searching for my boy.

  “Colton.” As soon as I say his name, I know I’m losing it. Michael’s horror tells me as much.

  “But he was right there …” I trail off, staring at the spot where he was laughing and running like the healthiest boy in the world. Of course it wasn’t really him. Colton could never run. Colton is dead. The word still shatters me.

  Abby backs away from me. “Mom, you’re freaking out.”

  “I swear to God I saw him.” The tears are falling fast. “That boy …”

  “Honey,” Michael says gently, “you’re having a panic attack. Let’s get out of here.”

  He ushers me and Abby away from the museum, away from J’s disturbing stare. I want to argue, negotiate, plead with him to believe me, but I know he never will. The worst part is, I know he never should.

  “We just got here!” Abby stops. “What about your cousin?”

  “There is no cousin,” he retorts. “We’re going home. Your mother needs to lie down.”

  “But I talked to someone who knew her.”

  “You talked to a stranger who tried to meet you,” he says, as we march down the sidewalk toward our car. My legs cooperate somehow, even though my mind is back on the steps, on that boy�
�my boy.

  “From now on,” Michael is telling her, “you’re forbidden from talking to anyone on that website. I’m canceling your profile as soon as we get home.”

  “But she shared my DNA!”

  “So what? Don’t you have over two hundred ‘cousins’?”

  “Well, yeah …”

  “It means nothing. Understood?” He says it to me as much as to her. My eyes have rebelled against my mind. It’s not the first time.

  “It means nothing,” he repeats, in my direction.

  “I heard you before,” Abby grumbles.

  “Then let it go.”

  Our car is in sight a block away. He peeks over his shoulder, walking briskly, though no one is following us. I check, too. She’s not there. He unlocks the car with the key fob. Its horn bleeps, the headlights flicker. We’re going to get away scot-free. Like nothing even happened.

  He takes me by the hand. “Okay?”

  I slide into the passenger seat, dazed. Abby climbs in the back seat. He slams his door and peels away from the curb. I pick up on his nervous energy, the speed with which he swerves onto the street.

  I press my nose to the window, as if my late son is about to come waltzing around the block. Michael puts his hand on my thigh.

  “Did you bring your Xanax?”

  His question is rhetorical; I always carry a bottle in my purse for emergencies. I scoop out a little white pill and stick it under my tongue for fast relief. Sure enough, within a few minutes, my pulse begins to slow.

  He clears his throat. “So no one was there, right?”

  After a brief hesitation, I nod.

  It’s settled, then: I’ve reconciled with reality, and we will not be telling Abby about J. She’s still too young, her universe too innocent. Her experience of danger is limited to falling off a horse.

  In an hour and a half, we will arrive at our house in the woods and attempt to burrow back into our inconspicuous life, where Michael makes blueberry pancakes on Sundays, Abby rides her bike down our empty street, and I keep counting my lucky stars for another day, another month, another year of peace from the world.