Madwoman

by Chelsea Bieker

Genres: Literary Fiction; Suspense

Synopsis

A gripping story of motherhood and motherloss and the brutal, mighty things women do to keep themselves and each other alive, MADWOMAN marks the arrival of a major fiction talent.

The world is not made for mothers.
Yet mothers made the world…

Clove has gone to extremes to keep her past a secret. Thanks to her lies, she’s landed the life of her dreams, complete with a safe husband and two adoring children who will never know the terror that was routine in her own childhood. If her buried anxiety threatens to breach the surface, Clove (if that is really her name) focuses on finding the right supplement, the right gratitude meditation. 

But when she receives a letter from a women’s prison in California, her past comes screeching into the present, entangling her in a dangerous game with memory and the people she thought she had outrun. As we race between her precarious present-day life in Portland, Oregon and her childhood in a Waikiki high-rise with her mother and father, Clove is forced to finally unravel the defining day of her life. How did she survive that day, and what will it take to end the cycle of violence? Will the truth undo her, or could it ultimately save her?

 

Release date: September 3, 2024

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 336

Sample

The world is not made for mothers. Yet mothers made the world. The world is not made for children. Yet children are the future. Or so I’ve seen on posters at pediatric offices. Pro-life campaigns. PBS maybe. When I was in school, we spent our lunch hour foreheads pressed to the table while a small twitchy principal bellowed into a megaphone for silence. This was before the internet and secret viral videos and conscious parenting. He and the lunch ladies swatted at us but never hit. I don’t remember telling you about it. I’m sure it seemed irrelevant to me at that time in my life, meaning my entire childhood, when all we cared about was surviving my father. My head on the cool table, solemnly eating Tater Tots, probably seemed like heaven.

Do you get Tater Tots where you are?

Now I’m the mother of Nova and Lark, seven-year-old girl, three-year-old boy, and I sense I’m coming to something important. Or rather, something important is coming to me. It will serve us both to bear witness. The world is not made for us — certainly it’s not; just try to afford preschool — but this thing I’m starting to understand, transforming from felt to known, it’s about the energy of violence. The way violence shrinks women, makes us feel lucky for things that aren’t lucky. Even when we think we’ve outrun it, look back — see its long reaching fingers touching every choice we’ve made.

For many years, despite all I’d seen and all I’d survived, I thought I had evaded those long fingers. That life was about wise choices. For instance, if I did motherhood differently than you, if I ensured a peaceful family life, then I could leave the past behind. No. Not just behind. I could annihilate it.

I would not, for example, burden myself with recalling the time you put a flat of plastic bottled waters in our shopping cart. They were marked down, what we’d been waiting for. You had decided women with plastic water bottles poking out of their purses were living at the height of luxury. You even had me excited to carry one around in the mini backpack we’d stolen from Mervyn’s. “Don’t make eye contact,” you’d said as we left without paying for it. We never felt bad about stealing. Life owed us minor rewards. But stealing from a grocery store was a non-option. “Not the grocery store,” you’d said, exasperated once when I’d gone to pocket a candy bar. I asked why not. “You don’t bite the hand that feeds you,” you answered. I didn’t understand. The same way I didn’t understand why bottled water, Crystal Geyser to be exact, had become such a preoccupation. Now I know it was easier to fixate on small externals than address the fact that we did not know if we would live to see the next day.

We might have gotten the waters that afternoon had my father not come with us, might have been able to expertly hide them around the apartment, maybe even have a moment of total enjoyment, tipping our heads back and drinking in a place where others might observe, think, Who is that extravagantly loved and enormously worthy mother and daughter consuming such pure water? But my father had been home for a week nursing an injury, mashed his middle finger during a mining shift, something to do with looking away when he’d needed to look. He was slowed down on pain pills but that morning declared he was sick of being inside. “Goodbye, peace,” you’d mouthed to me as we got in the car.

He was slowed down, but not as much as you’d estimated. He picked up on your desire in the store and made quick work of it, throwing the waters from the cart, crashing them into a display of baked beans. Cans everywhere. Snarled in your face that you were a poverty-stricken bitch and bitches like you drank dirty dog water. That’s how he did most of the verbal stuff, not so much yelling, not so much screaming. More of a low demon growl meant to be heard up close.

You tried to pick up the cans but there were too many. People stared. I felt angry at you, not my father — which is part of the disease of all of this, I know, and we’re getting there, I promise — but what made me so mad was the way you took care of the onlookers instead of defending yourself. Now I know you didn’t want the pity of strangers. At that time, I was only newly attuned to the life-sucking energy of pity, the way it stretched the canvas for shame. Young, eight maybe, still possessing hope that someone would do the right thing and shoot my father between the eyes.

We put diseased animals out of their misery, we don’t want them to suffer, to infect the rest of the lot. We let men live.

You angled your head down, saying, “It’s okay, it’s okay,” as we walked out single file behind my father, having purchased nothing.

In my pocket, though, a pack of gum. Something I could not, would never, show you. Is this betrayal? I wondered as my father steered the Jimmy to Burger King, a public place so he wouldn’t strangle you. Sometimes we could wait these things out, strategize safety, my father an active participant in the game of our survival. The next day, you woke to a bottle of Aquafina by your bedside. You held it to your chest. I started to point out it was the wrong brand, but you said, “See, he loves me.” I shook my head at your stupid ability to forgive. “I know what you’re thinking,” you said, putting the prized bottle in your purse. “You’re thinking one day you’ll grow up and do everything better than me.”

I thought having babies, soft mobile extensions of my body tucked sweetly in organic linen slings, would help me escape all that. That as a mother I would ascend and actualize into who I was meant to be. Babies, the ultimate distraction. No time for memories with a mouth at the breast, tracking infant weight gain and defecation. Unbridled happy exhaustion, new life in arms. Sometimes I thought it was working. But now my babies had transformed into kids. Walking, talking individuals, holding up mirror after mirror, and in those mirrors I saw my own face, and it was not as I’d hoped. Instead of healing and transformation due to all my wise choices, I saw my father’s face just under my skin, so similar in structure, his eyes my eyes. And behind him, you, Mother, looking at me with something like expectation, sorrow, and in my worst visions, a roiling and motivated anger.

I’ll carry the burden of you and my father and everything that happened on the island for the rest of my life. But I vowed to carry it in silence. So many lies I’ve told to ensure it would be my secret forever. Mine to death. I really had things figured out.

Until the morning I got your letter.

I had the day planned, chores to do. It was the first day of summer break for Nova and the first day Lark would no longer be breastfeeding. The night before we had sung a special song and talked about how this was his last time for what he called Nonnies, that he’d done such a great job drinking all the milk. All the milk was gone, and it had made him big and strong. He had just turned three. It was time. I wanted to say good night with a kiss and not a full feeding session that was by now purely recreational — the kid put down more food than I did — and I wanted him to stop pulling my boobs out of my shirt in public.

The morning had gone okay so far; he’d asked for Nonnies once but was easily distracted by a glass of hand-strained — my hand — almond milk with cinnamon and vanilla. With school out, his sister would be home all day to direct and delight and torment him, a total change to our quiet one-on-one rhythm. But change was good, I told myself, and on the other side of summer Lark would be officially weaned and I would no longer be touched out. I might have a sliver of space in my brain again, something I was looking forward to.

As I got the kids dressed I thought of you in little blips, images coming and going, how you started the day with a Diet Coke and a splash of vodka, or was it vodka with a splash of Diet Coke? So different from my cold-pressed celery juice. You thought I had been dead for so long, sixteen years, while I was simply alive, urging my children to go potty before we got in the car. I saw each detail of my life two ways — what it was, and then what you would think of it. It wasn’t a choice.

First, we went to Earthside Grocery and ate a leisurely breakfast of hot-bar eggs and sprouted-grain French toast on the upstairs patio. Lark crunched nitrate-free bacon; Nova drank a power-greens smoothie. Moments before, they had both produced real wet tears when I’d denied them a unicorn-shaped piece of cake on a stick at the checkout line, but now we were back on track. I metabolized my annoyance and focused on the fact that they were adequately fueled. Content. We all loved the grocery store — I was proud to have passed this love down to them, one of the only good and pure things I could give. The rest of my genetic offerings were fucked.

And perhaps this summer the two of them would finally bond, really bond, after so much struggle. Siblings are lifelong companions, my husband said often, as if reciting a line from some handbook only he had access to, and I sucked it all down, not knowing any better, not having anything to compare it to, overlooking the fact that he rarely spoke to his siblings, that his brother had recently posted a photo of his toddler son holding a rifle at a gun show and we had deemed them unsafe to visit. I had wished for a sibling, but you told me it was lucky you never got pregnant again. Why add another to the pot of suffering? Now I must say, you were right about that.

I loved that two children seemed so ordinary. A nice, even number, a sturdy team of four. But while the other mothers told you BOB made the best double stroller, they failed to mention what to do when your older child resented you for your younger child’s existence. Those been-there-done-thats only looked at you honestly once you had already joined them, like when a mother at preschool pickup said to me flatly, “One is fun, and two is ten.” Where had this advice been before? I was a miner of advice, watching others for clues on how to build a life, a real and good one, with an intense, propulsive need to educate myself on everything I didn’t know. The sense that I was always catching up to common knowledge plagued me. Or drove me, to put it more positively, and being positive was important, was a marker of the kind of mother I wanted to be.

Now, sitting in our favorite place, looking at my children’s cute faces, I saw picnics. Long U-pick days, marionberries and Hood strawberries, sandy feet jammed in puffy rubber sandals, nights of heavy sun-steeped sleep. Nonnies safely packed away in hopes of rehabilitation. It had been a nightmare Portland spring with almost no break from rain, no break from the winter-like dark and bone-deep cold. But today. Sun. Warmth. I put my full-length puffer in the basement.

“It’s so nice, right?” I said to them. “Blue skies!”

“I want ice cream,” Lark said, putting down his forkful of eggs. He pushed his plate away. “Ice cream now.”

“We aren’t going to have ice cream at eight o’clock in the morning,” I said. I did the smile. The one that pushed down the untoward feelings a dishonest woman like myself was not allowed to have. I had formed, at some point in early motherhood, my own laws of the universe applicable only to someone like me, who had lied the way I had. I knew if I wanted to keep all my good things, keep them safe and untouched by my past, I was allowed no common fuckups. No ordinary parental outbursts. No shoddy decision-making. And no trusting others to take care of the souls assigned to me. I’d used up my allotted amount of luck and grace, shot that wad early in life. You’ll see.

The day before my bleed, though, at the apex of luteal anguish, I did allow myself a ten-minute cry in the bathtub followed by a single throat-shredding scream into a pillow after my children were asleep and while my husband was doing his rowing machine. Then I would lick hazelnut cacao butter off a spoon and read erotic novels that made my pelvic floor ache. But that’s it. Otherwise, my dead father who circled the block in the Jimmy would take me back to where I belonged. And where was it I belonged? Oh, I pictured hell. Hell was an empty movie theater playing my childhood over and over forever. No one could see my father but me. Who would believe me if I told them he was waiting for the moment I’d slip, yell at my kids, take their safety for granted? Some days I felt I was doing a good job, but on other, harder days, when my children wouldn’t stop fighting, or Lark, my dear, sweet son, would punch his sister for no reason I could see, I’d feel the terror of what I’d done, a terror so consuming it would one day lead me out of my house and into the night, where my father would be idling. He wouldn’t force me in. He’d merely lean over and open the door. Inside on the seat would be a box. I imagined the box wrapped in velvet, a ribbon tied in a bow. I would hold it in my hands. I would lose all power to run. He would wait for me to open it. The box. There was something inside I needed to see.

But no, I could avoid this, I knew I could. Some days I even laughed at myself. There was certainly no dead father cruising in his Jimmy, and the best distraction from all this foolishness was to buy something. Smile and push down the urge to yell at my children — Shut up, you have it so good! All you have to cry about is not getting a unicorn cake pop for breakfast! — until I could get to my favorite sustainable secondhand clothing site and claim an eco-Spanish-wool cardigan with polished horn buttons, maybe a linen romper the exact color of sand, and while I was on my screen why not send for a synbiotic vitamin subscription that had a three-month waitlist, endorsed by Gwyneth Paltrow. My smile was a mouth smile, my husband had recently noticed. Not the full face. The dance of managing both motherhood and trauma was slowly eroding me, but I could not say that. I could scarcely think it. Instead I researched the world’s most perfect trench coat.

Lark continued begging for ice cream in a high-pitched squeaking voice, and the seed of a headache rooted behind my eye. He snatched his sister’s leopard purse and she screamed and slapped his arm.

“Do not hit,” I said. Calm, I was calm. “We do not hit in this family. Say it back to me.” I could tolerate a lot, but I could not tolerate violence.

She shook her head no.

“Say it right now. We do not hit.” Wait, wasn’t it bad to talk in the we to kids? Wasn’t it emotionally demeaning? Eternally damaging? As bad as saying good job, which I did all the time? “Say, I do not hit my brother’s body.”

“He hit me in the face this morning. I guess you don’t care about that.”

“Of course I care. Why didn’t you come to me when it happened? I could have helped.”

Lark curled up in my lap for his second small breakdown of the morning, then resettled and finished the eggs. “I want both of you to come to me before you get to the top of anger mountain. Hitting is never the solution.”

Nova glared at her brother. “It’s not my fault his favorite job on this planet is to push me up the mountain!” Tears formed behind her anger. What anger didn’t have tears just behind?

“Chill,” I said to her. “Chill,” I said to him. “Just chill, alright?”

A woman alone with a laptop at a nearby table raised her eyebrows at us. Imperceptible, almost, her judgment. Perhaps she was signaling my dead father right now to park the Jimmy, letting him know I was ready to leave this nice life, that I had failed. Good try, but not good enough. I shook the thought away. There was context, I wanted to tell this woman, and the context was that despite my cycle breaking and self-reinvention and doing everything you and my father did not, doing it all better, my kids still had very little to no chill. What did the books and podcasts call children like mine? Ah yes, spirited. If this woman only knew the daily negotiations, the monkey-bar swings from one emotion to the next so that by the time six o’clock rolled around I could nearly understand my father’s need to punch holes in walls… I smiled with a full face at her. Things were fine. I was in control. It was summer and I could still try for the post office, where I planned to mail off a dress I’d sold online so I could afford to buy another dress I’d later hate and sell. It was a major risk to sneak in a purely adult activity with both of my children in tow, but. The sun was out. My PO box called to me.

Day to day I couldn’t predict the number of packages coming in, the bills, the general warfare of my compulsions. The PO box kept everything separate. My husband didn’t need to know I had just done a balance transfer of eight thousand dollars to yet another credit card, the same debt following me around no matter how many online English classes I taught, the only job I could retain while being a full-time caretaker with a degree in creative writing. I kept buying dresses and jumpsuits and expensive supplements. Spending recklessly at the grocery store on a near-daily basis. If I lived within my means, making instant oatmeal and sad bagged teas at home, I could possibly catch up to my debt, but it would strip me of something vital. You and those bottled waters. Didn’t I deserve the abundance of a credit card after all we went through? In truth, it was hard to know what I deserved.

But I was in deep by now, addicted to self-improvement, each new supplement pulling me further away from my past. The safety of radiant health was something I found great meaning in chasing. Unfortunately, it cost a lot of money. But the cost of confessing the debt to my husband was higher, even though I dreamed about it, and because he literally worked in finance, managing rich people’s wealth, he would create a simple and straightforward way out. But this way would not involve my continued devotion to $395 ethically constructed canvas sailor pants or the $200 designer billowy blouses I tucked into them. He would lose trust in me, see the first crack, and then start looking for the rest of my lies. And these lies were not like the debt. No, they were not the sort you overcame in marriage counseling. These lies were the never-talk-to-me-again, the I’m-taking-custody, the do-I-even-know-you-at-all sort. The kind that lands a good, wholesome man like my husband on The Maury Povich Show. Well, that’s what you and I watched when I was little. I don’t know what the equivalent is now, but I could imagine the camera zooming in on his conventionally attractive and dismayed face, the audience sighing their sympathy.

Nova eyed me as I opened my special box with my special key. Normally she was at school when I brought Lark to the post office. And hadn’t Lark just been a baby in the Ergo mere weeks ago, asleep or halfway there most of the time? But life had transformed again. It was my first summer with two children. And children were different from babies. Children might report how many packages their mother picked up at the post office to their father.

“It’s where Santa is going to drop your presents and Daddy’s presents around Christmastime, so don’t mention it to Daddy.” She looked skeptical. I had made it too memorable by mentioning Santa, a man she revered as God.

“Presents don’t fit in there,” she said.

“No, see? We take these little slips of paper to the people behind the counter and they get the big stuff for us.”

“Is there something in there for me today?”

“Well, no, not today.”

“That sucks,” she said. She was big into the word suck lately. I tried to ignore it. Lark echoed her, “Sucks, sucks.” I took the stack of envelopes and slips, so many slips — what had I even ordered? — locked the box, and followed Lark, who by now was bounding ahead of us toward the long line.

Nova observed him with menace. “Say the word and I’ll leash him up for puppy time.”

Puppy time was a borderline sadistic game Nova invented that involved tying Lark by the wrist to a doorknob and serving him food and water in bowls on the floor and then leaving him there while she did something else entirely, a game they both loved for very different reasons. I let it go on because it was one of the few things they did that offered me a chance to take an alone shower.

“No public leashing,” I said to Nova, walking faster now because, yep, Lark had opened the glass cabinet that stood alongside the line. Normally the cabinet housed dusty stationery sets featuring jazz musicians or past presidents, maybe Marilyn Monroe, but they had changed it up. Today, an impressive display of a to-scale Lego post office had been erected, complete with tiny postal workers and customers holding wee brown boxes with white string. How convenient for me, a mother of a very curious three-year-old, that it was unlocked. I closed it. He opened it. I set my bag down, handed my mail to Nova. I’d need two arms to wage this war. He would not just look with his eyes.

I picked Lark up, straining my back, releasing against my will a teaspoon of pee into the canvas pants even though I had peed before we left the grocery store. Lark flailed and screamed. He had been doing a new shriek lately, a total ear stab. A woman of grandmotherly age got involved, saying “That’s a no-no” to the wailing Lark as if she alone had invented no-no. You used to say to me when I was young, “You’re pushing the lemon!” But now, as I pinned Lark’s arms to his sides, coaching him to pause and take a deep breath, it occurred to me you had been saying “You’re pushing the limit.” Of course, it was limit. I’d heard it one way, but it was always another.

I set Lark down, squatting next to him to rifle through my purse for something tantalizing. My left overproducing breast started to leak. For the last year my left breast had been two full sizes larger than my right. The right had given up but the nipple still tingled, reaching out for cellular communication with the other. Lark tried to free the left from my high-necked white blouse but couldn’t get in there. “Nonnie!” he cried. “Nonnie!” No, I wouldn’t give in like I had so many times. I wouldn’t sit on this post office floor and untuck my beautiful shirt and let my three-year-old nurse until he calmed. I was ready to graduate from Nonnie. It was time to transition into being like the mothers I’d seen at the park with their books, looking up every so often to make sure their children hadn’t been abducted, and no more.

“Not right now,” I said. “Nonnie is sleeping.”

“Just give it to him,” Nova said. “Precious baby gets whatever he wants anyway.”

I stared into the disappointing entrails of my purse. A dragon-fruit juice had opened at some point that morning and leaked out all over the expensive pink leather. Maybe if I just kept looking, I’d find a manuka honey sucker or some of those dried fruit buttons every kid loved. I didn’t want to hand him Daniel Tiger on my phone because I would be judged for that too. His need to touch the Lego persisted. And not just touch — dismantle; destroy. It was Lego or nurse. Lego or nurse. His endurance amazed me, the way his cries only got louder, his face redder, the sands of logic sifting through a bottomless hourglass until nothing existed but noise.

“What’s the Central California Women’s… Faculty?” Nova asked, holding a piece of paper, the torn envelope at her feet. She repeated the question, but I barely heard her because just then Lark scratched me hard across the cheek. Hot blood. I raised my hand to the wound, and he broke free, slamming the glass door open, grabbing the Lego roof, collapsing a side wall. A tiny customer lay scandalized on its side.

“Dear Clove,” Nova read. “I guess that’s what you’re calling yourself these days. I feel like I gave you a fine name, but it makes sense why you don’t use it.”

I was not understanding. I was still hung up on faculty and Central California. I looked down to see my blouse had ripped.

“I know you don’t want to be found. But I found you.” Nova’s voice boomed and I was momentarily impressed by her clear enunciation; the performing arts classes I’d charged were totally paying off, I thought, as she added a reverent tremor to the line: “Because you’re my child…”

I snatched the paper out of her hands. “What is this?” I said, or maybe I roared. Everyone was looking now, if they hadn’t been before. The contents of my purse lay scattered, my stash of bills and slips fanned out at our feet, Nova crying along with Lark because I’d grabbed the paper from her in a not-nice way, Lark trying to rip the hole in my blouse larger so he could tunnel his way to Nonnie, then giving up and slamming open the glass cabinet once more, and me, holding your words in my hands in this public space. Facility, not faculty. The woman working the counter leaned over, pointed at Lark, and said, “Do you think you can stop him from opening that?”

All the years of feeling judged while navigating public spaces that were not meant for me and my children, like a post office, for example, and the fear I carried day to day that we would not be able to make it through simple tasks, like mail a package, grocery shop, “run in” to any store, the terror I had of showing frustration or anger lest my very normal life be snatched away from me… all of it came up now into my throat, and I said, “Do you think you could put a lock on this child-height display of L. . .