Page 2 of Valley of the Moms
But here in Hamilton, the playing field was actually level. These women, much as Anna hated to admit it, were her peers. They looked nothing like her, lived nothing like her, spent their money on things she didn’t really relate to. But they were all around the same age, probably from the same wide circle of communities north of Boston, had eaten at the same Dunkin’ Donuts growing up. Christ, they probably all knew that chocolate glazed was the best donut in existence, when it came down to it. So, yes, you did have to perform, all in a way she hadn’t been expecting when she proposed they move back up north. She had to strive for the fucking Gerhard Richter, and all that striving was exhausting. She had always believed that people should be allowed to be whoever they wanted, even if what they wanted was kind of ordinary, something she wouldn’t often admit about herself, except when she was alone.
When she and Denny planned this big escape, she had been thinking about Patagonia fleece vests and L.L.Bean flannel and the kind of down-home life that removed the pretense from wealth, but okay, that was unrealistic, because to live the kind of unflappableEast Coast life that you see in Instagram reels—even the kind that she herself grew up with—you had to be kind of upper-crust. Fighting any of it was just an uphill battle. Now here she was, fighting some other battle to fit in. No one wore flannel shirts, it turned out. You just couldn’t get away with being the kind of person that Anna Plummer had aspired to be.
Her son, Ben, who was only five, stood in the entry to the kitchen, a halo of light surrounding him. Everyone talked about freezing time, and during the first years of his life she had only wanted to speed it up, to catapult through the messiness of diapers and strollers and naps that commandeered the day. But now, all these years into parenting, she could see her children needing her less, the softness from them evaporating. And she wished that she could go back to that place that she had been so desperate to escape.
This was the central conflict of motherhood: the inability to enjoy the moment you’re in because you’re always looking backward, constantly searching for a moment that has already receded into the rearview. Ben, dressed in dinosaur pajamas that saidsnore don’t roar—tiny T.rex prints all over top and bottom—clambered toward her, in a nearly kneecapping embrace. Little kids have no boundaries: They run in when you’re in the bathroom, knock the door down while you shower, will move mountains just to tell you that they had found a purple Lego and that it was a different shade of purple from the other purple Lego they found last week. All this can be annoying or special, depending on which day of the week they catch you—the way they need to include you in all of it, the way they can’t stop talking about the world, the way you’re the most important person in their lives.
“I’m hungry,” he said, burying his blond head in her legs. She leaned down and tousled his hair.
Aggravation. Obligation. Privilege. Parenting never ceased tobe all three. “What moves you today?” she said, knowing the question would mostly elude him.
“What, Mama?”
“What are you hungry for? What do you want for breakfast?”
“Toast,” he said. “Cinnamon toast.”
She didn’t know why she asked when the answer was always the same. He was her less adventurous child, prone always to eating the same few things, to less experimentation. In the ’80s, when she was a kid, parents didn’t give in to the whims and wants of children, but these days, it was different. If Ben wanted to eat toast and bagels every day of his life, well, it was food, wasn’t it? Throw a bunch of grapes in there and you’ve got half the nutritional bases covered (she pictured the triangle she learned in grade school, but then again, they used to drink cans of juice with dinner, so what did they know about nutrition, anyway).
Louisa, seven and always late, showed up in the kitchen with Barbie dolls in each hand. She had the Malibu Dream House that she would have murdered to own forty years ago, but the whole point in having kids, Anna thought, was to give them a better shot. Malibu Dream Houses for everyone. Cinnamon toast and grapes. Live large, kids. You only get one chance. A sherbet-pink sky outside, even on what had promised to be a gray morning, both her children, noiseless, at the kitchen counter, and maybe January was just a word, maybe January didn’t have to be thematic, maybe January was not as restless as it felt when you woke up in the dark.
Chapter 2
AT FIRST HEdidn’t recognize the lights for what they were—bleeding into the snow, a flash of mostly blue with hints of indigo and scarlet. Denny thought his eyes were playing tricks on him. Fresh snow often gives the illusion of being blue, after all, and he was tired. So tired. The lights were yet another sign that his body was exhausted.
But no. It was a throb of lights. Sirens without the sound. The unmistakable pulse of a noiseless police car, parked outside his home. A tear in the fabric of his life. Something just beginning to unravel.
The second week of school after the holiday break had just started. On Thursday, the first day that Anna was gone, he remembered that his daughter had library and tucked her book for return in her backpack, he made the lunches and threw a load of laundry in before he left the house to drive the kids to school, and he had done it all unprompted not because his memory was getting any better but because she hadn’t been there to remind him. Also that day he had left cash out for the cleaning lady, and had textedAnna again:Where are you.At first, he thought she had just been out late with friends, but then he had gotten increasingly worried. While his mother-in-law watched the kids, he had circled the blocks repeatedly. He had screamed—however unreasonably—into the woods behind the house. There were acres all around them. Could she hear him? Finally, he had driven down to the local police department to file a report, but they seemed unconcerned. Bad things did not happen in small towns, or not towns like this one, where many of the property lines included two rolling acres and glossy SUVs, and the kinds of good graces you read about in a Robert Frost poem.
Good fences make good neighbors.
At the police station a good ol’ boy from a few towns over—Rowley, where Anna always loved to go flea-marketing in spring and summer at old Todd Farm—hitched up his pants and said, “Just cooling off, they do that, we see it a lot.” Then he picked something he must have found offensive off of the corner of his tongue, grabbed a notebook from the back pocket of a pair of navy department-issued pants that were too tight, and made a show of taking notes that Denny was sure the officer would never again look at.
Anna’s temper ran hot, flame-hot, everyone knew that, and maybe it wasn’t unlike her to drive to the woods and take a walk to cool off. Maybe it wasn’t even unlike her to turn her phone off for a few hours to make the people around her feel a little uneasy. But to disappear? That wasn’t like her, no. Her social media bore no trace of her. She hadn’t posted any snarky memes or liked anyone’s political commentary. She had simply vanished.
Now blue light bloomed on the snow outside, and Denny dreaded whatever came next: a knock, an apology, a conversation with his own small children, who were down in the basement watching TV with his mother-in-law, an extra, worried set of hands tohelp out during the nightmarish past few days. Denny sat facing the window, wondering how long it would take the officers to summon the courage to face their own demons, to admit that they had been wrong. She hadn’t just beencooling off.Denny had spent half the week driving the roads of Essex County looking for her, looking for her Volkswagen, but it was as if the world had swallowed her up, and it would take a lot to make a woman like Anna Plummer turn small, turn invisible, turn into nothing at all. It would take an act of God, a catastrophe so consuming it would take the icy fingers of the Hamilton Police Department itself—those dang blue lights—to make someone so large in this life disappear. After all, only a force larger than life could change the color of the snow. Only a force larger than life could make Anna Plummer disappear.
A door on the Crown Victoria opened. Denny watched the perfect snow absorb one man’s footsteps, then another. In Christmas carols and movies and poems, snow was always soft, he thought, but this was animal snow, crunchy and savage, the kind that held weight, the kind that held memories. Despite an unusually warm winter, it had snowed the week earlier, and hard, the kind that Anna had always described with a sort of childlike innocence when recalling her youth. The annoying kind of snow, thick pack, stuck in the spokes of tires, the kind that didn’t go away, no matter how warm it got. Denny got it now, what New England really was, how haunted by this principle of the weather, how it defined the people here. He finally understood.
There was a knock at the door, and Denny rose to open it. Before the welcome mat at his home—her home, really—were two men he had never seen before. They held winter beanies in their hands, out of respect, he assumed. He almost laughed. Anna had a distaste for authority, and she particularly disliked the police. She would have found this funny, the cops there, at her house, where herBLACK LIVES MATTERsign still lived on the frosty lawn. Howmany times had she uttered responses under her breath to “thin blue line” flags as they drove through neighborhoods populated by officers? How many times had he convinced her not to share her feelings about the cops at dinner parties or social gatherings? It had been a mistake, he now realized, reining her in all those times, telling her what she should or shouldn’t say. There had been no real point, after all. You end up with the cops at your door either way.
Denny looked out at those cops now, studied the men he had never before met, despite his own trips down to the police station in search of his wife, this apparition.
“Mr. Plummer?” the taller of the pair asked. “Are you Mr. Plummer?”
“Denny,” he said, shifting his weight.
“Do you mind?” the second officer said. He was short and kind of squat with a mess of graying hair plastered across his forehead. He was gesturing inside. “Can we?”
“Oh, yes, of course,” Denny said.
Denny walked the officers inside, past the small foyer, with its convex eagle mirror that Anna bought because it reminded her of the one that she had as a child in her ship captain’s home, and past the vintage bread box that she picked up well before she had children and that she had always used to store dog leashes and treats. He brought the officers into their kitchen, where reminders of his wife were also everywhere: Here were the blue velour bar stools that they quarreled over at West Elm (too expensive, too hard to clean); here, in the center of the island, in a blue ceramic bowl, were the potatoes she bought for last Sunday’s dinner but never ended up cooking. The officers stood around the kitchen island.
“Can I get you anything?” Denny asked, though it was mostly a formality. They demurred. They seemed equally unaccustomed to accepting things at people’s homes.
“Mr. Plummer,” the taller officer began.
“Denny,” he corrected.
