She finished her story.
She composed a cover letter and sent it off with high hopes to the editor she’d worked with years ago at the highly respected literary magazine. She sent it snail-mail, the old-fashioned way, and she felt lighter than she had in years when she dropped it in the mail.
“Dear Ms. Smith:
Thank you for the opportunity to read “The Secret Ingredient.” There is much to be admired in these pages. Sentence by sentence, the prose is very strong — am I wrong in saying I hear a touch of L— M— (minus her finely timed humor) in your voice? The first few scenes were wonderfully promising — Who is this old woman who has found her way into the narrator’s home? What trouble will she cause? — but then the story sort of petered out as all began to go so swimmingly for your narrator. Surely you know that in fiction, trouble is essential! (See Burroway, Writing Fiction.) And your ending… hmmm… don’t think you’ve quite nailed it yet. Sorry to disappoint on this one.
Best wishes,
(illegible signature)”
“Why aren’t you writing today?” Louise asked.
She’d come up from the playroom to find Gwen at the kitchen table, blowing on a lukewarm cup of tea. Max was still asleep in the basement, in his playpen.
“Just taking a break,” Gwen said.
She’d forgotten how debilitating rejection letters could be. She’d received all types — tiny-slip-of-paper rejections, try us again, if only you’d done x y or z, love it but we ran out of money rejections — and she’d never been able to dismiss them lightly. Once she’d realized that they were part of the whole writing/publishing world, she’d become inhibited, then stalled.
The letter lay before her on the table. Louise bent forward to read it. “Oh, I see. I hadn’t realized you’d written a story.”
“It was nothing,” Gwen said. “Kind of silly, really. Now that I think about it.”
She told Louise how the story had been sparked by their meeting in the grocery store, but it lacked tension.
“Tension? Who wants tension? What’s wrong with a happy story? There should be more happy stories in the world.”
“In the world, maybe. But happy stories don’t make for a great read.”
Louise lowered herself into the chair across from Gwen. “So you need more trouble in your life, is that it?”
“No.” Gwen gave a half-hearted laugh. She picked up the letter and creased it down the middle. She thought she heard Max squeal, and she stood to go get him, glad for the distraction.
“It’s just the neighbor’s cat,” Louise said. “He’ll sleep another forty minutes.”
“Oh.” Gwen pulled at the skin of her neck, feeling suddenly annoyed. It irked her that Louise had come to know her son well enough to predict his naps to the minute. She wished Max would wake early; she missed him now that he was doing all this sleeping. She felt like taking back what Louise had taken from her — this intimate knowledge of her son. Or, rather, what she’d willingly given.
“Your story,” Louise said, “can you add some trouble and send it again?”
“No.” Gwen stood and took the letter to the recycling bin. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. It’s just a story.”
“But that’s not true,” Louise said. “I can see that it matters deeply.”
That night, the baby was fussy. Gwen had gotten her wish earlier in the day in that Max had woken early from his nap, but it turned him into a little crab apple and he fought going to bed. Or maybe Gwen’s own bad mood, brought on by the rejection letter and the fact that Dan had had to stay late at work, had infected him. She tried to shrug off her sadness and keep focused on cheering up Max. “It doesn’t matter!” she chattered in a sing-song voice as she bathed him. “It doesn’t matter deeply!”
Then the baby got sick. He threw up in the tub. It wasn’t much, but what came out of him was thick and pink and had a medicinal cherry smell that made Gwen wonder, for the first time, how exactly Louise was getting her son to sleep. What secret ingredient had she been slipping him? What magic elixir? And how had Gwen refused to see?
5.
She didn’t wake with a start but with a sickly feeling brewing inside her, as if she’d eaten something spoiled and now that spoiled thing was flourishing. She’d taken a nap; she hadn’t meant to, but she’d fallen asleep reading. The first two-thirds of someone else’s manuscript lay spread on the comforter. She wasn’t sure how she knew something was amiss, but she knew. The house was quiet. That morning, she’d told Louise that they couldn’t spend their days together anymore, that she needed to get back in sync with Max on her own. Louise had looked stricken; she’d winced and reached for the baby, who was snug on Gwen’s hip, but then she’d let her arms fall. “You’re right,” she’d said. “It’s what’s best for you and Max. I understand.”
They’d gone out to the stoop to see her off. A month had passed since Louise first entered their lives and Gwen couldn’t help but feel a little sorry to see her go. There’d been some pink vomit, but Louise, when Gwen questioned her, said she’d given the baby some of the infant Tylenol Gwen kept in the medicine cabinet because his teeth seemed to be bothering him. She’d been beside herself to hear it had made him sick, and this made Gwen feel bad for suspecting something else. Still, the incident pushed Gwen into acknowledging that it was time to part ways.
When she woke from her nap, she remembered the last thing Louise had said to her. Before driving off, she’d rolled down the driver’s-side window of her bus and called out, in a perfectly cheery voice, “I hope you get your trouble!” When Gwen had looked at her quizzically, she’d said, “For your story! I hope it comes to you.”
Wrongly quiet.
The baby wasn’t in his crib where she’d left him. She searched the house from top to bottom; he wasn’t anywhere. The front door was closed but unlocked and Gwen couldn’t recall if she’d remembered to turn the bolt before taking Max up for his nap. In all likelihood, she hadn’t. She circled the house again and ended in the basement in the playroom trying to quell a dizzying rise of panic. Louise must have returned, she told herself. She’d taken Max somewhere, to the park, maybe, but they’d be back. She stared at the beanbags where Louise had often napped with her son. Her perfect child. There was no sign that Louise had ever been there. Not even a stray gray hair.
Something erupted inside Gwen, a geyser of fear. She thought for a moment that it had lifted her up, that she was floating, but then she looked down and saw that her feet were still miraculously on the ground. She ran to the kitchen and called her husband at work. She told him to come home; told him she couldn’t find the baby.
“What are you talking about?” he asked. “Did you call the police?”