Francie closes her eyes, feeling ten years old again. She keeps her voice steady. “Because I wanted—Lowell and I wanted the most natural birth experience. Unmedicated births are now—”
Marilyn chuckles. “Oh, Mary Frances, that’s so like you. You can’t do anything like everyone else.” Francie is surprised to feel tears burning the back of her throat. “Anyway, I’m calling because I have something for William. A christening dress.” Marilyn pauses. “And I’d like to come visit.”
“Visit?” She didn’t think Marilyn would ever come to New York. She’s never stepped foot out of Tennessee. “You don’t have to do that, Mom. Lowell and I are saving for plane tickets home for you to meet Will.”
“The baptism is probably soon. I could look into a flight, next weekend perhaps? You’ll need help, I imagine.”
“I’m sorry, Mom. Next weekend doesn’t work.” She racks her brain for a plausible excuse. “Lowell has a big interview. He’s working all the time, and he’d feel bad if he couldn’t spend time with you. Plus, the May Mothers. We’re—”
“The May Mothers?”
“It’s a group of friends I’ve made. A mommy group.” Francie can only imagine how her mother would judge them all: Nell, with the large, garish tattoo covering her shoulder. Yuko, breastfeeding without cover in the coffee shop, in front of other women’s husbands. Token, a gay stay-at-home dad. “But this terrible thing happened—”
“He’ll need this gown. It was yours, and before that, it was mine.” Her mother waits. She knows what she’s doing. She knows Francie won’t be baptizing him. She’s forcing her to lie. “When is the baptism?”
“We’re not quite sure yet. Like I said, Lowell’s working a lot right now.” Despite the fan, the sweat rises on Francie’s back. She turns away from the window, glancing at Will on his mat, at the muted television set, trying to figure out what to say.
And then her heart stops.
It’s Winnie. On TV. Not the Winnie she knows, though. This one is much younger—a teenager. She’s standing on a stage, wearing a gold strapless gown, her hair tied back in a loose chignon, hanging on to the arm of a nearly identical older woman who must be her mother. Another image appears: Winnie in a blush-colored leotard and long tulle skirt, ballet slippers laced to her knees. Francie picks up the television remote from the counter and increases the volume.
“—Gwendolyn Ross is best known for her role in the cult television series Bluebird, which aired in the early nineties.”
“Mary Frances?”
“I’m sorry, Mom. I have to go. The baby is awake.”
She places the phone on the table. The reporter is standing on a leafy sidewalk, bright yellow police tape visible behind her. Francie moves closer to the TV. The building she’s standing in front of. It’s Winnie’s.
“Sources within the police department are keeping information tightly guarded at this point, saying only that they are, in fact, treating this as a case of child abduction, and that all leads are being pursued. The baby has been missing now for nearly nine hours. Zara Secor, reporting live from Brooklyn.”
“Thanks, Zara. Now, on to another bit of disheartening news. The climate change summit has come to—”
Francie goes to her bedside table for her laptop. Bluebird. Someone, Gemma perhaps, once mentioned that Winnie was an actress, but half the people Francie has met since moving to New York claim to be actors. She didn’t know this was what Gemma meant. Winnie is famous. The star of a television show in the early 1990s about a young ballerina auditioning for an apprentice spot in the New York City Ballet. Winnie—who went by the name Gwendolyn—was the ballerina. She was the girl they called Bluebird.
Francie had no idea. She would have been eleven years old when Bluebird aired, and it was exactly the type of show—with hints of teenage sexuality, an interracial relationship—that her mother would never have allowed in the house. She opens Wikipedia and finds Winnie’s page. Classically trained at the School of American Ballet, a summer at the Royal Ballet School. A family foundation, in her mother’s name, that provided scholarships to young dancers.
Francie shouldn’t be surprised. She knew the moment she saw Winnie at the first May Mothers meeting four months earlier that there was something special about her. Francie can still picture it. Gemma was telling the group she’d paid to bank her son’s umbilical cord blood—a process Francie had never heard of. “It’s expensive, but it can save their life if they ever, knock on wood, have a life-threatening disease,” Gemma was saying when people began to shift their attention to a spot across the lawn, to the woman walking toward them, the bump of her pregnancy rising under her short turquoise dress, a wide silver bracelet on each wrist. Everyone scooted aside to make room for her, adjusting blankets, shifting babies, and she took the spot right next to Francie. Francie tugged at her shorts and the damp cotton that clung to her midsection as she watched Winnie settle into place, folding her long legs underneath her.
“I’m Winnie,” she said, her fingers resting on the slope of her belly, just below her breasts. “Sorry to be so late.”
Francie had a hard time keeping her eyes off her, taking in just how beautiful she was. The face of magazine covers and catwalks: the splatter of freckles across the bridge of her nose, the faultless olive skin that had no need for the concealer Francie has been swearing by for the last decade or so.
And then the moment the two of them shared at the coffee shop. Francie was deeply embarrassed by Will’s sudden outburst, conscious of the judging stares of the two young men working on laptops near the window, the scowl from the girl behind the counter, waiting for Francie, too frazzled to choose her drink. Winnie seemed to appear from nowhere, unfazed by Will’s crying, lifting him from Francie’s arms and walking figure eights around the tables, patting his bottom, whispering into his ear, getting him to settle.
“How did you do that?” Francie asked, after joining her at a table in the corner. “I feel like I’m the only one who has no idea what I’m doing.”
“Don’t be silly,” Winnie said. “These May Mothers try very hard to make it look easy, but don’t let them fool you.” She had a sly look in her eyes, as if she and Francie were lifelong friends, sharing a secret. “This isn’t easy for any of them. Trust me.”
It’s more than an hour later, after Will has finally fallen asleep in the cosleeper, the vacuum cleaner running nearby, upright and stationary, to calm him, that Francie comes across the obituary of Audrey Ross, Winnie’s mother. She was killed on Winnie’s eighteenth birthday, on her way to the store for ice cream. Her death was written up in several national newspapers, for not only was Audrey Ross the mother of Gwendolyn Ross, the famous young actress, she was also an heir to her father’s multimillion-dollar real estate business, one of the largest in the nation.