The Other Mom

Lucy drew four people at school.

Daddy was tall and blue. Lucy was purple. I was green, with five straight hairs standing up from my head.

The fourth figure lay sideways beneath a brown rectangle.

Her teacher had written Lucy’s explanation in the corner: THE OTHER MOM. SHE SLEEPS UNDER MY BED.

I found the picture in her backpack on a Tuesday afternoon, between a library book and a plastic bag of apple slices gone warm. Lucy sat at the kitchen table peeling dried glue from her fingers.

“Who’s the other mom?”

She glanced at the drawing. “The one in my room.”

“There isn’t room under your bed for a person.”

“She gets flat.”

The refrigerator motor started. Outside, a delivery truck rattled over the manhole cover.

I kept my voice light. “Is this a game?”

Lucy frowned, insulted. At five, she treated questions as things adults should already know.

“She only comes when you’re not looking.”

That night, I checked.

Lucy’s bed was a white wooden frame with three storage drawers underneath. I pulled them out one by one. Socks, puzzles, a winter blanket smelling faintly of cedar. Behind the drawers was a gap perhaps eight inches high extending to the wall.

I lay on the rug and shone my flashlight into it.

Dust furred the baseboard. A pink bead, two crayons, and one of Lucy’s shoes sat deep in the gap.

The shoe was upright.

Its toe pointed out.

I reached in with a yardstick and dragged it forward. Then I saw the second shoe beside it, farther back. Same pair. Same neat position. Both toes facing the room, as if someone under the bed had taken them off and intended to step into them.

“Lucy?”

She lifted her head from the pillow.

“Did you put your shoes back there?”

“No.”

“Then how did they get there?”

She pulled the blanket to her chin.

“Other Mom wears them when she practices.”

My husband, Ben, was washing dishes downstairs. I carried the shoes to him and spoke quietly.

He examined the soles. “She pushed them behind the drawer.”

“She says she didn’t.”

“She also says a flat woman lives under her bed.”

He rinsed soap from his hands and came upstairs with me. We checked the window lock, closet, hallway linen cupboard, and attic hatch. Ben removed all three drawers and shone his work light into the cavity.

Nothing.

We moved Lucy into our room anyway.

At 2:14 a.m., I woke to whispering in the hallway.

It was my voice.

“Lucy,” it said. “Come back to bed.”

My daughter slept between us, one hand curled beside her cheek.

Ben woke when I grabbed his arm. The whisper came again from outside our closed door, soft and patient.

“Sweetheart. Mommy found your shoes.”

Ben sat up.

The handle turned downward.

He crossed the room in three steps and pulled the door open.

The hallway was empty. Lucy’s bedroom door stood open at the far end. Her night-light made a yellow pool on the carpet.

Ben searched the house with a baseball bat. I stayed in bed holding Lucy, who had not woken.

In the morning, we found the shoes placed outside our bedroom door. Toes facing in.

That was the point when Ben stopped saying imagination.

We installed two cameras. One faced Lucy’s bed. The other watched the upstairs hallway. We changed the locks though nothing had been stolen, and Ben screwed the windows shut.

For three nights, nothing happened.

Lucy slept with us. The cameras recorded empty rooms, shifting sunlight, and the hallway darkening at dusk. By Friday, exhaustion had made everything cheap and unreal. I burned toast. Ben snapped at a telemarketer. Lucy asked if Other Mom was lonely.

“She isn’t real,” I said too sharply.

Lucy’s lower lip trembled. “She says that about you.”

At 11:38 that night, the camera app alerted to movement.

The hallway feed showed nothing. The bedroom feed showed Lucy’s empty bed, the three drawer fronts beneath it, and the chair where we had piled stuffed animals.

Then the middle drawer slid open four inches.

It stopped.

The room remained still for twenty seconds.

A hand came out.

It was not flat or gray or monstrous. It was my hand. Same short nails. Same silver wedding band. Same crescent scar at the base of the thumb from opening an oyster knife on our honeymoon.

The fingers rested on the carpet.

Another hand emerged. Then dark hair spread across the floorboards as a head turned sideways through a space no skull could fit.

My own face looked into the camera.

It smiled.

The feed went black.

Ben and I were already running. He carried the bat. I carried Lucy, who woke halfway down the stairs and began screaming.

We drove to his sister’s house without coats. In the car, Lucy pressed both hands over her ears.

“She’s mad,” she said.

“How do you know?”

“Because you saw her.”

The police found no one inside. The middle drawer was open. The wall behind it was solid plaster over brick. The camera was still mounted, but its memory card had been removed.

On Lucy’s pillow lay my wedding ring.

I checked my hand.

My ring was there.

The police bagged the duplicate. It had the same jeweler’s mark and the same inscription Ben had chosen: STILL, ALWAYS. Under magnification, both rings had an identical scratch near the S.

No officer wrote “duplicate wife” in a report. They called it a possible stalking incident and advised us not to return.

We did not.

We moved into Ben’s sister’s basement while the house went on the market. Lucy saw a child psychologist twice a week. I took unpaid leave. Ben handled the realtor because I could not look at photographs of the bedroom.

For a month, Lucy stopped mentioning Other Mom.

Then she began watching me closely.

She asked questions before letting me tuck her in.

What did we name the dead ladybug in the windowsill? Mister Dot.

What song did I sing when the thunder came? “You Are My Sunshine,” but only the first verse because I forgot the rest.

What did she hide in my yellow rain boot? Three jelly beans and a key from a diary she had lost.

I answered every one.

“Good,” she would say, and allow me near.

The house sold to a contractor who planned to renovate. During demolition, his crew found a cavity behind Lucy’s bedroom wall. It was narrow, unfinished, and sealed on all sides. Inside were forty-seven drawings, done in crayon on different kinds of paper.

Some looked decades old.

Each showed a family and an extra mother under a bed.

The police took them. The contractor withdrew. Our insurance company called the cavity a preexisting structural defect and denied nearly everything.

We rented a second-floor apartment with no attic and beds on solid platform bases. Lucy chose hers herself. It sat flush against the floor.

For six months, we slept.

Then, one November morning, I went to wake her and found her sitting upright, staring at me.

The room smelled of cold dust.

“Question,” she said.

Her voice shook.

“Okay.”

“What was in your yellow rain boot?”

“Three jelly beans and your diary key.”

She did not relax.

“That’s what she heard you say.”

Behind me, from the hallway, my voice called, “Lucy? Breakfast.”

I turned.

No one stood there.

When I looked back, Lucy had climbed against the wall. She pointed at my bare feet.

On the floor beside her bed sat the shoes I had left downstairs.

They were facing out.

I did not try to prove which mother I was.

I picked up my daughter and ran.