Free What Was Mine by Helen Klein Ross

family wouldn’t have been easy. The boys were in middle school and Mom was gone by then and I didn’t have anybody but Doug to help out and he was busy, on the road a lot.
    Looking back, maybe I should have suspected something. But I wrote off her refusal of my help as a simple matter of pride. Lucy is two years older than I am. You never ask an older sibling too many questions.
    I’m just grateful our mother isn’t still alive, to have to suffer the pain of knowing the truth about Lucy. Someone capable of such an act and such a deception. My sister is not who anyone thought her to be.

18
lucy
    I knew I had to go back to work. But I dreaded leaving Mia all day. I thought about quitting my job and going freelance. Freelancers commanded hefty day rates and could come and go at will. But I knew I couldn’t depend on freelance to sustain the life I wanted for us. I needed the certainty of a biweekly paycheck, with health benefits.
    I cast about in my mind for a profession that would let me stay home with a baby. But what profession would let me stay home with a baby while at the same time paying enough to support us? It was 1990. Telecommuting wasn’t an option yet. My office was in midtown Manhattan. There were ad agencies in New Jersey I might have worked at instead, but none had the stature of Scali, McCabe, Sloves, which was one of the most creative shops on Madison Avenue, proven in part by the fact that it was no longer on Madison. I had a child to support for the next eighteen years. I couldn’t afford to throw away my career.
    I decided that if I was going to go back to my job, I had to move to the city. I had to be able to get to my baby from the office in a matter of minutes, had to be able to get to the hospital in case of emergency, which would be impossible if I had to depend on the vagaries of De Camp buses or PATH trains or traffic clogging the Lincoln Tunnel.
    I began to scour the New York Times classifieds. I’d get up earlywith the baby and retrieve the paper from my doormat, opening the door and shutting it quickly against the gray dawn, before neighbors were out. I read it while holding Mia on my lap at the kitchen table, sometimes letting her play with the red grease pencil from the office I used to circle 2BRS, DRMN . I knew I wanted a doorman. Mia was just five months old, but already I was picturing the teenager she would become, returning home at night from a dance, lithe and long-haired, tiny-skirted and bare-legged. I didn’t want her standing in a dark entrance, fumbling for keys. I wanted a brightly lit canopy and a doorman who would look out for her. A building close to a subway, which would mean a short walk home, short enough that muggers wouldn’t have time to mug her. It was New York before Giuliani. There were still plenty of muggers.
    I was nervous about seeing apartments with a real estate agent, baby in tow. What if one of them identified her, somehow, from the news? I was relieved not to have to sign up with an agency, after all. I learned of an apartment before it was listed. An account woman at the office took a job with a client in Düsseldorf. She put an ad in the Scali newsletter saying she was putting her co-op on the market. She gave me a good deal. And so I traded a light and airy 3 BR in Montclair for a rear 2 BR in Morningside Heights. It was a back apartment on the first floor. But it had a doorman. And a canopy entrance lit brightly at night, for safety. It was a short walk from the 110th Street stop. The apartment was dark, but I didn’t mind. The dark suited me now, cloaking me in its protective veil.
    One benefit I hadn’t realized before taking the apartment was that it was across the street from a newly built playground in Riverside Park. I became grateful for this amenity as soon as I moved in.
    The playground was a place I could take the baby, unafraid. No one knew I wasn’t really a mother. No one glanced suspiciously