Page 41 of The Delivery

Sheila recognizes Rebecca, her face ripple-transforming into a practiced expression of affability. But her cheeks are too defined, her eyes feline sharp.

When it’s time to lurch forward in the line, Sheila flares her manicured hand, making a point of waving Rebecca ahead of her. Face burning, Rebecca gives a nervous gesture of thanks.

She pulls up to the drop-off point and taps the button for the minivan door to slide open.

But Maddy hits the button, and the door jerks shut again.

“Mommy,” she says.

“Time to go, Maddysaurus.” To Rebecca’s own ears, her voice sounds chirpy and fake. It sounds like the kind of voice Sheila Evans would use. “Let’s not hold up the line.”

But Maddy scrambles forward, leaning past the console to whisper hotly in Rebecca’s ear. “Bao-Bao isn’t Bao-Bao. Someone replaced him.”

Behind them, a horn blares. In the rearview, Rebecca sees Sheila give a lipsticked grin and a semi-aggressive wave for her to move along.

“No one replaced Bao-Bao,” Rebecca says on autopilot. She has long prided herself on her honesty, and yet now when it matters most, how easily she lies, how quickly it comes. “Don’t be silly, Maddysaurus.”

Maddy stays leaning forward, her backpack crowding the ceiling of the van, looking at her mom. Her expression is confusion and dismay. “I said, don’t call me that!”

The horn sounds again, and then another, a chorus of impatience.

“You have to get out, honey,” Rebecca says.

Maddy gives her a bruised look and slides toward the rear, tugged by the weight of her backpack. Rebecca glances back. Maddy’s brow is furrowed the way it gets when she talks about Sydney and the Mean Girls.

She looks betrayed.

Because she has been.

Patrick, a kiss-and-ride mainstay, helps gather Maddy out of the minivan and then knocks semi-aggressively on the side panel for Rebecca to get moving.

Rebecca pulls out.

In the rearview she watches Sheila shaking her head, rolling her eyes at one of the mom volunteers through the window.

Rebecca drives several blocks toward home.

Signaling responsibly, she pulls the minivan over to the curb.

She hears Maddy in her head, the scared whisper: Bao-Bao isn’t Bao-Bao. Then she replays herself gaslighting her daughter: Don’t be silly, Maddysaurus.

What is happening to her? What is she doing?

Her breaths jerk quicker and quicker until she lowers her face into her hands and sobs.

Chapter 31

“ We have a no-return policy ,” Luca tells Rebecca and Mark over Zoom.

Their officious Experience Facilitator is, as always, impeccably made up, smoky eyes and bloody lipstick. A black turtleneck furls beneath that clearly defined jawbone. Her hair is drawn back sharply enough to trace the perfectly smooth curve of her skull. In the superb lighting, her cheekbones are contoured. She is devastatingly beautiful.

If she is real.

Rebecca and Mark are huddled together on Maddy’s bed, Mark’s laptop open before them. Maddy plays on the interlocking foam tiles that form a play area on her floor. She snaps together one of her Lego 3-in-1s, transitioning it from bald eagle to scorpion. To diminish sensory overload, she wears pink padded noise-canceling headphones. Chewing her bottom lip, she is entranced in the work of building, her fingers deft and confident. The softness of twilight through the slats lies across her face, her big expressive eyes so open, so vulnerable. With her unfiltered EQ, unfakeable kindness, and unquenchable curiosity, she is the purest being Rebecca has ever known.

For not the first time, Rebecca wonders if her daughter is the one who is autistic or if in fact the ones actually on the spectrum are all the so-called normal girls with their Snapchat streaks and numb expressions and social-hierarchy dominance games.

“What does that mean?” Mark says, “precisely?”