Madwoman

In the present, as the summer continues, Clove tries to find more time to write as Jane watches her children. Despite the ease that her presence has introduced into Clove’s life, Clove still feels guilty for letting another woman watch her children. She plans to meet up with the butcher at an upcoming grocery expo, which is occurring the same day as Nova’s birthday.

One day, Jane approaches Clove to start the planning process for her surrogate pregnancy, which was their original agreement—Jane would nanny Clove’s children while Clove became pregnant for her, as Jane is unable to get pregnant herself. However, Clove backs out, telling Jane that the time in her life for pregnancy is over and that another pregnancy would emotionally destroy her. Jane reacts with indignation, accusing Clove of reneging on their agreement.

During their argument, Clove senses “a current of danger” from Jane but dismisses the feeling (246), as Jane has been nothing but helpful and kind to Clove so far. Jane storms out of the house to take some time to think about her situation. Clove plays with her children, trying to remain calm about the situation. After a while, Jane returns, and Clove drops to her knees in the driveway, begging her not to tell Clove’s husband about her past. Jane accuses Clove of being paralyzed by her mother and ungrateful for her achievements in life despite her torturous childhood. When Clove wonders whether this is true, Jane tells her that she doesn’t even realize what she has.

Later that night, Jane and Clove drive to their graveyard shift at Earthside. Though Clove feels as if she’s been doing better recently—even managing to curb her spending habits—she feels annoyed by how often Jane is bringing up her mother and speculating on what life is like for her in prison. She also keeps advocating that Clove do the right thing and testify on her mother’s behalf.

Getting defensive, Clove accuses Jane of having potentially murdered her old lover, mostly to see her reaction. Jane turns bright red and deflects Clove’s attention. She tells Clove that Clove isn’t scared of her husband finding out or the potential of going to jail. Rather, Jane can see that the thing Clove is truly scared of is seeing her mother again.

That night, Jane decides that she’ll sleep at Mike’s place, so Clove drives home alone, her stomach in knots and her mind filled with memories of her mother. The next day is the first in a long while that she spends with her children without the presence of Jane, and Clove finds it difficult to regulate her anger while interacting with them. This makes her feel like her father. Just then, Jane comes back from Mike’s, and Clove can’t conceal her relief upon her arrival, despite the clear jealousy of her husband.

Clove and Jane decide to take the children to the beach. On the ride there, Jane casually mentions that she spoke to Nova and told her that her grandmother is in jail; Nova feels bad for her. In shock, Clove pulls the car over to the side of the highway. Jane tells her that it was a passing reference that Nova didn’t catch, but Clove doesn’t believe her and drives the rest of the way to the beach drowning in worry and suspicion.

At the beach, she remembers what happened in the aftermath of her father discovering her and her mother’s escape attempt. After shooting through the sliding glass door, he beat Clove’s mother hard enough to dislodge a molar and then marched them at gunpoint to his car, their plane tickets ripped in half on the floor behind them. Weeks later, Clove and her mother had mostly recovered from their wounds and were ready to try to escape again. One day, she and her parents went to the beach, where her father manipulated her into swimming far out into the ocean with him. He repeatedly threatened to drown her, having discovered the notebook where she’d planned the most recent attempt to leave. Eventually, he left her in the water to swim back to shore on her own.

In the present timeline on the way back from the beach, Jane continues to worry about Clove’s plans, telling her that meeting with the butcher is a bad idea. Clove says that she’s as irritating to her as Tootsie. In a small, hurt voice, Jane responds that she cares about Clove and only wants the best for her.

At the grocery expo, Clove and Jane work together to set up the Earthside booth. Jane has been acting distant and removed since the trip to the beach, but Clove feels grateful that she hasn’t brought up her mother since then. Clove says that she’s going to walk around to find the butcher, and before she does so, Jane pulls her aside and shows her a letter from her mother, which has already been opened. Even though she tells Clove that she needs to take the wheel, Clove reacts with fury to this betrayal, ripping up the letter in front of her. Jane begs Clove to help her mother, but Clove refuses, feeling as if her past has infected Jane incurably just as it infected the butcher.

Clove hurries off to find the butcher. She feels delight and relief upon seeing him for the first time, and they hug before heading to the butcher’s car to talk. Despite her worries and Jane’s warning, Clove and the butcher press their bodies together, kissing each other. Before they take it too far, Jane interrupts them and asks the butcher what he needs to speak to her about. The butcher admits that when they were dating, Clove had told him, while drunk, other details that she’s since repressed about what happened the night her father died. In particular, she’d thought it was possible that it wasn’t her mother who pushed her father off the balcony.

On the day that her father threatened to drown her, Clove managed to make it back to shore. She lay in the surf, feeling wonder that she’d managed to survive for so long. She ran back to her mother and tried to convince her to leave her father again, but her mother refused and brought Clove back to her father once again.

After getting home, Clove took a long nap, waking after 11 o’clock that night. Stepping out into the hallway, she saw her mother and her father standing together on the slim balcony. She advanced down the hallway, thinking of all the times her father beat her mother and running her fingers across her mother’s bloodstains on the wall. Her father kept threatening to throw Clove’s mother off the edge of the balcony and kill himself afterward. Clove rushed onto the balcony, trying to pull her father off her mother, and in the scuffle, she unbalanced her father, and he toppled over the edge of the railing. Clove’s mother started to wail, and at that moment, Clove felt herself finally break from her mother. She didn’t leave her mother at that moment, but her mother left her to go to her now-deceased father.

Clove fled the apartment and ran to Christina, who helped her set up her new life in San Francisco. Clove fled out of fear that her mother would defend her innocence by throwing Clove under the bus and telling the authorities that her daughter had killed her husband. However, that didn’t happen. Over the years, Clove’s memories adjusted to the dominant narrative, and she started to believe that her mother had murdered her father.

In the butcher’s car in the present, Clove opens the door and vomits onto the sidewalk. She realizes that all these years, her mother has sat in prison for a crime she didn’t commit, all to protect Clove. Unable to face her family, Clove decides to spend the night at the butcher’s hotel. In his room, she cries into his chest, and he tells her that she is brave and protected her mother from her father’s abuse.

Clove spends a fitful night tossing and turning on the bed’s comforter. In the morning, she picks up her phone to find many messages from a woman named Celine, her current legal name and the name of her childhood friend that she stole when she fled. However, she realizes that the phone isn’t hers but rather the butcher’s. She confronts him with the messages from Celine, and he claims that she is a woman he met at a grocery store a few months previously. They dated for a few months, but it didn’t work out. Clove doesn’t know whether to trust him, as he never knew her as Celine but only as Clove. She asks to see a photo of her, and he shows her a photo of the woman Clove knows as Jane. She hadn’t recognized her due to the years that have passed and Jane’s plastic surgery, but she is the same person as Clove’s childhood friend. In a panic, Clove flees the butcher’s room.

The butcher drives Clove back home. Today is Nova’s birthday party, and Clove desperately hopes that Jane hasn’t decided to tell her husband the truth due to not wanting to ruin it. Coming into the house, Clove discovers that her husband is alone. He tells her that Jane took the children the day before, claiming that Clove had texted her and instructed her to. However, Clove made no such text. Clove calls Jane over and over, telling her that she knows who she is and to please return her children.

The butcher knocks lightly on the sliding door. He tells Clove that he wanted to mention something else, which is that when he knew Celine, she volunteered frequently at a women’s prison in Chowchilla, where Clove’s mother is imprisoned. However, not knowing who Celine was, he hadn’t made the connection between them.

In desperation, Clove confesses the full story to her husband. He reacts with fury, telling Clove that she’s a liar who got their children kidnapped. They drive toward the prison, hoping to intercept Jane on the way.

They drive all day toward Chowchilla. Clove keeps envisioning what Jane wants with her children, worried that she might want to harm them in some way. She realizes that she doesn’t truly know who Jane is. When they reach Chowchilla, Clove’s husband spots the blue Chevy that Jane drives in a parking lot. They block Jane’s car in its spot and get out, spotting their children coming out of a fast food restaurant with Jane. Fortunately, they look unharmed and like they’re having a great time.

Clove furiously confronts Jane, who tells her that she took the children to visit their grandmother in prison. Clove says, “How dare you take this away from me” (306), as she believes that if anyone should introduce them, it should be her—and, more importantly, her choice. As an explanation, Jane tells Clove that Christina, her mother, had been poisoning her to make her sick, as she suffered from Munchausen syndrome by proxy. Jane claims that she “hadn’t had it easy” like Clove had (306), with her identity handed to her upon her leaving. To leave, she poisoned her mother with the same drugs that she had been poisoned with throughout her childhood.

Clove’s husband threatens to call the police, but Clove begs him not to. Jane convinces Clove to drive with her to a local hotel, and Clove’s husband follows close behind with the children in his car. On the drive, Jane confesses that she was the “feminist lawyer” who’d been to see Clove’s mother. She’d known where Clove was all along, as Clove was using Jane’s social security number for her new life. Clove listens to Jane’s confessions with difficulty, realizing that there were never simply good or bad people in her story but complicated people with complicated pasts.

Jane brings Clove into her hotel room and tells her that if she wants to fix the wrongs of her life, she needs to write a story that will exonerate her mother. Jane reads Clove’s drafts but realizes that something is missing. Clove knows immediately what will fix the document but tells Jane that she needs to see her mother first before she can write it. The next morning, Clove and her husband go to the prison to visit her mother. After introducing her family to her, Clove tells her mother that she wants to help free her from prison.

That night, Clove and Jane complete the writing project. They post a photo of Clove’s mother to her Instagram with a caption explaining their version of what happened. They claim that Christina had intervened in a fight between Clove’s father and mother—a convenient lie that will allow Clove to maintain her current life but also free her mother from prison. On completing the post, Clove feels relief, as the “long-standing cycle” of abuse “end[s] with [her]” (317).

The next morning, Clove sits with her husband and children at the breakfast table. Despite her worries, her husband doesn’t want a divorce. He wants to work through their issues together as a couple. Jane bursts into the room and tells Clove to check her phone. Her Instagram post has gone viral, and an army of supporters and lawyers is available to help free her mother from prison. Clove feels a deep relief and connection with her mother, promising in her mind to see the ocean with her again one day.