I'll Be You(3)

She turned to me and smiled, hands clutched tight to her chest, having already shaken off the bad news and moved on to the good. That was my mother: conflict averse. When Elli and I were children and used to fight, my mother would just close the door to our bedroom as if shutting the door might mean our fight wasn’t happening at all. If one of us went to her to tattle, she would stick her fingers in her ears and say, I can’t hear you. She lived in terror that the tiniest crack in her world might let a river of woe come pouring through. This approach hadn’t done much good when it came to me.

I thought about the baby—toddler. I wasn’t sure what a two-year-old even looked like. “Two years old. So—she can walk and talk?”

My mother opened the front door and a blast of cool air hit me in the face. “For God’s sake, Samantha. Yes, she can walk. That child is constantly in motion, and with my hips the way they are, you understand why I just can’t keep up. She needs someone quick and young to keep an eye on her. To take her places—to the park, or the beach—and wear her out so she actually sleeps.”

“Sounds easy enough.”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” I couldn’t tell whether this was a hypothetical, or a jab at me. But she was smiling, at least. We stood in the foyer of the quiet house, the sounds from outside sucked up by the beige carpet and slip-covered couches. I could see a purple crayon streak on the hallway wall, only partially rubbed away. There was an animal cracker under the console. It looked like the house hadn’t been vacuumed in at least a week. My mother was clearly losing it.

She looked at me, tiny muscles tightening around her lips. “Elli…Well, I’m not going to text her to let her know that you’re here. She might not—” She hesitated. “Your sister never explained what happened. Why you haven’t spoken in so long. I wasn’t sure…” Her voice trailed off again and I knew what she was thinking, that Elli might not want me taking care of her child. I felt a rush of blood to my cheeks; considering last year’s debacle, it was possible my mother wasn’t so wrong.

“It was all just a misunderstanding,” I said. “We’re going to work it out eventually.”

“I’m sure you will.” She reached out, took my hand, and squeezed it, a nervous smile on her face. “You’ll let me know if you don’t think you’re up for this after all, right?”

“I’m doing great, Mom. It’s all behind me. Promise.” I smiled a radiantly toothy smile that I’d perfected with my acting coach at fifteen, a smile that exuded trust me. I’m going to take the best fucking care of this child, I thought. They are going to be blown away by what a good aunt I am, how much I’ve changed. It’s going to be all ice cream and candyfloss around here. I pushed past the inconvenient fact that I had never spent any time with children, never paid close attention to them at all. I made a point not to coo at the babies who came into the café strapped to their fathers’ chests in BabyBj?rns and getting latte foam dripped on their downy heads. A baby, a family—it was so far from the world that I’d built for myself (correction: the hole I’d dug for myself) that it was easier to just fling that notion even further away and to think of reproduction as a monetizable bodily function, rather than an emotional imperative. I’d seen what that desperate need had done to my sister. It wasn’t pretty.

Better to want nothing at all, and then you’ll never be disappointed.

So here’s the sum total of what I knew about kids: They spilled cocoa on the café floor and left pee on the bathroom seats and fingerprints on the pastry display case. They were cute but destructive and seemed to demand a lot of attention. But I didn’t not like them. So surely I could handle one single kid.

As I was imagining this, my mother looked back through the front door and eyed my Mini Cooper with trepidation. “Can you fit a car seat in that thing? What’s the safety rating? Charlotte’s still rear-facing, you know.”

“I don’t even know what that means.”

“It means the car seat faces the rear, darling.” My mother turned to study me, trying to figure out if I was really this dim. I offered her a reassuring smile: Just kidding.

“It’s not like I have another car sitting around. Can I just borrow yours?” My mother drove a silver SUV, all five-foot-one of her hoisted up as high as the front seat would go. I figured she felt safe up there in her tank, looking down at all the people for once.

My mother sighed again. “I guess yours will be fine. It won’t be long until your sister gets back anyway.”

My flip-flops sank into the carpet as I stepped down into the living room, assailed by a sudden wash of memories of this house. Elli lying on the living room rug, a square of sun on her face, as I lacquered her toes with glitter polish. Myself, coming to on the guest bathroom floor, pills spilling from my purse. I felt my heart settle low in my chest, a precipitous plunge of panic. What had I done?

“I can only stay for a long weekend. Three days. Maybe four,” I lied.

“Oh, Elli will be back home by then,” my mother said cheerfully. “I’m sure of it. She’ll get what she needed from that place and return. She always does the right thing. You know your sister.”

Did I? I knew I had, once. Now I wasn’t so sure.