Never Have I Ever(17)

He rolled to me, making little grunty snuffles and rooting, and I hiked up my T-shirt so he could latch. He settled in to nurse in earnest, his hands fisted in my top. I wondered if the storm of bad memory that had been released in me was dripping into my baby as surely as the gin I’d pumped and dumped last night would have. I breathed, tried to be only in this sweet and quiet now, to only see my boy.

The very shape of him was beautiful and so dear to me in the faint light. I loved his big, round Charlie Brown head, still mostly innocent of hair. Takes after his dad, Davis liked to say, wry and smiling, rubbing at his own hairline, which was just beginning to recede. Oliver did favor Davis, but he had my eyes, wide-set and Irish green. He was unequivocally a good thing, and I had made him. I had put him in the world.

I rested my hand on his back to feel the pit-pat of his small, strong heart. Nursing released a cloud of hormones that could blunt life’s sharper edges. Most mornings doing this most basic job reduced the wide, black world to the rise and fall of my husband’s broad chest, the knowledge of our Mads sleeping right down the hall, and outside my fall pansy bed getting prettied up by dew to meet the sunrise. But not today.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that Roux’s game had been aimed specifically at me.

That could not be true. It only felt that way. It was a game for gaining social leverage, like something Tate would pull if she were smarter. I should have seen it when Roux took Char’s seat, the obvious power chair, as if she happened to be standing there. That had been choreography, designed to up herself in the pecking-order game women played with each other at our very worst. She’d gone fishing for guilt, and her hooks had sunk deep into me and Tate Bonasco. She’d hauled Tate up in one smooth move. But really, Roux only knew what Tate herself had confessed; she could have no idea how high the stakes were for me.

All I had to do was outbrain Tate—not a high bar to clear. Last night I’d overreacted, panicking. It had made Roux home in on me. All I’d revealed, though, was that I felt guilty about something, which was an almost universal human condition.

The thought gave me no peace, even as I ran my fingers in slow whorls on Oliver’s warm back, watching new sunlight spill lemon yellow into the room. I’d never had so much to lose. The last near-seven years had given me Char, then Maddy and Davis, now Oliver—one by one they had barnacled onto me until I was at home, for the first time in my life.

I’d grown up in a family where Mom preferred my brother and Dad preferred his job. After the accident it got worse. Dad blamed me for his having to make a lateral career move that landed us in Boston, and as for my mother? It was as if I had been coated in Teflon. Before the accident, she would at least look at me to telegraph her disapproval, her gaze twitching and flicking over my surfaces. But after, her eyes never seemed to light on me at all. I finished high school, barely, and I think it was a relief for all of us when I picked a tier-three college all the way across the country. With my grades I thought it was a miracle I got in, but I had Nana’s trust. Kids who can pay can always get in somewhere. I moved to a studio apartment by campus and I registered, but I never once went to class. It didn’t seem to matter.

The terms of the trust earmarked it for college; I couldn’t touch it if I wasn’t going, so I waited tables and then later worked at dive shops to make rent. I dated West Coast boys with tats and slouchy walks, lost souls who reminded me just enough of Tig to prick my heart. Not one of them was ever half as nice to me as he’d been. At nineteen, before I found scuba, when I was still heavily self-medicating, I went to Vegas with a surf rat named James Lee, and we woke up wearing rings. I liked James fine, but I felt alone even when he was sleeping right beside me. We split up a few months later with no drama, using a form we got at the county court clerk’s office. The only thing I kept was his last name.

My California time was like childbirth; once it was over, I forgot how awful it had been. Until now. Roux’s damned game. It had gotten inside me in a way that felt like an infection, heating and roiling the deeps within me, and things long buried were bubbling toward the surface. I hadn’t felt my past as a weighty physicality in years, but now it was a pressure in my abdomen, a humming in my hands.

Maybe I should go talk to Roux? Casually. Not about the game. I could make her some blondies as an excuse. Our set always baked for new families—another Char initiative—and I helped Char maintain a current database of neighborhood phone numbers and trusted local businesses: plumbers, roofers, lawn services, even the ever-changing crop of teenage babysitters. We didn’t usually bake for Sprite House people because at most they stayed a month or two, but Roux had come to book club.

I could walk two blocks down to the cul-de-sac, light of step, cheery, very off-the-cuff. I’d talk about raising teenagers and The House of Mirth. If she did the same, I’d know that her game had not been aimed at me. Then I could relax.

If she did bring the game up, asking me why I’d gotten upset enough to kick her out of my house last night, I could act affronted. Not even act—it was an affront, her digging in my business. I would tell her plain and simple that her awful game had brought up bad memories from my childhood, which was true enough, and tell her to back off.

Now that I had a plan, I was eager to get up and get it over with. Oliver was deeply asleep again, still latched. He was a good baby, as long as he got all his naps on schedule. If not, he could be a howling terror. I pressed one finger against the corner of his bottom lip, feeling his breath puff out warm as he released. A little milk went in a dribble down his cheek, and he rolled onto his back, chubby legs akimbo.