The Mothers(22)

“I don’t know. He left when I was little.”

“Fine. Your mom, then.”

Aubrey chewed on her thumbnail. “We haven’t talked in a while.”

“How long is a while?”

“Almost a year.”

Nadia had since grown used to the ebb and flow of their conversations, the opening up and shutting down, the ease forward, the retreat, so she just nodded and pretended to understand, the way she would pretend all her life when friends complained about their mothers. Rolling her eyes along with them while they ranted about mothers who disapproved of their jobs or their boyfriends, always sympathizing, always smiling, even though she hated them for complaining. She understood Aubrey even less. What did it feel like, she wondered, to be the one who’d left?

—

IF YOU DROVE east from the beach, if you left behind the surf shacks and bait shops and ice cream parlors, the lean surfers, the rent-a-cops cruising along the harbor, you’d reach the Back Gate. The entry to Camp Pendleton was guarded by armed Marines, but outside its border was a not-bad, not-good neighborhood. Here’s how you could tell: the fences were higher but the houses wore no metal gates over their windows; the Pizza Hut hid behind bulletproof glass but they stayed open late at night; and cops still patrolled, more than they did in good neighborhoods, but more than they did in bad neighborhoods already abandoned to their own chaos. In this not-bad, not-good neighborhood, Aubrey lived with her sister and her sister’s girlfriend in a little white house. The house itself was simple, but Aubrey’s bedroom was surprisingly ornate. The walls were painted a dusty green with silver flowers, and white Christmas lights traced the ceiling. Silver curtains rippled in the windows and swaths of lace draped over the bed like a wedding veil. Her first visit, Nadia had wandered through the room slowly, her arms behind her back, afraid to touch anything, as if she were in a museum.

“I couldn’t sleep when I first moved in,” Aubrey said, pointing to a dream catcher that hung from the ceiling. “Kasey thought this might help.”

Kasey was slender and lean like an alley cat, and she had long, dirty-blonde hair she liked to rumple in the middle of conversations, as if to prove how little she cared about how her hair looked. She was a bartender downtown at the Flying Bridge and she liked telling stories about her regulars. A man who hated touching dry glass. A woman who was deathly afraid of pickles.

“You know, them big ones they give you with your sandwich? Scared shitless. Runs and screams if you bring one near her, even if it’s still in a jar. Wild, huh?”

Kasey had traveled west eight years ago with her big brother, who was stationed at Camp Pendleton. She was lovesick over a straight girl and had fled to California to forget about her. On the long drive from Tennessee, she’d plucked the dream catcher off a shelf at a truck stop, wanting it for no other reason than the fact that she could want it. Now the dream catcher drifted inside a bedroom almost painful in its effort. Aubrey said that her sister helped her decorate the room after she’d moved in.

“Mo thought we needed to do something together,” she said. “We hadn’t seen each other in a few years.”

“Why not?” Nadia said.

“She left for college.”

“And she just never came back?”

Aubrey shifted slowly, one foot to the other. “Well, she didn’t like Paul.”

“What was wrong with him?”

“He hit my mom,” she said.

“Oh.” Nadia paused in front of the bookshelf. “Did he hit you?”

“Sometimes.”

Nadia couldn’t imagine a grown man hitting her. Even when she’d misbehaved as a child, her father had always carried her to her mother, who did the spanking, as if discipline were something to be dealt with between women.

“Well, what’d your mom say?” she said.

“She’s still with him.” Aubrey shrugged, then hopped off the bed. “Come on. Let’s go outside.”

Nadia finally understood, why Aubrey had left and why her mother had let her, why her sister had helped her create a bedroom out of a Disney movie, why Mrs. Sheppard cherished her. In a way, Nadia almost felt lucky. At least her mother had been sick—at least she’d only tried to hurt herself. At least her mother would’ve never let a man hit her child. Her mother was dead, but what could be worse than knowing that your mother was alive somewhere but she wanted a man who hit her more than she wanted you?

On the Fourth of July, Nadia sat on Aubrey’s porch, watching the neighbors set up fireworks in the street. The city was hosting a fireworks show downtown at the pier, but it wasn’t the Fourth of July without illegal fireworks, Kasey had said. She was appalled by the strictness of California fireworks law, so she cheered on the people who smuggled them over from Tijuana to set off in the neighborhood. What was the harm? It wasn’t as if people were setting off bombs. She sipped her beer, wrapping an arm around Monique, who watched the neighbors in the street and shook her head.

“Someone’s gonna blow a hand off,” she said. “I just know it.”

She was not a mother but she had a mother’s gift of rushing to the worst possible outcome. She was a trauma nurse at Scripps Mercy Hospital, so she encountered the worst possible outcome daily. But even if she hadn’t been a nurse, she was the type to worry. When she came home from work, she always asked if they had eaten. She reminded Aubrey to take her vitamins and called after her to grab a jacket, it gets chilly downtown, oh don’t look at me like that, you know you always get cold. A man in the middle of the street squawked as a car swerving around the display nearly hit him. Monique shook her head again.