The Mothers(23)

“You warm enough, babe?” she said.

Aubrey was sitting under a blanket with Nadia. She rolled her eyes a little.

“I’m not a baby, Mo,” she said.

“You’re my baby,” her sister said.

Kasey laughed and Aubrey rolled her eyes again, but she didn’t look upset, not really. It was the fake-annoyed look you give to someone who could never actually bother you. Sometimes Nadia envied Aubrey, even though she felt guilty for considering the thought. Aubrey had lost her mother too, but she was loved by her sister and her sister’s girlfriend and even the first lady, three women who cared for her only because they wanted to. Both girls had been abandoned in the sand. But only Aubrey had been found. Only Aubrey had been chosen.

Monique and Kasey’s love for Aubrey hung in their eyes, and even though it wasn’t meant for Nadia, she inched closer, holding her hands up to the warmth. In the street, the neighbors huddled around, giving directions in Spanglish. Teenage girls herded babies onto the grass, while old men in flannel shirts redirected traffic and boys on skateboards looked out for cops. Reggaeton and rap blasted out windows, rattling through cars parked in driveways. Soon, fireworks would illuminate the pier, but Nadia wanted to be nowhere else but here, in a house where everyone was wanted, with a family where anyone could leave but nobody ever did. A firecracker lit up the sky, and she jumped, delighted and a little surprised, at the first spark.

—

LATRICE SHEPPARD HAD GHOST EYES.

One brown and one blue, which meant, her granddaddy had told her, that she could see heaven and earth at the same time. Her mother had gasped the first time she’d held her—something must be wrong, the blue eye blinded, maybe, already filmy with disease—but the doctor had said it was too soon to tell. “Takes time for a baby’s eyes to adjust to the world,” he’d said. “Just pay attention. If the eyes squint or cloud, there may be cause for concern.” So she’d spent the first years of her life with her mother’s face always inches from hers, studying her eyes. Maybe that was why she’d always felt there was something wrong with them, even though she could see fine. The brown eye seemed ugly next to the blue, the blue next to the brown, and she learned that it was better to just be one thing, to distill yourself into something as simple as you could. She had already begun her unending growth spurt—by the second grade, she was the first to line up in the school picture—and at lunch, she ate alone on the playground while the other girls double-Dutched to a rhyme they’d made up about her:

Latrice, the beast

She’ll make you her feast

Got two odd eyes and two big feet

The height she couldn’t hide, but the odd eyes, she tried to. She started wearing sunglasses whenever she could, in the grocery store, in her bedroom, even in the classroom, handing her teacher a fake note from her doctor describing her sensitivity to light. Later in life, she would consider her odd eyes a blessing. Not ghost eyes, but she had been gifted with a second sight nonetheless: she could look at a girl and tell if she’d been hit before. Forget bruises and scars—hit women learned to hide or explain those away. No need for stories about running into doorknobs or tripping down stairs—all she needed to do was lock her odd eyes onto theirs and she knew a woman surprised or outraged by pain from a woman who’d learned to expect it. She saw past flawless skin to diamond-shaped iron burns, gashes from golden belt buckles, necks nicked by steak knives, lips split by class rings, faces blooming purple and deep blue. She’d told Aubrey this the third time she’d invited her for tea, and after, Aubrey had stared into the mirror, wondering what else the first lady saw. Was her entire past written on her skin? Could Mrs. Sheppard see everything that Paul had done to her? At least now she knew why Mrs. Sheppard had been so kind to her. Why, after the altar call, Mrs. Sheppard had found her in the church lobby and offered her a hug; why, the following Sunday, Mrs. Sheppard had given her a small Bible with a floral cover; and why, the Sunday after that, Mrs. Sheppard had invited her into her office for tea. Aubrey didn’t even drink tea, but for months she’d sat on the other side of the gray striped settee, dropping sugar cubes into her cup. She took her tea sweet—sugar, honey, and cream.

“That’s fine in here,” Mrs. Sheppard had told her once, “but out in public, folks might think it’s juvenile, a young lady doctoring up her tea with all those sweets.” She’d corrected Aubrey gently, but Aubrey had felt so embarrassed that weeks later, she’d only added a single sugar cube to her tea.

One afternoon, she sipped the bitter tea and asked Mrs. Sheppard what had happened to Elise Turner. She lofted the question casually, as if she hadn’t been wondering it for weeks—no, months, ever since Pastor Sheppard had somberly announced the news to the congregation. At the time, he hadn’t offered a cause of death, which had raised suspicions the way only a sudden, unexplained death could. A woman Elise Turner’s age didn’t just die naturally; she hadn’t seemed ill and if she hadn’t suffered some terrible accident, then what could’ve happened to her?

“I just don’t know,” Sister Willis had said in the ladies’ room after service. “Somethin’ just don’t sound right to me.” And even though the other women around the sink had nodded, no one had expected the news that trickled in, days later, that Elise Turner had shot herself in the head. The congregation had already imagined possible shameful tragedies—an accidental drug overdose, a drunk-driving accident, even a murder caused by circumstances the pastor had thought it best to obscure. Maybe Elise had taken a lover (she could do better than Robert, couldn’t she?) and in the seedy motel room where they’d conducted their affair, the lover had killed her.