The Mothers(41)

No matter where they went, they didn’t have sex. Kissing was fine and sometimes touching was okay, but always over the clothes and always above the waist. He’d never dated a girl before who he hadn’t seen naked and he burned, imagining what it would be like to really touch her. When they spoke on the phone at night, he pictured her in bed, lying against the sheets in tiny shorts and a tank top with no bra. He touched himself sometimes as she talked about her day, thinking about how her nipples would look poking against white cotton. He always felt guilty afterward for defiling her image. Dirty.

Under her thin T-shirt, he could make out the swell of her breasts and he wanted to touch her but he stopped himself. She wanted a secret. She was trying to be serious. He thought about mentioning the boy at the baseball game. He hadn’t stopped thinking about the smoothness of the boy’s skin but that sounded creepy, even in his own head. She wouldn’t understand. He barely understood it himself.

“I got a girl pregnant once,” he said. “She didn’t keep it.”

Aubrey was quiet a minute. “Who is she?” she finally said.

“A girl I used to know,” he said. “I loved her, but she didn’t want the baby.”

“What happened to her? The girl, I mean.”

“It was a long time ago,” he said. “We haven’t really talked since.”

She reached for his hand. He felt relieved, even though he still couldn’t bring himself to tell her the whole truth.

“Tell me something,” he said. “Something you never told anyone.”

She stared up at the ceiling. Then she said, “When I was little, I used to think I had superpowers.”

He laughed. “What?”

“Super senses,” she said. “Not powers, because they didn’t make me feel stronger. But you know how in biology class, they used to talk about how animals adapt? Like how over time, fish at the bottom of the ocean started doing weird things like glowing in the dark so they can lure prey and survive? It was like that.”

“What type of superpower?” he said.

“Like I could smell if a man was good or bad. Or I could jump out of my skin when he touched me.”

“Who?”

“And I could hear really good,” she said. “I could hear him moving throughout the apartment, like a rat clicking through the pipes. I could hear him before he got to my room. And I always wondered why my mom never heard but I told myself she couldn’t. Because she didn’t have super senses.”

She started to cry. His clumsy hands cupped her face and he kissed her wet cheeks, her jaw, her forehead. He buried his face in her neck, wanting to keep her in her skin.





EIGHT


We forgot about Nadia Turner, the way any unseen person is unthought of. She was a pretty, unmothered girl who’d wrecked her daddy’s truck, and after, she fell out of our minds. Except for the few moments she popped up, like when someone asked Robert Turner how his daughter was doing and he said fine, just fine, finishing up her sophomore year. Or working an internship in Wisconsin this summer, yeah, some government thing, who knows. Robert continued to lend his truck. The first lady did not hire another assistant. But we didn’t see Nadia Turner again. Not Thanksgiving. Not Christmas. Not long patches of summer while we were sweating in our prayer room, cycling through cards filled with requests. In hot months, wanting always reaches its peak.

Only years later, years after we heard the rumor, have we collected the signs. Betty says weren’t it peculiar that she’d never wanted to volunteer in the children’s church room, not even when she was flitting and following Aubrey Evans around? Agnes, the most attuned to spiritual things, says she passed the girl in the church lobby once and saw a baby trailing behind her. A little boy in knee socks, and when Agnes glanced back, he was gone. Oh I knew, she says, when we bring up Nadia Turner. I knew right away, just as soon as I seen her. I can always tell an unpregnant girl.

After a secret’s been told, everyone becomes a prophet.

—

A WINTER, AND THEN ANOTHER, and then another. Soon, Nadia had been gone so long, she felt guilty about returning home at all. By senior year, she thought of Oceanside as a tiny beach setting trapped inside a snow globe; occasionally, she might take it down from her bookshelf and gaze at it, but she could never fit inside. As graduation neared, she took the LSAT and applied to law school at NYU and Duke and Georgetown, any program that might keep her away from home, finally accepting an offer from the University of Chicago. She had planned to work throughout the summer in Ann Arbor, then move to Chicago in the upcoming fall. But home tugged her back in the form of a breathless phone call from Aubrey: Luke had proposed that night, they were getting married, she wanted Nadia to hear it first.

“What’s the matter?” Shadi asked, when she hung up the phone. He perched on the edge of the couch. “I thought she’s your friend.”

“She is.”

“So why aren’t you happy?”

“Because her fiancé’s a dick.”

“Then why’s she marrying him?”

“She doesn’t know it.”

A different man, a more perceptive one, might have asked how Nadia knew. But Shadi just pushed off the couch and went to boil noodles for dinner. He didn’t ask certain questions about her life before him because he didn’t want to know the answers. She was happy to oblige him, avoiding any mention of the summer before college altogether. She couldn’t tell him about Luke and the baby. Shadi was a good, progressive boy but maybe he wouldn’t understand why she’d gone to the abortion clinic. Maybe abortion seemed different when it was just an interesting topic to write a paper about or debate over drinks, when you never imagined it might affect you. And since she couldn’t tell him about the baby, she couldn’t explain why she’d been so devastated when Aubrey visited two years ago and announced that she’d been spending time with Luke. At first, Nadia didn’t even hear her. She was so excited to see her, she could hardly believe that Aubrey was actually here, in the passenger’s seat of Shadi’s Corolla, which he’d graciously lent her so she could pick Aubrey up from Detroit Metro Airport. On the ride back to Ann Arbor, Nadia kept glancing at Aubrey and grinning, already imagining the dive bars she would bring her to, the frat parties that would make Cody Richardson’s house seem as quiet and peaceful as a library. She would be introducing her college boyfriend and her college friends to her back-home friend, those two disparate parts of her life blending in a way that felt sophisticated and mature. Then she realized that Aubrey had mentioned Luke.