The Mothers(5)

Nadia thought about texting Luke. I’m here. I’m okay. But he’d just started his shift and he was probably worried enough as it was. She flipped through the magazine slowly, her eyes gliding off the pages to the blonde receptionist smiling into her headset, the traffic outside, the blue vase of seashells beside her. Her mother had hated the actual beach—messy sand and cigarette butts everywhere—but she loved shells, so whenever they went, she always spent the afternoon padding along the shore, bending to peel shells out of the damp sand.

“They calm me,” she’d said once. She’d clutched Nadia on her lap and turned a shell carefully, flashing its shiny insides. In her hand, the shell had glimmered lavender and green.

“Turner?”

In the doorway, a black nurse with graying dreadlocks read her name off a metal clipboard. As Nadia gathered her purse, she felt the nurse give her a once-over, eyes drifting past her red blouse, skinny jeans, black pumps.

“Should’ve worn something more comfortable,” the nurse said.

“I am comfortable,” Nadia said. She felt thirteen again, standing in the vice-principal’s office as he lectured her on the dress code.

“Sweatpants,” the nurse said. “Someone should’ve told you that when you called.”

“They did.”

The nurse shook her head, starting back down the hall. She seemed weary, unlike the chipper white nurses squeaking down the hallways in pink scrubs and rubber shoes. Like she’d seen so much that nothing surprised her anymore, not even a girl with a sassy mouth wearing a silly outfit, a girl so alone, she couldn’t find one person to sit with her in the waiting room. No, there was nothing special about a girl like this—not her good grades, not her prettiness. She was just another black girl who’d found herself in trouble and was finding her way out of it.

In the sonogram room, a technician asked Nadia if she wanted to see the screen. Optional, he said, but it gave some women closure. She told him no. She’d heard once about a sixteen-year-old girl from her high school who’d given birth and left her baby on the beach. The girl was arrested when she doubled back to tell a cop she’d seen a baby and he discovered that she was the mother. How could he tell, Nadia had always wondered. Maybe, in the floodlights of his patrol car, he’d spotted blood streaking the insides of her thighs or smelled fresh milk spotting her nipples. Or maybe it was something else entirely. The ginger way she’d handed the baby over, the carefulness in her eyes when he brushed sand off its downy hair. Maybe he saw, even as he backed away, the maternal love that stretched like a golden thread from her to the abandoned baby. Something had given the girl away, but Nadia wouldn’t make the same mistake. Double back. She wouldn’t hesitate and allow herself to love the baby or even know him.

“Just do it already,” she said.

“What about multiples?” the technician asked, rolling toward her on his stool. “You know, twins, triplets . . .”

“Why would I want to know that?”

He shrugged. “Some women do.”

She already knew too much about the baby, like the fact that it was a boy. It was too early to actually tell, but she felt his foreignness in her body, something that was her and wasn’t her. A male presence. A boy child who would have Luke’s thick curls and squinty-eyed smile. No, she couldn’t think about that either. She couldn’t allow herself to love the baby because of Luke. So when the technician swirled the sensor in the blue goo on her stomach, she turned her head away.

After a few moments, the technician stopped, pausing the sensor over her belly button.

“Huh,” he said.

“What?” she said. “What happened?”

Maybe she wasn’t actually pregnant. That could happen, couldn’t it? Maybe the test had been wrong or maybe the baby had sensed he wasn’t wanted. Maybe he had given up on his own. She couldn’t help it—she turned toward the monitor. The screen filled with a wedge of grainy white light, and in the center, a black oval punctuated by a single white splotch.

“Your womb’s a perfect sphere,” the technician said.

“So? What does that mean?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “That you’re a superhero, maybe.”

He chuckled, swirling the sensor around the gel. She didn’t know what she expected to see in the sonogram—the sloping of a forehead, maybe, the outline of a belly. Not this, white and bean-shaped and small enough to cover with her thumb. How could this tiny light be a life? How could something this small bring hers to an end?

When she returned to the waiting room, the girl in the jean jacket was sobbing. No one looked at her, not even the heavy woman, who was now sitting one seat over. Nadia had been wrong—this woman couldn’t be the girl’s mother. A mother would move toward a crying child, not away. Her mother would’ve held her and absorbed her tears into her own body. She would’ve rocked her and not let go until the nurse called her name again. But this woman reached over and pinched the crying girl’s thigh.

“Cut all that out,” she said. “You wanted to be grown? Well, now you grown.”

—

THE PROCEDURE only takes ten minutes, the dreadlocked nurse told her. Less than an episode of television.

In the chilly operating room, Nadia stared at the monitor that hung in front of her flashing pictures from beaches around the world. Overhead, speakers played a meditation CD—classical guitar over crashing waves—and she knew she was supposed to pretend she was lying on a tropical island, pressed against grains of white sand. But when the nurse fit the anesthesia mask on her face and told her to count to a hundred, she could only think about the girl abandoning her baby in the sand. Maybe the beach was a more natural place to leave a baby you couldn’t care for. Nestle him in the sand and hope someone found him—an old couple on a midnight stroll, a patrol cop sweeping his flashlight over beer cases. But if they didn’t, if no one stumbled upon him, he’d return to his first home, an ocean like the one inside of her. Water would break onto the shore, sweep him up in its arms, and rock him back to sleep.