The Mothers(53)

“I know about you and Nadia,” she said. “I know you slept with her.”

He couldn’t see her face. She was still bent away, one hand holding her hair out of the zipper’s track. He froze, unsure whether to deny it or apologize.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I just want you to know that I know.”

How did she know? What had Nadia told her? Or maybe Aubrey had sensed it on her own, like spotting paint clinging to their fingertips that neither had been careful enough to wash off. Only hours into their marriage and he’d already hurt her. But he would be smarter now. He ran his hands along the smooth cups of Aubrey’s shoulders and kissed the back of her neck. She was better than him but that would make him better. He would be good to her.

—

ON THE FLIGHT back to Detroit, Nadia dreamed about Baby. Baby, no longer a baby, now a toddler, reaching and grabbing. Pulling at her earrings until she unhooks his chubby fingers. Baby hungry always for her face. Baby growing into a child, learning words, rhyming -at words from a car seat on the way to school, writing his name in green crayon in the front of all his picture books. Baby running with friends at the park, pushing girls he likes on the swing. Baby digging for Indian clay in the sandbox and coming home smelling like pressed grass. Baby flying planes in the backyard with Grandpa. Baby searching for hidden photos of Grandma. Baby learning how to fight. Baby learning how to kiss. Baby, now a man, stepping on an airplane and slinging his bag into the overhead bin. He helps an older woman with hers. When he lands, wherever he’s headed, he gets his shoes shined and stares into the black mirror, sees his face, sees his father’s, sees hers.





TEN


Scripps Mercy Hospital called at midnight, and Nadia knew before answering the phone that her father was dead.

She had been half dreaming and she might have slept through the shrill ringing altogether if Zach hadn’t jabbed her in the back. As soon as she’d cracked open an eye and seen her phone screen light up with an unknown number, she knew that something terrible had happened to her father. A car wreck. A heart attack. He’d left the earth while she was sleeping, slipped away as silently as her mother had. But when she’d answered, a nurse told her that her father had dropped a barbell on his chest while lifting weights in the backyard. A crushed diaphragm, two broken ribs, and a punctured lung. He was in critical but stable condition.

She hung up. Beside her, Zach groaned into his pillow. She’d met him in Civil Procedure I when they were both 1Ls. He was the golden boy from Maine, skin tanned from summers spent boating, blond hair ruffled like a Kennedy. His father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had all been attorneys. She was the first-generation student who checked out textbooks from the library because she couldn’t afford to buy them, whose stress about her mounting student loans only offset her fear of flunking. When he’d first asked her out at a party after their first-semester finals, she told him she doubted they had anything in common.

“Why?” he said. “Because I’m white?”

He liked to refer to his whiteness the way all white liberals did: only acknowledging it when he felt oppressed by it, otherwise pretending it didn’t exist. She had been wrong after all—they did have a few things in common. They both wanted to practice civil rights law. They both knew what it was like to grow up in towns hugged by the ocean. And they both liked to text each other at the end of long nights studying, inevitably ending up together in bed. She didn’t expect much from him, which was liberating. He was a good time and she needed one. Breaking up with Shadi had drained her and law school had turned her into a stressed-out wreck. She drank so many pots of coffee while she studied that the smell of coffee made her feel anxious. Zach’s good humor, his easy looks, his expectation that life open itself to him were a comfort. She’d never asked him for emotional support before, but later, she felt grateful that she hadn’t been alone when she received the phone call about her father. Zach drove to her apartment and helped her pack a bag. She was moving numbly, grabbing handfuls of clothes out of drawers and stuffing them in a suitcase.

“You know I haven’t visited my dad in three years?” she said.

She hadn’t flown home since Aubrey and Luke’s wedding, since Mrs. Sheppard had cornered her in the lobby of the reception hall. In the years that followed, she’d reexamined everything about that summer before college: the pastor’s tentative visit, when he’d seemed unusually invested in her well-being, as if surveying damage he’d caused; Mrs. Sheppard’s coldness at work, how surprisingly kind she’d seemed right before Nadia left. Had she thought that Nadia might tell? Was that the real reason she gave Luke the money for the abortion? Not to help a girl in need but to make her go away? Nadia imagined the pastor’s wife in line at the bank sliding her withdrawal slip to the teller, how quickly she must have stuffed the cash in an envelope, paranoid that she might encounter a congregation member who would see the stack of money and somehow know what it would purchase. For years, Mrs. Sheppard had known her secret. For years, Nadia had thought she was hiding, when hiding had been impossible all along.

Her secret had unraveled, and Luke had never planned to tell her that his parents knew. He could’ve warned her when he’d brought her the money. She would’ve been upset with him for telling them, of course, but she had been too desperate to complain about where the money had come from. Now she only felt angry. She imagined her father settling in his pew each Sunday, sedate and unaware as the Sheppards eyed him. Poor Robert, too busy carting loads in his truck to know what had happened in his own household, blind to everything but his grief. And when was the last time she’d even spoken to her father? Really talked to him, not just called on Christmas or left a voice mail for his birthday. He didn’t like talking on the phone much and she’d been so wrapped up in her own life. She sat on the edge of her bed, suddenly exhausted. She hated hospitals and didn’t want to see her father in one.