The Mothers(58)

He guided her to the kitchen table and microwaved a plate of chicken and rice. She hugged herself, watching him move quietly around her kitchen, catching the microwave before it beeped, quietly shutting the utensil drawer. He set the steaming plate in front of her.

“Eat,” he said.

“I should’ve visited,” she said.

“You gotta eat something.”

“I should’ve come home more.”

“How would that change anything? Even if you’d been there, what was you gonna do? Lift a hundred pounds off him?” He slid the plate toward her. “You gotta eat now. You gotta stay strong so you can help him too.”

“I left him,” she said.

“You went to school. He wanted you to.”

“I left him like she did.”

He touched her cheek and she closed her eyes, melting into the softness of his fingers.

“No,” he said. “It’s not the same.”

“It is,” she said. “I feel like I have to be her for the both of us.”

She started to cry. Luke pressed her head against his shoulder, then he guided her away from the kitchen table. In the bathroom, he knelt on his good leg and ran water into the tub.

“Why are you doing this?” she said.

“Because,” he said evenly, “I want to take care of you.”

Later, he would set a glass of water on her nightstand and tuck her in bed. She would fall into a heavy sleep, relaxing for the first time in weeks because Luke was in the living room watching over her father. Before drifting off, she would think about how much she had wanted this when she was waking up in the abortion clinic. For Luke to be there, taking care of her. She was exhausted from taking care of herself. But for now, Luke stepped out as she undressed, as if he hadn’t seen her naked before, as if he didn’t already know the contours of her body, down to the dimple on her stomach where, her mother used to say, God had kissed her. Luke had kissed that same dimple before, fitting his lips against the divine’s. She sank into the warm bubble bath and closed her eyes.

—

IN THE MORNING, Luke brought her father’s medicine and Nadia kissed him in the kitchen. The paper drugstore bag crinkled in his hands as he hooked an arm around her waist. In her bedroom, the curtains whipped open in the breeze and Luke lowered her onto her childhood bed, which squeaked under their weight. Quiet, quiet. Not the rushed motions of their youth, a dress shoved up to her stomach, jeans sagging to his knees. Now he unbuttoned his shirt and folded it on the back of her desk chair. He slipped her socks down her ankles. He loosened her freshly washed hair and buried his face in it. Now they were slow and deliberate, the way hurt people loved, stretching carefully just to see how far their damaged muscles could go.





ELEVEN


It wasn’t an affair.

Affairs were for boozy, lonely housewives or horny businessmen, real adults doing real adult things, not sneaking her high school boyfriend into her childhood bed. Nadia felt layers of the past peeling away; she was slowly stepping backward into her old life. Luke on top of her, his familiar warmth and weight, every man since him melting away like the springtime fog. He visited each day during his lunch break and she snuck him into her room while her father took his afternoon nap. In her bed, Luke wasn’t married anymore. He didn’t know Aubrey. She was seventeen again and tiptoeing with Luke through her parents’ house, except now they had to be extra quiet, hoping that his cane wouldn’t drum too loudly against the floor.

In her bed, she believed the impossible. She felt herself growing younger, her skin softer and tighter, her mind unfilling with the textbooks she’d read. Luke uncrippled, unswallowing aspirin by the palmfuls. Unloving Aubrey. He kissed Nadia and she felt untouched, their baby unforming inside of her, their lives separating.

She unhinged from time, her days splintering into before and after. Before Luke visited, she cleaned the kitchen, helped her father to the bathroom, gave him his medicine, showered. She combed her hair but never put on makeup—too much effort would ruin the naturalness of their tryst—and helped her father to his armchair. After Luke, she showered again, closing her eyes into the steam, as if the hot water could rinse away what she’d just done.

Some days, they did not have sex. Some days, Luke sat at the kitchen table while she made him a sandwich. She felt him watching her as she cut it in half and imagined that this small moment was normal for them. She slid into the chair across from him and propped a leg onto his lap; he ate and under the table, stroked her calf. Affairs were shadowy and secretive, not lunches shared in a sunbathed kitchen while her father napped in the living room. But these quiet, clothed days felt the most treacherous, the most intimate.

“I love you,” he whispered one afternoon, his fingers stroking her stomach, and she wondered if he was speaking to her at all or the ghost of the child they’d made. Could you ever truly unlove a child, even one you never knew? Or did that love transform into something else? She wished he hadn’t said anything at all; he was tugging at the edges of her fantasy. What was love to her anyway? Her mother had told her she loved her and then she’d left. There was nothing lonelier than the moment you realized someone had abandoned you.

“You left me,” she said. “You left me in that clinic—”

“But I’m here,” he said. “I came back.”