The Mothers(72)

“Sleeping,” Monique said. Then she smiled. “Hey, why don’t we get some exercise? Let’s go for a run.”

“I don’t feel like it.”

“Why not?”

“You run too fast.”

“I’ll jog, then. Come on—let’s just get out of the house. It’ll be good for you.”

Monique stooped, picking up the pair of sneakers off the floor. She couldn’t resist it, fixing things.

“I think I’m going by the house today,” Aubrey said. “Just to pick up a few things after work.”

Monique paused, kneeling in front of the closet. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” she said.

“It’s my house. You said that.”

“But you still refuse to kick him out.”

“Where’s he supposed to go?”

“I don’t know. He should’ve fucking thought about that before.”

“It’s not a big deal, Mo,” she said. “He works late today.”

“Do you want me to go with you?”

“It’s fine,” she said. “I’ll be in and out.”

That night, she unlocked her front door and pushed it open slowly, like entering a stranger’s home. She did not hang her keys on the hook she’d made Luke nail to the wall because he always forgot where he put his. She did not slide her jacket on a hanger in the closet or even take off her shoes. She paused at the side table where they set the mail—a stack of letters from Nadia. She did not open them, because she knew what they would say, but she flipped them over to ensure the seal was intact. Luke hadn’t opened them either. She thought, as she often did, of the two of them whispering about her in bed. Stop, she told herself. A cord stretched from her to her baby girl, but she wondered if, along with food and nutrients, she was sending other things to her child. If a baby could feed off her sadness. Maybe that cord never broke. Maybe she was still feeding off her mother.

She flipped on the light in the guest room that she and Luke had imagined as a nursery. Before their years of infertility, back when they were newly married and hopeful, pointing at blank spaces and conjuring a crib, a planet mobile, walls painted a color soft and dreamlike. Her sister had brought her paint swatches to study, but she’d stared at lemon yellows and waxy greens, nothing quite right as she and Luke had imagined. She heard the lock click in the doorway and closed her eyes. She’d lied to her sister earlier—she knew Luke came home early on Thursdays but she was too ashamed to admit she missed him. She was not supposed to be the type of woman who forgave so readily—but she didn’t feel like a woman at all anymore. She carried a girl inside her, a girl both she and Luke, and she had become three people in one, an odd trinity.

“Wow,” Luke said, when she turned around.

He had not seen her since she’d called to tell him she was pregnant. She felt his eyes slide over her body, her swelling stomach, the ugly maternity sweatpants, and he seemed to marvel at the sight. Maybe she wasn’t as beautiful as Nadia, as brave, as smart—but she was the mother of his child. She and Nadia lived on a forever tilting floor between love and envy, and she finally felt that floor tilt until she could stand. She was birthing the kept child. She had something Nadia never would, and for the first time, she felt triumphant over Nadia Turner.

“Do you still see her?” she said.

“No,” he said. “Never. Aubrey, I just—”

“Or talk to her?”

He shook his head. She didn’t ask if he still loved her, because she feared the answer.

“I didn’t come back to see you,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about the nursery and my sister’s house is too small—”

“Of course,” he said. “Let’s do it here. What do you want? I’ll get it.”

She imagined the two of them assembling the nursery piece by piece, the way she and her sister had redecorated the guest room when she first moved in. They’d created the bedroom from Aubrey’s fantasies, a room she had imagined while sleeping on trundles and couches and motel cots, a room she had assembled in her mind when she needed a place to hide. Her mother’s boyfriend touched her and she hung a picture frame, spread a thick quilt on the bed, traced the floral wallpaper with her fingernail.

She and Luke could create a beautiful world for their daughter and she wouldn’t know any different.

“I have to think about it some more,” she said.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. Think all you want.” He slid his hands in his pockets, taking a tiny step toward her. “Can I—is she kicking yet?”

“No,” she said. “Not yet. I’ll tell you when she kicks.”

She headed to the front door, past the key hook, the coat closet, the side table. Then she paused and grabbed Nadia’s stack of letters. The most recent one had no return address, only the words Please forgive me written on the envelope in smudged blue ink.

—

BY FEBRUARY, Nadia’s father had started taking slow walks around the block in the evening. He wore a navy blue windbreaker zipped up to his neck and she perched on the front steps, watching him make one slow loop and then another. He no longer needed her help, but she still did small things for him, cooking dinner and washing his clothes. Every two weeks, she cut his hair with her mother’s clippers, wondering what her mother would say if she could see them now, if she’d be surprised by how their lives had melded, if she’d foreseen this in the moment she pushed her little girl forward and urged her to kiss her daddy hello. The February bar exam came and went, and Nadia started thinking about July. She could take the California bar, not the Illinois, and move back home for good. Find a job somewhere close, maybe downtown San Diego, only a forty-minute drive away, so she could still take her father to church on Sundays. She could do what every girl in Oceanside did: marry a Marine and dream of nowhere else. What was not to love about this place where there were no winters and no snow? She could find a nice man and live in this eternal summer.