The Push(28)

“Are you going to be okay?”

“Oh, yes, I’ll be okay. I’m not sick, not exactly.”

“What’s wrong, then?” I knew it was bold of me to ask, but I needed to know. I could smell something strange, pungent and sweet, like the yogurt other kids had in their lunches at school. There was a small container of pills on the table beside her, and I wondered if they were the same ones I had seen in my mother’s room.

“I’m not sure it’s my place to talk to you about the birds and the bees, but you’re a mature ten-year-old.” I must have turned red. My mother and I had never talked about sex or where babies came from, but I had an idea of how it all worked from kids at school. Mrs. Ellington lifted the comforter from her middle and pulled her white nightshirt down taut over her swollen stomach. I hadn’t noticed her being fat there before, but she was always dressed so nicely in things that weren’t tight and ill fitting, like my mother’s.

“You’re having a baby?”

“I was. I was pregnant. But the baby didn’t make it.”

I had no concept of what not making it meant, of what would have happened to the baby inside her. Where had it gone? What had happened? She must have sensed my confusion. She slowly pulled the comforter back over her middle, as though it hurt to cover it up, but she smiled through whatever pain was in her. I saw she had a hospital bracelet on her arm, the same kind I’d seen my mother come home with once years ago after she’d had a bad bout of the flu. I didn’t know what to say. I pointed to the pills on her nightstand.

“Do you want more of those?”

She laughed. “Well, yes, but I can only have one every six hours.”

“Will Thomas and Daniel be sad?”

“I hadn’t told them they’d be big brothers yet. I was going to tell them soon.”

“Are you sad?”

“Yes, I’m very sad. But you know what? God has a way of taking care of things.” I nodded as though I understood, as though God were someone I trusted, too.

“She was a little girl. I would have had a daughter.” She put her finger to my nose and her eyes welled with tears. “Just like you.”





32





There was something special about the street of old row houses, the way the air smelled like winter-flowering honeysuckle when we stepped out of the car. I would learn that the backyard was full of them. Neighborhood basketball hoops lined the dead-end road, and the elementary school down the street was rated one of the best in the area. We could do most of the work ourselves. Offers were being accepted the following week, but we agreed on a number right then and there. Our real estate agent got the deal done by dinnertime. She called with the news while we anxiously ate pizza at a restaurant where we’d soon become regulars.

Three bedrooms. A quick closing. I was starting to believe that life would finally move along. I was desperate for it.

We had needed a change, although we didn’t speak of the new house that way. We didn’t speak of needing a change at all. It had been three months since the accident and I no longer dreamed of the playground. I no longer heard the sound of his body hitting the pavement when I poured cereal or closed the car door. Time had given me that. Time, and my will to forget. I no longer went to the park. I no longer walked anywhere near there. The boy’s name was never mentioned. Violet had started sleeping through the night again, and the fog that muddled my brain seemed to have lifted.

You had come home one day and opened your laptop to the house listing on a real estate agent’s website. I didn’t even know you had been looking.

For the next two months the three of us spent every weekend there, breaking things up with tools we borrowed and meeting with tradesmen who did what we couldn’t. We agreed we couldn’t manage a full renovation right now, but there were things that couldn’t wait: new flooring, new bathrooms. The list grew with your keen architect’s eye. The week of the move, your parents came to town to help with Violet while we packed and unpacked. They brought her over to say good-bye to the apartment before we handed back the keys. Ceremony was your mother’s thing, not mine. Somewhere along the way I’d lost the sentimental attachment to the place where our family began. Even you had—I could tell by the relief in your face when we left that building for the last time. The way you dropped the keys into the manila envelope and tossed it onto the doorman’s desk.

Violet stayed with your parents at their hotel downtown while we worked until two in the morning. I moved her old baby stuff, packed in rubber bins, to the second small bedroom upstairs.

“Shouldn’t those go in the basement?” you asked.

“We’ll need them again sooner or later.”

You drew a long breath. “Let’s call it a night.”

We slept on our mattress in the middle of the floor of our new bedroom. We hadn’t remembered to turn on the heat and so we bundled up in hoodies and sweatpants underneath the blanket.

“We’ll be happy here,” I whispered and rubbed my socked feet over yours.

“I thought we always were.”





33





She must have seen my naked silhouette in the moonlight. My thin nightshirt draped the intersection of our bodies, my catlike arch, my breasts like tiny sacks of sand swinging over your face.