The Push(29)

I moaned low and long, my hands on the headboard, and I blocked out the room around us. The closet didn’t have doors to hide the mess of laundry I hadn’t yet done, and the row of dry cleaning I hadn’t yet unbagged, and the box of clothing donations I hadn’t yet dropped off. I was buried in “yets.” The move was disorganized and the end of the renovations were slow.

Looking back, we were in the midst of the kind of mundane chaos I sometimes yearn for now.

I didn’t hear the creak of the door or the smack of her flat feet along the new hardwood that had been laid the week before. I didn’t know she was there, not until you shoved me off and swore and pulled the sheet over yourself. I lay at the end of the bed in a fetal position, where I had landed at the hand of your panic. Go back to bed. Nothing is wrong, I had told her calmly. She asked what we had been doing. Nothing, I answered. Jesus Christ, Blythe, you said, as though everything about the moment was my fault.

And it was, in a way. I was ovulating. You were tired. I had cried into my pillow. And so you rubbed my back and began kissing my neck, the kind of kisses that said you loved me but didn’t want to fuck me. There would always be another time to try, you said.

You don’t want another baby, I’d accused. Why? We lay together quietly, and later, you ran your fingers through my hair. I do want another baby, you whispered.

You were lying but I didn’t care.

I rolled over and stroked you until I felt you give in. I slipped you inside me and pretended everything was different—you, the room, the motherhood I knew—and begged you not to stop.



* * *



? ? ?

Three weeks earlier I had brought up the idea again while we brushed our teeth. You spit in the sink and ripped us each a thread of floss. Let’s see. Later. We’ll see.

There was an uncharacteristic bluntness in your voice that would have triggered my suspicion on a different day. But not then. This wasn’t about you. This was about me. The only way forward I could see for our family was to have a second child. Redemption, maybe, for everything that had gone wrong. I thought back to why we’d had Violet in the first place—you wanted a family and I wanted to make you happy. But I also wanted to prove all of my doubts wrong. I wanted to prove my mother wrong, too.

Blythe, the women in this family, we’re different. You’ll see.

I wanted another chance at motherhood.

I could not concede that I was the problem.

I often pointed to babies while I walked Violet to school. Wouldn’t that be nice? A little brother or sister? She rarely replied to me. She was increasingly in her own world, but by then the distance that grew between us made life together easier, in a way. We saw the same mother at drop-off every morning with her newborn tucked into her chest while she carefully bent over to kiss her older child good-bye.

“Two looks like a lot of work,” I once said to her, smiling.

“Exhausting, but worth it.” Worth it. There it was again. She bounced and patted his head. “He’s such a different baby. It’s a whole different experience with the second.”

Different.



* * *



? ? ?

Violet in our bedroom doorway, hands by her sides. She refused to leave until I answered her about what we had been doing. And so I explained. When two people love each other, they like to cuddle in a special way. We were silent, all of us, there in the dark. And then she walked back to her room. We should comfort her, I said to you. We should go make sure she’s okay.

“Then go,” you said. But I didn’t. We rolled away from each other in a standoff that made no sense to me.

We didn’t speak in the morning. I showered without putting on the coffee for you. On my way to the kitchen I stopped halfway down the stairs to listen to your breakfast conversation with Violet. She told you she hated me. That she wished I would die so that she lived only with you. That she did not love me. These words would have speared the heart of any other mother.

You had said to her, “Violet, she’s your mom.”

There were so many other things you could have said, but those were the words you chose.

That night I shamelessly begged you to try again. Just once more. And you agreed.





34





The mother was dressed in the same yoga clothes she always wore at drop-off, her shirt slightly wrinkled from the hamper. Her hair was leftover from the previous day’s effort. Her son stood next to her and pulled his baseball cap off. The schoolyard was electric with morning energy, tummies filled with Cheerios, faces plump from sleep. She crouched. He found his spot in her neck. I could see from where I stood that there was pain in the boy’s face; her hands closed around his head like the petals of a flower. Her mouth moved slowly in his ear. He coiled into her. He needed her. Behind him noise grew, shouts, the whip of basketball rubber on cement.

She slipped her hands down his slight shoulders and he pushed away, his small chest rising, but she pulled him back again. It was she who needed him this time. Now, her face in his neck, three seconds, maybe four. She spoke again. He squeezed his eyes. He nodded, put his hat on, pulled the brim low, and walked away. Not slowly, not with hesitation, but with anticipation, with haste, on legs that turned in slightly at the knees. She could not watch, not this morning. She turned away and left, looked down at her phone, and got lost in something that didn’t make her ache in the way her son did.