by Sara Shepard
She caught herself on the arm of the couch. His breath smelled like weed and barbecue potato chips. There was grease at the roots of his hair. He wasn’t terrible-looking, though. What did he get out of this? What sort of power did it give him, watching topless women clean?
“You’re pinching,” Ronnie said, looking down at his hand, which was still clamped in hers. She could sense Bethany hesitating behind her.
Charlie let go slightly. “Take your pants off?”
“Hah.” Ronnie pulled her hand away, trying not to appear unnerved. “Not funny.”
Charlie stuck out his lip in a pout. “Aw, c’mon.”
She stepped back, adopting a powerful stance. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Bethany’s eyebrows rise. Ronnie knew how to stand her ground—or at least fake it, anyway. It helped that she knew she was capable of hurting someone, if it came to that.
She knew that all too well.
She changed clothes in the powder room. Threw her hair in a ponytail. Slid on a pair of rubber flip-flops. Once she buttoned the top button of her blouse, she didn’t look like the same woman she’d been five minutes before. “See ya,” she said to Bethany in the hallway, lobbing her a kind but indifferent smile.
She left through a side door and stepped into the bright sun. The street was empty, yet Ronnie glanced right and left, feeling a strange alertness. The last few weeks, she couldn’t shake the sense that someone was tailing her. She made it a point not to take clients anywhere near Raisin Beach—she ran too much of a risk of someone spotting her around town. But maybe someone she knew was nearby? Or, worse, maybe it was Jerrod. Maybe he’d found her.
The adjacent yards were empty; not a single car rolled down the road. Ronnie looked this way and that, her heart lurching and bucking. Jerrod’s not here, she told herself. He hasn’t found you.
She had to hold on to that.
* * *
• • •
Ronnie navigated her car—the very same one she’d driven cross-country more than two years before, the bumpers starting to rust, the muffler making a worrisome rattle—to the apartment she and Lane now shared. The complex was made up of about ten low-to-the-ground pink stucco buildings. At its center was a playground, a small patch of lawn, and a medium-size swimming pool, which Esme adored.
Lane’s car wasn’t in his designated spot, which meant he still wasn’t home from Silver Swans—the teachers had to remain behind for some staff meetings after the kids went home. Ronnie pulled into her own space and darted up the stairs to her door, suddenly seized by the familiar nervousness she always felt when she left Esme with a babysitter. It had been a while since she’d had to use someone, but now awful scenarios rushed through her mind: Esme is gone. Mrs. Lombardo stole her. I won’t even be able to go to the police.
When she threw open the door, there was Mrs. Lombardo, the downstairs neighbor, sitting on the blue floral couch watching Dr. Oz. And there was Esme on her knees in front of the coffee table, scribbling in a My Little Pony coloring book.
“Mommy!” Esme cried, leaping to her feet, running over, and throwing her arms around Esme’s neck. Ronnie felt the panic drain from her.
“Thank you.” She handed Mrs. Lombardo some bills. The old lady gave Ronnie a wan smile, gathered her industrial-size handbag from the kitchen table, and excused herself with only a few murmurs of conversation. It was one of the reasons Ronnie liked the lady—Mrs. Lombardo never looked at Ronnie’s overly made-up face with skeptical curiosity, nor did she ask what sort of job Ronnie worked at that only required her to be gone for a few hours at a time. Ronnie felt silly for being nervous. Mrs. Lombardo just wanted pocket change for more lottery tickets.
She sat down at the counter barstool and pulled Esme on her lap. “What do you want me to make you for dinner in honor of your first day of school, baby? Anything you want.”
“Anything?” Esme’s eyes, which were sometimes chocolate brown but today were more of a honey gold, widened. “How about candy?”
“Not candy for dinner.” Ronnie poked her leg. “I know! What about pink pancakes?”
“You can make pancakes pink?” Esme frowned. “No, Mommy. I don’t think you can.”
Ronnie loved when Esme’s know-it-all attitude shone through. If they’d stayed in Cobalt, would Esme be so spunky, so happy, so smart? Ronnie sincerely doubted it.
“There is a way we can make pink pancakes,” she said, and then slid Esme off her lap and walked to the cupboard. Several boxes of food coloring were stashed behind the salt and pepper shakers—Ronnie had gone through a baking phase a while back but dropped it when most of her cakes fell flat. She opened one of the boxes and extracted a tiny vial with a red cap. “You can help me.”
Ronnie reached for a mixing bowl and a spoon and the instant pancake batter, then started dumping in the mixture. “So tell me about school. Are you excited to go back?”
“Uh-huh.” Esme was concentrating hard on squeezing a drop from the food coloring vial.
“Are all the kids nice? Did you make any special friends?”
“They’re nice. Well, except for this— Oh, so pretty!” The batter was now turning pink. “Oh, Mommy, I love it!”
“What were you going to say?” Ronnie asked. “Except for this— Was there a kid who wasn’t so nice?”
But Esme wasn’t on that train of thought anymore. “Do you think Daddy Lane will eat them? Boys don’t eat pink things, Mommy.”
“Daddy Lane eats things that are pink,” said a voice behind them, and there was Lane, bursting through the door, his ruddy face stretched wide with a smile.
“You will?” Esme said, looking delighted. “Pink pancakes?”
“Pink pancakes?” Lane smiled in question at Ronnie. “That’s what we’re having for dinner?”
“I told her she could choose.” Ronnie glanced at Esme again. The conversation about friends felt unfinished. What had Esme been about to say? Then again, Esme started sentences that felt like they’d be revelatory, but they often ended up being about nothing.
Lane moved across the room to kiss them; Ronnie was paranoid that she smelled like Charlie’s weed pen. “I’m going to take a quick shower, and then we’ll make these pancakes,” she declared, hurrying off to the bathroom.
Ronnie stepped into the shower before the water was properly hot. Halfway through lathering up, she heard the door open and noticed Lane’s blurry figure through the shower door’s mottled glass. “Just grabbing something!” he called, but then opened the door with a saucy smile. “Unless I can come in?”
Ronnie considered it. She was so drawn to Lane—his big, warm body, his floppy hair, his muscled arms. Just pressing herself into him made her feel safer than she’d felt with any man. But then the notion of Esme walking in on them flitted through her brain. Nightmare. She flicked him with water. She didn’t mind Esme seeing them being affectionate, but she liked to leave the actual sex until after the little girl was asleep. “I’m almost done,” she said.
But as Lane’s gaze traveled longingly down Ronnie’s frame, she felt a thrill. She leaned out of the shower and gave him a long kiss. “Mmm,” he said, closing his eyes. That was one of the things Ronnie loved about Lane—how he seemed to lap up affection, savoring every drop. He experienced the world in that way, one of the few people she knew who was actually in the moment, so aware of the world around him.
They’d met in line at Trader Joe’s. Before moving to Raisin Beach, Ronnie hadn’t realized Trader Joe’s was a thing; all Cobalt had was the Kuhn’s market, which smelled like old bread and bologna. Esme had been only two and a half at the time, and Ronnie was holding her because the Trader Joe’s cart seats were oddly narrow. She couldn’t find any of the normal items from other stores—Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, Breyers ice cream. And Esme was on the verge of a tantrum. Ronnie was trying to add up the cost of everything in the cart in her he
ad, worrying if she had enough cash to cover it all.
When she’d gotten to the checkout line, she hadn’t known what to do with her groceries. There wasn’t a belt, per se—just a little desk where the checker stood. She was suddenly overwhelmed, which brought her right back to what had happened only a few short months before. It amazed her that her hands had done such things.
“Ma’am?” the checker said in a bored voice. He had a long beard, Ronnie remembered, and little John Lennon sunglasses. “Ma’am, can you pull forward?”
But Ronnie couldn’t move. And then a man’s voice said, from behind her: “He’ll take your items from you. It’s okay. You don’t have to unload them yourself.”
What had Lane seen in Ronnie that day? A pretty woman, for sure. But he’d also come to her rescue . . . and pegged that she was raising Esme on her own. When she told him her story—well, most of her story—later, that she’d had to escape from abuse, how she and Esme were winging it here in Raisin Beach, Lane didn’t seem surprised.
The shower suddenly made a whining sound, and the water temperature changed from hot to lukewarm. Ronnie rinsed her hair quickly, and her mind drifted to the Welcome Breakfast. She still wasn’t sure if it had gone well or not.
She’d been worried about meeting other mothers in Raisin Beach. Mothers here were . . . different. Back in Cobalt, mothers were just moms, just doing their best to get by. They didn’t wear high heels or go to brunch. They never had time to work out—unless it was to a workout video in front of the TV while the baby napped, but Ronnie didn’t know any mothers who actually bothered. They certainly didn’t have Instagram pages showing off their beautifully arranged cheese plates or mommy-and-baby matching outfits.
In conversations she overheard at the playground, Raisin Beach mothers talked about things like “Yes spaces” and how their houses were no-screen-time zones, and the benefits of co-sleeping and how they’d die if their kids’ sheets weren’t made of fragrance-free, conflict-free organic cotton. Half the time, Ronnie couldn’t understand the words they were saying. They all felt so above her, and she wasn’t sure if she’d have anything to contribute to the conversation, ever. And though her hipster boyfriend was a plus—the kindergarten teacher, at Silver Swans!—she still worried that she’d stand out among the Silver Swans parents. Making friends wasn’t at the top of her priority list—staying safe was, staying hidden—but it would be a nice bonus.
But a few mothers were nice at the breakfast. Ronnie liked how Lauren cut through the bullshit, and Andrea was hilarious. She—Andrea would want people to refer to her as she, right?—seemed lovely. Ronnie had already texted Andrea, in fact—they’d all exchanged numbers before leaving—to thank her for the Baileys hit and to compare notes with their kids’ first days.
Maybe Esme and Andrea’s son could play together sometime. Ronnie could only imagine what Jerrod would think about that—he wasn’t accepting in the slightest—but she’d had some experience with transgender women at Kittens, and as they put it, they’d been women their whole lives; they just didn’t know it at first. Fuck Jerrod, she thought. Jerrod didn’t matter. For all she knew, Jerrod was . . . well, she didn’t want to think about that. She considered Vanessa, too. Sometimes her sister popped into her thoughts, unbidden, but she was even more awful to think about, so she pushed both thoughts from her mind.
When she stepped out of the shower, Esme was sitting on the counter, her little legs swinging. “Can we play Lava Floor?”
“Uh, sure. A quick game before dinner.” Lava Floor was a game Esme and Ronnie and Lane made up that involved scattering a bunch of pillows around the room and jumping from one to the next. Probably every kid generation played the game—Ronnie remembered playing it with Vanessa when they were little, too.
After Ronnie was dried and dressed, they walked to the living room and started scattering the pillows. Lane, who was looking at something on his phone, grinned at them. “Lava Floor?” He smiled. “I’ll play.” He set down the phone and pulled up a couch cushion.
“I want Mr. Nibbles to play, too,” Esme decided. Mr. Nibbles was her stuffed bear; Ronnie had bought him for her a few days after they’d first moved to the apartment, and she carried him around everywhere. Though when Ronnie looked around, she didn’t see the toy in plain view.
“Oh!” Esme said, remembering. “I took him to school today. He’s in my backpack.”
“I’ll grab him,” Ronnie said, spying the backpack on the kitchen table. It was in the shape of Rainbow Dash, the My Little Pony Pegasus with the colorful mane. Ronnie slowly unzipped the main compartment and plunged her hand inside, finding Mr. Nibbles right away. “Here you go,” she said, tossing the stuffed animal to Esme, who was already jumping from pillow to pillow.
She was about to put the backpack down when she noticed something else in the bottom, an iPad-like device. She’d heard about these. Each child was given the device, free of charge; on it were preloaded educational games as well as video and art apps so the kids could record their artwork and observations. She thought of the conversation she’d overheard at the breakfast between the moms of kids Esme’s age who were already reading.
Ronnie pulled out the device, wanting to take a closer look. When she turned it on, there was a “1” next to an app called Student Work. Had Esme already uploaded a drawing? Perhaps Miss Barnes had already realized what a great artist Esme was. But when Ronnie clicked on the icon and the image came up, she couldn’t make sense of the words. She stared into the living room, stunned. Then she felt her knees go boneless.
“Mommy?” Esme whined. “Are we going to play?”
“Hang on,” Ronnie said shakily. What on earth? There, in the center of the device’s screen, was an uploaded image of a few crayon-printed words. The letters were crooked and unsure, but the message loud and clear.
Mommy. Everyone knows. Everyone hates you.
Four
Mom. Mom!”
Andrea Vaughan dreamed she was skydiving. Not that she’d ever done such a thing, but there she was, falling from an airplane, the wind whipping against her face. As she looked down, there was a figure lower in the sky, falling faster. The figure turned onto his back to face her. His features sharpened before her eyes. Andrea saw the familiar round chin and rosebud lips. His long neck and sinewy arms. He was reaching out for her, his eyes full of fear and regret.
She drew in a breath. A name formed in her mind. Roger. She needed to help him. She needed to catch him in time.
“Mom!”
Andrea’s eyes snapped open. It was Tuesday morning. Her four-year-old son sat on the bed, his face inches from hers, his tiny fingers grabbing fistfuls of sheets.
“Arthur,” she said, blinking hard, sitting up. “What is it?”
“You’ll never believe it.” Her son’s grin was huge. “There’s a Power Rangers episode on right now!”
Andrea rubbed her eyes. She was still stuck in that dream. That nightmare.
“Come on, come on!” Arthur was already running out of the room. “You have to see!”
Andrea slid out of the bed. Feet on the floor. Reality again. “Hang on.”
She hurried into the bathroom. At the mirror, she leaned in close and inspected the lines on her face and the nakedness of her features. A swipe of lipstick here, a blot of concealer there. Hang on, let me put on my face for the day, her mother, Cynthia, used to say. Cynthia’s boudoir was teenage Andrea’s favorite guilty pleasure: beholding her mom’s giant vanity of colors, labels, scents. All those private hours of slathering and puffing and brushing . . . and then hastily wiping it all off when she heard her mother’s key in the door down the long, long hall. Because back then, Andrea wasn’t a her in her mother’s eyes. Andrea was her mother’s son.
But that was then. That was New York, and this was California, and she was free. Sort of.
And yet her reflection still surprised her, mo
re than twelve months into transition. She’d been on hormones for more than a year, and after all the years of resembling her father, with his thick neck and square shoulders, she now looked more like her mother—crazy how the simple introduction of chemicals could do that. Her breasts weren’t as big as her mom’s—the endocrinologist said they’d never be quite as bountiful as the female members’ of her family from estrogen alone—but still, they were breasts, real breasts. And they were attached to her, grown from her body.
Andrea put on clothes she’d chosen for today—a polka-dotted blouse, skinny jeans that accentuated her narrow hips and butt. She pressed her lips together with a mix of relief and satisfaction. Every single cell in her body had always been Andrea. Now that she could be Andrea every day, it was like she finally got to exhale that gulp of breath she’d been holding for thirty-four years. Not once had she switched back and presented as male. And yesterday—yesterday!—she and Arthur set forth in this new community with her as a mother, presenting herself to all those mothers and letting them get used to it.
Well, with the help of Baileys.
Andrea wasn’t even a drinker most of the time, but she’d been so worked up she’d shoved the liqueur in her purse at the last minute. When she’d gotten to the loft, she’d felt such an intense panic at the other women in the room that she’d almost run out of there. As much as she liked Raisin Beach’s landscape and amenities and climate, the parents she’d come upon were so dedicated and slick and focused and . . . conservative. She’d spied a few cross necklaces. Amid all their bragging about their kids, she’d overheard a group talking about church. A woman with gorgeous blond extensions prattling on about some lifestyle Instagram she ran wore a WWJD bracelet. Andrea didn’t universally condemn religion, per se, but there were lots of times where Jesus and the trans community didn’t mix.
But Ronnie and Lauren had been different—cool, accepting. Thank God they’d been accepting, because she’d put herself out there so fast, her confessions just burbling out of her like lava. But now—well, she couldn’t say she knew them yet, but at least she had allies.