The Nest

by Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

  The first participant that morning to stand in front of the room and read his truths and lie was a new hire from the Interactive Group. A gaunt twenty-something, wearing a vintage-looking cardigan and Clark Kent eyeglasses that magnified his smudged eyeliner. He had a tattoo of a squid down his left forearm. He stood, stoop shouldered, and introduced himself.

  “Hey. I’m Gideon and okay, well, here goes.” He shoved his hands in his pockets and read from the paper on the table in front of him in a quick, even monotone.

  “I nearly died from overdosing on pills. I nearly died from bleeding out. I nearly died from autoerotic asphyxiation.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Cheryl jumped up, waving both hands before anyone had a chance to respond. “Thank you, Gideon, for your candor.” She paused for a beat. “But I guess I should have spelled out the guidelines a little more clearly. We want you to reveal something interesting about yourself, but nothing quite that personal in nature and, please, everybody, nothing sexual. Think professional.”

  “Sorry,” Gideon had said, shrugging idly. “Clinical depression and suicidal ideation are more common than most people realize, and they’re both a really important part of who I am.”

  “I understand.” Cheryl kept a smile affixed to the lower half of her face. “We’re just going for something a little lighter here.”

  “The lie was autoerotic asphyxiation,” he’d added. “FYI.”

  STEPHANIE OPENED HER MOLESKINE and tried to tune out the rest of the room as Cheryl asked for someone to read their four words. She started making a list of things she needed for dinner.

  “You said not to self-edit,” an amiable guy spoke from the other end of the table, “so this is what I’ve got: Fat. Happy. Golfer. Husband.”

  Her cell phone, sitting on the table in front of her, started to vibrate. Without even looking at the number, she waved at Cheryl. I have to take this, she mouthed and left the room as quietly as she could. Relief.

  She looked down at the incoming ID: Beatrice Plumb.

  Standing in the hallway outside the meeting room, Stephanie was surprised to find how happy she was to hear Bea’s voice. She’d begged off the phone quickly, telling Bea she wanted to talk but was in a meeting (true) and couldn’t stay on the phone (true) and that, yes, Leo had mentioned something about new work but they’d both been incredibly busy and maybe they’d talk about it tonight (lie).

  Bea sounded so anxious that Stephanie found herself feeling protective, maternal almost. She didn’t know if Leo had read Bea’s stuff; she doubted it, but she could ask. She briefly wondered why Bea had handed the pages to Leo and not her, but then again—they probably weren’t new pages, they were probably old pages that she was passing off as new and Leo wouldn’t know the difference. Stephanie would remind Leo to read them, and she would help him come up with something to say to Bea, something nice and noncommittal. She’d put it on her list.

  Back in the conference room Gideon was up again, this time reading his four words (musician, pessimist, wizard, Democrat). A slight wave of nausea roiled her stomach; she sipped the lemon water she’d brought into the meeting. She was going to have to eat something soon.

  She slid her phone out of her jacket pocket to check the time. Once it was in her hand, she couldn’t resist opening the app she’d downloaded that tracked the development of the baby based on due date. This week your baby is the size of an apple seed! This week your baby is as big as an almond. This week an olive! She hit the button and watched the photo appear of what her embryo looked like at nine weeks—like a tiny bay shrimp, a curled crustacean with an immense head and sci-fi budding arms. As she did almost every time she looked at the eerie images, she felt herself blush. It was unseemly, really, how addled she found herself to be forty-one and single and accidentally pregnant by Leo Plumb, beyond a shadow of a doubt the most irresponsible and least paternal of all the men she’d ever loved in her entire life.

  She knew it was crazy, told herself a million times a day that it was crazy, but she found she couldn’t completely suppress a few fleeting moments of optimism—about the baby for sure, about Leo, maybe. She was surprised by how responsible he’d been lately, how present. He helped around the house. He seemed to be working every day and was enthused about meeting with Nathan. He read all the time. Nothing in his behavior made her believe he was anything other than completely clean and sober. She couldn’t help but wonder if everything in her life had been pitched toward this moment—agency sold, money in the bank, some time on her hands, a seemingly renewed Leo in her bed, trying to make some kind of amends to someone or something. That she was on the receiving end of this newly burnished Leo, the very thing she’d desired and abandoned as so much wasted effort all those years ago—Leo in the living room scribbling on a legal pad, Leo in her bed in the morning running a finger down her back, Leo in her kitchen every night, closing a book and pulling her onto his lap—well, she’d decided not to question it. She’d decided to selfishly, greedily, take it. All of it. Maybe even this new wrinkle, the unexpected residue of the power outage.

  Over the years, she’d considered having a baby with any number of people. Marriage was not part of her plan; she wasn’t against it, she just wasn’t for it. She treated her occasional yearning for a baby the same way she treated her occasional yearning for a dog. Let it linger and wait to see if it passed, which it always did, which she took as a good sign. Because other things she desired (her house, a particular author signed, a midcentury table in good condition) didn’t flit through, they planted themselves until she turned desire into ownership. That her fleeting thoughts of motherhood never truly haunted her the way, say, her quest for the magenta peony bushes in her yard did was comforting as she imagined her ovaries surrendering the final vestiges of fertile eggs into the hinterlands of her reproductive system.

  THEN THE STORM. The expected-unexpected arrival of Leo. The power outage. Leo. A little too much wine (hers), the familiar mouth (his). Leo had seemed the tiniest bit broken. She made him laugh. They talked. He took her wrists and circled them with his thumb and forefinger, pulling her to him (the way he had that first night their friendship became something else, the night he turned to her in a hidden booth at a small burger joint and said, “I’ve been wondering what you keep beneath your blouse”) and then he’d two-stepped her across her kitchen, in the dark, under the moonlight, and kissed her with such acquisitive purpose, she thought she might combust. Leo. What else was there to do when the lights were out—wind howling, branches splitting and falling—but fuel the fire, let him lift the sweater over her head, unzip her pants, and fuck her silly under the unblinking, marbled gaze of Lillian.

  She looked back down at the list she’d written. Her four words. She was going to have to talk to Leo very soon. Whatever he said, whatever his reaction, the decision was hers. This belonged to her. She took the cap off her pen and crossed out single, wrote mother.

  It didn’t look terrible.

  CHAPTER TWENTY–TWO

  When Matilda was recovering in the hospital and found out how much money she was getting from the Plumb family, she’d had all kinds of fantasies about what to do with it. (Shamefully, she remembered that her first involuntary thought was a pair of suede boots she’d coveted, the ones that went over the knee and stopped midthigh; then she remembered.) She thought about trips and clothes and cars and flat-screen televisions. She thought about buying her sister her own beauty salon, which she’d always wanted. She thought about buying her mother a divorce.

  The staff at the rehabilitation hospital tried to prepare her for all her future expenses, not just her prosthetic foot (which would need to be replaced every few years) and its various related medical issues and costs, but the accommodations she’d have to make to her home. “It sounds like your living situation is not ideal,” one of the social workers said to her. “You might need to reassess.” Matilda took the financial worksheets and nodded her head, but she didn’t really listen. Everything seemed so much su
nnier at the rehab hospital where she was a little bit of a star, so young and determined and doggedly cheerful. She learned each skill quickly and was able to go home sooner than most patients. When she returned to her parents’ cramped apartment in the Bronx, Matilda started to understand what she was up against.

  The problems began at the building’s front door, which opened to three flights of stained, uneven, peeling linoleum stairs that were discouraging in the best of circumstances but were horrific with crutches and wouldn’t be much better once her prosthetic foot was ready. Inside the apartment to the left of the front door was a corridor, too narrow for a wheelchair (which she sometimes needed, especially at night), leading to the apartment’s one bathroom and galley kitchen. Straight ahead, four small steps down, was the sunken living area that thirteen-year-old two-footed Matilda believed was the height of design sophistication and now made amputee Matilda want to weep in frustration.

  And there was her mother’s decor, what she and her sister used to call South of the Border kitsch—mismatched throw rugs from Mexico, colorful baskets full of fabric, tiny rickety tables holding religious statuary—all of it now seemed like a concerted effort to kill her. Small things she’d never noticed about the apartment loomed large: The toilet was very low, the shower required stepping over the side of a challengingly deep bathtub, there were no railings—not even a towel bar—for her to grab onto.

  Beyond the physical discomfort with the apartment and the utter lack of privacy, which was psychologically draining, there was the emotional stress of being around her two parents. Even though they’d been unusually kind to each other in the wake of the accident, uniting in their worry and grief for the first time in years, they never left her alone. They watched her move around the rooms guardedly, her mother clutching a rosary, her father trying to avert his gaze.

  She had to get out of there.

  Matilda didn’t believe in God as much as she believed in signs. (She knew she’d gotten a sign the night of the accident in the front seat of Leo Plumb’s Porsche, the setting sun glinting off his wedding ring, and she’d ignored it and now look at her. God had taken her right foot.) She said a rosary every morning when she woke, praying to know what to do, where to live. So when she saw the billboard in front of a brand-new condominium complex on her favorite street, the one lined with cherry trees that bloomed exuberantly in the spring, she knew: The sign was her sign.

  PRICES SLASHED it said. And in tiny print on the bottom: ACCESSIBLE UNITS AVAILABLE.

  She bought two apartments. One on an upper floor for her sister who had three kids and a deadbeat husband, and a smaller one on the ground floor for herself. She paid cash, only asking her sister to cover her own maintenance costs. The leftover money had still seemed monumental. A lawyer-friend of Fernando’s helped her open a money market account attached to her checking. She was being as frugal as she could, but it went so fast! And someone in her family was always asking her for a loan: a down payment for a car, plane tickets to visit family back in Mexico, a new dress for a daughter’s prom. It never ended and how could she say no? She couldn’t. Because when she thought about why she had the money, she was ashamed.

  And now she was scared, because she had to find a way to be more mobile. She had to get a job. Once the morphine from the night of the accident wore off, she admitted what she’d always known: She’d never be a singer. “You’re smart, Matilda,” one of the nurses in rehab said to her. “What kind of career are you thinking about?” Nobody had ever used that word with her before: career. She liked the sound of it. She liked imagining herself going to an office every day. After high school, she’d wanted to go to college but there was no money, and the day she’d come home, excited after her allotted fifteen minutes with one of the school’s overworked counselors, with community college applications and student loan forms her parents had been so negative, so discouraging. She knew they were afraid of their undocumented status, of being found out and losing their jobs. She heard them later that night arguing over whether to let her apply, her father becoming increasingly angry and volatile. The next day she’d asked Fernando about catering work.

  Now she had some money; she could take classes if she wanted, but not if she was on crutches—or in constant pain.

  Vinnie wasn’t the first person during her stay at the rehabilitation hospital to mention elective amputation to Matilda, not the first person to gently suggest (or in Vinnie’s case, aggressively suggest) that as far as amputations went, hers was a particularly shitty one and she should consider another operation to amputate below the knee, which would open up a world of better prosthetics. Matilda didn’t understand because at first everyone had seemed excited by how much of her leg had been saved. She didn’t remember much from the recovery room, but she did remember the surgeon triumphantly telling her that he’d taken “as little bone as possible.” When she repeated his boast to her physical therapist, who was examining her stump and frowning, the woman said: “Sometimes more bone is a good thing and sometimes it’s not.”

  She was right. Matilda’s prosthetic foot hurt almost all the time. No matter how she paced herself or rested or how hard she worked to strengthen her body’s other muscles, no matter how many (or few) barrier socks she wore or how much therapeutic massage she had, after only an hour or two with the foot, her stump would start to throb, the pain gradually working its way up her calf and then past her knee until there was a concentrated knot of tension and an almost unbearable ache at the top of her hamstring where it joined her lower gluteal muscles. (How blissfully ignorant she’d been of the infrastructure of upper thigh to ass before the accident! Only wondering if there was a cure for the tiny cellulite bumps that peeked out from her very short shorts.) Most days the pain would creep into her hip; many days her neck would start to ache by late afternoon and she’d end up in bed before dinner.

  Her doorbell rang, loud and insistent, angry. Vinnie. Matilda opened the door to find him standing there with a pizza box balanced on his left arm and a full-length mirror tucked under his bionic arm. She eyed the long mirror warily when he came through the door.

  “I don’t want that thing in here,” she said.

  “Maybe you don’t want it, but you need it. Your foot is bad, right?” He could tell just by looking at her how much pain she was in. She would still laugh and smile, but her eyes would be unfocused. He understood.

  “It’s not too bad,” Matilda lied. On good days, Matilda’s nonexistent foot would tingle or just feel like it was there, its ghostly presence driving her crazy. But on bad days it hurt to distraction. Today, it felt like needles were piercing her nonexistent foot. For weeks, she’d had a persistent itch on one of her missing toes. She found herself in the ludicrous position of fantasizing about amputating a foot that didn’t exist.

  “Sit down,” Vinnie said, placing the pizza on her kitchen table. “Take a slice while it’s hot. You can eat while we do this.”

  She reluctantly sat on one of her kitchen chairs. Took a slice and blew a little before she bit into it. “How did you manage to get it here while it’s still hot?” she asked him.

  “Trade secret,” he said.

  “What’s in the sauce that makes this so good anyway?”

  “Nice try. We can talk my miracle sauce later. Let’s do some work.”

  Vinnie had been talking about mirror therapy for weeks, and Matilda thought it sounded ridiculous, like voodoo. Still, he was in front of her and he’d carted a mirror all the way to her house, so she reluctantly did what he said. She straightened her knees and let Vinnie position the mirror between them so that when she looked down, she saw her intact foot on one side and its mirrored image on the other. “Oh,” she said.

  “Move your left foot,” Vinnie said. She did and the optical illusion was of two perfect feet, moving in concert. “Scratch your toe,” he said, “the one that’s been itching.”

  “How?”

  He pointed. “Scratch the itchy spot on your left foot, but keep l
ooking in the mirror.”

  She leaned over and gently scratched. “Oh my God,” she said. “It helps.” She scratched harder. “I can’t believe it helps. I don’t understand.”

  “Nobody understands, really. The simple way to think about it is that you’re helping rewire the old signals in your brain. You’re teaching your brain a new story.”

  She moved her foot to the left and to the right, flexed and pointed and flexed again. She wiggled her toes. She rotated her ankle and the foot in the mirror, her missing foot, seemed like it was back and was working. She scratched again, it helped again. “It already feels better,” she said. “Not great but different.”

  “Good. Four or five times a week for fifteen minutes. And use the mirror whenever the foot hurts or itches. Got it?”

  Matilda nodded and smiled. “It sounded so stupid,” she said. “I didn’t want to go buy a mirror just to do something that sounded so dumb. Thank you, Papi,” she said. She spoke softly and put a light hand on his shoulder. “Thank you for bringing the mirror.”

  “It’s temporary,” Vinnie said, standing abruptly. The charge that shot through his arm, his chest, and other places he didn’t want to dwell on when Matilda touched him was dismaying.

  “I’ll buy my own. You can have this back—”

  “No, no,” he said. “I don’t mean the mirror is temporary; it’s yours. I bought it for you. I mean you still need to deal with the underlying problem.” He sounded angrier than he intended. Matilda was frowning. He took a breath. Stop. Rewind. He started again, keeping his voice even. “The mirror is just a temporary fix is what I meant.”

  In her heart, Matilda knew Vinnie was right. Of all the things people had said to her over the past six months, all the useless advice and meaningless platitudes (God never gives you more than you can handle, everything happens for a reason) and quoting of Bible verses, what Vinnie said about elective amputation and losing her ankle made the most sense. Matilda grew up knowing that you didn’t get anything without giving something up. In her world, that was the prevailing logic. It was just a matter of knowing how much you were willing to lose, how many pounds of flesh, which in her case would be literal. (“If thy foot offend thee, cast it off”—that Bible verse she understood.)