by Naima Coster
“What do you think Margarita will say?”
“Relax, I’m having two.”
“Well played, sister.”
“Look, I’ve got to go. The dog is chewing up some wires.”
“I love you.”
“Me too.”
The sisters said their good-byes and hung up. It had gone unnoticed how plainly she had told her sister how she felt, how easily her sister had reciprocated. Noelle resolved that was how it should be. Love was regular; love was everyday.
“Should I take you home?” Bailey asked. He was dressed, watching her from the bench.
“My sister is getting married.”
His face turned solemn. “Not Margarita, right?”
They laughed, and Noelle led the way back through the brush.
The farmhouse was at the end of a long, dusty driveway, a quarter of a mile long. They passed the pond with ducks, the tree swing that the owners’ children must have used when they were young, and the shed where the mean old basset hounds that wandered the farm liked to lurk. They sprang out as soon as they heard Bailey’s car rumbling by. Noelle lowered the window and shooed them away. They were slow moving and fat but still ferocious.
Her apartment was just two rooms. The kitchen and living room were one, already furnished with a wooden table, old plaid armchairs, a corduroy couch. In the bedroom, she kept a mattress on a box spring with no frame. There were taxidermy mallards, an egret hanging from the ceiling, a deer and his antlers poised over the doorway.
“The old farmer’s a hunter,” Noelle explained, pulling down towels from a closet. She handed one to Bailey and started making tea. He had a long drive back, nearly two hours, but neither of them mentioned that. She didn’t have much in her refrigerator by way of dinner, so she smeared toast with butter and honey, set out a little pitcher of milk. He joined her at the table under the low glow of the overhead lamp. She used her phone to play a bolero on the speakers. It was all she listened to these days, although she couldn’t say why. Maybe it was being divorced, wanting clichés about love lost. Maybe it was about wanting more Spanish as she prepared to adopt a baby. Or maybe the music brought romance into her life, without any of its accoutrements: a husband, a shared bank account, the problems of pleasing a man.
Bailey slurped at his tea. “How do you like the single life? It’s lonely but easier, right?”
“At least now I know what to expect,” Noelle said. “When you’re married, you think you’re going to spend your life with someone, but it isn’t true. You can only ever spend your life with you.”
“I think back to being married, and I don’t know how Clem and I spent all that time. Probably making dinner, arguing about pointless things.” He spooned more honey onto his toast. “My life is so wide open now.”
Noelle was noncommittal. “I’m adopting a baby, so I’m going to be plumb out of time soon. But I don’t mind. I’ve had my fair share of it.”
“A baby? All by yourself?”
“Sure. You know something about that, don’t you?”
“My mother is a queen. I couldn’t have asked for a better one.”
“I’ve always envied you. I’ve always wanted Ruth to think of me like a daughter.”
“Well, she does, doesn’t she?”
“I suppose.”
“I can’t say I ever thought of you as a sister though. Not even when you were living with us. If I had, it would make things too awkward now.” Bailey leaned across the table. “You know, between me and Margarita.”
“Come on,” she said, and took him by the hand.
They undressed each other efficiently, their bodies still clammy and cold from the swim. They contemplated each other, and Bailey was every bit as fine as she’d expected, from the muscles in his arms to the span of his chest, the shape of his legs, his cock. The first thing he did was put his mouth on her. He kissed her face, her ears, her eyelids, her collarbone, her breasts. He laid her back on the bed, finally kissed her lips, then snaked his way down to the center of her. A shock went through Noelle’s body. She rose to meet him. She was so pleased, she came before he was through. Her head was swimming. She was floating, grinning, serene. He asked if it would be all right to be inside her, and she said yes. He asked whether she had a condom.
She shook her head. “It’s been just me for so long. You didn’t bring one?”
“I was spending the day with my mother.” He was naked, still kneeling over her body.
“I don’t care if you don’t care,” Noelle said.
“All right.”
He crawled forward to rest his elbows on either side of her head. He kissed her long and slow, parted her legs with his, and lowered himself into her. She shuddered under the warmth and weight of his body. It was everything she’d been missing. He worked himself up, and Noelle panted along with him, although she knew she wouldn’t come again. He unloaded himself with a gorgeous grunting in her ear. She kissed his shoulder over and over again, as if she loved him, as if she were offering him a benediction. She felt herself begin to weep.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
He rolled onto his side, knit his hand with hers. “Why are you apologizing?” He handed her the bundle of his T-shirt. She blew her nose on Clementine Farms.
“I just haven’t felt that good in a long time.”
“The pleasure was all mine. I’m tempted to write home about it.”
Noelle laughed through her tears. “Don’t you tell your mama.”
“She’d be thrilled,” he said. “But I won’t.”
They lay for a while, catching their breath, soaking in the scent of each other’s skin and wetness, the water and silt from the sound. Noelle felt herself recovering from the onslaught of feeling: how she had wanted Bailey and missed Nelson at the same time, how deep she had been in her body and her mind all at once. Bailey leaned off the bed and rummaged in his jeans. He withdrew a slender brown cigarillo, pointed it at Noelle.
“Do you mind?”
“Those are bad for you.”
“Get out of here. Are you serious? No one’s ever told me that.” He winked at her and lit up. He smoked silently, his free hand massaging her thigh. When he was done, he stamped out the butt and dozed off. Noelle figured she’d let him sleep, wake him up in a few hours for his drive. From what she knew, work started early on a farm, and he’d have to get back.
With his eyes closed, he looked like Ruth, his skin easily weathered, lined. It occurred to her that she should have slept with more men when she had the chance. She wouldn’t be able to do all this when there was a child in the house.
It might have been the sex, or the news of Diane’s wedding, but soon her mind turned to Nelson. She thought of him often, although he had gone out of focus for her, their life together blurred, as if by a merciful trick of memory. She remembered vaguely how it felt to argue with him, to miss him when he was away. She remembered how he’d tended to look at her, how his kisses tended to feel. It was all habitual. The discrete moments she remembered most clearly were all from the end: the terrible phone call on Diane’s porch, the morning she’d sent him away.
When she first arrived on the coast, they were still sending emails back and forth, settling what to do about the house, the furniture, the little fund in the bank. In the end, they’d sold everything, split it all down the middle. The only thing either of them wanted was cash. It was as amicable as divorces went. Noelle had given some of the money to Margarita to help her get a stable place in L.A., and she had saved the rest, decided to live meagerly because she could. She had nearly enough for the adoption, but she wanted enough for a down payment, too, a place they could move into when the child got older. She wanted a boy from Colombia; there were already too many women in her family. But she wasn’t opposed to a girl, or a child from elsewhere in Latin America.
Nelson knew she planned to adopt, but they stuck to divorce business in their emails. They were cordial, passive, in their negotiations. Su
re, if you like, they said, and That’s fine with me, whatever you need. Eventually, they were done dividing, and the emails stopped. Then he wrote to her again.
He had landed somewhere else in Europe for a long residency. Noelle hadn’t paid attention to the details of his new life. What was it, now, to her?
But he had written to her so baldly, so wholeheartedly, she had wondered if he hadn’t meant to send the email at all. It was what she had been missing all the time she was his wife. She had read his email many times since it arrived. While Bailey slept beside her, she searched for it on her phone. She turned her blue screen away from him, read it again feverishly.
Noelle—
Every city in Europe seems to have a river running through it. I know it’s a holdover from when there was trade along these waters, but it never stops seeming symbolic to me. There’s this bank and that bank, an east side and a west, like every city in the world is the same.
Sometimes, I like to think we’re still in the same city, and there’s a river between us, but at any time, one or the other of us could cross over. Our lives are separate but still close. I know that’s not the case.
I should have told you about how losing the pregnancy affected me. I thought mostly about you, my duty to snap you out of it, to get us back to our life. I always felt like our life was something we could lose if we weren’t careful. I couldn’t see our life was everything all around us, the things we shared every day.
Maybe there’s nothing I’ve ever held dearer than my own potential—the idea of it, the idea that I had to make good on all my luck, my life. But one day I’ll be fifty or a hundred, and all the things I’ve done, or could have done, won’t matter. No one will have anything to say about my potential, which doors are open to me, and which are closed. No one will remember me at all. I don’t mean to sound like a nihilist.
It was hard to watch you lose your way. You were the one who kept us steady, who held it all together. Your strength was a fact of my life, and I passed it off as my own. I am sorry about that. Sometimes I think I’m still that little boy looking for proof I’m as good as everyone else. I’m that little boy waiting for the white people to come and kick me out. I’m that boy who can’t remember his lines. But I can’t let myself get too pessimistic either. I don’t regret very much—it’s all led me to this life I could never have imagined.
Anyway, I’m at this café, overlooking the river, and it’s not like the States. You don’t have to keep ordering things for them to let you stay. Just one little cup of coffee and they leave you alone for hours. Even me. And the waiters are rude to everybody, so you don’t have to worry if it’s just you.
I started writing to you because I was here, drinking my coffee, and I saw a man come in with his wife. He was black, and I couldn’t tell with her—Egyptian, maybe. Who knows? But they had a little girl with them, green eyed and brown skinned. She had her hair in twists. They ordered cake for her. They had wine. And it was sweet because the little girl really occupied herself, taking the cherry off the cake, peering out at the water, chattering every once in a while to her parents, who were very quiet. They watched her, and they watched the water. They held hands under the table and, only once in a while, took sips of their wine. It was like they were in their own world, and the girl was a part of it, but, really, it was mostly the two of them. I thought of the girl growing up, passing in and out of their lives, as all children do when they’re grown, but they’d still be at that table, holding hands, glancing over at each other from time to time. It was beautiful. It broke my heart.
Noelle closed her eyes and tried to imagine the child Nelson had described in the letter, but she saw only herself as a girl: spindly, long haired, and indignant, waiting for her father to show up and wrench them all away, to take them home. And she couldn’t picture the child they’d lost: he had been a mound in her stomach, a thing with no life outside of her.
She checked to make sure Bailey was still asleep. He was. Noelle kissed his forehead, felt herself swell with gratitude. She slid a pillow under her hips, then another, tilting her pelvis toward the ceiling. She braced herself, turned back to her phone, and read the rest.
I guess what I’m trying to say is the only time I’ve never tried to prove anything was with you. I didn’t worry about what other people would think or what it said about me. It was simple. I wanted you for myself.
16
December 2002
The Piedmont, North Carolina
The parents were meeting in the back room of a restaurant just north of downtown, on Beard Street. One of the mothers knew the owner, and he had provided them all with pitchers of sweet tea and platters of lemon bars on the house. The committee members sat around a long table underneath a crystal chandelier and ordered lunch off the menu. Mrs. York would call them to order eventually, but Lacey May couldn’t wait that long. She blew into the room, without looking anyone in the eye, and went directly to the chairwoman.
“Lacey May, you didn’t RSVP,” Mrs. York said. “I thought you weren’t coming.” She looked smart in her blue blazer, a ballpoint pen stuck behind her ear. Lacey May admired her, and she knew she had to say what she had come to say quickly, before she changed her mind.
“I wanted to tell you in person that I quit.”
A dozen heads turned toward Lacey May, but she didn’t let the attention deter her.
“The campaign is causing too much trouble with my family. I can’t go on like this.”
A few other members spoke up all at once, trying to talk her out of it. Her daughters would thank her in the long run; they were shifting gears. They needed Lacey May; why didn’t she just sit down for a while and see?
Lacey May had never had many friends. She didn’t tend to get along with other women, or they didn’t tend to get along with her. She didn’t go to church or participate in any neighborhood associations. This had been the first group she had belonged to since high school, and they had welcomed her. They had asked for her help finding the right words for their flyers; they had asked her to sign the op-ed in the paper. They had walked shoulder to shoulder with her to tack up posters that day in the hall. She hadn’t told them much about her life, but it didn’t matter. They had stood together, stood up for their children. Lacey May didn’t want to leave them, but she knew Noelle wouldn’t come back as long as she was involved in the campaign. There was no other way.
“Well, stay for the meeting at least,” Mrs. York said. “We’re talking about how to move on from that poster fiasco. It didn’t move us one step closer to what we want. There’s even talk of a reprimand from the mayor. It doesn’t mean anything, but it’s embarrassing. He says we were trespassing, vandalizing.”
Mrs. Gray, a young mother with bobbed hair, chimed in. “Have you ever heard anything more ridiculous?” In the beginning, Lacey May hadn’t been sure about her. She had a tiny diamond nose ring, a tattoo of starlings across her chest. But she had proven one of the most dedicated to the cause, and Lacey May liked her. She worked at a preschool downtown.
“We’re changing our focus,” Mrs. York went on. “There’s a way we can win.”
“I’m sorry,” Lacey May said. “I can’t be a part of it.”
“We’re getting organized before the next school board elections. We’re going to run our own candidates, petition the ones who are against us.”
“You’re going to leave the students alone?”
Mrs. York and Mrs. Gray nodded at Lacey May.
“That’s how we’ll get what we want in the long run,” Mrs. Gray said.
Lacey May stood, considering. Finally, she shook her head. As much as they might have needed her, her daughters needed her more.
“Good luck,” she said, and left in a hurry. She didn’t look back.
She was relieved when she surfaced on Beard Street. It was quiet, midday, the winter sun white, and the air cold. Not far from here, the garage where Robbie used to work was still open. Lacey May scanned across the street for it, and
there it was, the large doors lifted. Just to see it flooded Lacey May with memories: the sight of Robbie in a work shirt and overalls, the smell of paint thinner on his skin. The street had changed over the years, slowly sprouting a half-dozen new businesses. Besides the restaurant, there was a brewery, a lunch window, a nightclub, and a sandwich shop. It had flowerboxes in the window, a neon COFFEE sign overhead.
There, beneath the blinking sign, she saw Robbie. He was shaking a paper cup at a passerby, a man in a suit who ignored him. Robbie strode away from the shop, following the man, murmuring something at him, then he stopped in front of the nightclub, its windows shuttered. He leaned against the building, sucked on a cigarette, and their eyes met from across the street.
Lacey May went to him, and he slipped the paper cup into his back pocket. As she neared him, she could see he looked beat-up, his hair standing up on his head, his button-up shirt too large. He was missing his gold chain. When he hugged her, he smelled of sweat, and something sickly sweet, maybe whiskey, although it wasn’t his drink. The stench of smoke lingered on his hands.
“Oh, Robbie,” she said. “What are you doing down here?”
Robbie shrugged. “I come here sometimes,” he said, and then, “Would you believe that someone stole my car?”
“Really?” Lacey Macy paused, caught herself. “That’s terrible.”
Robbie nodded, looking off in the distance. “I reported it and everything. Called the police. They couldn’t do nothing. Now I’m just waiting for my ride.”
Lacey May didn’t bother asking who was coming to get him. It was nobody, or it was someone she didn’t want to know.
Robbie pointed across the street. “I left it in that lot, and when I came back, it was gone.”
“How long did you leave it there?”
“Not long.”
“Maybe it was towed.”
“Somebody stole it,” Robbie said firmly.