“Good.” He cupped the back of my knee from where he knelt in front of me. “I’m mad at you too.”
“Okay.” My voice didn’t sound like my own.
“Mira.”
I looked up at him. “On a scale of one to ten, how much do you love me right now?”
“Four.” Half as much as the day before. I knew it wasn’t fair, but Six wanted honesty.
“I can work with that.” And then he stood, kissed my forehead, and walked out of the bedroom. My heart beat in time to his steps, faster and faster as he approached the door.
I waited only a few seconds before I tore down the hallway after him, not caring if my heavy footsteps woke Brooke—I couldn’t care about anything except the fact that Six was leaving.
He’d barely made it to the door before I leapt up into his arms, entangling myself around him. Like an octopus, I thought, the way he’d always described me. And I would’ve stayed latched to him, too, if he hadn’t pried me off of him.
“It’ll be like no time has passed,” he told me with a promise he knew I didn’t believe.
And then, I watched him walk out the door.
21
Four months later
He’d said it’d be like no time had passed, but time had passed all right. At first, I’d counted the hours. By the seventy-two-hour mark, my units of measure changed to days, and that quickly turned into weeks. By the time it became months, plural, I was halfway convinced that he didn’t love me as much as he’d claimed.
He'd sent me flowers after leaving; pink peonies, the edges of their petals darker than the rest of them. I’d allowed myself a minute to appreciate them before I tossed them. They’d die sooner than later, anyway.
If Brooke had noticed them, she hadn’t said anything. We’d fallen into a routine, she and I. She taught me more baking shit in the mornings, I taught her a couple simple self-defense routines here and there in the afternoon and come sundown, we’d both be in the living room painting on the nights we weren’t at the Dry Run. I’d stopped letting her paint my skin, needing distance from her as her belly seemed to explode straight from her center. Her stomach grew and my aching for Six diminished so much that I had begun questioning my feelings for him in the first place.
And the nights that Brooke kept me up with her fruitless crying, I stared up at the ceiling wondering why I wasn’t crying over Six. Sure, her separation from her fiancé was—on the surface at least—more permanent than mine. But Six barely called, and when he did it was not with news of his arrival date. I started to believe he wasn’t coming back, and started feeling suffocated in the space that reeked of him.
I looked at Brooke’s growing belly with anxiety, wondering when she’d pop the kid out so we could find her a more permanent living situation and I could go back to my little apartment with Henry.
When the first chill of impending autumn breezed through the kitchen, I turned on the television for some background noise while Brooke napped in her room. I stretched, debating whether or not to go for a run. I was achingly restless—almost never tired. Brooke was too fatigued to go on walks with me, even though I wanted to push her to do them with me—not for the company, but to speed along the pregnancy so I could finally walk away.
I couldn’t ever remember feeling as empty as I did. Not even pre-Six. He’d filled me in the places I hadn’t known were there, and without him, I was all too aware of his absence.
This had all seemed a lot easier when Six had been by my side for everything. With Brooke always near me, I suddenly craved my solitude. At least I had Henry, even though he didn’t do anything at all.
I looked to the fish tank and felt my heart stop.
Henry was belly up, floating along the top of the tank, completely motionless.
“No!” I reached my hand in the tank and pulled him out without thinking—but he didn’t flop in protest. He didn’t struggle at all. He just lay there, a sickly white-yellow color, in my hand.
Horrified, I dropped him. He splat on the ground at my feet, splashing water everywhere.
This was all wrong. Henry was here for me, the only thing that was mine in this damned apartment.
I slid to the floor and scooted him into my hands. It didn’t matter that he was the sixth or seventh or eighth iteration of my original fish—it was what he represented, that I’d lost then.
With the tip of my finger, I scooted him back onto my hand and stared at his lifeless body, the orange and white pattern in his flesh. I’d had this one for a long time, a long time for me. He’d made the trek with me into this foreign environment, but he hadn’t flourished. He’d died.
I wasn’t sure how long I sat there, cradling my dead Henry, but after a while I managed to pull myself to standing. I heard a door open and close and then another one open and close shortly after, telling me Brooke was up and in the bathroom.
I debated what to do with Henry. I couldn’t put him in the toilet; how undignified. I didn’t want to put him down the garbage disposal either, which made him more food than pet.
A cool breeze blew in from the patio’s screened door and I walked out to the courtyard, stopping at the batch of purple flowers and digging a small hole with my fingers right behind it. The dirt was cold, colder the deeper I went, but it didn’t feel right to give him a shallow grave that Six’s Chihuahua neighbor could easily sniff out and dig up. So I dug and dug until the dirt was caked between my fingers, and slid him into the hole before covering him up and patting the dirt smooth.
As I returned to the kitchen to wash my hands, the news on the television picked up volume. I glanced out my periphery and then did a double take. I was so focused on the familiar face on the television screen that the words became warbled.
That was Cora’s face on the screen. In capital letters below her photo were the words: MISSING CHILD ALERT.
My blood turned cold and my hands dropped in the sink while the water continued to run.
She was missing?
The screen blurred as I stared at it, unblinking. Video from in front of an apartment flashed on the screen and then it cut to what looked like a high school photo of Cora.
Rapidly, I blinked, and forgot to breathe.
Then, like my senses were slowly coming back to me, I registered the hot water that was scalding my skin and the sound of my name being said repeatedly.
I turned, still feeling as if I was in a trance as a half dozen thoughts burned through.
Call Six.
Call the police.
Which police? San Francisco police or Detroit—where she lived?
Did Six have something to do with this?
Was she in danger?
Get out of this house now.
The last thought was obeyed—not necessarily by choice—because standing in front of me was Brooke, water dripping from between her legs and pooling on the floor at her feet.
“We have to go to the hospital.”
I couldn’t tell you how we got to the hospital. One minute, I was watching Brooke stuff toilet paper into her underwear and the next we were walking through the emergency doors. I was still in a fog, still confused and concerned and too plagued with questions to really realize that Brooke was in active labor.
“Your name?” The receptionist at the counter looked vaguely interested in the fact that a heavily pregnant woman was bent in half, hissing breaths in and out.
“Brooke,” I told her when Brooke couldn’t supply her own name.
“Brooke?”
“Yeah, with an E.”
“Last name?”
I should know that. Maybe she’d told me at some point, but it was lost on me then, and at the bottom of the list of things I was concerned with at that moment. “Brooke Something.”
The woman gave me a displeased raise of her eyebrow and I rolled my eyes before lifting Brooke’s wallet off of her and pulling the driver’s license out of the clear pocket.
“Satisfied?” I asked her, because the shock of Cora’s fac
e on the news was fading as Brooke’s moaning increased. “Can she get a bed or something?” I looked over at Brooke, her face flushed as she held the reception counter with a white-knuckled grip. “She’s peeing everywhere.”
A nurse in periwinkle scrubs stepped forward with a folder in her hands and looked at me with no small amount of disdain. “That isn’t urine. Those are her waters.”
I knew that. “Well,” I said, putting an arm around Brooke and turning her to the wheel chair they wheeled out from behind the back room, “She’s watering everywhere, then. And this isn’t a garden, so can we get going?”
I gently pushed Brooke into the chair, but her face had relaxed significantly. Pain wasn’t etched in lines across her forehead, but she still looked like she’d just finished climbing a fourteener. “Gonna make it?” I asked her, my attention now fully on Brooke and the tiny human she was about to push from her body.
Brooke’s eyelashes were thick and wet as she looked up at me and clamped a hand around my wrist. “Can you call my mom? Number’s in my phone.” I tried to imagine ever asking anyone to call my mother for me, but the look in Brooke’s eyes was so pleading, so desperate, that I nodded and took her purse, following slowly behind her as they wheeled her back toward an elevator. I found Brooke’s clunky phone and searched contacts until I came across “Mom.”
The elevator dinged, its doors closing, and I lost signal.
“It’s okay,” Brooke said and patted my hand as she arched her back in the wheelchair. “Wait until we get into the room.”
We. It wasn’t until that moment, when I was following Brooke upstairs to the labor and delivery wing, that I realized I was going to be joining her for this particular journey.
“Uh…” I began, trying to figure out how to politely decline the opportunity to watch Brooke expel this child from her womb.
But my chances to say no were dashed as the doors opened, and the nurse directed me to go to room eight.
I waited outside the door as they moved Brooke into a bed, and dialed her mom’s number again. It rang and rang and rang before it finally clicked to a robotic-sounding answering machine greeting.
“Uh, hi. You don’t know me.” I looked at Brooke, whose face was contorted and her body seizing like someone had jammed a hot poker against her tailbone. “I’m Brooke’s…friend. Anyway, baby’s coming, so you probably should get here. Room eight.”
I flipped the cover closed and entered the room, observing a nurse with kind eyes and a kinder voice holding Brooke’s hand and calmly reminding her to breathe. She was leaning into Brooke, chanting “Breathe” over and over so many times while another nurse prepped an IV. I felt so unneeded that I nearly stepped out of the room before Brooke’s eyes popped open and focused on me. Her jaw was clenched, and her hand was reaching for mine.
I stared at it far longer than I probably should have, wondering what the fuck I was supposed to do. I barely knew Brooke. Sure, we’d spent the last four months together, every single day, but I had never intended to become invested in her and my goal in making her my hobby had shifted since then.
“Take her hand,” the kind nurse prodded, so I did, and Brooke squeezed hard enough to shatter a few of my bones. How the hell did these nurses manage to do this with little effort?
“Breathe, Brooke. It’s almost over.”
“Is it?” I asked, and the nurse turned to me, looking like I was crazy. I guessed her version of over was much different than mine because Brooke’s contractions persisted over and over until I thought she couldn’t take it anymore. And by ‘she’ I actually meant me because my hand was as lifeless and flat as a pancake, despite alternating the hand Brooke squeezed.
It felt like hours of torture. I had an errant thought that they should train special operative military members with videos of women in labor, to see the kind of pain they can endure and moan about, and still keep their words to a minimum. Because with each round of contractions, Brooke’s moans grew louder and more violent—almost animalistic—but she didn’t scream for an epidural or relief. She didn’t even form intelligible words, just moans that I felt down to my soul, moans of anguish. Sounds that were hard for me to bear, and I wasn’t the one preparing to have my body ripped in half.
There were moments of relative quiet, though, when they were checking out her business down south in between contractions. Brooke took it like a champ, her hair plastered to her forehead with sweat, the sides of it curling a bit haphazardly. She was only occasionally aware I was there, and never once actually said anything to me. She gestured for the ice the nurse had collected for her and the washcloth they kept rewetting and wiping over her forehead.
When the contractions started lasting longer and coming faster, I pulled the kind nurse aside and glanced at her nametag. “Hey Harriet. Can’t she get something to make this not so terrible?” I wanted to show her my pancake hand, but I held off. The epidural I was hinting at was more of a gift for me than Brooke at this point since she hadn’t actually asked for one. But I wanted one. I wasn’t comfortable having my hand squeezed hard enough to shatter the structure of my hand’s skeleton. And, more than that, I wasn’t comfortable watching Brooke bear the pain she was enduring. It wasn’t something I was accustomed to—I only knew my own pain. Bearing more than that felt heavier than I could carry.
“She hasn’t asked for one,” the nurse said and moved like she was going to go back in the room.
I stopped her with my hand. “Why the fuck not? Doesn’t this shit hurt?”
The nurse narrowed her eyes, but she still spoke kindly to me. “It’s the worst pain you’ll ever feel. But she’s made it this far. She’s close. By the time we even called an anesthesiologist, it’d likely be too late.”
This was all foreign to me; I didn’t know how labor worked. I didn’t know the rules. I just knew that Brooke’s mom still hadn’t shown up and I knew that Brooke was calling my name.
I rubbed my hands over my face, fatigue hitting me then. I didn’t know how Brooke was handling it. I would’ve asked to be put under, just so I could get a nap.
I went back into the room with great reluctance, just as the kind nurse stood up and nodded to the nurse in charge of the cart of metal instruments.
Brooke’s eyes were closed, her face soaked in sweat as she heaved shallow breaths in and out.
“We’re at a ten,” the nurse proudly proclaimed and started pulling metal stirrups out from under the bed. “Good job, Brooke. She’s almost here.”
The sight of Brooke’s legs being placed in the stirrups made my eyes go wide.
“So, wait, this is happening?”
The nurse who’d first wheeled Brooke back gave me an are you a moron stare, so I gave her one back. “I meant, is it go time?”
“That’s one way to put it,” came a voice from behind me, sending me jumping to the side. A man with a well-trimmed beard gave me a polite smile before stepping up to the bed and introducing himself to Brooke and explaining in a low, friendly voice that it was just about time to push.
But Brooke didn’t look like she was actually listening, because she’d slammed her head back against the bed, her teeth gritted and her nose scrunched up. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she said suddenly, her eyes closed and her arms fumbling to push herself up. I waited in vain for anyone to help her, but the nice nurse took her place on one side of Brooke and grabbed her hand, stalling Brooke’s progress. “It’s time to push, Brooke. That’s what that feeling is.”
“No, I have to go to the bathroom!” Brooke’s pleas were frantic, and the doctor lifted the sheet that was covering Brooke, causing me to jump aside to stand across from Harriet the nice nurse.
“It’s okay,” the nurse told her soothingly. “We’re going to start pushing. I want you to bear down, chin to chest, and we’ll count to ten. Yeah?”
Shit, this was happening. I looked around for an escape, but the door had closed, and I was surrounded by people setting up a warming bed, and plugging in a scal
e, and another nurse wearing a mask, standing behind the doctor expectantly.
Brooke’s hand grabbed my arm and I turned to her. She wasn’t looking though; she’d gritted her teeth again and pushed her head up and chin down as Harriet counted up to ten. The room was abuzz with people acting like Brooke’s screams weren’t as fucking terrifying as they sounded to me. I couldn’t imagine what giving birth felt like, but I’d seen enough in books and heard enough in health class to know that it wasn’t a fun time.
Brooke’s cries turned into sobs, and more than once she didn’t make it to the full ten. I held her arm limply, my attention on the doctor between her legs and the nurses who were holding Brooke’s legs in place and pulling up with every contraction she had.
She had to have been wiped out. Her moans were so guttural, like they’d been exhumed from her soul, but even those were getting harsher, weaker, as her energy waned.
“She’s got a lot of dark hair,” Dr. Stanley said with a jolly laugh, like this was a tea party or some shit. “Couple more pushes, and she’s out Brooke.”
Harriet rubbed Brooke’s arm reassuringly and made eye contact with me, before looking pointedly at Brooke’s other arm long enough that I mirrored whatever Harriet was doing. Brooke didn’t really seem to notice. Her eyes were blanked, often crossing from the pain. Like she was in an entire other dimension, struggling to gain a foothold in ours. But, nonetheless, she found it within her to bear down and push again, and again, and once more until the screeching sounds of her daughter filled the room and everyone in the room came alive. They wrapped the baby up and placed her on Brooke’s chest as they rubbed her body, her face, removing all the weird birth residue. She let out a tiny, cat-like mewl, and then her eyes popped open, her hands in fists as her whole body shook. Like she felt deep rage at the world but couldn’t summon the voice to say so.
“Want to cut her cord?” Harriet held the scissors up to Brooke, and Brooke looked at me.
“No way, no how,” I said, my hands up in protest. I didn’t want to be the one to untether Brooke’s daughter from her mother.
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