by Brit Bennett
—
AFTER A WEEK, her father was finally released from the hospital. Nadia was relieved to go home after a week of living out of her haphazardly packed suitcase, a week of barely sleeping on the hard cot, a week of sipping watery coffee while her father underwent chest scans and breathing tests. A week in which an endless parade of Upper Room members filtered in and out of her father’s room: Sister Marjorie, carrying a slice of her homemade pound cake; First John, bringing a Miles Davis biography that he’d just finished; the Mothers, fussing and fawning with the socks they’d knitted because hospitals just got so cold and you could never have too many pairs of thick socks; even the pastor, who’d come by one morning to pray, laying a palm on her father’s forehead. Everyone seemed a bit surprised to see Nadia there, like Third John, who’d jolted when he saw her in the doorway.
“Look who’s here,” he said, with a grin, as if he had fully expected her not to be.
Of course she was there. Of course she had flown home to visit her father in the hospital. How could anyone think that she wouldn’t? Was that why the congregation had flocked to see him? Everyone had been so convinced that she wouldn’t visit her sick father, that she would leave him there all alone, so they’d all made sure to visit him themselves. She could imagine them already, whispering about her after Sunday service. How they would pity her father with his dead wife and his daughter too busy to visit home. How they would feel noble, honorable even, for standing in the gap and serving as the family he ought to have.
On the cab ride home, her father turned toward the window, like he was grateful to see sunshine again. He still couldn’t walk on his own, so she helped him into the house, grabbing him the way the nurse had taught her. She realized, lowering him into bed, that she hadn’t been in her father’s room since it had become his room only. He still slept on the left side of bed like he used to, the other half untouched as if her mother had just rolled out of bed to get a glass of water.
“Go rest,” he said. “I’ll be fine.”
She hesitated before finally slipping out his door. What good could she do him half asleep? She showered and crawled into her bed, drifting off to sleep, when she heard the doorbell ring. When she opened the door, she found Luke Sheppard on her steps. He held a red Tupperware container under one arm, his other arm leaning against his wooden cane.
“I’m with the sick and shut-in ministry,” he said. “Can I come in?”
Marriage hung on Luke’s body. He looked older and fuller now, not fat, just satisfied. He filled out a baby blue sweater that Aubrey had obviously bought him—the soft color he never would have chosen, the careful stitching he wouldn’t have noticed—with the satisfaction of a man who no longer had big decisions to make, who relied on a woman to buy his sweaters. He slowly wandered into her kitchen, leaning on his cane, and asked where he should put the food.
“I don’t need your food,” she said.
“It’s not from me,” he said. “It’s from Upper Room.”
He’d stopped shaving too. She imagined him abandoning his razor in front of the bathroom sink—he was satisfied, why groom?—and Aubrey teasing him when she passed to brush her teeth. Maybe she loved his beard, the way his hair tickled her when they kissed. Maybe he only did things that she loved.
“You told your parents,” she said.
“What?”
He looked confused, then his face washed over and his shoulders slumped. He stared at her tiled floor.
“I needed the money,” he said.
“Then make up a reason!”
“They would’ve said no.” He stepped toward her. “It had to be a really good reason.”
“So that’s the best reason,” she said. “That I was having your baby.”
“It’s not like that—”
“I bet your mother skipped all the way to the bank—”
“You needed the money,” he said. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, I just thought—it seemed easier that way. You would’ve worried.”
“Just go,” she said.
He let himself out, not meeting her eyes. He wouldn’t care that he’d hurt her. He had a good life now and she’d done nothing but drag him back into the past. During long lulls in the afternoon, she thought about him, how peaceful he seemed. This had always frightened her about marriage: how satisfied married people seemed, how unable they were to ask for more. She couldn’t imagine feeling satisfied. She was always searching for the next challenge, the next job, the next city. In law school, she’d become prickly and analytical, gaining a sharpness while Luke had rounded and filled. She felt hungry all the time—always wanting, needing more—but Luke had pushed away from the table already, patting his full stomach.
—
I MADE AN appointment with the doctor, Aubrey typed. She waited a moment, then a reply arrived from rmiller86:
Baby?
For a second, she thought he’d forgotten their rules. No sweet-talking, no flirting, just plain, friendly conversation. Miller had first e-mailed her a year ago. Don’t know if you remember me, his e-mail began, but as soon as his name appeared in her in-box, she returned to their sweaty kiss on the dirty bathroom floor and felt her whole body burning. Of course she remembered him. Did he think she rolled around with so many strangers in beach bathrooms that she might forget him in particular? She’d called Nadia, angry that she had given him her e-mail address.
“Jesus, Aubrey,” Nadia said, “that was, like, years ago. I just thought it’d be funny. How was I supposed to know he’d actually write you?”
Aubrey wouldn’t have written him back if he hadn’t mentioned that he was currently stationed in Iraq. He couldn’t tell her where—security reasons—but she imagined him somewhere hot and horrible, covered in dust and dodging bombs. A soldier all alone in the desert—it wouldn’t hurt to write him back. Writing him was the good thing to do. The patriotic thing. Besides, he was halfway around the world. There would be no bathroom floor. Just nice, friendly conversation.
His first name was Russell. She imagined his family and friends calling him Russ, maybe even Russy when he was small. She began sending care packages addressed to Lt. Russell Miller, boxes filled with the things he asked for—soap, jelly beans, car magazines—and things he hadn’t asked for—homemade cookies or novels or even a photograph, like the one from last Mother’s Day, when she’d skipped church and gone for a ride with Mo and Kasey up Pacific Coast Highway. In the photo, she was nestled in the crook of her sister’s arm and her pink tank top strap had slipped partway down her shoulder. She’d sent the photo to Russell because she looked more natural in it than in any other picture she’d ever taken. The picture was innocent enough—her sister was in it, for god’s sakes—but she sometimes wondered if he’d noticed the tank top strap, if he’d imagined himself beside her, slipping a finger underneath it. If he did, he never said. He thanked her for the picture. I feel like I know your sister, he wrote. Like she’s my mother too.
He was lonely. She was lonely too, in her own way. Luke had just been promoted to floor head at the rehab center, so he worked longer hours. He’d also started spending his evenings at Upper Room, helping his father. Between church and work, he couldn’t even find the time to go with her to the doctor about her trouble getting pregnant.
“I can’t,” he said, popping a green bean into his mouth. “Carlos got me training a couple of new guys.” He ate like that often now, leaning against the counter. If you went through the trouble cooking a man a meal, the least he could do was sit to eat it.
“Can’t you move something around?” she said.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. It’d make me feel better if you came with me.”
“It’d make me feel better if everyone stopped obsessing about babies,” he said. “We’re young. We got time.”
They had been trying to get pregnant for a year. She
hated that word, trying. Why did it take such effort, such drudgery, for them to accomplish what millions of people did effortlessly every year? She bought pregnancy tests by the armload from the 99 cents store and she took them every two weeks, even when she had no reason to think she might be pregnant, like tossing pennies into a wishing well. When she visited Mrs. Sheppard for tea, she felt her mother-in-law gazing at her with pity, the way you look at a child who is adorably failing at some simple task. She listened to Luke’s mother offer advice, about pregnancy superfoods she should try, about vitamins some doctor on Oprah recommended. Now she’d finally made an appointment with her doctor but Luke wouldn’t even go with her.
“I don’t get it,” she told Nadia. “Why does he act like it’s no big deal?”
She was sitting at Nadia’s kitchen table, watching her sort her father’s medicine into a daily pill organizer.
“I don’t know,” Nadia said. “Maybe you should. Just relax, I mean.”
“I am relaxed. Do I not seem relaxed?”
“I know, I just mean—you have time, that’s all.”
Nadia opened a new vial of pills, counting the tablets in her palm. She sounded harried and distracted, too worried about her father to care about anything else, and Aubrey wished she hadn’t even mentioned the appointment. Luke always said the same thing—they had plenty of time to have a baby—but she still felt like she’d already failed him. She couldn’t get pregnant and she knew it was her fault because Luke had made a baby before, accidentally, with some nameless girl. That girl hadn’t even wanted his baby, yet Aubrey was incapable of forming a child she prayed for every night. She didn’t say this aloud, though. She already felt selfish enough, going on about her doctor’s appointment while her friend was frowning and counting pills. Besides, she’d never told Nadia about Luke’s aborted baby. She hadn’t told anyone, except for Russell, but that was different. Russell wasn’t anyone. He was a phantom who ghosted across her computer screen. She shut her laptop at night and with a click, he disappeared.
—
IN LAW SCHOOL, Nadia had lived by detailed schedules, her days planned down to the hour. But in the hospital, where long periods of waiting were only punctuated by brief visits from doctors, she had felt like she was floating in time, unhinged from it completely. Now that she was back home, she created a new schedule. She didn’t write it down, the way she’d kept a calendar on the dry-erase board back in her apartment, but she memorized it, and soon her father did too. She woke at six, checked his breathing, and showered. Her father slept in his easy chair in the living room now—lying down was too painful—so she rubbed his shoulders each morning, working out the kink in his neck. She helped him to the bathroom, only as far as the door. He still had too much pride to allow her to help him bathe, although she was increasingly aware that that day was nearing, if not during this injury, then someday in the future, the way all people grew old and infantile. Maybe that was what her mother had tried to avoid. Maybe it was easier to exit while she was still young and capable than wait for her own eventual decline.
The doctor had told Nadia that the biggest concern about her father’s injury was infection, but she knew there were other things to worry about too. Pneumonia. Lung collapse. Fluids filling his chest. And pain. Even if nothing further went wrong, the pain alone could prevent her father from breathing deeply. Each morning, she checked him for fever and guided him through his breathing exercises, ten deep breaths every hour. She packed frozen peas inside his shirt for fifteen minutes to decrease the swelling. She encouraged him to cough, always afraid she might see blood. Three weeks in, she found herself looking at the phlegm her father had coughed into a wad of tissue and realized she didn’t feel disgusted at all. She was too worried to feel anything else.
She was starting to think like a nurse, Monique said. When her father was discharged, Monique had come by and talked her through all of the medicine bottles lined up on his dresser. She showed Nadia how to support him when he coughed to minimize the pain, how to listen to his chest for fluids, how to help him take little walks around the living room to keep his blood circulating. Nadia fell into her routine, most days not even leaving the house.
“You gotta go back to school,” her father finally told her. “You can’t just sit around here all day.”
She was helping him change for bed, pulling his navy USMC shirt over his head. She tried not to look at his scars, the parts of his chest that still looked bruised.
“I’m not,” she said. “I’m studying for the bar. That’s what I’d be doing in Chicago, anyway.”
She never wanted him to think she’d halted her life for him. Other fathers might have felt touched, but hers would only feel ashamed. She had inherited this from him, an inability to ask for help, as if needing something was an inconvenience. She always made sure to study in front of him, even though she could hardly concentrate. Every few minutes, she glanced up at him and swore she heard a hitch in his breathing. A snag in his throat or the swish of fluids filling his chest. She heard imaginary ailments. She felt herself falling apart. One night, when the pain was too bad for her father to sleep, she sat up with him, her hand clenched in his. She wanted to take him back to the hospital but he refused.
“What’re they gonna do?” he wheezed. “Give me medicine? I got some right here. I don’t need no hospital.”
He told her war stories, about growing up in Louisiana with parents who hated each other. His mother had cared for him and his five siblings, while his father worked long hours at the oil refinery and spent his week’s earnings at gambling houses and brothels. He’d return from work, sweaty and covered in soot, and his wife would draw his bathwater and iron his shirt so he could go back out to spend his day’s pay on liquor and women. Her father had never understood why his mother would do that. She’d sit on the edge of the claw-foot tub—she had a long braid down her back that whipped up at the end—and pour warm water. She sometimes added a drop of cologne and the house, which usually smelled like food and dust, filled with a sweet fragrance. At catechism, when the priest talked about the woman who had poured expensive perfume on Jesus’ feet, her father had thought of his own mother’s devotion. At least Jesus had been grateful. His father never thanked his wife for anything.
One cloudy day, she was in the front yard, washing clothes in a basin, while her children were shooting marbles on the porch. Her husband came down the steps, bathed and cologned and wearing a shirt she’d starched and pressed. He was heading to the pool hall to gamble away his week’s earnings and he would return in the early hours in that beautiful white shirt she’d scrubbed, now crumpled and musky with the smell of a cheap woman. And after standing in the welfare line all day, she would scrub it clean again. She stared down into the basin, at her fingers wrinkling in the warm water, at the pounds of shirts and coveralls and drawers waiting for her in the basket. As she would later say, she felt a heaviness on her chest, as if those shirts had all wrapped themselves tight around her heart. She didn’t think. Her fingers wrapped around an ice pick that had been lying near the pump and she shoved it into her husband’s back. He bled out on the laundry tub.
“The water was red, red,” her father said. “I never seen anything redder.”
He bore his father’s name but he wanted to be nothing like him. When he’d enlisted in the Marines, his superiors noted that he was calm-headed and quiet, the type who kept to himself. He was called Altar Boy because of the rosary he wore under his uniform. After he was transferred to Camp Pendleton, he had a bunkmate called Clarence who was loud and charming, the exact opposite of himself, so of course, they became friends.
“He wanted me to meet his sister,” her father said. “I thought she’d be ugly. Guy wants you to meet his sister, she usually is. Guys with pretty sisters don’t want their friends sniffing around. But he said we’d be good for each other.” He turned his head toward the glass door, where the morning sky lit pink.
“I couldn’t believe how pretty she was. And young. Guess I was young too. I watched my daddy bleed out over a laundry tub and I never felt young after that. But your mom, she had light. She smiled at me and my whole chest cracked open.”
Her father finally fell asleep by noon, his head slumped toward the window. By the time the doorbell rang that afternoon, Nadia had been awake for twenty-four hours. She stumbled to the door, expecting Aubrey, but instead, Luke paused in the doorway, clutching a plastic container of food to his stomach. She knew she looked horrible—scrawny and mean, eyes dark and puffy, her T-shirt hanging off her shoulders, her hair in a tangled ponytail. She hadn’t showered or slept or eaten in hours. In his startled eyes, she felt like a sliver of herself, like an ice cube passed around inside a mouth until it hollowed into a slender crescent.
He guided her to the kitchen table and microwaved a plate of chicken and rice. She hugged herself, watching him move quietly around her kitchen, catching the microwave before it beeped, quietly shutting the utensil drawer. He set the steaming plate in front of her.
“Eat,” he said.
“I should’ve visited,” she said.
“You gotta eat something.”
“I should’ve come home more.”
“How would that change anything? Even if you’d been there, what was you gonna do? Lift a hundred pounds off him?” He slid the plate toward her. “You gotta eat now. You gotta stay strong so you can help him too.”
“I left him,” she said.
“You went to school. He wanted you to.”
“I left him like she did.”
He touched her cheek and she closed her eyes, melting into the softness of his fingers.
“No,” he said. “It’s not the same.”
“It is,” she said. “I feel like I have to be her for the both of us.”
She started to cry. Luke pressed her head against his shoulder, then he guided her away from the kitchen table. In the bathroom, he knelt on his good leg and ran water into the tub.