The Mothers

by Brit Bennett

  “I thought you should know,” she’d told Luke.

  The phone line had gone silent, and she’d checked her screen to make sure the call hadn’t dropped. When Luke finally spoke, he sounded choked-up, and in spite of everything, her eyes had watered too.

  “Can I see you?” he’d said.

  “Not now.”

  “I won’t come over. I don’t have to come over but what about the doctor. Can I come to the doctor’s?”

  “I’m not ready,” she’d said.

  He hadn’t asked when she would be. He had abandoned his early, insistent attempts to convince her to return home. Now he circled from a distance; she felt him swooping around her, waiting. She hadn’t invited him to any of her appointments but she’d informed him of important updates, like when she learned that the baby was a girl. “A girl, wow,” Luke kept saying, and she thought about Russell asking if Luke wanted a boy. But each time he repeated “A girl, wow,” she felt his voice lifting into awe. A gender made a baby seem real, no longer a wish. She imagined Luke lifting a little girl above his head, a girl with her mother’s tight curls or her father’s wispy ones, all gathered in a puff. A girl who would not travel from home to home, who would not fear men clicking down hallways, who would not fear anything, stretching her arms as Luke lifted her high, always sure that she would land safely against her father’s chest.

  “Knock knock.” Monique leaned against the doorframe, yawning. She was holding a glass of water.

  “I was about to get it myself,” Aubrey said.

  “I know. I was up.”

  “You don’t have to check on me.”

  “No one’s checking on you. I was up.”

  The only thing more annoying than her sister checking on her was how she always pretended that she wasn’t. Monique eased over the scattered sneakers on the carpet, the boxes Aubrey still hadn’t unpacked although she’d moved back in months ago, and set the water on the nightstand. Then she leaned toward Aubrey’s belly and said, “Good morning, baby girl.” She always told Aubrey that she should talk to the baby more. At twenty weeks, a baby could hear. At twenty weeks, a baby could recognize her mother’s voice. But Aubrey talked to her baby the same way she talked to God, never aloud, only inside herself. She swallowed her vitamins and hugged her belly. There. I hate swallowing those and I did it for you. Anything for you.

  “Where’s Kasey?” she asked.

  “Sleeping,” Monique said. Then she smiled. “Hey, why don’t we get some exercise? Let’s go for a run.”

  “I don’t feel like it.”

  “Why not?”

  “You run too fast.”

  “I’ll jog, then. Come on—let’s just get out of the house. It’ll be good for you.”

  Monique stooped, picking up the pair of sneakers off the floor. She couldn’t resist it, fixing things.

  “I think I’m going by the house today,” Aubrey said. “Just to pick up a few things after work.”

  Monique paused, kneeling in front of the closet. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” she said.

  “It’s my house. You said that.”

  “But you still refuse to kick him out.”

  “Where’s he supposed to go?”

  “I don’t know. He should’ve fucking thought about that before.”

  “It’s not a big deal, Mo,” she said. “He works late today.”

  “Do you want me to go with you?”

  “It’s fine,” she said. “I’ll be in and out.”

  That night, she unlocked her front door and pushed it open slowly, like entering a stranger’s home. She did not hang her keys on the hook she’d made Luke nail to the wall because he always forgot where he put his. She did not slide her jacket on a hanger in the closet or even take off her shoes. She paused at the side table where they set the mail—a stack of letters from Nadia. She did not open them, because she knew what they would say, but she flipped them over to ensure the seal was intact. Luke hadn’t opened them either. She thought, as she often did, of the two of them whispering about her in bed. Stop, she told herself. A cord stretched from her to her baby girl, but she wondered if, along with food and nutrients, she was sending other things to her child. If a baby could feed off her sadness. Maybe that cord never broke. Maybe she was still feeding off her mother.

  She flipped on the light in the guest room that she and Luke had imagined as a nursery. Before their years of infertility, back when they were newly married and hopeful, pointing at blank spaces and conjuring a crib, a planet mobile, walls painted a color soft and dreamlike. Her sister had brought her paint swatches to study, but she’d stared at lemon yellows and waxy greens, nothing quite right as she and Luke had imagined. She heard the lock click in the doorway and closed her eyes. She’d lied to her sister earlier—she knew Luke came home early on Thursdays but she was too ashamed to admit she missed him. She was not supposed to be the type of woman who forgave so readily—but she didn’t feel like a woman at all anymore. She carried a girl inside her, a girl both she and Luke, and she had become three people in one, an odd trinity.

  “Wow,” Luke said, when she turned around.

  He had not seen her since she’d called to tell him she was pregnant. She felt his eyes slide over her body, her swelling stomach, the ugly maternity sweatpants, and he seemed to marvel at the sight. Maybe she wasn’t as beautiful as Nadia, as brave, as smart—but she was the mother of his child. She and Nadia lived on a forever tilting floor between love and envy, and she finally felt that floor tilt until she could stand. She was birthing the kept child. She had something Nadia never would, and for the first time, she felt triumphant over Nadia Turner.

  “Do you still see her?” she said.

  “No,” he said. “Never. Aubrey, I just—”

  “Or talk to her?”

  He shook his head. She didn’t ask if he still loved her, because she feared the answer.

  “I didn’t come back to see you,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about the nursery and my sister’s house is too small—”

  “Of course,” he said. “Let’s do it here. What do you want? I’ll get it.”

  She imagined the two of them assembling the nursery piece by piece, the way she and her sister had redecorated the guest room when she first moved in. They’d created the bedroom from Aubrey’s fantasies, a room she had imagined while sleeping on trundles and couches and motel cots, a room she had assembled in her mind when she needed a place to hide. Her mother’s boyfriend touched her and she hung a picture frame, spread a thick quilt on the bed, traced the floral wallpaper with her fingernail.

  She and Luke could create a beautiful world for their daughter and she wouldn’t know any different.

  “I have to think about it some more,” she said.

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay. Think all you want.” He slid his hands in his pockets, taking a tiny step toward her. “Can I—is she kicking yet?”

  “No,” she said. “Not yet. I’ll tell you when she kicks.”

  She headed to the front door, past the key hook, the coat closet, the side table. Then she paused and grabbed Nadia’s stack of letters. The most recent one had no return address, only the words Please forgive me written on the envelope in smudged blue ink.

  —

  BY FEBRUARY, Nadia’s father had started taking slow walks around the block in the evening. He wore a navy blue windbreaker zipped up to his neck and she perched on the front steps, watching him make one slow loop and then another. He no longer needed her help, but she still did small things for him, cooking dinner and washing his clothes. Every two weeks, she cut his hair with her mother’s clippers, wondering what her mother would say if she could see them now, if she’d be surprised by how their lives had melded, if she’d foreseen this in the moment she pushed her little girl forward and urged her to kiss her daddy hello. The February bar exam came an
d went, and Nadia started thinking about July. She could take the California bar, not the Illinois, and move back home for good. Find a job somewhere close, maybe downtown San Diego, only a forty-minute drive away, so she could still take her father to church on Sundays. She could do what every girl in Oceanside did: marry a Marine and dream of nowhere else. What was not to love about this place where there were no winters and no snow? She could find a nice man and live in this eternal summer.

  One evening, while she watched her father disappear around the corner, Luke’s truck pulled up in front of the house. Her breath hitched, and she clambered to her feet as he headed up her driveway.

  “Hi,” he said. “Can I come in?”

  She stepped inside silently, Luke following her. She suddenly felt exposed—she was wearing bunchy sweatpants and a baggy Michigan shirt, her hair pulled into a sloppy bun—and she glanced around the living room, the floor she hadn’t yet swept, her stacks of books on the coffee table. But why did it matter? Those days of impressing him were over, weren’t they? Besides, he knew her. What part of her life was unseen to him? They both paused in the entrance, as if venturing further into the house breached an unspoken agreement. Then she started into the kitchen—a safe room—and he followed her slowly, his hands in his pockets.

  “Heard from Aubrey?” he said.

  “No,” she said.

  “She took your letters.”

  “She did?”

  “The ones you sent to the house. I don’t know if she read them but she took them.”

  For the first time in months, her chest felt lighter. Aubrey might never forgive her, but at least now she might know how sorry Nadia was. She filled a glass with water and handed it to Luke.

  “I heard about your baby,” she said. “Congrats.”

  He took a long sip before setting the glass on the counter. “My mom?”

  “Your mom.”

  “It don’t feel real yet,” he said. “I don’t know if every guy feels like that or if it’s just—I mean, she e-mailed me the sonogram. I guess I always thought I’d be in the room to see it.”

  Nadia thought of her own sonogram, the faceless splotch against the dark backdrop. She’d never told Luke that she had seen it. It would hurt him, knowing that she’d seen their baby and he hadn’t. He leaned against the wall, sliding his hands back into his pockets.

  “I got something to ask you,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Can you talk to Aubrey?”

  “I told you, she won’t talk to me—”

  “Maybe it’s different now,” he said. “She took the letters. You can tell her what happened—how you were sad about your dad and how shit just got complicated because of everything that happened before—”

  “You want me to take the blame,” she said.

  “Don’t say it like that.”

  “That’s what you’re fucking saying—”

  “I want to see my daughter,” he said. “I want to know her.”

  So they were having a girl. In a way, she felt relieved. She’d been hoping their baby would be a girl. Baby was, or had been, a boy, and if this new baby had been a boy too, it would’ve felt like Baby had been not just replaced but overwritten completely. But that was a stupid thought. She had no way of knowing whether Baby was a boy or not, and how dare she care if he’d been replaced, a child she hadn’t even wanted in the first place. Not the way Luke wanted his girl. She could do this for him, take the fall. She imagined herself delivering this version of the story, the version that his mother undoubtedly already believed. That she had seduced Luke, that she had ensnared a good man who was only trying to help her care for her sick father. Would Aubrey believe this? Would any woman truly believe this, besides one who needed to?

  “I hope she forgives you,” she said. “I hope you’re there for her. You were never there for me. You left me in that clinic. I had to handle everything on my own—”

  “Nadia—”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “But I’m not lying for you. I’m not lying to her anymore.”

  Luke left quietly. She followed him into the entrance, where her father was standing in the entryway, unzipping his jacket. He frowned as Luke brushed past him.

  “What’s going on?” he said.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Just Luke Sheppard saying hi.”

  —

  A CHILDHOOD’S WORTH of terrible Christmas gifts lived in Nadia’s drawers. Her father found them all the afternoon he searched her things. He wasn’t a good gift-giver—his wife had always bested him—but he’d still spent hours every December inside department stores, picking out necklaces with little swirly shapes, charm bracelets, anything covered in pink rhinestones. Pretty, frilly things he thought a girl would want, like pajamas with an actor’s face on them, clunky jewelry, a lavender cell phone case. He found most of these still in her nightstand drawers as he sifted through her things. He liked to think that she kept them because she treasured his gifts, but he knew better. His daughter was not sentimental, not about him. Love was not the same as sentiment. Most likely, she couldn’t be bothered to throw his gifts away. In the bottom of one drawer, he found the gift he’d been most proud of, a ceramic box covered with lavender flowers. It had reminded him of a jewelry box his mother used to own; as a boy, he’d run his fingers over the sculpted flowers, amazed by the types of things women owned, prettiness for pretty’s sake.

  He didn’t know what he was looking for. A receipt? A medical document? Some evidence that the clinic he’d overheard her arguing with Luke Sheppard about wasn’t the one downtown. By the time his daughter pulled into the driveway, he had emptied her nightstand drawers, covering her bedspread in metallic wallets, fuzzy socks, sparkly earrings still attached to cardboard. She walked in to find him sitting on the edge of her bed, the ceramic box in his lap. In his hands, he held a golden pair of baby feet.

  FOURTEEN

  In the early morning, Upper Room was cloaked in quiet, which Nadia knew, because years ago, she’d spent a summer of mornings there. In those days, when she was seventeen and wounded and desperate to prove herself worthy of anyone’s attention, she had traveled the silent hallways alone, carrying a mug of coffee from the pastor’s office to the first lady’s. She’d made that journey each morning, and when she’d poured the steaming cup under Mother Betty’s watchful eye, she’d glanced at the pastor’s closed door and wondered what he was doing inside. His work seemed mysterious, unlike his wife’s, which was industrious and practical. Sometimes he’d entered the office after she had, smiling at her as he bustled past, a thick Bible under his arm. Other times he was on the phone when she walked in, his back turned although she could see his hands playing with the curly cord. Once, she’d watched him guide a couple into his office for counseling and she imagined how the pastor might conduct a session. How he would lean back in his creaking leather chair at strategic moments—away when he made a point, toward them when they spoke—how he would seem wise and understanding. That summer, she’d wondered about the types of people who arranged to see the pastor early in the morning. These were the most damaged people, probably, the ones who needed the most help, the ones most worried about what might happen if anyone else in the congregation discovered their problems. She’d never imagined that years later, she and her father would be two of those people, arriving at the pastor’s office as the sun lightened the sky.

  The pastor jolted when they walked in. He’d been sitting behind his desk, bent over an open Bible and stacks of legal pads, writing a sermon, probably, which made arriving at his office unannounced seem even more wrong. But her father had walked into her room that morning and said, “We’re going to see the pastor,” with such firmness, she couldn’t contradict him. She’d spent a long, sleepless night, picturing her father sitting on her bed, surrounded by her emptied drawers, holding the baby feet. His eyes had shimmered with tears.
r />   “You went through my stuff?” she’d said, weakly.

  “You did this thing?” he said. “You did this thing behind my back?”

  He’d refused to name her sin, which shamed her even more. So she’d told him the truth. How she’d secretly dated Luke, and discovered that she was pregnant, and how the Sheppards had given her the money for the abortion. Her father had listened silently, head bowed, wringing his hands, and when she finished, he sat there a moment longer before standing up and walking out of her room. He was in shock, and she didn’t understand why. Didn’t he know by now that you could never truly know another person? Hadn’t her mother taught them both that? Now she and her father stood in the pastor’s doorway and the pastor gazed up at both of them. Then he cleared his throat, gesturing to the burgundy chairs across from his desk.

  “Why don’t you two sit down?” he said calmly.

  “No,” her father said. “You don’t give me orders. She was just a girl, you son of a bitch, and you knew what your boy had done to her—”

  “It was handled, Robert—”

  “Handled how? Handled by you? You the one who made her do this? Or your boy?”

  “Let’s just talk about this now,” the pastor said, easing out of his chair. “Anger won’t solve anything—”

  “Damn right I’m angry! You wouldn’t be angry, Pastor? If this was your girl?”

  Her father wanted someone to blame, and how easy it would be to give this to him. She could be the innocent girl, bullied into that unnatural surgery by a selfish boy and his hypocritical father. Across the desk, the pastor rubbed his eyes, like he was suddenly fatigued by the truth.

  “I knew,” he said. “I knew that we shouldn’t have given you that money. It’s arrogant. Interfering with a life the Lord has already created.”

  “No,” she said. “No one made me do anything. I couldn’t—I didn’t want a baby.”

  “So you kill it?” her father said.

  He was disgusted with her, which was worse than his anger. After all, hadn’t he and her mother not been ready to be parents? And hadn’t they raised her anyway? What was wrong with her? Why couldn’t she have been stronger?