by Brit Bennett
“No one made me do anything,” she said again. Her mother was dead now, long gone, but she might have been proud to know that her daughter did not blame anyone for her choices. She was that strong, at least.
—
ON HER LAST NIGHT in California, Nadia asked the cabdriver to stop at Monique and Kasey’s house on the way to the airport. She sat at the curb for five minutes, watching the meter tick up, until the husky Filipino driver rolled down the window to light a cigarette.
“You going in or . . .” he said.
“Give me a minute,” she said.
He shrugged and tapped his ashes outside the window. She leaned against the glass, watching the smoke lick and curl. Her father had stood in the doorway of her bedroom, watching her pack her suitcase. “You don’t have to go,” he’d kept saying, out of a desire for her to stay or just politeness, she couldn’t tell. He would be settling into his armchair right now, growing re-accustomed to the silence. He might turn on the television to fill the home with sound. Maybe he missed how simple his life had been without her, all his easy routines. He would have to find a new church now—he hadn’t even looked the pastor in the eye when they’d left his office—but what other church would have a need for a lonely man and his truck? She imagined her father traveling from church to church, forever carting someone else’s load, keeping nothing for himself.
She finally climbed out of the cab and rang the doorbell. After the second ring, Aubrey cracked open the door. Her stomach curved like a beach ball over her maternity pants. She was pregnant in a way that Nadia had once feared; in the days following her pregnancy test, she’d lifted her shirt in front of the mirror and stared at a flat stomach that ballooned in front of her eyes until it hung immovably over her jeans. When she’d called to make her appointment at the clinic, the man who answered the phone told her that before he could finalize the date, she had to listen to a recording explaining her other options. “I’m sorry,” he’d said, “it’s just something the clinic is required to do.” He did sound genuinely sorry, and when she’d fallen silent on the other end, he told her that he had no way of knowing whether she actually listened to the whole thing. So as soon as the recording started, she’d quietly set her phone on her desk. She didn’t need to listen to know that she didn’t want to be heavy with another person’s life.
But Aubrey didn’t look scared. She seemed comfortable in her big sweater, a hand resting on her stomach, as if to remind herself that it was still there. She wanted this baby and that was the difference: magic you wanted was a miracle, magic you didn’t want was a haunting.
“Congratulations,” Nadia said.
She tried to smile—this was the hardest part, wasn’t it? When the ease of friendship began to instead require drudging effort. When you stood on the welcome mat instead of trouncing right through the door. She searched Aubrey’s face, for kindness or for anger, but found neither, only a quiet steadiness as Aubrey glanced down, wrapping her sweater tighter around herself.
“You lied to me,” she said.
“I know.”
“For years. You both did.”
“And I’m so sorry. I just didn’t know how to—”
“Is that your cab?”
She felt Aubrey gaze past her shoulder to the cabdriver smoking at the curb. “I’m flying back tonight,” she said.
“For how long?”
“I don’t know.”
“So that’s your plan. You do this to me and now you’re just gonna leave.”
“Can I come in a second?”
Aubrey hesitated. For a long moment, Nadia thought she would say no, then she stepped aside and Nadia entered the little white house that had once been her home, past the cardboard boxes scattered on the floor, into the kitchen where a sonogram hung on the refrigerator. She leaned closer. There she was, a baby girl. Twenty weeks old and healthy, ten fingers, ten toes. At twenty weeks, a baby looked human.
“My dad found out,” Nadia said. “About my abortion.”
“Oh.” Aubrey’s voice was soft. “Is he mad?”
Nadia shrugged. She didn’t want to talk about her father, not now. She turned back to the sonogram on the refrigerator, imagining herself in the room, holding Aubrey’s hand as the doctor slid the wand on her stomach. The doctor would laugh when he squeezed into the crowded room—he usually didn’t see patients bring in their entire families. No one would correct him that Nadia wasn’t family. She’d join the circle forming around Aubrey—Monique holding her other hand, Kasey touching her shoulders—as all four women watched the baby appear, backlit and washed in white light. Could she feel their awe while they watched her on the screen? Could she feel that she was already encased in love? Or could a baby sense when he was not wanted?
“What does it feel like?” Nadia asked. “Being pregnant.”
“It’s strange,” Aubrey said. “Your body isn’t yours anymore. Strangers will just touch your stomach and ask how far along you are. What makes them think they can do that? But you’re not just you anymore. And sometimes it’s scary because I’ll never be just me again. And sometimes it’s nice because I’ll be more than that.” She leaned against the wall. “But other times I think, what happens if I don’t love this baby?”
“Of course you will. How could you not?”
“I don’t know. That’s what happened to us, right?”
Sometimes Nadia wished that were true. It’d be much simpler to accept that she had been unloved. It’d be much simpler to hate her mother for leaving her. But then she remembered her mother offering her seashells at the beach and sitting up with her all night when she was sick, pressing a hand against her hot forehead and then kissing her, as if that kiss could detect fever better than a thermometer. Nothing about her mother had ever been simple—her life or her death—and her memory wouldn’t be either.
“Maybe they did,” Nadia said. “At least the best they could.”
“Then that’s even scarier,” Aubrey said.
She hugged her stomach. Inside of her was a whole new person, which was as miraculous as it was terrifying. Who would you be when you weren’t just you anymore?
“Do you have a name for her yet?” Nadia asked.
Aubrey paused, then shook her head. She was lying. She had probably thought up lists of names since the baby was just a prayer. But she didn’t want to tell Nadia and Nadia had no right to know. Still, after she hugged Aubrey good-bye, after she climbed back in the cab, after she leaned against the airplane window and watched San Diego shrink beneath her, she imagined herself in the hospital one morning after she received the call. She would pace outside the nursery, looking past the rows of newborns in pink and blue beanies, until she found her. She would know her by sight, the swirling light wrapped in a pink blanket, a child sown from two people she would always love. She would know the baby she will never know.
—
IN THE BEGINNING, there was the word, and the word brought about the end.
The news spread in only two days, thanks to Betty. She would later tell us that she had not meant to cause any harm. Yes, she had leaked personal, private information but that was only because she hadn’t realized it was so personal and private. She had just been going about her business one morning, unlocking the doors around the church, when she’d heard loud voices in the pastor’s office. Of course she’d gone to check on what was happening. Wasn’t that her duty? What if the pastor had needed help? Crazier things had happened. She’d read in USA Today about a minister in Tennessee who had been stabbed by a crazy congregant. And she’d seen a segment on 60 Minutes about a church in Cleveland that had been robbed by a few hoodlums who had suspiciously known exactly where the tithes were kept. When we asked what exactly she aimed to do if the pastor had, in fact, been held at knifepoint in his office, she had dismissed us with a wave and insisted we let her return to her story. So she had gone to inves
tigate the loud voices, and when she’d drawn near, she had peeked around the corner through the crack in the pastor’s door and guess who she’d seen inside?
“Robert Turner,” she whispered across the bingo table. “Yellin’ and carryin’ on. He called Pastor an S.O.B.—can you believe it?”
Of course we couldn’t, which was why Betty looked so delighted to tell us. We could hardly imagine Robert even getting angry, let alone swearing at the pastor in his own office.
“For what?” Hattie asked.
“I don’t know,” Betty said, but her slow smile told us she had a good idea. “But his daughter was there and Robert kept saying ‘she was just a girl’ and the pastor said he was just helping the girl but Robert said she’s his child, it’s no one’s place to be helping her with nothin’.” She paused. “Y’all know what I think? I think there were a baby and now there ain’t one.”
We were disgusted but not shocked. You read about it in the papers every day, girls getting rid of their babies. Weren’t nothing new about it. When we were coming up, we all had a girlfriend or a cousin or a sister who had been sent off to live with an aunty when her shamed mother learned that she was in a family way. Some of our own mothers had taken these girls in and we’d peeped them changing through cracks in the door. We’d seen pregnant women before but pregnancy worn on a girl’s body was different, the globe of a belly hanging over cotton panties embroidered with tiny pink bows. For years, we’d flinched when boys touched us, afraid that even a hand on our thigh would invite that thing upon us. But if we had become sent-off girls, we would have borne it like they did, returning home mothers. The white girls ended up in trouble as often as us colored girls. But at least we had the decency to keep our troubles.
“Y’all think—”
“Of course.”
“Lord have mercy.”
“Y’all think Latrice know?”
“Is there anything around here she don’t know?”
The Turner girl and her unwanted baby. For days, we could think of nothing else, and although we’d promised to keep the secret amongst ourselves, the truth trickled out anyway. Later, we would blame each other even though we never determined who’d been the first one to run her mouth. Was it Betty, who’d loved the attention so much when she shared the story that she hadn’t been able to stop herself from giving a repeat performance to someone else? Or Hattie, maybe, who had shared a ride home with Sister Willis, a woman who couldn’t, as we all knew, hold water? Or maybe someone had just overheard us at bingo and the story had spawned from there. We were all guilty in a way, which meant that none of us were guilty and all of us were surprised that next Sunday, when Magdalena Price walked out of service right in the middle of the pastor’s sermon. The pastor glanced up, watching her go, and stuttered for a moment, like he’d lost his place. He was preaching on overcoming fear, a sermon that we’d heard him deliver dozens of times. What could he have said to offend her? Then that Wednesday, during midweek Bible study, we heard Third John tell Brother Winston that the pastor had paid Nadia Turner five thousand dollars to not have that baby, how else do you think she was able to go off to that big school? In Upper Room’s imaginings, the girl grew younger, the check larger, the pastor’s motives darker. He’d paid her to kill her child because he’d been afraid that the pregnancy would hurt his ministry or maybe he just didn’t want his kin mixing with Turner stock. Remember how crazy her mama was? Remember, as if any of us could ever forget.
Then the reporter came. A white boy fresh out of college, wearing melon-colored pants and a blond ponytail. We didn’t take him seriously at first, melon pants and all, until he told us that he’d heard that our pastor had paid off a pregnant girl, a minor too, and did we care to comment? He stood on our front steps in a wide stance, pen above his notepad, the way policemen always stand, a hand near their holster, as if to remind you they could take your life anytime they wanted. We told him we didn’t know nothing. He sighed, flipping that notepad shut.
“I figured wise women such as yourselves would want to know what your pastor’s been up to,” he said.
We wanted to chase him off those steps with a broom. Get! Get out our house! Who was he to poke around, turning up our rugs? Who was he to tell our stories? But he wrote it up anyway. One of the photographers had an aunty who went to Upper Room and was willing to talk. Some folks will say anything just to see their name in print. At that point, it didn’t much matter if his story was true. The earthquake came, the one we’d been expecting over the years. New members dried up. Old members stopped coming. Pastors around the city turned down invitations to visit and stopped inviting Pastor to their churches. Some days, Betty said, she sat in the pastor’s office with nothing to do, no schedule to fill, no appointments to make.
Years later, after Upper Room’s doors had finally shuttered, we paid Latrice Sheppard a visit. She invited us inside, offered us tea and cookies, but never an apology.
“I did what any mother would’ve done,” she said. “That girl should be thanking me. I gave her life.”
But none of us were sure what type of life Nadia Turner was living. We hadn’t seen her in years. Hattie said she’d settled down in one of those big East Coast cities like New York or Boston. She was a big lawyer now, living in a tall building with a doorman who tipped his cap to her when she came bustling in from out of the snow. Betty said she never settled down and she was still flitting around the world, from Paris to Rome to Cape Town, never resting anywhere. Flora said she heard about a woman on CNN who’d tried to kill herself in Millennium Park. She hadn’t caught the name but the photo looked just like the Turner girl, the same ambered skin and light eyes. Could that be her? Agnes said she didn’t know but she’d felt in her spirit that the girl would think about killing herself later in life, maybe even more than once, and each time, she would instead live. She got her mother in her, holding the knife, and her own spirit flinted over, and each time they struck, she would spark. Her whole life, a spark.
—
WE’VE SEEN HER one last time.
A year ago, maybe, on a Sunday morning that, like all Sunday mornings since Upper Room died, we have spent together. We’re too old to find a new church now, so each Sunday, we gather to read the Word and pray. No one leaves us prayer cards anymore, but we intercede anyway, imagining what the congregation might still need. If Tracy Robinson still has a taste for liquor, if Robert Turner has finished mourning his dead wife. We pray for Aubrey Evans and Luke Sheppard, who, in the dying days of Upper Room, we’d seen together in the lobby with their baby—together, but not quite so, the way you can fix a hole in a worn pair of pants but they never look new. On Sunday mornings, we pray for everyone who comes to mind and after, we sit on the balcony outside Flora’s room and eat lunch. But that Sunday, we’d glanced out and seen Robert Turner’s truck heading down the street. We were delighted to catch a glimpse of him but instead, we saw his daughter driving. She was older then, in her thirties maybe, but she looked the same, hair flowing down to her shoulders, sunglasses covering eyes that glittered in the sun. Her left hand hanging out the window held no ring but we imagined she had a man somewhere, a man she could get rid of when she had the mind to because she would never put herself in the position to be left. Why had she returned to town? Flora thought Robert might be sick again, but Hattie pointed out the flattened boxes filling the truck bed. Maybe she was helping her daddy move. Maybe she was bringing him home with her, wherever her home now was, and maybe that was why she’d seemed so peaceful, because this was the last time she’d ever step inside her dead mother’s house. Agnes swore she saw a pink Barbie bag on the passenger’s seat—a gift, perhaps, for Aubrey’s daughter. We imagined her walking up the steps with the present and kneeling in front of the girl, a girl who wouldn’t exist if her own child did.
Then she disappeared around the corner, and as quickly as we’d seen her, she was gone. We will never know why she returne
d, but we still think about her. We see the span of her life unspooling in colorful threads and we chase it, wrapping it around our hands as more tumbles out. She’s her mother’s age now. Double her age. Our age. You’re our mother. We’re climbing inside of you.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Endless thanks to the following people, without whom this book would not be possible:
Julia Kardon, the agent of my dreams, who saves me daily with her guidance and wit. Thank you for always believing. There’s no one else I’d rather have in my corner. Everyone at Mary Evans Inc., especially Mary Gaule, whose feedback and support has meant so much to me. Sarah McGrath, whose incisive edits improved this book at each step, Danya Kukafka, for her invaluable help behind the scenes, and all the good folks at Riverhead, whose contagious enthusiasm has made the process of publishing my first book so much fun.
The faculty and staff at the Helen Zell Writers Program, particularly Peter Ho Davies, Eileen Pollack, Nicholas Delbanco, and Sugi Ganeshananthan, who guided me in shaping a rough draft into a thesis into a book.
My inordinately talented cohort, who challenged me each workshop with their insight and feedback: special thanks to Jia Tolentino, who edited and published my first essay; Rachel Greene; Derrick Austin; and Mairead Small Staid, whose kindness and good humor kept me warm through three Michigan winters. And to Chris McCormick, fellow country mouse, for the impromptu brainstorming sessions and hastily planned trips and endless advice. I applied to graduate school only hoping to improve my writing. What a gift to have met you all.
To the creative writing faculty who mentored me at Stanford, particularly Ammi Keller, who encouraged me during that first scattershot draft, and Stephanie Soileau, who challenged me during my first real revision. You both approached those early drafts with such seriousness and generosity, and I’m forever grateful.