Me, Him, Them, and It

by Caela Carter

  He gets to hear me call Cecelia “Medium” and he gets to see how Tammy follows me around and how I became Good Evelyn again as soon as I got away from him? I don’t want him anywhere near here. How could none of them ask me about this? What’s he going to do anyway? Where’s he going to stay?

  I run down the stairs and watch Nora for a minute, her eyes buried in a pile of legal papers in the family room. Aunt Linda is still at work.

  “How come you didn’t tell me?” I try not to sound completely pissed. Her eyes snap up.

  “Tell you what?”

  “That my dad is coming for Christmas.”

  Nora’s eyebrows knit together. “You didn’t know?”

  “My dad just e-mailed me.”

  Nora sighs and puts her highlighter down. “I’m sorry, Evelyn. When he asked us today, I figured he had run it by you already.”

  “I don’t want him anywhere near me.” I hear the edge in my voice. Anger rattles my words the way it used to.

  “We’re going to have to talk to Linda about this, then,” Nora says. “I’m sorry this is such a surprise, Evie. Did you take your vitamins tonight?”

  How can she just change the subject like that?

  I nod. “Where’s he going to stay?”

  “I don’t know, sweetie. Is Tammy done with her math?”

  “Yes,” I say. This is not Nora’s fault. Don’t get mad at Nora. “Is he staying here?”

  “Well, he’s your father. It’s hard to imagine that we wouldn’t offer to put him up over Christmas.”

  Because he will ruin Christmas. I spin on my heel. Before I’ve reached the stairs, I turn back to Nora.

  “Well, he can’t stay down here,” I say. “Because then the girls won’t know how Santa got to the tree without waking him up.”

  I’m trying to sound as pissy as possible but Nora smiles. “Evelyn, I’ve come to truly love you over the past few months. I hope you know that.”

  I have no idea what to say to that, so I just disappear back up the stairs to check my e-mail. No reply.

  3 Months, 23 Days Left

  Todd still hasn’t replied when I pull out a dress to wear to Maryellie’s baby shower. It’s burgundy and velvet and ugly but it’s the only winter dress I have, and the only maternity dress I have, so I’m glad my mother bought it during that crazy shopping spree.

  I climb into the car, telling myself that he will have replied when I get back.

  When I trudge up two flights of stairs to step into the living room, crowded with about twenty women and girls sitting and standing and shifting in the door frames, I attempt to steel my face so no one can tell that I’ve never been in an apartment this small before. It makes Aunt Linda’s house look like a castle. It makes my Silent House look like an entire country. How the hell is Maryellie going to raise a baby here? Where will she even fit a crib?

  Even though my face is blank, an army of brown eyes rests on my pale nose. I’ve gotten so used to being the only white face in a room of females, I forgot it would be surprising to these aunts and cousins. Maryellie shouts my name from the shoe-box kitchen to the right, trilling the “l” as usual, and rushes in to plant a kiss on my cheek. Her mother wraps her arms around me, and it should make me miss Mrs. Gates but instead it opens up a cave deep in my heart that I know is the space my own dad used to fill.

  We women sit in a circle and play games: we measure Maryellie’s belly with toilet paper, we pass baby gifts, we bet on the birthday, we make up a poem for the baby’s name: Emanuella. The whole time, Maryellie’s mother keeps kissing her and hugging her and putting her hand on her stomach to feel Emanuella kick. The aunts pile compliments high onto Maryellie’s belly. Her cousins shower her with gifts and offers to babysit. By the end of the party, I almost ask if bean can live in this crazy crowded apartment too. There’s a lot more room for a baby here than in my giant house.

  If you combined Maryellie’s family with my family’s resources, maybe raising a baby wouldn’t seem so daunting.

  When everyone starts leaving, I suck my breath in and give Maryellie’s aunts and mother a kiss. My friend walks me out to my Jeep.

  “Did he reply?” she asks.

  I shake my head.

  “Well, I’ve been thinking and it’s probably going to take him a while, you know? He’ll need to tell his parents and everything before he can figure out how to help.”

  She’s right. I’ll hear from him, but not for a while.

  “I like your family,” I say. “You’re lucky.”

  She laughs. “We’d be luckier if I knew I could graduate, you know?”

  My eyes go wide. “What do you mean? You might not graduate?”

  “I don’t know who’s going to take Emanuella next year so I can go back to school. My mom has a job and Mario, who knows about him?”

  “But you’re an honors student. What’s the point of all those APs?”

  She says, “No, don’t worry. I’ll figure it out and graduate eventually.” But I’m afraid she’s just trying to quiet my concern.

  She kisses me again, and I hoist my belly into the car. I’m really not sure which one of us has it easier.

  Christmas Ev(i)e

  I’m helping Cecelia and Tammy stir cookie dough, each of them taking ten turns to whip it together before they switch. It’s sticky and thick and we aren’t getting anywhere, but who cares. Cecelia was stirring it at first when the brattiest voice came from Tammy’s little mouth: “That’s not fair she stirs! I’m bigger!”

  Bratty has never sounded so beautiful. Aunt Linda and Nora, who were two feet away dicing vegetables for the soup, both let their jaws drop along with mine while Cecelia just handed her sister the bowl of dough, saying, “Here, Tammy. We’ll take turns.”

  Stirring this cookie dough is going to take more bicep than either of their little bodies have grown so far, but it doesn’t matter. I pull the bowl from Cecelia and hand it to Tammy, who starts chopping the wood against the steel.

  “Long, smooth strokes,” I remind her, and the doorbell rings.

  I’m almost surprised. I’ve lost myself in this little domestic moment. This is my family, I keep telling myself. Cecelia and Tammy and Aunt Linda and Nora. No Dad. No Mom. No bean. This is it. It’s a fantasy, but it’s what I have.

  But Aunt Linda rinses her hands in the sink and walks to the door. He flew into O’Hare and rented a car. He got a hotel room, too, because Nora told him what I said about Santa Claus. I told Mom not to come. Two parents are always harder than one.

  He walks in the door—my dad. His shoulders stoop so he seems a foot shorter than he should be. His dark hair is flecked with gray. The wrinkles around his eyes and mouth—which have been there as long as I can remember—have changed direction, each of them pointing directly to the floor. He looks older, even though it’s only been a few months.

  He reaches to shake Aunt Linda’s hand as she opens her arms to hug him.

  “For Pete’s sake, Jim,” she says, wrapping her arms around the outside of his biceps. “We lived together for years. I would think you could hug me.” Even though he’s hugging her, I feel his eyes on my inflated stomach, my boobs that actually need the bra I’m wearing, my thick legs in my jeans.

  Nora approaches him and shakes his hand.

  I don’t even remember picking it up, but the steel bowl is in my grasp and my arm is whipping around the cookie dough, the spoon clanging back and forth in the bowl, making a satisfying racket.

  “Girls,” Nora says, “this is your uncle Jim.”

  That’s all it takes for Cecelia to wrap herself around his leg, pressing her ruddy cheek into his knee. The Stranger stiffens like she has a runny nose. He pats her braids.

  “Well, hello. You must be Tammy.”

  “I’m Celie!” she shouts. Tammy, in fact, is peering at the scene from behind the door frame. She hides behind objects while I hide behind noise. Clang, clang, clang goes the spoon and the bowl. “What makes you my uncle?”

  My
dad looks speechless, so Nora leans over to pry Cecelia’s hands from his leg, saying, “Well, you know that Evelyn is your cousin, and this is her daddy. Your cousin’s daddy is your uncle.”

  Cecelia jumps onto Nora’s leg and peers up at her. “So what’s your cousin’s mommy?”

  “Your aunt,” she says. “Evelyn’s mother, Judy, is your aunt. And your Mommy Linda is Evelyn’s aunt.” Clang, clang, clang. I’m glad to have something to look at besides his old face.

  “Well …” We all watch as the wheels in Cecelia’s head turn and it does not escape me that he is still standing in the doorway. Not looking at me. Not even hearing the racket I’m making with the cookie dough. “Why doesn’t she call you Aunt Nora then?”

  Nora looks at me. “I don’t know, sweetie. But if she wants to call me that, Evelyn should call me Aunt Nora.”

  I’m so surprised I stop slamming the spoon around and inspect the dough. It’s ready. I feel my dad’s eyes on me as I pull the spoon out and hand it to Cecelia. I take a second one from the drawer, dip it in the dough and hand it to Tammy around the door frame. He’s still in the front door.

  The girls lick their spoons. I start to put balls of dough on the cookie sheet.

  “I know y’all have arrangements for dinner, but I’d like to take my daughter for lunch.”

  I feel all eyes swing to me. “No!” I want to say it. I want to scream it. I want to get in his face and tell him to leave. I want to just keep stirring dough and ignore him completely, not even dignifying his coming with a single word. But two of the eyes on me are Cecelia’s, and I don’t want to be Bad Evelyn in front of her. So I don’t say anything while I hand Aunt Linda the bowl and cross the kitchen to the coat closet.

  Is this what it means to have a kid? To have to do the right thing even when you’d rather throw a temper tantrum?

  “Be back in time for dinner, okay?” Nora, or Aunt Nora, or whoever, says to me as if I’m off to some exciting social engagement, and I follow the Stranger outside and climb into the car.

  He reaches and pats my back and smiles so huge I almost wish I had some reindeer antlers to pull out of my pocket and make him laugh, but I wish more that I was back in Aunt Linda’s house helping Cecelia and Tammy form the dough into cookie shapes and teaching them to use a rolling pin and convincing myself that that is my real family and being right about it.

  I know I need to talk to my dad eventually. Maybe I even want to. Maybe I even hope I’ll forgive him one day. But I hate that he’s making my one Christmas with my cousins so hard.

  At lunch we are silent. This is pointless but at least I’m used to it.

  He starts with the sitcom questions again: How are my grades? Am I being a good big cousin? Am I staying out of trouble? Have I made any friends? But away from the girls, I’m free to snub him. I could snub him for two straight days. It won’t be that bad. I just wish that those two days weren’t Christmas.

  I’m halfway through my hamburger when he says, “Pumpkin, your mother left me.”

  I stop chewing.

  “I’m not saying she lied to you. It seems to me that no one tells you enough of anything, or maybe that no one knows how much to tell you and how much to leave you alone because you have so much”—his eyes involuntarily jump to my stomach, then back to his plate—“going on yourself right now.”

  I stare at him.

  “And I’m not saying it’s not my fault. I’m not even saying it’s not what I want. But you, Pumpkin, you are the most important person in my life. I can’t stand the idea that you would think I’m leaving you or tearing your family—crappy as it may be—apart.”

  For some reason, the question my mouth forms is this: “So you’re the one who still lives in the house?”

  “No. I guess she kicked me out more than left me.”

  I don’t know what to feel. “Did you cheat on her again?”

  “No,” he says. Then, “God, I’m so sorry.”

  Then you shouldn’t have done it, jerkface.

  “Look, Evelyn, this is not really your concern. Your parents’ marriage, I mean. It’s your business, but it’s not your concern.” He’s stuttering. He’s as nervous as I am right now. We’re both not used to honesty anymore. “I mean, there is nothing you can do to control your parents’ marriage. But we both love you. We both love you so much. That’s why we lived like that for so long.”

  “But that was no good for me,” I hear Talkative Evelyn say. The words feel like fresh water; they are coming from somewhere really pure in me, maybe from right where I keep bean, and I’m not saying them on purpose but not by accident either.

  “I know,” he says. “We messed up. We fucked everything up, Pumpkin. I’m so sorry. I loved your mother, but she got so sad and it just … it just was so sad for so long. I guess there’s only so much sadness a person can take before she breaks. Or he breaks, I guess. But I don’t want that to happen to you, Pumpkin. I’m so sorry.”

  I’ve never heard my father curse before. He seems like he might cry. I’ve never heard that before either.

  I don’t know what to do. I don’t even know if I’m still mad at him or what.

  So I pull two paper napkins into straight lines and tie them together, fanning out each side so it looks like a big bow. Then I stick it on my head and say, “Hey—look, Dad. I’m a Christmas Present for Christmas Evie.”

  But when he smiles so big I can see the fillings in his molars I put it back on the table and say, “I still don’t want you to call me Pumpkin, though. Not yet.”

  He nods.

  Making Plans

  When I call Mom on Christmas, I can’t help wishing she’s here too. Not with Dad. I stand by that decision, especially now that they’re getting divorced. But if she could be here separately … I wish she could also see how Tammy and Celie pull out the tiaras that come with the dolls and shove them right on their heads. I wish she could see me being good at something. Practicing.

  I call her to give her a gift. The only one that will really matter.

  I say, “Which room will we use for the nursery?”

  She pauses a minute as if she can’t believe I actually brought up part of the plan. She says, “I was thinking we would use the one between your room and my office. How does that sound?”

  “Sounds good.” I’m ready to keep planning, but I don’t know what else to ask. I wonder what she’s doing today. Probably sitting by herself with a bunch of legal briefs. It’s so depressing. Which is my fault, I realize suddenly. When I told her not to come, I was only thinking about how hard Christmas would be for me. Maybe I should have thought about her too.

  “Do you want to paint it?” she asks.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “What color?”

  “I don’t know.” How do you decide that?

  “Okay, Evelyn, don’t get mad at me for asking this one, okay? Is it a boy or a girl?”

  “I don’t know. I keep telling them that I don’t want to know.”

  She hesitates. “Okay, we’ll paint it yellow. How’s that?”

  By the time we hang up, we’ve gone online and ordered a bassinet and a changing table and made plans for her to come to Chicago two weeks before I’m due to wait for the baby, which means she’ll get to see how good I am with the girls after all.

  3 Months, 1 Day Left

  Chicago is so cold. The air bites my face if I just step outside to my car or the mailbox. I spend every second outside simultaneously apologizing to bean for the cold and wondering how, even as I am shivering, I can still be sweating pig-sized drops of perspiration from my armpits.

  But we go out on New Year’s Day anyway because the suburban zoo is having some sort of holiday party and Cecelia has been begging to go. The whole family goes. Aunt Linda, Nora, and I sip hot chocolate and herbal tea while the girls do different crafts at different habitats. And when we are all so frozen it feels like our limbs will never untangle themselves from our coats and one another’s coats as we nuzzle up and
snuggle together, we climb back into Aunt Linda’s car and wait for it to warm up so we can go home. As the car purrs in the parking space, Cecilia climbs onto my lap to keep warm, her car seat empty for now. She curls up, resting her head right on my bump.

  “Hi, baby,” she says. “It’s your big, big cousin, Cecelia.”

  And then, I feel it. It’s not at all the same as when I thought the blob was bashing around in my insides trying to save its life. No. This doesn’t feel haphazard or random or crashing. This feels like a foot kicking me from the inside out; it feels so exactly like what I would have thought it would feel. It makes tears come to my eyes.

  And I know I’m not crazy either because Celie says, “It kicked me!”

  “It did?” Aunt Linda and Nora whip their heads around to see me in the backseat. Tammy reaches her stubby arm across Cecelia and starts groping my stomach.

  “Oh, Evie-Teeny!” Aunt Linda says, letting her own eyes fill up. “How exciting!” She reaches behind the driver’s seat and grabs my hand.

  I nod. I go with it. But that’s not why I’m crying. I’m terrified. Terrified. The bean has a foot. There’s a person in there, in me.

  Aunt Linda whips out her cell phone and dials my mom. “Judy, your grandbaby just kicked! She just kicked!” Aunt Linda keeps forgetting that bean might be a boy. Sometimes I think she forgets there are penises in the world.

  “Yeah, yeah, here you go,” she says, and passes back the phone to me. I steel myself for my mother’s stony reaction, but when she starts talking she’s a blubbery mess too.

  “Oh baby, my baby,” she says. “Isn’t it incredible?”

  “Incredible,” I repeat, leaving off the question mark. I don’t know why I was such a disappointment when all that was in me was a pack of cells, but now that it’s cells in the shape of a foot, it makes all these women cry with joy.