Reggie wanted to say something lighthearted, to show she was above all this, but she couldn’t find the words. She wasn’t above it. She was buried beneath it, and none of the adults seemed to care. She pushed through the people gathered around her and sank with her head down to Ms. Bird’s class.
She nearly walked straight into Ted Irish, whose eyes fell so coldly on her that Reggie did an about-face and took the back hallway to class. In the corner of Ms. Bird’s room, Arielle, the French girl, was surrounded by a gaggle of girls, the school gossips. In her beautiful accent, the words falling out of her mouth like water, Arielle said, “She thinks she’s special because he had sex with her, but he’ll have sex with anyone.”
Reggie was always astonished by how quickly these girls could call up an invasion of misery.
“Don’t listen to them,” Jewel said when Reggie sank into her seat. Steadfast Jewel, there by Reggie’s side even though Reggie had ignored her calls all weekend.
In sociology, Matt moved to sit next to Reggie instead of across from her. He wound his fingers through her hair until Mrs. McMahon said, “Enough, Matt. Save that for after school.”
Everyone laughed, except for Jewel. Reggie saw Ted Irish lean over and whisper something into his girlfriend’s ear. Reggie couldn’t hear them, but her face burned anyway. She wondered if this day would ever end. She somehow couldn’t imagine herself ever making it through.
After school, Ms. Thorne said, “I am very sorry about what they did to your locker. I’m not saying this will be easy. But you’re shutting down, Reggie. Skipping school. Not respecting yourself.”
Reggie looked at Ms. Thorne. Ms. Thorne was a good person, she cared about Reggie because it was her job, but Reggie couldn’t connect with her. She was part of the system that had fallen into place after the accident, where respecting Ted’s grief meant sacrificing Reggie. None of the kids who were bullying her had to go to counseling. Reggie was so upset she was shaking.
“I don’t drink,” Reggie said desperately, “or do drugs.”
“Good,” Ms. Thorne said, though she looked confused.
“Do you know how drunk my dad was?” Reggie asked.
Ms. Thorne shook her head mournfully.
“0.29,” Reggie said. “That’s really high. He turned onto a sidewalk.”
It was really crucial for Reggie that Ms. Thorne say something—she felt strongly that right at that moment she needed guidance—but Ms. Thorne was silent. Reggie felt like she’d been carrying an armload of bricks these past few months, and the longer the silence lasted the more she felt like letting the bricks fall. She wondered what had been the point of all this talking.
* * *
When Matt pulled up that night, Reggie went to his car. She had Flour Baby with her.
“Forget Ted Irish,” Matt said through the cranked-down window. “He’s a pussy, blaming you.”
“Can I drive?” she asked. Matt shrugged and unbuckled his seat belt. Reggie slipped into the driver’s seat and Matt shut her door for her. From the passenger side, he told her to go back to Walled Lake, but Reggie turned east instead, toward Detroit, and the night fled from the headlights as she accelerated. She felt the engine ask for a higher gear and she shifted into it.
She’d left Ms. Thorne’s office feeling strange, feeling like screaming. Carla had tried to talk to her—“I got a call from the school, sweetie”—but Reggie shrugged her away and phoned Matt.
“Where’re you going?” Matt asked.
She turned to look at him, the wheel shaking beneath her fingers. A stoplight turned yellow as they neared it, but Reggie sped up and blew through the intersection in the stolen time between the red light for her and the green light for cross traffic. A cop car pulled out behind her and its flashing lights pivoted in her rearview, casting a pretty glow on Matt’s face.
“I’m tired of being a rule follower,” she said, and she drove faster. There were tears in her eyes but for the first time they felt cathartic. “Everything’s a mess and I haven’t even done anything wrong.”
The cop sped up too, setting his siren wailing, and Reggie kept going. Her whole life seemed visible on the road before her, ready for ruin, and she thought, get the bad stuff out of the way now. Get it all out. Get arrested now and maybe she wouldn’t later; make mistakes with boys now and she’d be too hurt to make them again.
She glanced at Matt as she careened onto the highway entrance ramp. He looked to be teetering between uncertainty and excitement, as though he’d never done anything quite this bad. Then Reggie had an idea. “The flour baby,” she said. “Throw it.”
A slow smile crept over Matt’s face. Whether or not they were right for each other, they could, as Carla said, have fun. He was easygoing, quick to agree, fine with anything, fine with Reggie. And she was desperate to bind herself to him because he was one of the only people who cared about how she felt. And even if he didn’t care for long, he did right now.
The cop was close behind them. “Go, go, go!” Matt said. He reached down and pulled Flour Baby from its dark nest in the footwell, tearing away the plastic bag. He cranked down the window and sent the bag of flour soaring toward the cruiser. In the rearview, Reggie watched the baby hit the cop’s windshield and explode in a poof of white powder. For a moment, everything behind her was weightless and pure.
IV
Blood
Drinking helps, or at least we think it does. It helps Patrick and me talk, and we do, for hours at my kitchen table or at the cop bar near campus. When we have a conversation there’s space for our ghosts to sit between us calmly.
Soon Patrick and I are spending most of our time together, and because we met by chance, something about this time feels as though it doesn’t count toward the sum of the season, but the time passes anyway. We take the light rail to Branch Brook Park during the Cherry Blossom Festival in April. Newark has more cherry trees than Washington DC, I tell Patrick. He asks how I know, and I tell him everything I know about Newark I learned from my landlord, Yuejin, a kind man of about sixty who lives across the street from me with his wife and their two teenage children. We circle the lake until we find a spot to lay down a blanket in the grass. I read aloud from the book of poems I have that a friend of mine wrote, and Patrick falls asleep while I read, but I keep reading. His head is in my lap, and I run my fingers through his hair. I like the way the words mingle with the wind, the sounds of geese, and the slap of sneakers from the people who’ve come to the park to go running.
When Patrick wakes, it’s dusk.
“I liked the poems,” he says.
“When you meet Aamina, you’ll have to tell her which was your favorite and why.”
Patrick looks concerned.
“I’m joking,” I say.
We go home and make chicken piccata. Even though I curdle the sauce we clink glasses over what to us is a very special meal. Of course, we keep talking about my father and his friend, but when the conversation gets too heavy, we pour another drink. It’s easier to change the subject when your glass is full.
* * *
My job as a paralegal started as for now and seems to have turned into forever. I have a degree in English, but I went back for a paralegal certificate not long after I graduated. I liked my job in Michigan, where Ralph and I met, but we moved here so he could get his master’s. He finished. He left. I stayed.
I’m scrolling through my phone while walking home from the train one night and thinking about how the last time I saw the doctor she’d mentioned not to text and walk—it was the latest thing for doctors to remind patients of, the new wearing seat belts. I almost walk into a double-wide stroller carrying two newborns, and Thora, digging in a bag.
“Oh my God,” I say. “Babies.”
Thora straightens. She looks tired. She comes around to my side of the stroller and hugs me.
“We just got home last night,” she says.
“I thought it was quiet down there. I almost texted you.”
; “It was so crazy. We wouldn’t have answered.” Thora brushes loose bangs away from her forehead.
“Did you take a cab?” They don’t drive in the States. “I would’ve driven you.”
“Oh, no, Marie. It was so late. And it happened fast.”
So Per and Thora had slipped out in the middle of the night while I slept beside Patrick. I stoop down and look at the two girls and their milky blue eyes. The sidewalk is damp from an earlier rain. Against the stones the infants look as soft as silk and assaulted by the porch light. Thora tells me their names: Bolette and Hilma.
“Bolette. Pretty. Hilma, too.” I look up at Thora. “How are you planning to get that stroller with those babies up the stoop?”
“To be honest,” Thora says, “I was hoping Per would get home soon. I just had to take them for a walk. There wasn’t enough oxygen in the house. Is this what they call ‘mommy brain’?”
“I think it’s just called tired brain.”
“Good,” Thora says. “Reminds me I’m still a human.”
“Very human,” I say, and together we take the babies inside.
* * *
The next day I wake up early to the sound of the 6:00 a.m. flights taking off from Newark Liberty, and I’ve been sitting in the window since, watching traffic gear up with coffee steaming under my nose. I’m supposed to be writing, but Patrick is sleeping in my bed, and I’ve made up this rule as an excuse not to write: that I can’t write with someone else in the house. When I try, and Patrick asks me what I’m doing, I tell him I’m online shopping. No packages ever arrive, and when he notes this, I say I’m online window shopping.
Patrick sleeps through the early morning. He stayed out late last night with friends from class. I slip quietly from the bedroom and crack the front door open to listen to the babies shrieking downstairs. They’ve been up for hours, too.
I ease the door shut. I listen to the new sounds—cooing, crying—until it’s almost time for work. My boss represents the people with the money, the studios and the producers, not the artists, and the contracts we prepare make every project seem boring.
Patrick is stirring. He has summer classes, and I live much closer to the Business School than he does, so he stays with me most nights. In fact, for a month we’ve spent almost every night drinking together. Sometimes just a glass or two, sometimes so much we drown in it, fall into sleep and curl up in the rocky bottoms of our drunkenness.
He emerges from the bedroom looking sleepy. He wraps me in his arms. I tell him there’s coffee in the pot.
In the bathroom I rub the line between my eyes that has become permanent, the one from squinting and scowling. An uncomfortable feeling descends on me: sickness, hangover. I woke up so early this morning because my body was breaking down the sugar in the wine, and I couldn’t get back to sleep. Patrick and I are helping each other talk about the things that have happened, but we’re drinking too much, and now I wake up each day feeling ill. I don’t know how much longer I can live with this never-ending hangover.
But then again it’s nice to be with someone who understands.
I splash cold water on my face and do my best to cover the dark circles beneath my eyes. I put dry shampoo in my hair and fluff it around. Patrick eats cereal as I stuff my things in my bag. I leave him at the kitchen table to finish his reading for his class later on.
“Oh,” I say, stopping at the door. “The babies were born, so take care to be quiet in the hallway.”
Sitting next to me on the train is a woman with a baby strapped to her chest. I offer to hold her takeout coffee while she digs through her diaper bag in search of something. I smile at the baby, but he stares skeptically back at me.
The train swoops into the tunnel, the light disappears like a curtain falling, and the baby looks around in surprise. The sudden absence and appearance of light is new to him, lights flipping on and off, scenery appearing and disappearing from windows. Years ago I went to Iceland with Ralph. It was summer, and we camped beneath the midnight sun. We never stayed in a place with blackout curtains, so it was light all the time until the day we drove through a long tunnel and the darkness felt like a new discovery.
Absently, because I’m in that tunnel in Iceland, I take a sip of the woman’s coffee.
“Thank you,” she says to me, reaching for her cup. She didn’t see. I’m ashamed as I hand the coffee back to her and avoid her eyes as we pull into Penn Station. I should say something, she deserves to know, but I don’t, and though maybe it’s a small thing, I’m pretty sure I’ll remember it every so often and feel badly whenever I do.
* * *
“You’ve been hiding something,” my friend Aamina tells me on the phone. She’s the one who wrote the book I read aloud to Patrick. She teaches poetry at Rutgers–Newark, and I met her last year at a reading put on by the Creative Writing Department.
“That’s true,” I say.
I lean against a pillar in Penn Station. I missed my train and have to wait for the next.
“Spit it out,” Aamina says, exasperated.
“I’m seeing someone.”
“What?”
Unlike Thora, Aamina doesn’t put up with my bullshit.
“I have to meet him,” she says. “I’m coming over tomorrow. For dinner.”
“Aamina,” I say, “I’m not ready for company. My house is a mess.”
“Your house is never a mess. You just don’t want me to meet this guy.”
A track announcement echoes in the corridor, drowning out Aamina. I pull the phone away from my ear until it passes.
“Okay,” I say. “Tomorrow. Seven thirty.”
“Where did you meet him?” Aamina asks.
I can hear her moving around her kitchen. A knife striking a cutting board. A voice—cool, female—calls my track from overhead, and I drift with the crowd of people toward the track entrance.
“Look, I’ll tell you everything tomorrow. I’m about to go through the tunnel.”
* * *
Patrick has to cancel plans with his friends because of the dinner, and he’s annoyed.
“One time,” I say.
“It feels a little soon.” He looks down at the beer he’s holding.
“She’s a friend,” I say. “She’s not my mother.”
Aamina arrives wearing a silk shawl wrapped over her yoga clothes. She teaches free community classes in Military Park. Her curly black hair reaches her shoulders, appears weightless, and is electrified by a streak of gray. She pushes her glasses up the bridge of her nose as she shakes Patrick’s hand.
I made lamb meatballs and a feta salad, and we sip the wine Aamina brought. All evening I worried Patrick or I would say something stupid, something that would make Aamina think I’m making a mistake, but in fact we can’t think of anything to say at all. Patrick’s description of the MBA program is boring, and he can’t quite articulate what he wants to do after he graduates. Nor can I articulate anything about where I am with my book. At one point, Aamina sighs, and looks at me like I might be an alien, and I ask her about her next book of poems. As she pulls up the cover art on her phone, Patrick disappears into the bedroom.
“Beautiful,” I say, spreading my fingers over the screen to expand the shadowy reflection of a woman in a mirror.
She scrutinizes her screen, smiles a distant smile, lost for a moment in the question of whether or not the cover is right. When she looks up, her eyes fall on Patrick’s empty chair.
“Where’d he go?” she asks.
I shrug. “I guess our shoptalk wasn’t interesting for him.”
Later, after Aamina and I share one of her cigarettes on the fire escape, she asks me to walk her out. We lean against the stoop railings, one of us on either side, and look up. The stars fight to be seen in the brightly lit sky, tinged blue by the office building down the street that recently added blue perimeter lights to its roof. Aamina folds her arms over her chest. She went to Harvard, and in the moments when she intimidates me, I always remember
that, as though her degree is a detective badge.
“So, what’s going on with that?”
“With what? Patrick?”
She looks at me. She knows I know what she means.
“It’s just, you know.”
“Is he a mature twenty-three?” she asks.
“He’s almost twenty-four.”
“That does not answer my question.”
“Okay!” I hold up my hands. “It’s new. I don’t know what I’m doing. He’s a . . . you know, he’s a project.”
“I liked Ralph.”
“I know you liked Ralph. Everyone liked Ralph. He could charm a brick off a fucking wall.”
“Not your brick, apparently.”
“Aamina.”
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I know it was complicated. Just try to remember what you want, okay? Like, long term. And work on your book.”
I smile. “I know. I’m one of those writers who doesn’t write.”
Aamina rolls her eyes. “Self-fulfilling prophecy.”
She’s one of those writers who sits down, does the work, revises the work, and produces something beautiful. A career writer. She hugs me and pushes hair off my shoulders.
“Be in touch more,” she says. “I’m in Newark the whole summer.”
* * *
The dinner and Aamina’s skepticism hang over me the next day in the waiting room at my doctor’s office.
I liked Ralph.
For a moment, I allow myself to miss him. I do every day, of course, but I bury it with movie-template faux feminism: I’m stronger on my own, etcetera. He was there when my father died and there when I got sick. I see him in the chair by the hospital bed, sleeping, his legs tucked into his chest. His coarse reddish blond hair falling into his eyes.
My name gets called. I return the unopened glossy magazine I’ve been holding in my lap to its stack on the table.
I’m seeing a new doctor this time. My old one, who told me I shouldn’t get pregnant, moved to Chicago in the spring. I got a postcard in the mail letting me know. Even though my medical history is in the computer, I go in ready to give the new doctor my whole story. It’s like this every time. They want you to explain yourself. They want you to prove you’re not making it up.
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