Everything Here is Under Control

by Emily Adrian

  “It’s legal,” Nina says. “I swear.”

  “What are you going to do with them?”

  “Tweet them.”

  “Nina, no.”

  The way she looks at me, it’s like I drove the hearse myself. Nina waits for me to make my case. It’s tempting to invoke JJ’s mother, because her baby is gone. No one else’s baby is gone. Probably, Mrs. Jenkins did not design the alt-right funeral but left the arrangements to her son’s friends or to her own opportunistic brothers. Maybe she made a brokenhearted attempt to nix the flag and the banner, or maybe she was easily persuaded that Jared would have enjoyed the procession doubling as provocation.

  Either way, does Mrs. Jenkins deserve what Nina has in mind?

  I was around Nina’s age when I decided I did not belong here. All the evidence—school photos in which my bangs were long and parted in the middle, my front tooth chipped into a perfect circle—suggested I did, but I believed, baselessly, in my own superiority. (Jaclyn did nothing to encourage or temper my arrogance; when I referred to my future earnings, my house with a TV in every bedroom, she sighed and said, “Won’t that be nice?”)

  Does Nina believe in her own unsung excellence? She should. She’s smarter and lovelier than I ever was. Truly, Nina does not belong here. But it’s equally true that she belongs wherever she wants. Wherever she is.

  “They’re the ones parading around in public,” Nina points out. “They want people to see.”

  “But isn’t Deerling kind of like Vegas?”

  Nina looks concerned for me.

  “I mean, don’t people expect that what happens here, stays here?”

  “Why should I care what they expect?”

  The internet contains little proof that Deerling exists. Google it, and you’ll find images of derailed trains, farm animals giving birth, multiple couples posing for engagement photos in front of the same abandoned barn. The right tweet sent at the right moment—and possibly, this whole summer qualifies—will put our hometown on the digital map.

  Longtime residents of Deerling know the Harts. They’ve admired Nina’s grandpa’s cherry-stained patio furniture. They’ve brought their babies to the library to hear Rosalind read Peter’s Chair and The Night Kitchen, her voice as clear and comforting as church bells. Even Carrie, with her single motherhood and tattooed calves, is revered by a certain kind of Ohio woman—the kind whose hair is bobbed and dyed red to indicate sass levels, of which Carrie is presumed to have an oversupply.

  But the Hart family’s status in Deerling won’t protect Nina if she picks a fight with a dead white boy. This town loves nothing so much as our dead white boys.

  “Nina, no,” I say again. “It’s not safe for you to share those pictures.”

  She doesn’t need to ask why, nor does she need to remind me that I’m not the boss of her. Nina nods, taking my opinion into consideration. And then she shrugs, flashes me a polite smile, and gets out of the car.

  * * *

  The last time I hung out with Nina before today, she was three. Carrie was on a date then too, with an older man she met online. Gabe and I were in town, and we offered to babysit, figuring Carrie—who had recently moved from her parents’ house into her first apartment—could use a break.

  It was the tail end of the time when Carrie and I still considered ourselves friends. We rarely spoke when we were apart, but a trip to Deerling meant seeing her at least once, maybe twice. At twenty-one Carrie had emerged from the fog of early motherhood; she could think and speak on subjects other than her daughter. Having reclaimed some semblance of autonomy, Carrie was less distracted but more guarded. Before leaving to meet her date, she poured three glasses of wine and, while Nina sat at the table and sliced a toy loaf of wooden bread, quizzed us about New York. She asked about my job recording wholesale orders for a plastic jewelry manufacturer in Long Island City, Gabe’s classes in American literature, and our roach-infested apartment in the East Village, paid for by Gabe’s parents, who were still pretending to believe I was a frequent visitor with an address of my own elsewhere. (When the Feldmans visited, we hid my toothbrush, plus my foil packet of birth control pills, beneath the bathroom sink.)

  Carrie was polite. More polite—and so much more distant—than I could bring myself to be. Instead of asking reciprocal questions about her blog and tattoo apprenticeship, I gulped my wine faster than a babysitter should, and I pouted. I let Gabe do the talking, the fawning over Nina’s culinary skills. What impressed me about Carrie’s maturity was that she had the self-discipline required to perform it in front of me, never resorting to our old rapport. I was supposed to be teasing and blunt; she was supposed to be sincere and unfazed. I still longed for these roles, useless as they’d been.

  It was only as Carrie attempted to exit the apartment that her confidence wavered.

  “You’ll call me if something happens?” She slid her purse strap over her bare shoulder. “I mean, anything. Like if she gets hurt, or cries for more than a minute.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Please don’t worry about bothering me. If something’s wrong, I’d rather be here than there.”

  Impulsively, I hugged her. Gabe was distracting Nina, letting her ride him around like a horse. For a second, Carrie relaxed in my arms.

  “If your baby so much as stubs a toe, we’ll call you.” And then, when she did not immediately break the embrace: “You look hot, by the way.”

  She did, with her chaos of hair and liquid-lined eyes, but an East Coast irony had seeped into my voice and stained the compliment. Carrie pushed me away, laughed. Sighed.

  “I miss you,” she said before she left. And I thought it was criticism—an observation that, even though I was standing in her apartment, vowing to keep her daughter safe, I had ceased to be a person in whom she could take any comfort.

  Now I wonder if I misunderstood Carrie that night. Maybe the circumstances compelled her to be formal and proud, but she still wanted me to know my leaving mattered. That her life would have been easier, in some respects, if I had stayed. Our friendship was not entirely fucked; one day, she would describe it as “remarkably healthy.”

  There were so many nights after which things between us were never the same, beginning with the night she told me she was pregnant (Halloween, neither of us in costume) and ending with this one. We didn’t know it, but this was the last time I would babysit Nina. The only time I would make myself at home among the furniture repurposed from the Harts’ living room, the frosted Goodwill drinking glasses, the pictures of Nina in their dollar store frames. If we were going to let each other go, rip out the seams that had held us together since prepubescence, why didn’t we do it earlier, back when I had given Carrie every reason to hate me?

  When I remember the years between eighteen and twenty-

  one, I remember Gabe. The tension between us and our parents, between what was supposed to have happened and what had. I hardly remember Carrie at that age, except in flashes, a skeletal epilogue. It’s easy to forget she and I were in each other’s lives at all, but we were. We made an attempt to change the terms, to be friends as defined by the dictionary: two who assist each other; bound by mutual affection; of the same nation (not hostile). We gave it a shot and discovered what my mother, the contented divorcée, must have already known: it’s harder to love someone less than to stop altogether.

  Gabe and I took Nina to rent a movie from the two-story Blockbuster on Center Street. Rather than presenting her with a handful of options, we made the mistake of asking her which film she wanted to see, as if a three-year-old might maintain a mental wish list. Later we learned the DVD she’d selected, Happy Feet, was one she already owned and had seen approximately fifty times.

  I carried Nina on my hip. It thrilled me, the way her small body fit perfectly into the curve of mine. She pointed at the tubs of licorice, the packages of microwave popcorn. Cardboar
d cutouts of Disney characters, suspended from the ceiling and spinning in the air-conditioned breeze, made her laugh hysterically. Gabe spending a dollar seventy-five on gumballs and shoving four into his mouth at once made her laugh hysterically. An older couple in matching shorts and tightly laced hiking boots stared at the three of us, hesitating before they smiled. Before the wife said, “Your daughter is gorgeous.”

  It thrilled me to hear Nina mistaken for ours.

  Carrie had told us not to bother with bedtime. She said Nina wouldn’t fall asleep without her mom beside her, and she was right; it was past ten by the time Carrie got home, and Nina was still up, riding a post–Happy Feet high. She ran full tilt toward the front door and threw her arms around her mother’s bare legs.

  It was midsummer, and Carrie was dressed for a bistro in Paris or a wine bar in Tribeca. She and her bearded date must have turned every head at Buster’s Backyard Barbecue.

  What I remember clearly is the genuine pleasure with which Carrie greeted her daughter that night, after only three hours apart. She dropped to her knees and squeezed Nina tight. “Tell me everything you did while I was gone,” she said.

  “We went to my movie store,” Nina said. Everything was hers back then—every store, every park, every yappy little dog tied to a porch railing. “We got my Happy Feet.”

  “Anything else?” Carrie asked, looking up at Gabe and me for confirmation: No meltdowns? No injuries?

  But there was nothing else. Our night, having gone off without a hitch, was easily summarized by a three-year-old.

  * * *

  On Sunday morning, Nina corners me in the bathroom, where I’m brushing my teeth while bouncing Jack in my left arm. At first I think she’s here to take the baby, and my whole body goes slack with relief. But no. She’s showing me something on her phone. The Twitter account of a contributor to The Atlantic—Angela Beatty, a twentysomething black woman with seventy thousand followers.

  “She writes about the election. All the hate it’s stirring up. Should I send her my photos?”

  I squint at the screen. In her headshot, the writer looks hip and self-assured. Her lipstick is a deep plum color.

  Jack did not sleep last night, which means I did not sleep last night. At one point, I brought his car seat into the guest room and left him to weep within its protective curve while I, upright in bed, pressed the heels of my palms into my eyelids. Eventually I saw stars. That was the closest I came to unconsciousness.

  “I mean, look.” Nina shows me the best photo of the album.

  The casket wrapped in the battle flag is the focal point. The faces of the riders are turned away from the camera—to recognize those men, you’d have to recognize their horses or the suntanned backs of their necks—but the teenage driver of the Chevy must have been watching me from the start. I didn’t notice at the time, but now I see his smirk. Scornful, defiant. Internet gold.

  “I know she might not use it for an article,” Nina says, “but if she tweets it, people will pay attention. And she won’t have to say I took the photo. I can be her anonymous source.”

  Technically, I took it, but Nina seems to have forgotten. She savors the phrase anonymous source.

  If the photo goes viral, the family will claim bereavement, a right to privacy—but the look on this kid’s face will render their rights irrelevant. And then what? Tomorrow morning, Nina will join her classmates in a moment of silence for the dead kid?

  No one will ask who snitched?

  Jack cries. My one-armed grip on him is inadequate. “Can we talk about this later?”

  Offended, Nina shrugs. She backs out of the narrow bathroom and disappears down the hall.

  I want to dismiss her feelings. Lately I’m capable of dismissing a lot of people’s feelings, the way a kid hardens herself against a sibling’s vulnerability because there are never enough resources to go around. Who, besides Jack, can claim to need me anyway? Who can’t appeal to some other woman, whose arms are empty, whose body did not bleed for five weeks straight?

  I find I can’t dismiss Nina. My affection for her is sudden. I have no control over the avalanche of it, which coincides with the moment she gives up on me.

  * * *

  In the afternoon Carrie invites me to go hiking at the dump. From her attic she retrieves a spit-up-stained infant carrier last used to transport Nina. It’s the kind certain celebrities made popular ten years ago and that people now say may give your baby hip dysplasia. It pleases Jack like nothing else. To me, wearing him feels exactly like being nine months pregnant. My fear of downhill slopes returns. The carrier presses the baby so tightly to my chest I can barely breathe, and still I walk with a protective hand on his head.

  On the trail, we don’t acknowledge that this is our place. We ignore the bench where we used to sit and get high, on which someone carved, Be still and know that I am God. Carrie is walking too fast for me, swinging her arms and humming something beneath her breath. It’s annoying.

  Jack thrashing his head from side to side is annoying.

  The sound of my own labored breathing is annoying.

  “Tyler Cox?” I say.

  Carrie shifts her gaze from the sky to the ground. “Nina told you?”

  “Yup.”

  “I was going to mention it before I left, but you and Jack were passed out in the guest room.”

  “You could have woken me up.”

  “Just to say I was leaving the house?”

  “Just to say you had a date with my ex-boyfriend.”

  Carrie actually laughs. “Tyler is not your ex-boyfriend. You kissed twice.”

  “Three times.”

  She side-eyes me. “He says twice.”

  Why would Tyler omit our third kiss? We were in Maddie Baker’s above-ground pool. He had one hand on my back, covering the knot of my swimsuit top. I fantasized about him untying the strings, even as I worried he would actually try it.

  Probably he didn’t omit our third kiss. He simply forgot.

  “That’s depressing,” I say.

  Carrie laughs again. She hasn’t slowed down; if anything, she’s walking faster, aglow with health and energy.

  “Do you remember what he did to me?” I ask, indignant.

  “He brought it up on our second date. He feels terrible.”

  “Your second date? How many have you had?”

  Steadily, she says, “We’ve been dating for a year.”

  I shout, “What?” and Jack’s eyes fly open. I pat him through the carrier until they close.

  On our first day of high school—after the summer of three kisses, the summer of Enrique Iglesias—Tyler cornered me against the back row of the school bus. I was thrilled, terrified. He straddled me and, without technically touching me, began rhythmically thrusting his pelvis at mine. Crowded three to a seat, his friends cheered. They said things I either couldn’t hear through my confusion or have since blocked out. The driver, a middle-aged woman who kept the radio tuned to a gospel station and ate sunflower seeds by the bagful, kept driving, not even bothering to threaten the boys through her intercom.

  It was Carrie who seized Tyler around the waist and pulled him off me. She called him a disgusting horndog and kneed him in the balls so hard his face turned faintly green.

  I’m ashamed to admit that until she rescued me, I hadn’t known whether to feel violated or flattered.

  “He pretended to rape me on the school bus and then never spoke to me again,” I say.

  “I know.”

  “I was mortified.” It’s only a partial lie. Mortification did set in, eventually.

  “Teenage boys do shitty things,” Carrie says. “It’s an old story.”

  She was always bolder around boys than I was. Quicker to kick them where it hurt but also to kiss them when she felt like it. Her ease with the opposite sex was, in our youth, the first
development to challenge the ideas we had of ourselves and of each other. Carrie could be daring; I could be hampered by self-doubt. Who would’ve thought?

  “A year, huh?” The sun is creeping higher in the sky. The baby is covered in SPF 40, plus long sleeves and a floppy hat. My shoulders are bare, my face not even moisturized. Soon I will have a sunburn and Carrie will not. Another old story.

  “I really like him,” she says.

  “Has he lived here the whole time?”

  “He was in Columbus, but his dad had a stroke and he moved home to help.”

  “So, he lives with his parents.”

  “For now, yes.”

  “Honorable.”

  “Amanda.”

  “Sorry. How did you meet? Or, meet again?”

  Carrie’s smile is not for me but for Tyler in absentia. “He came into the shop. He wanted a custom piece, a rainbow trout on his biceps. He and his dad used to go fishing in Michigan every fall. It’s sweet. The tattoo took three sessions—full color and everything—so we got to talking.” She shrugs, still smiling.

  “I guess you’ve tattooed half our high school class by now,” I say, trying to steer the conversation elsewhere.

  “People come in sometimes. Not as often as you’d think. Tyler has a lot of ideas about expanding the business. He works at the bank, so he’s good with numbers, investments—that kind of thing.”

  I don’t want to talk about Tyler Cox. Imagining them together leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and I refuse to believe that Carrie can’t find someone better in Deerling or nearby. She lives here; it’s not impossible that someone worthy of her also lives here.

  For a while we walk without speaking. I order myself to enjoy the hay-scented air, my heart beating hard, the expanse of prairie rolling toward the horizon. But I’m too busy questioning whether I’m capable of enjoying anything. Aren’t I too hot? Too tired? Hasn’t my skull been throbbing with my life’s worst hangover for the last three months?